Last edited Thu Aug 21, 2025, 09:49 AM - Edit history (2)
Jokes aside, that’s a classic bad faith move.
It’s the kind of sophistry that I am shocked ever worked. But it is falling for right wing gambits to be offended by humor whether you agree with it or not imo. Not that it doesn’t have an insidious message like Manbearpig. But still feuding with comedy is just stupid. Everything is combative enough as is 🤺..
But serious allegations of ecofascism from the left..that’s really sleazy and lazy. It is as stupid as a hallmark card that says “love isn’t divided, it multiplies!” And it ignores the ugliness of the world we live in from horrors visited on humans and animals to increasing minor nuisances we are told are inevitable.
You can see the effect of overcrowding everywhere - from education to medical care and the solutions involve even more bullshit jobs, rapacious exploitative data mining and a noxious form of utilitarianism. Very effective altruism-a truly loathsome ideology which I wish wouldn’t corrupt the animal rights movement by associating itself with it. I get why the animal welfare movement takes funding where it can find it. But still, that’s a truly horrible movement.
Instead of finding any reasonable solution, we find more convoluted drivel to address stuff with simple solutions.
It was shockingly irresponsible to not couple basic family planning education as part of a public health policy when infant mortality rates fell. That’s not coercion or propaganda.
All it is is a suggestion to put thought into serious decisions over invading your neighbors’ lives and spaces and then blaming them.
I always wished someone as annoying, asinine and unrelatable as Peter Singer had not become a key figure in animal rights.
When I came across this cool and funny author Deb Olin Unferth I was thinking wistfully that the nicest people sympathetic to animal rights don’t get as much spotlight as a complete ass like Singer.
Anyone utilitarian enough should get that associating a fairly repellant persona with any movement is bad for it..
I personally consider chicken factory farming an abomination as birds don’t even get the most basic humane protections. These are all signs of a society whose sociopathy barometer is broken in many ways-factory farming, ventilation shutdown, species loss, human biomass exceeding all other biomass, war, poverty and stuff like our world in data is daft. The root cause is overpopulation.
I liked this review of Barn 8 in The Guardian. Olin Unferth herself comes across as a delightful person unlike those she portrays (apparently chickens going by societal callousness and animal activists) for once with genuine sympathy ;-/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/18/barn-8-by-deb-olin-unferth-review-the-great-chicken-heist
The chicken-related writing, however, is a force unto itself. If you thought you didn’t care about chickens, Unferth is here to prove you wrong. Throughout, she makes us feel them as minds, as with the rescued hen who stubbornly insists on sitting on her egg, “because she’d never been able to sit on her eggs before and she wasn’t going to get up for anything … she was such an intelligent, unintelligent little birdie, thinking her job was to sit there, stay no matter what.” The meticulous, science-fictional descriptions of the alien atmosphere of factory farming are also astonishing. The thousands of tiered cages, miles of feed troughs, constant rains of dirt and faeces and hosts of cramped, debeaked birds – Unferth makes us see the barns as being the unfathomable horror that they are.
Perhaps from a fear of anthropomorphism, though, Unferth almost entirely forgoes making the chickens characters in their own right.
She also shows a deep sensitivity and understanding for her animal liberationists, people who go undercover as farmworkers for years at a time to film the abuses inside egg farms – actions that, thanks to “ag-gag” laws, are often themselves crimes. Unferth does not sentimentalise these characters; she portrays them as the prickly, unsocialised types they often are, while also conveying their quiet heroism. In one passage, she shares their common fear that: “Soon all that will be left of the miracle of our planet will be the monocrops of damaged cows, pigs, dogs, hens, a few other practical species – and humans, horrible, unbeatable, disgusting humans.” In another, she describes the real sacrifices activists make: “When they finally quit and cut out, as almost all did … they had nothing: blank years on their resumes since what they did was strictly secret, no skills other than to perform jobs they’d spent their lives trying to abolish, alienated family, permanent back trouble.”
I often wish there was half as much fuss about the ways chickens, pigs and cows are treated as there is over cats and dogs.
But re overpopulation, all that crap about how much better things are for the poor..it’s such bullshit. First of all it attributes the improvement of life to things that are not necessarily if at all connected (cancer like growth of junk capitalism and attendant fluff-shopping malls, a bloated/exploitative, derivative and talent free entertainment industrial complex, more useless baubles and gadgets, junk tech) rather than the real source of progress - science and medicine.
Secondly, it’s a way to sound like someone who is a humanist while reducing humans to statistics. Which is what overpopulation results in.
I have noticed that in overpopulated parts of the world the dynamics are that whatever is said and whatever the charts show, human life ends up becoming cheap. You don’t play numbers games with human life and then divert attention away from what is actually causing that dynamic and to the things that are trying to check that tumor like approach. Every war at its core has its origins in resource conflicts. And to see the people who are cynically hoarding resources (the billionaires and their sycophants) recruit and harness a collection of morons to parrot their bs..
It’s also personal for me. My family is very small and when I lost my mom in 2021, it was devastating given all the other impositions. She had an excellent oncologist and I did my best for her, but in the end we couldn’t survive these toxic dynamics of encroaching technologies and rapacious greed.
We have far too much junk, while basic regulation, education and healthcare in non-moronic ways is missing. And now the junk is overtaking the working sectors with AI, big data, behaviorism and other junk.
I tend to agree with Warren Hern..it’s the sort of thing that sends fundamentalists and other disingenuous creeps into faux outrage spirals. But overpopulation has some common features with cancer:
The shocking sensationalism of the titles aside (that’s Salon for you) -it also predictably trolls the fatuously disingenuous National Review crowd who want people to ignore how anti-human in any material sense their worldview is- the real point I took away is that collective human impact on the planet tends to mimic cancer:
https://www.salon.com/2023/08/05/are-humans-a-cancer-on-the-planet-a-physician-argues-that-civilization-is-truly-carcinogenic/
https://www.drhern.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/human-cancer-on-planet.pdf
I have myself felt that humans have turned into a species where the dynamics of super-fit cancer cells that cheat at cell competition are rewarded more than fitness in any decent sense. Social Darwinism by people who largely reject evolutionary biology in any real way.
https://www.ddw-online.com/science-reveals-how-cancer-cells-outsmart-normal-cells-30882-202407/]
The researchers, based in the Breast Cancer Now Toby Robins Research Centre at ICR, hope that this discovery will lead to better treatments. Normally, this evolutionary principle of ‘survival of the fittest’ is a crucial quality control mechanism for maintaining tissue health and function. However, defects in cell competition can result in the retention of damaged or dangerous cells, potentially triggering the formation of tumours. The ICR team discovered that differing levels of extracellular glutamate, a crucial building block and messenger molecule in the body, regulates competition between cells. They found that cells with a lower secretion of glutamate are earmarked as ‘losers’ when surrounded by normal healthy cells. When this happens, the loser cell starts to donate its nutrients to its fitter neighbours.
Importantly, they also found that the process can be exploited by cancer cells, which cheat the system by pretending to be ‘super-fit’ and increasing their glutamate production. This allows them to expand and spread at the expense of surrounding normal cells. Furthermore, when cell competition takes place between cancer cells, it can lead to some cancer cells developing resistance to chemotherapy or other targeted therapies. These resistant cells survive and multiply, making treatment less effective.
It’s an apt metaphor for the proliferation of grifting and worthless crypto and AI industries at the cost of real and necessary jobs at the EPA/NOAA etc. regulating “space junk” and protecting the environment as well as other federal govt jobs. Which is what this year has been all about it. Russell Vought’s Project 2025 and that sort of creeping corrupt deregulation is entering via the backdoor where I live these days.
Current Affairs’ latest piece on that is worth a read-I wish there were more regulatory checks on these guys:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/make-bureaucracy-great-again
A lot of the attacks on “limits to growth” comes from stealthy fundamentalist groups and other bad players who coopt the language of compassion and justice to suit their cynical and unscrupulous ends. Or don’t even bother with that.
lol..my apologies OkItsJustMe ;-/..rant mode
I think far too much about this stuff for someone who is not and never will be a political activist. Shrug.
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