The Roman Philosopher Lucius Anneaus Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE) was perhaps the first to note the universal trend that growth is slow but ruin is rapid. I call this tendency the "Seneca Effect."

Sunday, January 15, 2023

The Age of Exterminations: How to Kill a Few Billion People




Bill Gates has been accused of having publicly declared (*) his intention to exterminate billions of people in order to reduce overpopulation. It is not true; Gates never said anything like that. Unfortunately, though, that doesn't mean we can rule out that some powerful elites are actually planning mass exterminations. It has already happened in the past, there is no reason to think that it won't happen again. The problem is not with overpopulation itself, but with the concept of "utilitarianism" that empowers the elites to take action without being bound to moral principles. We saw it happening with the Covid pandemic. We must rethink our implicit assumptions if we want to avoid even worse disasters in the future. 


With 8 billion people alive on Earth, it is reasonable to believe that the planet is becoming a little crowded and that life would be better for everyone if there weren't so many people around. But we should not neglect the opposite opinion: that we have resources and technologies sufficient to keep 8 billion people alive and reasonably happy, and perhaps even more. Neither position can be proven, nor disproven. The future will tell us who was right but, in the meantime, it is perfectly legitimate to discuss this subject.

The problem is that we don't have a discussion on population: we have a clash of absolutes. The position that sees overpopulation as a problem has been thoroughly demonized over the past decades and, still today, you cannot even mention the subject without being immediately branded as a would-be exterminator. It happened to Bill Gates, to the Club of Rome, and to many others who dared mention the forbidden term "overpopulation." 

The demonization is, of course, a knee-jerk reaction: the people who propose population planning would be simply horrified at being accused of supporting mass exterminations. But note that there is a real problem, here. Exterminations DID happen in the recent past, and they were carried out largely on the basis of a perceived overpopulation problem. During the Nazi era in Germany, the idea that Europe was overpopulated was common and it was widely believed that the "Lebensraum, the "living space," available was insufficient for the German people. The result was a series of exterminations correctly considered the most heinous crimes in human history. 

How was that possible? The Germans of that time were the grandfathers of the Germans of today, who are horrified at thinking of what their grandparents did or at least did not oppose. But, for the Germans of those times, killing the Untermenschen, the inferior races, seemed to be the right thing to do, given the vision of the world that was proposed to them and that they had accepted. The Germans fell into a trap called "utilitarianism." It is one of those principles that are so embedded in our way of thinking that we don't even realize that it exists. But it does, and it causes enormous damage. 

In principle, utilitarianism wouldn't seem to be such a bad idea. It is a rational calculation of the consequences of taking or not taking a certain action based on generating the maximum good for the maximum number of people. So defined, it looks both sensible and harmless. But that's the theory. What we have is a good illustration of the age-old principle that "in theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice, they are not." 

For a good illustration of the problems with utilitarianism in our current society, you can read an excellent post by Simon Sheridan. A typical example of the basic feature of utilitarianism is the diagram in the figure. 

In this case, the choice looks obvious. You act on the lever to direct the trolley to the track where it causes a smaller number of victims. Easy? Not at all. The example is misleading because it assumes you know the future with absolute certainty. In the real world, there is no such thing as certainty. There exists such a thing as a "fog of life," akin to the "fog of war." Just like no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, no Gannt chart survives contact with a real calendar. And, if you made a mistake in your evaluation, you may direct the trolley along the wrong path.

A good example of the damage caused by utilitarianism is the recent Covid pandemic. To refresh your memory, take a look at this 2020 post by Tomas Pueyo, which was one of the starting points of the disastrous ideas of "flattening the curve" and "Covid zero." On the basis of models that predicted millions of victims caused by the virus, a series of measures were proposed and then implemented. They were supposed to be both short-lived and harmless, at most a minor inconvenience: lockdowns, social distancing, face masks, and the like.  

I don't have to tell you that all the assumptions at the basis of these ideas turned out to be wildly off the mark. The pandemic was much less deadly than the models said it would be. The "flattening of the curve" just didn't happen despite the measures lasting more than two years instead of two weeks. "Covid zero" turned out to be not just a dream but a nightmare. Finally, the measures were far from harmless (for instance face masks positively harm health). The psychological damage was immense, especially to children, with people deprived of their jobs, their social life, and even the possibility of comforting their sick relatives. And people died as a result of depression and lack of proper medical care. Just as an example, Sheridan reports that "two infants in South Australia needed to be flown interstate for life saving surgery but were denied because the borders were closed due to covid. They died." This was real damage done to avoid possible damage. A classic case of misfiring utilitarianism: the trolley was directed along the wrong path. 

Now, back to overpopulation, we are in a similar situation but more dramatic. We have models telling us that a combination of resource depletion and pollution (especially in the form of climate change) could lead not just to millions of victims, but billions. If the models are right, what do we do? Unfortunately, if you really believe that billions are going to die if nothing is done, then you could make the case that killing a few billion people now would save more billions later. It is the same logic of the trolley dilemma, aka, "we had to destroy the village in order to save it."

Would you bet that, today, nobody in the higher spheres of power is thinking about something like that? That is, can you rule out that someone is planning to exterminate a few billion people in order to "save humankind?" Go back to the history of the exterminations planned and carried out by the German Nazi government and you'll see that this idea is not so farfetched. During the pandemic, the "anti-vaxxers" were singled out, insulted, isolated, demonized, fired from their jobs, and more. Just like the German Jews in the 1930s. Fortunately, the animosity against the anti-vaxxers seems to have fizzled out before it could evolve into a mass extermination. But it was clearly heading in that direction, and we don't know whether it could pick up steam again in the future. 

The problem is not whether the models are right or wrong. Models can be extremely useful if you understand their limitations. But if you use models as oracles, then doom is guaranteed. That's exactly what happened with the Covid pandemic. Is it the same for the world models that predict humankind's doom. Are they right or wrong? The answer is simply "we cannot be sure." They might be completely wrong or perfectly right, or even too optimistic. But you should never ignore the models. They are not oracles, they are maps of the future. A good map tells you about the roads that lead you where you want to go, but it is up to you to choose the one to follow.

So, how do you avoid misusing the models? You need to approach them differently. There is an alternative to utilitarianism. It is called "personalism." It is both a religious and a philosophic stance that sees the human person as sacred, the basic value, not exchangeable with anything else. It is the principle of "First do no Harm" ("primum, non nocere") that we derive from the Hippocratic Oath. 

Personalism doesn't mean that you can do nothing against emergencies, but blind faith in science must be tempered with moral sense and the capability of understanding the value of the human person. If you are in a condition of uncertainty, then try at least not to worsen the situation by taking hurried and unproven measures. It is a point forcefully made by Dr. Malcolm Kendrick in a post titled, "Don't just do something, stand there!" His point is that physicians are often overtreating their patients in their hurry to "do something." And they may do more harm than good. 

In his post, Kendrick proposes to apply to medicine the OODA principle: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. It is not philosophy. it is "a practical concept designed to function as the foundation of rational thinking in confusing or chaotic situations". It was developed by the Air Force Colonel, John Boyd. It means that you refrain from acting until you have at least a certain degree of understanding of what happens. It is the military equivalent of the medical principle "do no harm." OODA is a good idea, but it can be interpreted in various ways. It is the same problem we have with the "Precautionary Principle" -- it may be interpreted in terms of avoiding rash decisions, but also in the opposite way (**). Personalism, instead, has a deeper relevance and is less ambiguous. If you say that life is sacred, then it is. 

Applied to the Covid pandemic,  the approach based on personalism (and maybe on OODA as well) would have avoided drastic and harmful actions taken in a moment of great uncertainty. Sick people would have been cured, but those who were not sick would have been left in peace. Vaccination would have been recommended, but not made mandatory. It was done in Sweden, which didn't suffer more damage from the virus than countries that, instead, took a drastic approach to the pandemic. 

How about climate change? In this case, the risk is not just millions of victims, it is truly "existential." That is, the climate tipping points might well kill us all. Even without tipping points, we have plenty of negative effects ongoing. Droughts, sea acidification, seawater rise, melting ice, extreme weather, and more. This said, it is also clear that the system we are modeling is hugely complex and hard to predict. We have no idea of when, where, and how fast, a climate tipping point could manifest itself, despite the dull certainty of people who define themselves as believers of the "near-term extinction" concept. Humans may well go extinct in a non-remote future, but there is no reason to hurry up in that direction.

In a personalistic framework, we deal with climate change by applying the "do no harm" principle. It means first of all avoiding panic. There are hasty actions against climate change whose consequences are unknown and could cause more harm than good. Apart from mass exterminations (obviously!), geoengineering or CO2 capture and storage are good examples of potentially disastrous "solutions" which might not be such. Then, "do no harm" does not mean "do nothing." It means taking actions that we believe are effective, but also that we are reasonably sure are not harmful. 

For instance, assuming (as it is very probable) that fossil fuels are an important factor causing climate change, we should make sure that phasing them out doesn't harm people. A lot of people, everywhere, are living at the edge of survival, and forcing them to stop using fossil fuels without offering substitutes is tantamount to killing them. They need alternatives: efficiency, PV panels, wind turbines, and the like. Think also of "degrowth," is it a good idea? Not for those living at the edge of survival: asking them to degrow means, again, killing them. (***)

So, should we also do something to reduce population growth? Why not, as long as we don't harm anyone? The Chinese government did that with the "one-child" policy. You may argue that it was not a good idea, and also that it didn't work. But it is also true that nobody was killed and nobody was harmed. The policy may have been the main factor that contained the Chinese population to manageable levels. (I told the story in some detail in a previous post). Population planning at the world level could be a good way to stunt the action of those evil people who may be planning to obtain the same results by means of mass exterminations. 

Unfortunately, given the way the pandemic was managed, it is perfectly possible that we will soon go into "panic mode" about climate change. That may well lead humankind to make truly horrible mistakes. But this is the way humans are. Maybe one day we will learn, but that will take time.  

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An excerpt from Sheridan's post about utilitarianism and its disasters. Read the whole post on his blog.


Many people could recite the most basic formula of Utilitarianism: the greatest good for the greatest number. Utilitarianism is a form of what is sometimes called consequentialism which just means that the ethical value of actions should be judged by their consequences. If you, purely by accident, blundered your way into creating the greatest good for the greatest number, your action is deemed of higher value than if, with the best of intentions, you failed to create anything good.

Now, of course, Utilitarianism is a big topic and there are numerous sub-variants which are attempts to answer the objections made to the doctrine. Probably the main objection has always been that Utilitarianism implies that killing an innocent is justified if it saves the lives of others. This is one of those classic arguments that always seems confined to university faculties at universities and can usually be counted on to draw the cynical response that it’s “just semantics” and “nobody would ever have to make that decision in real life.”

Well, during the last three years, exactly these kinds of decisions were made. To take just one of the more egregious examples, here in Australia two infants in South Australia needed to be flown interstate for life saving surgery but were denied because the borders were closed due to covid. They died. The justification given, not just by politicians but by everyday people on social media, was the utilitarian one: we couldn’t risk the lives of multiple other people who might get infected with a virus. The greatest good for the greatest number.

(This raises the other main objection to Utilitarianism which is that it must rely on speculative reasoning. We can only predict more people will die based on some model. But we can never know for sure because, despite what many people apparently believe, we are not God and we do not control the future).

The death of those children was a low point even for the corona hysteria and is, in my opinion, one of the lowest points in this nation’s history. Combined with the countless other episodes of people being denied urgent medical care, the elderly residents of nursing homes left without care for days because one of the staff tested positive and all the staff were placed in quarantine, the people unable to be at the side of loved ones who were on their death bed, the daily cases of police brutality, or any of the other innumerable indignities and absurdities, for the first time ever I found myself being ashamed to call myself an Australian.


(*) Publicly expressing one's evil plans is a typical trope of modern fiction. It is called the "badass boast." It shouldn't be needed to say that this is not something that happens in the real world but, strangely, many people seem to believe that it does. For instance, Osama bin Laden is commonly believed to have confessed his role in the 9/11 attacks in New York in a videotape.

(**) About how the precautionary principle could have been correctly applied to the Covid pandemic, there is an interesting paper by Vianna Franco et al. -- highly suggested.  

(***) That degrowth or "zero-growth" is not a good idea was clearly understood by Aurelio Peccei, the founder of the Club of Rome, already in the 1970s, See this post on the subject on "Cassandra's Legacy."



44 comments:

  1. An excellent piece!

    As Simon Sheridan says, we are not God and we do not control the future. In addition, I would point out that any speculation on possible futures needs to allow for societal reaction to our proposed actions. Hence, when you say that "it is also true that nobody was killed and nobody was harmed," this is not so. Many live female births were unnaturally ended so that the family's "one child" might have a chance to be male.

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    1. Stewart Brand once said "We are as Gods, so we must get good at it."
      And we aren't getting any better at it, IMHO. Science and technology can provide the power but not the wisdom to use it well. ArtDeco

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  2. The one child policy resulted in infanticide as female babies were either aborted or worse killed post birth in a society that values boys over girls. I would not say it did not harm anyone!

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    1. Allow me to disagree, anonymous. Girl infanticide has been practiced in China for thousands of years. In my opinion, faulting the "one-child" policy in our times is an unwarranted leap of logic. Then, even if there was a correlation, you can't blame the government for evil actions carried out by individual families who were in no way forced to kill their daughters.

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    2. Oh but forced they were. Forced abortions and forced sterilization were implemented. https://www.britannica.com/topic/one-child-policy

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    3. They were not forced to kill their daughters.

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    4. But they were forced to kill. And did.

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    5. Perhaps it would be better if you Ugo Bardi, look into the consequences of the ' one child' policy in China. Hundreds of millions of abortions, tens of millions of children living!!! in the shadow of existence because their existence is simply 'not recognised'? they ah don't live and numerous other ' demographic models'. Too many to mention.

      I would say delve into it. Unless of course, 'utilitarian' speaking, you think ' Chinese' are different from you and me in all sorts of human respects

      I recommend that after thorough study then you apply the same 'plaintive' criteria where the mental and health issues surrounding the Covid crisis are concerned.... Oh dear two children were not transported to hospital!


      The covid crisis in Europe is an endless source for petty bourgeois to broadly air their conspiracy needs and criticism of what they see as 'failing' health policies as if you have nothing better to do.

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    6. Perhaps it would be better if you Ugo Bardi, look into the consequences of the ' one child' policy in China. Hundreds of millions of abortions, tens of millions of children living!!! in the shadow of existence because their existence is simply 'not recognised'? they ah don't live and numerous other ' demographic models'. Too many to mention.

      I would say delve into it. Unless of course, 'utilitarian' speaking, you think ' Chinese' are different from you and me in all sorts of human respects

      I recommend that after thorough study then you apply the same 'plaintive' criteria where the mental and health issues surrounding the Covid crisis are concerned.... Oh dear two children were not transported to hospital!


      The covid crisis in Europe is an endless source for petty bourgeois to broadly air their conspiracy needs and criticism of what they see as 'failing' health policies as if you have nothing better to do.

      Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

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  3. "The Age of Exterminations: How to Kill a Few Billion People" - but why is that - in the first place?

    Anna De buisseret is a former British army officer and an outspoken lawyer - hints also on an assumed ongoing mass depopulation campaign: We are being illegally treated ASSAULTED HARMED COERCED

    The problem with De buisseret's message, and alike, is that it doesn't explain why the mass-depopulation has become a necessity for our Nations' Engineer to resort to and exercise - against the masses on such a massive scale?

    De buisseret and her peers worldwide NEVER EVER mention the possibility that the world might be living in an Energy Musical Chairs Game, actually...

    Today, some people in the Middle East think depopulation and forced energy-deprivation are not something new, but rather an ongoing practice since 1914 when Britain invaded Iraq for the first time for its resources, the WW I has been choreographed and the Soviet Union has been synthesised - the rest is history...

    It has been enough to supress energy consumption in oil-rich Arab nations, by the agency of the theatrical Arab-Israeli conflict since 1917, to balance fossil resources to global demand - all the last 100 years.

    Now this becomes insufficient alone - and a larger population needs to be forcefully taken off of fossil fuels - to keep the West playing an Empire for a longer time...

    If anyone knows De buisseret, please forward this short text to her...

    Dear Anna, The issue now is that the Magna Carta itself requires overhauling, adding to it the right for humans to understand what Energy really is...

    "In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most.
    No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores.
    No system of energy can deliver sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it.
    This universal truth applies to all systems.

    Energy, like time, flows from past to future".

    Wailing.

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  4. A well-balanced accounting of one of the fundamental questions of our age, Ugo.

    I DO think you took it a little too easy on Billy, though. His infamous TED talk DID include a (Freudian?) slip claiming the value of vaccines in helping reduce human population by 10-15 percent, and all the Gates Foundation "decade of vaccines" funding, research, and profit-harvesting following that speech didn't exactly make the world better (unless better is defined as Bill getting richer.) It might be trite to say leopards don't change their spots, but it seems particularly applicable to Bill, and he IMHO should be kept as far away from "public health" (isn't that a Nazi neologism now accepted as something wholesome?) as possible.

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    1. I didn't say that Bill is not planning to exterminate a few billion people. I said that he didn't express that idea in a public statement. If he had, I would think that he went a little feebleminded and I would be less worried about whatever he is concocting in darkness.

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    2. Just read some of the stories of how the many ran his business and that should be enough. Remember when you bought a PC and it came with windows and microsoft word and other tools and you owned them? Well my friend, connect that PC to internet today and as long as you aren't running something like Windows XP, well microsoft will "update" your computer and when you boot it back up that copy of word, that you only ever used for resumes and such, its gone! Poof! Not to mention you don't own any new copies of windows, and can't turn off "updates" if you don't want them.

      "You will own nothing and you will be happy"

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    3. Yes. Windows is one of the hateful things in the universe -- and yet we cannot free ourselves from it.

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    4. We can't or that asshole who wouldn't have problems killing billions has rigged it so you cannot free yourself from it? At this point i'm going to get linux.

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    5. Unfortunately, Linux is being sabotaged in all possible ways and it has become difficult to use it in place of windows. On many laptops, it just doesn't work -- you try to install it, and you find that you can't.

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  5. but how long can current population survive until 2030 ?

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    1. There will come the Parousia, like a thief in the night (Thessalonians, 5:2)

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    2. and when will this parousia come because in the bibble is written the parousia will come after the kingdom falls and when the anti christ appears but he is still not here

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    3. and if the parousia will come why would the club of rome still try to save humanity if the parousia comes the club of rome must not put effort in it anymore that and can you still sleep at night if you know that your family will also be death but off course you do the club of rome members are by the 1% richest of the world they don't care if poor peasants like my family die as long as they have a good life the don't care

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  6. As I’m sure you are very well aware Ugo, 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'

    I'm writing from Europe, it's my perception there is now a very powerful self censorship to within an accepted narrative on so many issues that we risk the loss of our critical capacity to think for ourselves and openly debate.

    When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.

    In theory we still have freedom of speech, but the consequenses of straying too far from todays accepted understanding can be significant, even if what you say is hard to refute. It’s in this context that I agree fully with what you write, but feel slightly naughty for having read it!

    I've always loved the quote from Lewis Carroll, "Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."


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  7. you say the parousia will come like a thief in the night did you just not say in your article that models can not predict the future you talk against yourself

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    1. The future is like a polished diamond. It has many facets.

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    2. what is meant by this many facetes please explain ?

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    3. It means that now we see darkly, as in a mirror. But then we'll see face to face.

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  8. but when would the parousia come do you mean soon or like in 2 years or is the parousia all underway it's because there is also a new rapport from the club of rome ?

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  9. As the cover of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy says: Don't Panic!

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  10. It is a good text on the surface, but it suffers from an obvious bias: anti-covid measures have never been about saving lives or any health reason. It has been a destruction of demand accompanied by the largest transfer of wealth in human history. The negative effects of these measures were therefore clearly intentional and criminal. The models presented (flattening the curve, etc.) were knowingly false. This is why I find it difficult to understand the link with utilitarianism in this article, since those in charge were perfectly aware of the consequences of their actions and perfectly predicted the results obtained, namely an unprecedented increase in their power and wealth.

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    1. I think you could make a case that the people who proposed the anti-covid measures did so in good faith. Surely, many people completely believed the stories about "flattening the curve" and "Covid zero." Even people in relatively high level positions did, I am sure of that. Then, the whole story may have been masterminded by a small group of evil people who knew exactly what they were doing, and what they wanted to accomplish. But we have no proof that it is the cas.

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    2. Ugo:

      If you knew for a fact that everything since 2008 was a lie, would you have believed them on covid? I still find it hard to believe that people didn't notice they were bailing themselves out by way larger amounts then in 2008. Some of us have been saying since 2008 that the system is bankrupt and run by corporations. We were called conspiracy theorists, then covid happened and most of what we were saying was going on was proven to be true........ ever so slowly and with tons of censorship..... and we were called conspiracy theorists. I dunno buddy, if you were dating someone and they lied to you endlessly and gaslighted you to think you were just making it all up, where do you draw the line?

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    3. I know alot of people don't care for economics and such, but your first tell that what i say is true should have been the fact that they didn't raise interest rates for almost 15 years and printed copious amounts of money over that same time line. A healthy system does not require that. It is freaking common sense.

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    4. Ah and those low low interest rates were mainly for corporate america and wall street, your credit card still charge you interest in the teens. Didn't pass on those savings ;)

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  11. Useful idiots are just what they are.
    I played devil's advocate when I said that utilitarianism was not at stake here. In fact I think it is, but not in the way it is presented. There are indeed people who think about the consequences of their actions and who probably think that not acting will result in the most suffering. However, when I see the level of stupidity reached by their little clerks I think that these people themselves do not have the capacity to understand and measure their own actions. Unless they have already delegated all their intelligence to an AI, which would explain why we find less and less of it in humans?





    There is a second point that is not addressed about utilitarianism. Utilitarianism only exists in conjunction with a certain conception of power. Those who lead believe they are really leading. In fact, that is what they want. Power is only for those who take it. This is why we only see profiles of sociopaths and other "deviants" at the highest levels of society. Normal people shun power because they quickly realize the responsibility it brings (manipulating others) and don't want it. There is a saying in French that says "pour vivre heureux vivons cachés". If society was composed of normal people, it seems to me that the very notion of utilitarianism would not exist. But maybe I'm projecting my anarchic Taoist ideals.

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    1. Well, in my experience, the category of the "useful idiots" includes most university professors and researchers. They submitted to the covid rules with an enthusiasm that surprised me, and perhaps surprised them as well.

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    2. After some reflexion I decided to stop calling them useful idiots, which is rude, and calling them human drones instead, which is neutral.
      They may have been brilliant previsously but then they fell into the wrong hands and their brain has been hacked. Their new program is not designed to take into account neither logic nor evidences. What the group says is the truth no matter what. The problems start when they are many enough to form an army of drones.

      At least you don't have to consider yourself friends with your colleagues at the university. In my case I've seen my closest friends get hacked, mostly by their professional circle (and probably other circles behind). It's sad.

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    3. Also friends... yes. They were completely captured. But there is little that can be done about that. We are what we perceive of the world around, and for most of us what we perceive is controlled by the PTBs

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  12. Hugo, you are like John Kerry such a divine individual, one of the select few who can save the whole planet. I am surprised you were not invited to WEF. Seriously, you need to send your blog posts to Klaus Schwab, Kerry, and Soros.

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  13. Population Matters is the UKs most promoted "climate change" initiative and is fronted by Attenborough and Thunberg. It advocates a population of 50m for the UK by 2050 lowering to 17m some point in the future at a rate of "no less than" -0.25%/year. In a different document it advocates limiting the projected global population growth to 8b by 2050 rather than the projected 9b.

    Their EU desire was to stablise EU 27 member state population at 497m by 2021-23 then decrease.

    It all seems a bit disingenuous seen as Scotland has more land dedicated to golf courses than fruit n' veg, and no one seems to notice that most land use is given to lawns, cows, sheep, and cars. Maybe if those issues were addressed then I'd have time for population controls.

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  14. Utilitarianism makes morality into a calculation. If you accept all human life is equal perhaps there may be no difference which way the streetcar is directed. 5 deaths may only be the same tragedy repeated five times. Non-eucllidian geometry could give a correct answer. Making morality into a calculation may not only be dangerous, it may be 'flat' wrong. If you get the pun, good for you.

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    1. Indeed. That is the way an A.I. is likely to reason at first. But then it's unlikely to view all lives as equally valuable 😉. ArtDeco

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    2. When I worked on risk assessment for Qld (Australia) state railways the policy was to 'cost' railway employee lives at $1M and members of the public at $4M

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  15. Peace be with you my sagacious friend. Once again, I am come out from the howling waste to enjoy the warmth and glow of you little fire. As I journey through the cold and dark these beacons grow scarce and far between.
    I have no loaf to share, only what sustenance maybe found in words wiser than my own.
    “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
    As far as models go, "It doesn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing."

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  16. China's one child policy DID murder people. Females were aborted prior to or just after birth.

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