LogFAQs > #912045816

GanglyKhan posted...

I would rather have 33% of the population get wiped out now than 100% later.

100% of the population isn't going to be wiped out by overpopulation. That's not remotely how overpopulation works. Overpopulation just raises the stakes as far as competition for resources go, meaning people end up dying if they can't compete. Those who compete successfully will see a reduction in quality of life, but they won't die.

Of course, even considering this ignores that human overpopulation just isn't a major risk. Most developed countries actually have negative population growth if you discount immigration. That's a consequence of a number of factors, including lower infant mortality (don't need to have as many kids if the first 1-2 are more or less guaranteed to survive), women being able to work (since they aren't expected to spend their reproductive years pumping out babies and subsequently trying to keep 20 of them alive), and diversification in available work (so children can choose different professions from their parents, diminishing the "carrying on my legacy" motivation). It's easy to be scared by looking at some developing countries' birth rates and wondering what's going to happen if their death rates drop, but what's going to happen is a relatively brief surge in population growth before birth rates drop to be closer to death rates and you end up with sustainable growth.

Quite simply, the world is not going to end if malaria is eradicated, nor any other major diseases. Not even close.

Sahuagin posted...

communism targets a group, it's just not (necessarily) a racial group, it's whoever is determined to have "power". in Soviet Russia it was the Kulaks (rich farmers).

Communism itself is just a financial theory. While that theory does promote animosity between the working and upper classes, any application of it to support attacking a group of people is separate from the theory itself, and is instead a matter of somebody manipulating that animosity (which, in all honesty, is going to be there regardless of whether or not communism spells it out explicitly). That's very different from an ideology that explicitly identifies certain groups as being inferior and in need of eradication for the advancement of a master race.