Environmentalist Suicide

Apparently today is Earth Day. Who knew?

A former friend of mine once said something incredibly stupid: She'd kill herself to protect the earth from her humanity. I believe this was caused by several factors. She had terribly low self-esteem, wasn't of anything close to sound mind, thought she was a druid, and didn't seem to value humanity very much. Her life was a sad story, which she liked to tell any time anyone else had a bad day and needed to vent. Got a bad grade on an exam? "I'm an orphan." Well fuck, that helps so much!

This is a fringe movement, those who believe that humanity should cease to exist in order to save the planet. I say cease to exist because they have different methods: murder, suicide, no next generation, so it's not quite accurate to say they want to destroy humanity or kill it. The thought behind the movement is that humanity is unnatural and harmful to the world and therefore must be removed.

I consider myself an environmentalist, but I consider the concept of 'environmentalist suicide' to be incredibly stupid. Humans are animals, naturally evolved like any other. We have as much right to exist as any other species, meaning that we have no right to exist but also do not deserve to not exist. Nature doesn't have morals, it just is. Survive or don't, that's it.

To suggest that humanity has less right to survive is based on the false notion that humanity is unnatural, that we break the rules. Bullshit. We're no better or worse than any other creature and we're all just trying to survive. The whales wouldn't die to save us (or at least have made no such indication), so why should we do the same for them? Does a wolf starve to death before it eats a rabbit? No. It eats the rabbit and doesn't question it. Instead it survives. Does the rabbit complain? No. It does what it can to survive and has a hundred siblings to carry on.

I'm not trying to justify all human action. It is equally stupid when people gloat about wasting energy and littering and going out of their way to destroy the world. Their kids need that world to live in.

There's a terrible situation of extremes. On one side you have those who don't consider any larger impact on the world and the next generation. On the other side you have the static world advocates. Who are the static world advocates? They are the ones who fight tooth and nail to not let anything change, who believe that any alteration of the environment is bad and should be stopped. They advocate taking a picture of the world and never letting that change. How boring. The irony is that they like to talk of biodiversity, when preventing any change means that we won't see new species, and so over time we'll have less diversity.

Evolution doesn't just happen. Something causes it. There is a balance to the world, which tends to remain unless upset. Humans are not the only cause. The world changes in temperature and air content and sea level and all sorts of things change and have changed without us. We should not fear changing the environment. It is not an antique to be locked away in a glass case and never touched. Certainly we should not break it, but we shouldn't be so afraid of some dust, or new paint, or using it as a pitcher rather than a vase.

Let's not get caught up in extremism. Humanity should not end. It also should not foul its own nest. We should not fear changing the world, but we should be careful to not destroy it. That means not destroying ourselves, for we are part of the world.

Producer regulation does not imply consumer restriction

The FDA is moving towards regulating salt. My first thought when I saw that was "wtf?" Then I started actually thinking and decided to see what they meant. Were they looking into salt types? Purity? Sources? Turns out I was entirely at the wrong end. The regulation would be on salt levels in manufactured foods.

As I finished the article I looked over the comments. In summary they expressed outrage at Obama telling them what to eat.

Let's start at the place where you would start if you were being logical. Or complete illogical. The Soviet Union and the Communist Party's regulation of industry. In this extreme example, regulation of the producers is a direct restriction of consumer choice. If there is one car design, one apartment layout, there is no choice beyond buy or not buy.

At the opposite extreme, no regulation at all, there is theoretically unlimited choice brought on by the wonderful productive nature of the free market. Until you introduce patents, copywrite laws, and all the other restrictions which are necessary to prevent intellectual property being ripped off, and all of which restrict consumer choice to some degree.

It appears inevitable that regulation would restrict choice. But that's at overly-general extremes.

Let's look at the specific example: salt. I go to buy my soup and that damn socialist has reduced the salt in it. What an outrage! I take it back home, heat it up, and grab my salt shaker. At this point Obama personally takes away my salt shaker and dumps it in the trash. Actually that second part doesn't happen. I have just as much control over what I eat as I did before. In fact, I potentially have more. If the soup starts with less salt, I have the choice of having less salt, or more salt, or the same salt as right now.

Just to review the facts: Obama has not killed my grandma and he has not stolen my salt shaker.

Day of Silence and Mass Murder

Not being in school I have no reminders of when Day of Silence is. It's today. People plan ahead of time to not speak for the day in order to spread awareness and protest or something like that. At college one group also held one to protest abortion. I didn't bother to point out that fetuses have no voices because they literally can't talk and have less mental capacity than a brain-damaged hamster; they knew they were putting on a good performance.

My Google news brought up this article. Students protest hate speech with ‘Day of Silence'
It ends with this:

In the past year, hate speech has also been highlighted in Massachusetts bullying cases which ultimately led to student suicides. Though he did not identify as gay, 11-year-old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, a sixth-grader at New Leadership Charter School in Springfield was repeatedly taunted with anti-gay slurs and endured other forms of bullying. He hung himself at his home with an extension cord last April.

That got me thinking. Why commit suicide? That seems rather dumb. It's a surrender, a submission to those who are wronging them. If you're going to kill someone, kill someone more likely to be the problem: the other people. I'm not advocating killing every 6th grader who ever called someone gay, since then there would be no 7th grade the next year, and so on until humanity is gone. I am suggesting though, that if this were say, 10 years later and the people in question are in their 20s rather than 12; that by then people should have outgrown their "everyone is gay" phase. If you're going to commit suicide, don't, take down the people who are the problem instead.

Same as in those shitty oppressive culture where women are abused and neglected and sometimes kill themselves to get away, or do nothing and eventually are killed for some petty offense like "exposed eyelid in public." The world would be a better place if those women either refused to die and tried to escape or accepted death and made it useful, taking a queue from the suicide bombers, except fighting for something worthwhile. Or at least die for a useful crime like "cut off everyone's balls and eliminated the next generation."

Of course the ideal would be no suicide, no murder, and no defocused hatred:homophobia, racism, sexism, etc.

Dear President Ahmadinejad,

Do you need a hug? You seem angry. It's not that we hate you. I don't hate you, at least. But you've been acting crazy lately. By lately I mean since we first heard of you. We're not going to nuke you. We just say stuff like that because certain morons in our country think we should. But they're not in power and sensible people will do what they can to keep them out.

So here's a hug.
*hug*

Signed,
An American

P.S. Israel is not using mind-control devices to spread belief in the Holocaust. You're mixing up "Israeli mind-control devices" with "Hitler killing millions of Jews and Eastern Europeans". It's the second one that makes us think there was a Holocaust. Have a nice day.