#Malthusian

[rh35211]

Ghost caught on cam? Video of scary figure at King Charles III’s coronation goes viral - India Today

[offcampusstillnerdy]

Absolutely this. A well-studied phenomenon. One example is the overlap around 1930s Euro fascism and fascinations for healthy lives/ bodies, set in an imaginary bucolic. Another is contemporary Hindu fundamentalist nationalism that demonises Indian Muslims, Christians and castes/ communities that are not high-caste Hindus - yoga and vegetarianism have become tools of violence and hate. (You can look this up or ask me if you want links).

The vegan to ecofascist pipeline

[kinialohaguy]

Breathe

Aloha kākou. Life on this planet is a symbiosis between the earth and its inhabitants. It’s been this way since God created the heavens and the earth. As told in the Book of Genisis, God gave man domain over the earth. The geological history of this planet is the science as we know it to be. From ice ages to the movement of tectonic plates, volcanoes, floods, and mass extinctions, the evolution…

[geographicbook]

The Malthusian Theory

INTRODUCTION The Malthusian Theory, propounded by the English economist Thomas Robert Malthus in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, stands as a pivotal contribution to the discourse surrounding population growth, resource availability, and their interplay within societies. Malthus’ theory revolves around the notion that population tends to expand exponentially while resources, particularly…

[justslowdown]

Oh, don't look at me

Is it anybody's business

What I believe?

Oh, I cannot love

Is it anybody's business

Where I get off?

Oh, forest fiery tree

The mahogany in misted

Foils what I grieve

Oh, horse run with me

Your Malthusian mistress

Pulls at my sleeve

[probablyasocialecologist]

Thomas Malthus, who is often interpreted as arguing for population control to overcome economic limits, actually invoked the threat of limits to advocate for growth, arguing that scarcity is a natural fact, and that only a growth-based economy could overcome it. In this way, Malthus was one of the first ‘apostles of growth’. Since then, both neoclassical economists and elites sought to further cement the idea that growth is needed to overcome natural scarcity as common sense. But scarcity is not a natural fact. Rather, scarcity, as well as the social hierarchies that limit autonomy and self-determination, are imposed by a capitalist system of production. As a corollary, degrowth is not about imposing limits on society according to natural scarcity, but about regaining autonomy to collectively create public abundance, and also deliberate and set limits. And this – collectively setting limits – is a key prerequisite for the formation of autonomous, democratic governance, as the Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis argues in his work. Indeed, it is precisely capitalism – through alienating us from each other and from the abundance of the earth – which undemocratically imposes limits on us and makes it impossible for us to set our own. Thus, just as degrowth is about the collective reappropriation and dépense of social surplus, it is also about the rejection of natural scarcity, the undoing of imposed limits set on us by capitalism and hierarchy, deliberating collective limits, and thus about creating a self-determined post-scarcity society.

The Future Is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism

[charliejaneanders]

Apart from all the other reasons to criticize Firefly/Serenity, I was just remembering how the movie begins with straight-up, no-shit Malthusianism.

"Earth-That-Was could no longer sustain our numbers, we were so many."

Science fiction has a serious Malthus problem.

[curiosity-killed]

@ god why does my brain specifically and exclusively hate economics

[queering-ecology]

Chapter 5 . Non-white Reproduction and Same-Sex Eroticism: Queer Acts against Nature by Andil Gosine prt 1

“In Euroamerican-dominant cultural contexts, two kinds of sex have been (are) said to be toxic to nature; reproductive sex between non-white people, and sex between men.” (149)

The concept of ‘overpopulation’ has put the blame for global ecological disasters/climate change on the reproducing proclivities of the poor; due to the easy collaboration of capitalism with patriarchy and racism, that has meant the economically dispossessed non-white peoples of the world, particularly child-bearing (or potentially child-bearing) women from Asia, Africa, and South and Central American, as well as First Nations and non-white women in North America. (149)

“Although overpopulation propaganda and its material offshoots (family planing programs, coercive sterilization practices, etc.) and the criminalization and policing of sexual acts between men have been and are generally treated as distinct phenomenon, their genealogies are intimately interwoven through the projects of colonialism, development, and nation building. Read against the heterosexist, racialized formations of nature engendered by these projects (the creation of national parks,etc.), heterosexual, potentially reproductive sex between non-white people and homosexual sex, I argue threaten colonial-imperialist and nationalist ambitions. Both are “queer acts'' in that they challenge the stated norms of collaborating colonial narratives of race, sex, and gender, through which modern formations of nature have been constituted. Both fail to meet and are threatening to the white nation building projects engendered through the process of colonization, and uncritically buttressed in historical and contemporary discourses of environment and ecology.” (150)

Any acts seen to upset this agenda are constituted as not just unnatural but toxic to nature. This claim is not far removed from those made by postcolonial scholars and psychoanalysts who recognize sex as a primary site through which the terms of empire are negotiated and stipulated. (151)

The Sex of Others

The sex of “Others” has long preoccupied the imaginations of social and economic stewards of Euroamerican culture. The author provides many examples of this. These fantasies exerted a powerful influence on figures such as Columbus and “informed the organization of colonial society around the tropes of race and gender” (Rattansi 1994, 44) (152) (ie the first time Columbus saw 'America' from his ship he compared the land to a woman's breast)

“The management of sexuality, parenting, and morality were at the heart of the colonial project” (Ann Laura Stoler 1995, 226) (152) Through the course of colonization, anxieties about non-white peoples’ sexualities would also inform the constitution of natural space across the world. The creation of “wildlife preserves'  and national parks across the colonized world was predicated on the removal of their human, reproductive presence: the areas’ indigenous populations. Aboriginal peoples in Africa, North America, and Asia were viewed as both a part of and a threat to pristine nature, a contradictory argument that rested in no small part on fears about the potential reproduction and ‘abundance’ of them. (152) 

Reproduction-Overpopulation

English cleric Thomas Malthus is credited with innovating the idea that the sheer growth of human population (and not what humans do) is socially and environmentally destructive. In his 1798 Essay On Population, Malthus argued that since agricultural production increases arithmetically and population soars geometrically, poverty and disease acted to check excess numbers of people who were outstripping available resources. (He was strongly influenced by his work as a colonial administrator in India for the East India Company)

Malthusian theory has been revitalized by racial theorists, birth control advocates, American military agents of imperialism and national security, ethno-nationalists, international development policy makers and project managers, and environmentalists.

The idea that population growth in non-white communities poses an ecological threat has throughout the twentieth century enjoyed considerable popular appeal, particularly in the Global North. (153) i.e. Tragedy of the Commons-Garrett Hardin (1968) (“Freedom to breed is intolerable”, eugenics, sterilization, against redistribution of wealth, privatized ownership of natural resources)

Most credible scholarship has outright rejected Malthusian claims. The overpopulation myth is simply bad science, unsubstantiated by lived experience and driven by particular ideological interests that serve to deflect attention from the fact that most environmental problems–global warming, pollution, deforestation, and so on–are the direct consequence of industrialization, over-consumption, and capitalist territorialization, and NOT simply the overabundance of people. (153)

For preservationist-conservationist environmental movements in North America, the myth of overpopulation was an appealing distraction from the effects of capitalism and industrialization that became especially apparent in the 1960s, effectively turning attention away from the consumption activities of white, middle-upper-class Americans who often made up the movements’ membership (Darnovsky 1992). (153)

One important point oft overlooked in Malthusianism is that in overpopulation discourse the main culprit is sex. Identification of overpopulation as the cause of poverty and environmental degradation necessarily implicates the people said to be engaged in dangerously overproducing themselves: non-white men and women living in the Global South engaged in heterosexual sex. Sex itself, then, is the act of destruction. (154)

[ultramaga]

https://archive.is/WLhfC

Remember the mantra, folks. It never happened. Only a Nazi would say it happened. Sure it happened - but that's a GOOD thing. We never said it didn't happen -- you must be crazy to remember otherwise!

[stonefemblues]

i was just looking for more phrases like “jacking off” or “cranking the hog” what the hell are these

[astromechs]

inferno was such a waste of felicity jones

[kinialohaguy]

Baby Parts For Sale

Aloha kākou. Planned Butcherhood is selling aborted fetal body parts for Intellectual Property rights. They’re selling body parts for money and lucrative patents. Leftist politicians call abortion “Reproductive Rights” or healthcare. Hawaii’s Senator Brian Schatz posted this statement on “X” today, “No health care provider should have to be afraid of going to jail or losing their license for…

[bicripple]

Currently reading Staying with the Trouble by Donna Hraway for a book club and just got to the part where she reveals herself as an ardent neo-Malthusian and I am so angry that she is using her platform for leftist-palatable eugenics. And I am so so tired of this being accepted in the environmentalist community.

The world produces more food than we need by a long sho. Inconceivable quantities of food are wasted. There's horrific inefficiency in how much land is used to grow crops to feed animals rather than to use that land to feed humans directly.

But a butterfly specialist wrote a book in 1968 saying the world was doomed by human overpopulation and the moral panic that ensued just never seems to have been questioned very deeply.

The most frustrating thing about Haraway siding with the Malthusians is how literally one chapter beforehand she describes how the Hopi were brutalized by white Malthusians who came and killed their sheep out of a faulty idea the sheep were overpopulated. Haraway has a lot to say about the arrogance of these white people but doesn't seem to notice it in her own writing.