6 Comments
Oct 7Liked by Jamie Paul

Great article!

I contend that moderns man’s greatest folly is presuming that what solves on a spreadsheet applies at scale.

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Paul Ehrlich has become the whipping boy for every depopulation alarmist. His book THE POPULATION BOMB was a warning. Since then, we have been poisoned by micro-plastics, chemtrails, countless chemicals in our food, and tons of sugar.

How has mankind survived? A naturally occurring event - people stopped having babies through choice and/or through the contamination of our planet. Of course, war will eventually remove much of the world's best breeding stock and the elderly will require sophisticated robots to provide care until we die. (a great improvement over the underpaid and often disinterested aides that shuffle around in nursing homes).

A good primer for the 21st century would be Terry Gilliam's movie BRAZIL.

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>It’s worth taking a step back from our own self-centered considerations to ask whether fewer humans might be better for the planet? The answer is an unquestionable, resounding yes.

This is the bit I disagree with. I share your skepticism about catastrophic depopulation, for the reasons you say--we'll adapt, we always do. But I don't think it's correct, let alone obvious, that fewer humans would be better for the planet, even in the short run. I make an animal welfare case ( https://outlandishclaims.substack.com/p/bring-me-my-arrows-of-desire ) and a more mainstream leftist case ( https://outlandishclaims.substack.com/p/malthus-and-trump-are-wrong-about ) on my blog.

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"both prophesying societal collapse..."

I Stopped reading right there. Why can't people stop lying about this? For people who want the actual truth, there's a good podcast about The Limits to Growth project and the ongoing campaign to discredit it: https://tippingpoint-podcast.com/

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author

I have yet to encounter an intelligent comment that follows a proud declaration that the commenter stopped reading.

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It is a testimony to the attention span of some Substackers that they sometimes read posts that go on and on and on and on and on.

We only use 10% of our brains and many Substack essays clutter up and clog that gray matter to the point that it's useless.

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