The amount of people who express misanthropic sentiments like this seems scary. But also I think almost everyone (save for spree killers and suicide bombers) who claims these beliefs would renounce every word of it if they had a loaded gun pointed at their head for about five seconds.
That’s the thing about these kind of people: they say they want to inflict pain on people for whatever reason but they could never comprehend that same pain happening to them.
I also think that for the vast majority of the people who proclaim anti-human worldviews it's something they say just to be provocative, and they wouldn't actually be able to stomach witnessing their ideas being applied to reality in any way. In general for people who advocate for fantastically radical ideologies and visions for society that involve some sort of mass death, cruelty or global regime shift, the only reason they feel comfortable saying that shit is because they know what they're advocating for wouldn't actually happen. It's a way of living out cathartic revenge fantasies against society by proposing futures that are so unlikely to ever occur they may as well be impossible.
"the only reason they feel comfortable saying that shit is because they know what they're advocating for wouldn't actually happen. It's a way of living out cathartic revenge fantasies against society by proposing futures that are so unlikely to ever occur they may as well be impossible.
I think this is a massively wrong assessment of what's happening.
We are all more or less comfortable with the status quo. That one _ALREADY_ involves massive displacement, death, war, famine, disease, oppression, and so on and so forth.
Our comfort with that is not because these things are unlikely or impossible - because they're neither. (They are actual and real.)
And while I _do_ agree that most of these people wouldn't PERSONALLY give the order, they would be very comfortable with bringing structures into place that WOULD.
In fact, hundreds of thousands are _already_ doing just that in various ways - even though to my knowledge no major groups that are involved in consciously advancing an omnicide.
But give the pig just the tiniest smudge of lipstick and you're good to go.
People that proclaim they would be comfortable with other forms of mass death very often have that precise reasoning. "I'm not, but I would be somewhat reluctantly accept even major outbursts of violence if there was a reasonable chance that this also meant that there as a decent chance to stop the stuff that's going on."
What I mean is that for most of us the types of extreme suffering we haven't experienced first or second hand feel sort of abstract (which isn't a moral failing in itself, it's just an unfortunate fact of how humans work), and so in the case of an american trying to be edgy by claiming to believe that famines and wars are good because humans are inherently evil, it's disingenuous even as cruelty because true violence and poverty don't exist to that person. In their mind people starving or being murdered in countries they couldn't find on a map basically holds the same weight as thanos killing half the universe or whatever. The anti-human sentiment is mostly coming from edgy teenagers who think that being pessimistic automatically makes them smarter than other people and the usual TESCREAL techtards who think they're scientists and love to say incoherent "controversial" things because they think they've got the authority to grant idiotic ideas legitimacy just by suggesting them.
Honestly Émile I have so much to say I think I’ll save it for the next subscriber Zoom Call. Very good read even if at the same time it was hard to see just how many people are pro-extinctionist and what their “justifications are”.
Also that image at the beginning was actually really funny. Personally I’d full it with coffee or hot chocolate so I can stay warm in the winter.
“the k/k ratio — that is, the ratio of killers to those killed — is dramatically falling”
Okay, do you have evidence for that? I know you've mentioned Bruce Ivins, in which there was evidence that he was the one who was responsible for the anthrax attack in 2001, but in many ways, he was very exceptional. And if we're talking about chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction, at least with regards to chemical and biological weapons, there's a reason why we don't have proliferation of those weapons in warfare; turns out, that in terms of effort-versus-killing folks, chemical and biological weapons *suck*. Bret Deveraux has made an argument about it with chemical weapons, but I believe the argument also applies with biological weapons as well:
I mean, thinking about it, if you want to *kill* everyone effectively, a *lot* of things need to go right: for one thing, WMDs are notoriously finicky, and if you want to maximize megadeaths a *lot* of things have to go right — it has to catch *everyone* unawares, it has to effect *everyone* who could possibly do something to stop it or recover the population, and it has to, you know, work. Most famously, Harris and Klebold had a series of pipe-bombs set up in the cafeteria of the school during their school shooting, in order to have it explode and kill more people, but it didn't. And that's *explosives*; we've known how to blow people up for hundreds of years.
Another thing that hasn't been considered is that, you know, if you want to kill everyone, generally speaking that *takes a lot of effort and competence*. And generally speaking you'd have to keep it close to yourself, and your opsec needs to be pretty flawless, and you need to procure stuff from multiple sources without exposing your hand and attempting to stop you. I mean, you're going to need to *buy* stuff, and *make* stuff, and it's definitely possible to screw it up. We do remember the groups that succeed in blowing up or poisoning people, but we also forget that for a significant portion of those folks, sometimes they just blow themselves up or poison themselves.
Generally speaking, though, do I believe that there's no way for a single person to kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people? No, I don't. There is one effective way to make an attempt. It's not via methods of violence, but with *policy*. And you don't need guns, germs or nukes to do it, you just need billions of dollars and the ability to subvert policy goals.
You want to kill lots of people? Just take over a powerful nation-state and gut its institutions, and appoint folks who want to do nothing but plunder the state for profit while disregarding the safety and life of its citizens.
This must be part of the calculus for wanting network states, though I'm not sure I can quite put my finger on it. The aspiring technocrats know first hand about both the democratization of these capabilities, and the prevalence of destructive anti-human ideals. But they also have malignantly narcissistic desires to be THE ONE with that power and the protection from it (live forever!).
It's simply not realistic for any one of them to save themselves by grabbing hold of the entire world. Why not carve it up "Risk" style and see who does the best job of saving themselves, while turning their captured corner of the human population into a surveillance state liminal space focused on their personal transhuman goals. 🤷🏻♀️
The amount of people who express misanthropic sentiments like this seems scary. But also I think almost everyone (save for spree killers and suicide bombers) who claims these beliefs would renounce every word of it if they had a loaded gun pointed at their head for about five seconds.
That’s the thing about these kind of people: they say they want to inflict pain on people for whatever reason but they could never comprehend that same pain happening to them.
I also think that for the vast majority of the people who proclaim anti-human worldviews it's something they say just to be provocative, and they wouldn't actually be able to stomach witnessing their ideas being applied to reality in any way. In general for people who advocate for fantastically radical ideologies and visions for society that involve some sort of mass death, cruelty or global regime shift, the only reason they feel comfortable saying that shit is because they know what they're advocating for wouldn't actually happen. It's a way of living out cathartic revenge fantasies against society by proposing futures that are so unlikely to ever occur they may as well be impossible.
"the only reason they feel comfortable saying that shit is because they know what they're advocating for wouldn't actually happen. It's a way of living out cathartic revenge fantasies against society by proposing futures that are so unlikely to ever occur they may as well be impossible.
I think this is a massively wrong assessment of what's happening.
We are all more or less comfortable with the status quo. That one _ALREADY_ involves massive displacement, death, war, famine, disease, oppression, and so on and so forth.
Our comfort with that is not because these things are unlikely or impossible - because they're neither. (They are actual and real.)
And while I _do_ agree that most of these people wouldn't PERSONALLY give the order, they would be very comfortable with bringing structures into place that WOULD.
In fact, hundreds of thousands are _already_ doing just that in various ways - even though to my knowledge no major groups that are involved in consciously advancing an omnicide.
But give the pig just the tiniest smudge of lipstick and you're good to go.
People that proclaim they would be comfortable with other forms of mass death very often have that precise reasoning. "I'm not, but I would be somewhat reluctantly accept even major outbursts of violence if there was a reasonable chance that this also meant that there as a decent chance to stop the stuff that's going on."
What I mean is that for most of us the types of extreme suffering we haven't experienced first or second hand feel sort of abstract (which isn't a moral failing in itself, it's just an unfortunate fact of how humans work), and so in the case of an american trying to be edgy by claiming to believe that famines and wars are good because humans are inherently evil, it's disingenuous even as cruelty because true violence and poverty don't exist to that person. In their mind people starving or being murdered in countries they couldn't find on a map basically holds the same weight as thanos killing half the universe or whatever. The anti-human sentiment is mostly coming from edgy teenagers who think that being pessimistic automatically makes them smarter than other people and the usual TESCREAL techtards who think they're scientists and love to say incoherent "controversial" things because they think they've got the authority to grant idiotic ideas legitimacy just by suggesting them.
Honestly Émile I have so much to say I think I’ll save it for the next subscriber Zoom Call. Very good read even if at the same time it was hard to see just how many people are pro-extinctionist and what their “justifications are”.
Also that image at the beginning was actually really funny. Personally I’d full it with coffee or hot chocolate so I can stay warm in the winter.
Great idea, I see no option how that would become super disgusting super quickly.
“the k/k ratio — that is, the ratio of killers to those killed — is dramatically falling”
Okay, do you have evidence for that? I know you've mentioned Bruce Ivins, in which there was evidence that he was the one who was responsible for the anthrax attack in 2001, but in many ways, he was very exceptional. And if we're talking about chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction, at least with regards to chemical and biological weapons, there's a reason why we don't have proliferation of those weapons in warfare; turns out, that in terms of effort-versus-killing folks, chemical and biological weapons *suck*. Bret Deveraux has made an argument about it with chemical weapons, but I believe the argument also applies with biological weapons as well:
https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/
I mean, thinking about it, if you want to *kill* everyone effectively, a *lot* of things need to go right: for one thing, WMDs are notoriously finicky, and if you want to maximize megadeaths a *lot* of things have to go right — it has to catch *everyone* unawares, it has to effect *everyone* who could possibly do something to stop it or recover the population, and it has to, you know, work. Most famously, Harris and Klebold had a series of pipe-bombs set up in the cafeteria of the school during their school shooting, in order to have it explode and kill more people, but it didn't. And that's *explosives*; we've known how to blow people up for hundreds of years.
Another thing that hasn't been considered is that, you know, if you want to kill everyone, generally speaking that *takes a lot of effort and competence*. And generally speaking you'd have to keep it close to yourself, and your opsec needs to be pretty flawless, and you need to procure stuff from multiple sources without exposing your hand and attempting to stop you. I mean, you're going to need to *buy* stuff, and *make* stuff, and it's definitely possible to screw it up. We do remember the groups that succeed in blowing up or poisoning people, but we also forget that for a significant portion of those folks, sometimes they just blow themselves up or poison themselves.
Generally speaking, though, do I believe that there's no way for a single person to kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people? No, I don't. There is one effective way to make an attempt. It's not via methods of violence, but with *policy*. And you don't need guns, germs or nukes to do it, you just need billions of dollars and the ability to subvert policy goals.
You want to kill lots of people? Just take over a powerful nation-state and gut its institutions, and appoint folks who want to do nothing but plunder the state for profit while disregarding the safety and life of its citizens.
Good thing that isn't happening right now, eh?
Wow, the Tzar Bomba scale really stood out. You always make me think about these big picture implicatons so well.
This must be part of the calculus for wanting network states, though I'm not sure I can quite put my finger on it. The aspiring technocrats know first hand about both the democratization of these capabilities, and the prevalence of destructive anti-human ideals. But they also have malignantly narcissistic desires to be THE ONE with that power and the protection from it (live forever!).
It's simply not realistic for any one of them to save themselves by grabbing hold of the entire world. Why not carve it up "Risk" style and see who does the best job of saving themselves, while turning their captured corner of the human population into a surveillance state liminal space focused on their personal transhuman goals. 🤷🏻♀️