#Malthusian logic

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Minor, The Pain of All The World, c. 1910

* * * *

The New Malthusianism of the Right

How the Right Repackages Malthusian Logic to Justify Exclusion, Fear, and Social Control

James B. Greenberg

Jun 17, 2025

There is an unspoken logic behind the right’s crusade to dismantle the public sphere: a modern Malthusianism, dressed in the language of efficiency and merit, but rooted in something much older and more brutal. It sees poverty not as a structural failure, but as evidence of surplus life—populations deemed unnecessary, unworthy, unfit for rescue.

This worldview doesn’t rely on overt violence. It doesn’t need to. The tools are policy, budget cuts, and selective silence. Remove access to healthcare. Undermine vaccination campaigns. Hollow out the safety net. The result is a slow culling by design—death by bureaucratic abandonment. What emerges is not the spectacle of fascism, but its quieter cousin: a soft, managed cruelty that lets nature, supposedly, take its course.

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The recent gutting of USAID under Elon Musk’s influence is a case in point. A technocrat’s dream of efficiency masks a strategic withdrawal from responsibility. Bill Gates, not often given to hyperbole, warned that this vision leaves the world’s poorest to die at the hands of the world’s richest. It’s not just a policy shift—it’s a value statement. A declaration about whose lives are worth sustaining, and whose are not.

This isn’t new. Malthusian logic has long served as moral cover for violent inequality—from colonial famine policies to eugenics programs to the gatekeeping of immigration. The targets change, but the rationale remains: some lives are worth preserving, others are simply excess. What’s changed is the mechanism. Today it’s not enacted through spectacle or coercion, but through metrics, models, and managed invisibility. The cruelty is buried in algorithms and budget lines.

Malthus imagined famine and disease as natural checks on the population of agrarian societies. But the 21st century presents the opposite challenge. Birthrates in the wealthiest countries have dropped below replacement levels. Scarcity, where it exists, is political, not demographic. Yet the Malthusian myth has endured—reshaped and redeployed as ideological cover for policies of containment and control.

Today, that logic finds new footing in national security circles. Climate change is no longer just an environmental issue—it’s portrayed as a destabilizer of poor nations and a trigger for mass migration. Droughts, floods, and crop failures become reframed not as humanitarian emergencies, but as threats to the wealth and borders of the Global North. Migrants are recast as invaders. The displaced become suspects. Fortress policies follow.

But these policies don’t just emerge from fear—they serve profit. As walls rise and aid retracts, private security firms, data contractors, and border surveillance industries step in. Crisis becomes a business model. Technologies once pitched as humanitarian tools—satellite tracking, biometric IDs, AI forecasting—are now deployed to sort, exclude, and contain. The logic remains unchanged: manage the risk, shield the center, and let the margins fall away.

What’s most revealing is how this rhetoric obscures the actual source of vulnerability. It isn’t overpopulation that drives suffering—it’s the uneven distribution of power, resources, and the means of survival. Climate change doesn’t kill indiscriminately. It amplifies existing inequalities. It hits hardest where protections have been deliberately withdrawn.

This isn’t governance. It’s triage on a planetary scale. And it reflects a profound shift in the function of the state—from protector to gatekeeper, from provider to sorter. The new Malthusianism isn’t about managing numbers. It’s about managing narratives—who belongs, who drains, who deserves.

Anthropologists have long studied how states make populations legible, governable, and expendable. What we’re witnessing now is a recalibration of that calculus under the pressures of climate, capital, and ideology. The danger is not just that certain lives are deemed unworthy—but that their abandonment becomes rational, even moralized.

We are told this is simply how the world works now. But that’s not true. It’s how power works when it no longer pretends to care. But people are not numbers. And history reminds us that even in the shadow of abandonment, solidarity can rewrite the script.

Suggested Readings

Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Biehl, João. “The Juridical Afterlife of the Poor: Brazilian Public Health and the Politics of Abandonment.” Journal of Political Ecology 15 (2008): 1–18.

Greenberg, James B., and Thomas K. Park, eds. Terrestrial Transformations: Political Ecology, Climate, and the Remaking of Planet Earth. New York: Lexington Books, 2023.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014.

Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. The Rise of Necro/Narco-Citizenship: Belonging and Dying in the National Borderlands. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2025.

Weizman, Eyal. The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza.London: Verso, 2012.

[viiridiangreen]

Mostly based, except for:

The Luddites' beef wasn't with the looms

[opinions-about-tiaras]

I feel like we were robbed of an Infinity Saga where instead of abstruse Malthusian philosophizing that doesn't even make sense by its own internal logic, Thanos is doing increasingly unhinged acts of omniversal genocide to court Aubrey Plaza as Death, who just stands there, silently, with that terrible, wide-eyed piercing stare she's so good at, barely aware of him, certainly not impressed.

[apesoformythoughts]

"So really, it doesn't matter who is in power—Democrats or Republicans—and it does not matter if we place more emphasis on the government to solve our problems or free enterprise economics in a secular, amoral, Malthusian register. Nor is this a cynical reading of our situation. It is rather who we are. I cannot emphasize enough that what I am talking about here is not just a few falsehoods in the modern worldview that we can just tweak and set them right which will make all of the boo boos better. What we can now see clearly is that modernity, freed from the last vestiges of its Christian hangover, and which now manifests its inner logic publicly, represents a total reworking of the fabric of the real, of how we construe what truth is. We are way beyond tweaking the mechanism of the modern world with a little St. Thomas Aquinas.

I am not here to tell people not to participate in the electoral process or for whom they should vote. But since our choice seems to be between Claudius or Domitian, what I am saying is that the transformation of our Empire is now, as it was back then, more a function of our holiness as a counter witness to the idolatries of power than it is about which apparatchik is in charge of things now."

— Larry Chapp: "The Universal Call to Holiness as a 'Politics' for Our Time"

[darkmaga-returns]

And so it comes down to this. Oh, the humanity.

The self-styled “Medical Freedom Movement” is turning its guns on yet another of its heroes, HHS Secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Circular firing squads are a chronic cultural feature of Washington, DC bureaucracy, giving rise to the insider aphorism “Keep your head down, if they can’t see you they can’t shoot you.” Right up there with another of my favorites from dealing with the DC inside-the-beltway crowd: “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” Understand those two, and you are a long way down the road toward understanding DC culture.

By way of disclosure and transparency, I have personally experienced the “Medical Freedom Movement” circular firing squad attacks (including from many associated with the Children’s Health Defense organization) for at least four years now. So, I have become a bit jaded and biased and refuse to associate myself with this “Movement.” 

As far as I am concerned, the meta-issues are freedom in general, “Western” (US sphere of influence) government deployment of modern PsyWar, propaganda, and censorship technology against its own citizens, and the rise of a globalized centralized planning “government” structure grounded in utilitarian, neo-Malthusian, corporatist-socialist “stakeholder capitalism” logic.

[scottishcommune]

To consider starvation as merely an “alternative” to the civil war that wracked Ethiopia and the destruction of so much of the cultural integrity of Latin American villages by (largely American) corporate interests reveals a shocking social amnesia. It is breathtaking to contemplate the extent to which this “ecological” ensemble of ideas deflects public attention from the social origins of ecological problems. That anything besides “nature” is seeking its “balance” in the Third World seems to elude Foreman, whose obfuscation of social problems expresses the logic of a reductionist “ecology.” Such “reverence for the earth” stifles even the modest decencies of middle-class virtues like empathy and concern for the plight of hungry children. “Earth wisdom” of this kind could well leave us with a “love” of the planet but no care for the underprivileged who make up so much of the human species.

Yet Foreman’s remarks are not idiosyncratic. Quite to the contrary: an authoritarian streak is latent in a crude biologism that conceals an ever-diminishing humaneness with “natural law” and papers over the fact that it is capitalism that is at work here, not an abstract “Humanity” and “Society.” This authoritarian mentality sometimes coexists with pious appeals to variants of Eastern spirituality, placing a saintly mask on the ruthless egoism that stems from bourgeois greed. “Ecological thinking” of this kind is all the more sinister because it subverts the organic, indeed dialectical thinking that can rescue us from reductionism. An unbridgeable gulf separates social ecology from the neo-Malthusianism that the ensemble of biocentrism, antihumanism, and “natural law” theory have spawned. We are grimly in need of a “reenchantment” of humanity — to use the quasi-mystical jargon of our day — with a fluid, organismic, and dialectical rationality. For it is in this human rationality that nature ultimately actualises its own evolution of subjectivity over long aeons of neural and sensory development. There is nothing more natural than humanity’s capacity to conceptualise, generalise, relate ideas, engage in symbolic communication, and innovate changes in the world around it, not merely to adapt to the conditions it finds at hand. For biocentric, antihumanist, and “natural law” advocates to set their faces against the self-realisation of nature in an ecologically oriented humanity and dialectical thought is to foster the image of a blighted humanity. No less than Adam and Eve’s acquisition of knowledge, humanity’s power of thought becomes its abiding “original sin.”

- Murray Bookchin, Thinking Ecologically: A Dialectical Approach

(in response to Earth First! founder and "deep ecologist" Dave Foreman's comments saying that Ethiopians should be left to starve for the sake of the planet)

[mitigatedchaos]

I've been mentally categorizing you as a pretty clean example of the 'new right'; editorializing with 'extreme' feels like it's giving more heat than light but w/e. It's very clear in the associative sense (you hang out with people on the right), in the stylistic sense (your writing is easy to match with the Moldbug, Land, ZHPL cluster), and in the operational sense (you critique the left primarily and the right only parenthetically).

And like, at the end of the day, your overriding issue of concern is to codify racial differences as beyond the scope of policy intervention. Whatever else you want it to be, that project is and always has been a keystone of the right's ideological basis and coalition-building.

When I was a child, in the year 2000, the Human Genome Project took 13 years and cost $2.7 billion just to sequence the human genome. Now that costs less than $1,000. Genetic engineering was science fiction.

In 2017, the FDA approved the first commercial gene therapy, Kymriah. It costs $475,000. If monogenic gene therapy costs $500,000 in 2020 and declines in cost by half every 5 years, then by 2035 it costs $62,500, and by 2050 it will cost around $7,800.

I recently posted a criticism of Hitler, and I'll bring up part of it because it's relevant here - Hitler apparently thought the world was going to be consumed by Malthusian total war, and that the only thing to do was to win. However, in many developed countries the fertility rate has been below replacement since around 1973, or for about fifty years as of 2024.

World War 2 started in 1939. Hitler killed millions of people. 1973 was a mere 34 years away.

The BAPism cluster is implicitly based on the biocapital meltdown theory. Its logical conclusion would be a return to pre-industrial mortality rates. In terms of actual science, at least one researcher said that it's a mystery how mutational load hasn't killed us 10 times over already - that amount of uncertainty is not a sound foundation for radical policy.

The Social Justice cluster are based on a theory of social causes, but their social approach doesn't work and the social interventions we do have are relatively weak and tend to fade out. Despite this, they want a system of formal racial benefits and penalties throughout all of society, and prefer to use one particular race as their moral dumping ground for all problems. They're the kind of people that would sabotage hiring for air traffic controllers.

Neither philosophy is based on a realistic assessment of the situation. Both are based on despair over genetic fatalism.

I'll go over 4 possible future cases, the relationship between the Rationalists and what you call the "New Right," and some of what I think will happen to the coalitions in 10-20 years.. (Total post is ~2,600 words.)

And like, at the end of the day, your overriding issue of concern is to codify racial differences as beyond the scope of policy intervention. Whatever else you want it to be, that project is and always has been a keystone of the right's ideological basis and coalition-building.

We already paid the staggering oppression setup costs for the 2008 world system. It's a sunk cost. Now is not a good time to engage in a radical political program involving much higher oppression, suffering, or material costs on the basis of very limited evidence.

Let's talk about the possibilities. When it comes to the things people complain about, there are basically three possibilities: { mostly_genetic, partly_genetic, barely_genetic } As for the genetics industry, we can treat it as having two possibilities: { improvement, stasis }

Genes and the environment are not actually independent. I work based on a theory of compounding capability. Someone with a higher ability can take better advantage of positive events ("positive shocks," such as a scholarship or inheritance), and has more options to mitigate the downsides of negative events ("negative shocks," such as a fire or illness).

Someone's genes influence the environment which they create around themselves, and the environment influences just what they can accomplish with those genes.

So we can actually collapse the first set of possibilities into just two: { partly_genetic, barely_genetic }. We can basically break the situation down into four cases.

(barely_genetic, stasis): It turns out that the genetics industry is a one-trick pony and can only cure a few terrible genetic diseases, and for no cheaper than $500,000 a pop. However, this is a different situation than the one we're in now. Currently, we have about 50 years of social interventions with relatively little to show for it. If in 2050, the genetics industry can only influence (and predict) some very narrow/minor stuff, then we'll have 30 years of mucking about with genetics with relatively little to show for it. At that time, it would be more reasonable to consider radical politics. (Though actually effective radical policy might look quite different from what contemporary progressives would imagine.)

(partly_genetic, stasis): In this scenario, it turns out that the genetics industry is not that bad at predicting things using genetics, but actually influencing them proves much more difficult for some reason. This seems like a rather unlikely combination, but was one of the sources of fear of genetics in the 90s and '00s - genetics could only show you someone's doom, and thus couldn't save anyone, only be used as a rationalization to leave some people to suffer and die.

By now, some of you have probably realized what the joke behind the #librx posts is. Just because we're in such an incredibly inconvenient scenario doesn't mean we need to let BAP deploy bodybuilder death squads that hunt fat people for sport. Both the bloodgild (vampire prison), and admitting college students based on their test scores per calorie, are fairly ridiculous policies. But if we take reactionary assumptions about underlying conditions, that doesn't necessarily mean we can't create more soft-touch policies than reactionaries would prefer.

(barely_genetic, improvement): This is not far from the scenario envisioned by sterile, party-line New York Times Futurism. In this scenario, the genetics industry enables us to cure a variety of health problems, but shows little ability to influence the things that people complain about.

From a policy development perspective, this puts us in an improved position compared to where we are right now. A powerful ability to manipulate genetics makes it much easier to determine what is not genetic, and thus makes it easier to narrow our search for successful social policy.

(partly_genetic, improvement): This is a new era. Three things.

1 - If genes are significant driver of performance, then the ability to alter genes allows us to use money to buy increased performance. This means that resource transfers are single-round and possibly even a net economic investment, and not just a moral or political benefit we're buying with our economic surplus.

Right now our means to convert money into performance are limited.

2 - Due to compounding capabilities, if genes drive performance, and we can alter genes, then this frees up potential for success with social policy. Suppose someone is a drug addict who has a genetic propensity for drug addiction. (This is a made-up example.) If the biological risk of drug addiction is changed (and this is a big if), then the ability of a rehab program to not only get this guy off of drugs, but keep him off of drugs, is improved.

3 - One of the primary arguments for cruel right-wing policy is conservation of scarce genetic capital. This does not completely eliminate such arguments, because it's necessary to retain a corps of personnel to maintain the necessary biomedical equipment, and to maintain a society that can continue to field this industry. However, such arguments are dramatically reduced in scope, and shifted towards things like reproductive alignment, prevention of excessive reliance on capital-intensive systems of reproduction, and other future bioconservatism.

This scenario is likely to introduce all sorts of new problems, including a new ideological mania where people insist that society has to be perfect, so natural reproduction must be outlawed and some genes must be made illegal. (Maintaining human freedom in this new high-energy, high-capital equilibrium will require new ideological development.)

It's very clear in the associative sense (you hang out with people on the right), in the stylistic sense (your writing is easy to match with the Moldbug, Land, ZHPL cluster), and in the operational sense (you critique the left primarily and the right only parenthetically).

The position of Scott Alexander circa 2013-2014 was that the current rate of gene burn does not constitute an emergency as technology is likely to change the game within 100 years, and that biological causes (in general) are not frightening because they seem likely to be easier to deal with than social causes. In 2017, he argued that people shouldn't worry too much about their personal aptitude test scores.

Mitigatedchaos is to the right of the median capital-R Rationalist - most of them are committed to the Democratic Party, and quite a few here wouldn't agree with my opinions on polyamory or borders. Mitigatedchaos has an overall more conservative portfolio than the typical 2014 rationalist on a number of metrics, including on bioconservatism ("reproductive alignment" being one example).

(A 2014 Rationalist, of course, would find describing beliefs as a "portfolio" (along with other investment terms) to be quite intuitive.)

Nonetheless, stalling for time until the genetics industry comes online is one of the positions that is mainstream within the rationalists.

What do Mencius Moldbug, Nick Land, and Zero HP Lovecraft all have in common? Imagination.

Take technology. Change it. Does that change other aspects of society?

If you are Ted Chiang of the New York Times, this is inconceivable to you. The Democratic Party has a position and a coalition right now, therefore the Democratic Party will have that same position and coalition forever. The work of futurism is merely to tell readers of the New York Times that they will believe the same things in 2050 that they believe right now.

What do Robin Hanson, Scott Alexander, Mencius Moldbug, Nick Land, and Zero HP Lovecraft all have in common?

They have a tendency to view the world in terms of dynamic systems (rather than static ones) and evolutionary dynamics. This is the kind of person who can think of an organization becoming misaligned, or organizational linkage limits, or limitations resulting from information processing and transmission. Or think of "coordination problems" as their own thing. You know, like in Meditations on Moloch.

With a few exceptions, the left coalition haven't done much interesting ideological work since the second term of the Obama Administration. It's largely conflict theorist stuff for winning interpersonal and institutional conflicts, shutting down criticism, and gaining power. No more "creating a free society through digital media piracy;" now it's all guns and bombs and knives and everything has to be tied in to the central narrative conflict about identity.

It's difficult to learn about a system when it's all functioning smoothly. It's when a system breaks that you start really learning about the internals. Compared to 2008, in some sense the left coalition's ideology-forming system is "broken," or more compressed into a particular, narrow range.

As a political theorist, I've learned a lot.

I learn from Social Justice by watching the conflict and then synthesizing theory about it. Watching events like, "It's inequitable and therefore racist to teach algebra to 8th graders," tells us a lot about political maneuvering, coalitions, and ideology, but the actual idea itself is just flat bad. It's observational, like a zoologist studying animal behavior in the wild.

This is different from how I relate to the Rationalists or what you call the "New Right." Both Scott and I understood the theory of racism as self-perpetuating, as every sufficiently smart liberal would have back in 2008. There, the relationship is more horizontal.

There's a crossover or flow of ideas or concepts between the Rationalists/Post-Rationalists and the "New Right" because they're the two major groups on the public Internet studying or inventing theory in a way that's of much interest, currently. (The exceptions mostly aren't far from the neighborhood, here. The actual community of people having these ideological or philosophical discussions is smaller than we would have naively expected back in 2008.)

In 2017, Scott published a review of Seeing Like A State, which focused on the concept of legibility (which I sometimes speak of in terms of "dimensionality;" this is an immensely powerful concept that has guided some of my thinking on the nature of capital). This is of interest if you're a "New Right" person or a smart liberal.

For the right-wingers, it's interesting because it sets limits on the appropriate scope and nature of state power.

For the smart liberals, it's interesting because it's part of the set of much more advanced arguments for liberalism based on the limits to obtaining and processing information, and the limits of what can be known, similar to the economic calculation problem.

But if you're Social Justice, then you want to flatten everyone into a limited number of legible categories, so that you can discriminate against them to "correct" "for past injustices."

To take it back out to the conflict analysis level again, Social Justice's actions aren't that interesting at the object level. However, criticisms about "what isn't captured in the metrics" would have been a more advanced critique back in like, 2010. From the conflict analysis perspective, this suggests that the body of ideology is changing in its interpretation as it moves into the hands of different people, which suggests different motivations and different levels of capability.

That is interesting. "How many bits of complexity can our ideology support, and how does it handle under compression?" is an interesting question both for right-wingers and smart liberals.

and in the operational sense (you critique the left primarily and the right only parenthetically).

Republicans can't even manage to produce enough professional-class personnel to staff the government without having to rely on like 30% Democrats (there's a chart somewhere about this).

A lot of assertions that the right wing have power are based on observing things that aren't necessarily caused by the right wing and concluding that the right wing intended for these things to happen, and therefore caused them, and therefore have an immense amount of power.

There is basically no risk of BAPism coming into actual power over the next 20 years.

Social Justice and the broader left coalition choking the genetics industry to death before it can come online, though? That's just assuming that they apply the same playbook to it that they apply to every other industry. (Imagine if they fucked it up as bad as housing is fucked in California.)

If smarter liberals within the coalition were going to stop them, then why haven't they stopped them already?

Between the right-wingers and the left-wingers, the right-wing ideas are generally more immoral or crueler but more functional, while the left-wing ideas are more moral on the surface but are anti-functional.

Think of reduced environmental restrictions vs "degrowth."

We've had social conservatism before, and liberalized out of it. Given that [the left have more power] × [their ideas are more destructive], yes, I primarily criticize the left and criticize the right less often and less severely at this time. I could make a pretty sophisticated argument against a number of right-wing ideas, but that's not really of benefit right now.

In the medium term, it makes sense to align with the right-wingers for the next 10-20 years, as growth in the genetics industry is fueled by the immense demand for near-miraculous cures.

After that medium term, it's much less clear what happens. At some point between 2030 and 2045, different questions within the field of genetics are going to undergo partisan polarization, and it's likely that the makeup of the two coalitions (as well as their ideology) will change.

As we saw from the coronavirus, partisan polarization is unpredictable and varies based on the initial state of the system and the order in which an idea is passing through a coalition. Observing it in action is quite the argument against maintaining a high partisan alignment.

Anyhow, I think you can call mitigatedchaos "right-wing," but I put way too much effort into hedging everything to call it "extreme right." It's about as far to the right as a lot of people are willing to read, as if it were a cottage right next to the jurisdictional border, with a big sign next to it marking out the border line, reading "Right-Wing Beyond This Point."

[vague-humanoid]

@quasi-normalcy @el-shab-hussein @dirhwangdaseul

A side of the story of Jeffrey Epstein’s creation and maintenance of a pedophilia ring and sex trafficking operation among the wealthiest, most famous, and most powerful Americans seems to have been forgotten. This is the fact that he was constantly surrounded with notable and influential members of the scientific community. 

One scientist, who remained anonymous, told Slate about lavish parties Epstein would host at his Upper East Side apartment. These parties often mixed the scientists with individuals from the world of high fashion, including many young models. “Sometimes he’d turn to his left and ask some science-y questions,” claimed the anonymous scientist, “Then he’d turn to his right and ask the model to show him her portfolio.” 

Epstein hosted this particular party in 2010, after he had been convicted for soliciting prostitution from a minor. In attendance was John Brockman, a literary agent who has represented Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Jared Kahneman, among other scientists turned authors. According to Slate: “At one point, a young female staffer stepped into the room to give Epstein a massage, rubbing his neck as he talked and listened.” “I have only two interests,” Epstein once said to a long time friend, “Science and pussy.” Indeed, when Epstein convened a meeting of 21 physicists on his private island in 2006, he “was always followed by a group of something like three or four young women,” according to one participant.

One of the physicists in attendance was none other than Stephen Hawking, who rode in a submarine specially modified by Epstein for Hawking. According to Epstein’s LinkedIn, Hawking is among the many “well known luminaries” Epstein financially contributed to in his role as a “science philanthropist.” Keep in mind that many of the legal documents produced in the course of Epstein’s trials alleged that photos of naked girls decorated the walls of his property. Professor Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University, who organized the conference, has said that it, “wouldn’t have happened if Epstein hadn’t funded it” and that Epstein supported “some of the work at my institute.” Krauss remained close with Epstein during and after he was sentenced to prison for his pedophilia. “As a scientist,” Krauss told the Daily Beast in 2011, “I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.”

Alan Dershowitz, a member of the legal team which helped negotiate a “non-prosecution agreement” to rescue Epstein from prison in 2008, alleges that Epstein once steered a lunch conversation between the two of them toward the issue of improving human genetics. Dershowitz claims he was appalled due to the similarity of what Epstein was proposing to Nazi rhetoric used to justify the Holocaust. Apparently it didn’t offend Dershowitz too much, as the two continued to work together. In fact, Dershowitz was named in court documents as one of the many men who participated in the rape of girls trapped by Epstein on Little St. James.

Epstein’s embrace of transhumanism and eugenics was also overtly Malthusian. Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker claims that while at a Harvard meetup of scientists Epstein was critical of projects meant to promote healthcare or feed the hungry, warning that this would lead to overpopulation. The fear of “overpopulation” has a long history among bourgeois eugencistists and is rooted in the logic of imperialism. 

[dailyanarchistposts]

Co-Evolution

In order for Darwin’s theory of ‘survival of the fittest’ to be correct, it must show that any new species develops out of the old one through competition between them. The extinct species must lose a battle of survival with its superior descendant. The example of co-evolution of plants and animals – whereby some evolve together, or species differentiate without one being driven to extinction – proves that the idea of the survival of the fittest being the sole basis of evolution is false. Why then has Darwinism been so uncritically accepted?

The ideological direction of Darwin’s theories is clear. Humanity has differentiated itself into superior and inferior races through a process of natural selection. Humans have clearly ‘won’ the struggle of life and within human society, certain groups have achieved higher status than others. This ideology provided the scientific ‘justification’ for the hierarchical world-view that the ruling classes had always pushed. With the onset of modern capitalism, the religious basis to justify social hierarchies became a scientific one. This then is why capitalist society has always touted Darwinism and ignored any evidence contradicting it.

Modern scientific knowledge enables us critically to examine the history of life on this planet and see how it ‘fits’ Darwinist logic. It soon becomes clear that it doesn’t fit at all! The basis for evolution, if it followed Darwinist ‘laws’, would be a Malthusian pattern of population growth and check. If the world were following Darwin’s logic we would expect to see an increase in number of species, increased struggle for survival between these species, followed by extinction of the “weaker” species. However most major events in world evolution show the exact opposite: extinction and then speciation. The bestknown example is what happened after the mass dinosaur extinctions. Despite the increasing amount of scientific evidence in fields such as geology, the ‘survival of the fittest’ dogma goes unchallenged because of the ideological link between Darwinism and the capitalist façade that dominates our lives. Here is a section of an essay entitled “Spontaneity and Organisation” by Murray Bookchin that gives a different approach to the idea of evolution.

“Ecology denies that nature can be interpreted from a hierarchical viewpoint. Moreover, it affirms that diversity and spontaneous development are ends in themselves, to be respected in their own right. Formulated in terms of ecology’s “ecosystem approach”, this means that each form of life has a unique place in the balance of nature and its removal from the ecosystem could imperil the stability of the whole. The natural world, left largely to itself, evolves by colonising the planet with ever more diversified life forms and increasingly complex interrelationships between species in the form of food chains and food webs. Ecology knows no “king of beasts”; all life forms have their place in a biosphere that becomes more and more diversified in the course of biological evolution…..”

[citadelofmythoughts]

https://www.tumblr.com/citadelofmythoughts/749109507460841472/god-i-hope-quirks-dont-just-get-erased-get-rid

Plus we also have to take into consideration that the person who proposed the Quirk Singularity theory proposed it at the very least well over a century ago, when the study of Quirk genetics was likely in its infancy and thus any degree of knowledge was incomplete at best, or outright based on deeply flawed logic at worst.

For all we know, it could basically be the Quirk equivalent of Malthusian philosophy, where the end conclusion only sounds reasonable if you completely ignore the possibility for society to evolve beyond the current state of affairs and assume that society will only remain at one point forever and ever. (and hey, it wasn't THAT long ago when people believed in quack science like phrenology, or that the sun orbited the Earth in a geocentric orbit).

Or, as it's likely, the doctor based it on the time when Quirks weren't as well integrated into people's bodies (ie like if every person was like Izuku with One For All, except that was the typical state of affairs back then) and thus the danger was much more evident. A case of logic that might have made sense back then if you tilt your head, but much like the Doctor himself, never really evolved beyond that point to consider the current state of affairs.

Like @anarchistauthor notes, the narrative likely frames the QST as being another extension of the serious societal problems that comes from being so hero-centric at the expense of actually evolving their understanding of Quirks and its effects on how society functions. In a world that didn't treat heroism as the end all be all, there would probably be far more methods in society to acclimate and adjust to how everyone having superpowers would affect things. Better infrastructure to avoid them being so easily damaged, better health services to help those with difficult to use powers, etc.

(and maybe they would have used their powers to evolve their ability to increase human potential, like traveling to deep space, given that was mentioned as being something that got tossed to the wayside after superpowers became humanity's primary fixation.)

So really, the issue isn't with Quirks themselves, but rather the result of a superpowered society never really adapting their society to better consider how powers would actually work, and instead taking the most narrowly defined way possible of handling it, or just flat out telling people to "shut up and deal with it" basically.

I love this because it's honestly great worldbuilding and touches on things I've been working on in my own MHA fic.

Like while the world has a hero focus, how much support is actually given to kids to help the understand their quirks? Feels like so much of their "training" is left up to them.

The society of MHA has serious issues but the solution to those issues is not making everyone "normal" it's making everyone *equal*

[mcb3k]

COVID-19 shows us that in today’s economies the logic of Malthus no longer applies: the people in countries that suffered the highest death tolls can obviously not expect to see any economic benefits from the death of their compatriots. We do not live in a zero-sum economy anymore. In a positive-sum economy your living standards are not determined by the productivity of your piece of land, but by the productivity of the economy that you are part of — the goods and services that you rely on are produced in a large-scale collaboration of millions of workers. Your economic well-being depends on them. The fact that the pandemics in history lead to economic booms for the survivors allowed us to understand the pre-growth economy of the past. The fact that the COVID-19 pandemic is creating an economic downturn allows us to see the collaborative, positive-sum economy of our own time. The episode of the Black Death showed us that in a zero-sum economy it is in people’s economic self-interest that others are worse off; more deaths means higher living standards for the survivors. The COVID pandemic in 2020 shows us how much the world has changed. In today’s positive-sum economy your own economic well-being depends on the well-being of others and it is in your own self-interest that others are healthy and well.

join the praxis discord - sign up - github

[valkyrieandstrangeridingaragorn]

Have you read this article?

I hadn't read it, thank you for sharing. I definitely agree with what they say, just one nitpick: I'm really not a fan of people calling Loki a fascist. I get what they mean... but they're removing the entire context of his actions in NYC. There's a conversation to be had about morals and indoctrination on Asgard, no doubt about that, but I think it's disingenuous to categorize him as a fascist when he was in extreme duress during that invasion and some of the things he said can be traced back to Thanos. Anyhow...

This article explains quite well my frustration with the TVA and its agents:

Fascism [... ] takes active support from a sizeable portion of the population to pull off. [...] These are people who do not like their position in life and are urged by the fascist regime to blame a scapegoat that is perceived as powerful but also weak enough to overcome.

This setup becomes even more difficult to swallow once we learn that TVA agents were not created by the Time Keepers like we initially thought, but are actually the very variants they fight against. The entire organization was built upon a deception, where thousands of people were “tricked” into being fascists. We can see how this story beat problematically divorces the agents of the TVA from their sickening actions. [...] It removes their complicity so that we, as the audience, can feel better when they do a turn in the final act.

And that's why the last two episodes are so frustrating. The narrative is obsessed with excusing the agents from their actions and they try so hard to paint them as good but that doesn't line up with what we see on-screen. At the end of the day what we see is a bunch of fascists excused by the good ol "they were just following orders" that was always meant to be no more than fascism apologia.

We ended up with a very distorted portrayal of fascism, one where it's depicted as simultaneously both bad and necessary. We are not supposed to like the antics of He Who Remains and Renslayer’s fascism, but in much the same way fans applauded Thanos for his Malthusian ecoterrorism, we understand that there is a cold logic to it that we can empathize with.

It really is troublesome that the show seems so keen on playing both sides on this matter. They had a show about fascism and they tried to find a middle ground instead of actively speaking against it and judging all characters accordingly. Imagine Katniss commiserating with Snow and deciding that yeah, he has a point, the people of the districts need to be controlled. That's what the Loki series has done.

[somewhere-south-of-neutral]

This makes me want to do a deep-dive death of the author literary analysis on the (definitely false) idea that the creators intentionally created this dichotomy to draw parallels between neo-Malthusian ecofascism and the ideology of pathetic "Nice Guys™" who are willing to do anything for and to the object of their obsession except leave them alone.

To be clear, I don't think this is an easily defensible or at all plausible theory, but I like the challenge it poses.

So far, I have parallels in the way that both ideologies are based on a fossilized view of the present whose starting point is a poor understanding of the matter at hand and which gets further and further from reality and any sense of moral logic over time;

the way both ideologies are fundamentally rooted in a personal disregard for the bodily autonomy of others, due to a combination of egotistic myopia, a patronizing belief in one's own infallibility, and a failure to view certain people (i.e. women) as actual people;

(related to the above) a continuation of the longstanding meta-motif of relating colonial extractivism and resource exploitation with the exploitation of the female body;

the idea that both Thanoses' quests are basically just fetishistic worship of the concept of death and the desire to control it;

the fact that both plans are equally likely to woo a woman;

the fact that both plans are equally viable solutions to issues relating to scarcity;

and, finally, the probably significant overlap with people who fail to understand the flaws (both practical and moral) with each plan. (i.e. If they had given movie Thanos his comic backstory, I think the exact same group of people would be trying to claim that he "did nothing wrong" or "made some good points".)

really think mcu infinity war lost something when they decided to make thanos a malthusian ecofascist instead of a pathetic man desperate to fuck a skeleton who doesn't wanna fuck him back

[triviallytrue]

mutuals arguing about logical positivism, scientism, degrowth, malthusianism, i just want to grill for god's sake!

[audarcy]

Endgame/Infinity War is such a badly told story for so many reasons.

First of all, I’ll get the CinemaSins shit out of the way: obviously, the story ignores a lot of the ramifications of what Thanos does. And to be fair, it would be fine if Thanos’ plan was illogical if it had not been presented as logical within the story, or if the lack of logic had ever been pointed out. But yeah, killing half of all life would almost equally deplete resources (because half of our food source would be gone), killing half of all life at once would cause a ripple effect of considerably more death and destruction (plane pilots disappearing mid-flight, employees at nuclear facilities abandoning their posts, doctors disappearing mid-surgery, etc), life would not be able to go back to normal not just because of the Insane Trauma everyone left behind would have but also because the world’s infrastructure would be totally fucked..........you get the picture.

But I’m even going to give that all a pass. It’s comics and comics are fucking stupid. Comics have a planet called counter-earth that scientists never found because its on the opposite side of the sun so no one ever saw it. It’s allowed to be dumb. Moving on.

Ultimately, the main desire of IW/EG is to maintain and restore the status quo. Someone is trying to change things, and we have to stop it. And in the end, that’s exactly what happened. The only major change to the world is the death of Tony Stark. Which, uh, I guess is one good thing.

IW/EG just....didn’t mean anything. It was a cliffhanger followed by a fun throwback and then a big epic fight scene and a major character death to make it seem serious. And now we’re left basically where we started. It took all of that just to kill a character who’s had the same arc in every movie he’s been in, including the one where he’s dead. (“Maybe making weapons of mass destruction is bad...but if I am the one with the weapons of mass destruction, that is good.”)

And obviously these movies are trash meant to get the big box office numbers and little else, but these themes actually become pretty insidious under scrutiny, so it’s important to be critical of them. It’s important to be cognizant of these things because it’s subtle propaganda. It’s propaganda that says that those in power need to stay that way, that weapons of mass destruction belong in the hands of the “good guys” (white American Tony Stark) to beat up the “bad guys” who threaten the status quo...et cetera.

Also, the story gives a “logical” creedence to Thanos’ plan that it never actually challenges. And sure, the audience relates to not wanting half of all life to die, so we root for the heroes, but then we start getting people writing thinkpieces like “Actually, Thanos has a point!” followed by some Malthusian fascy bullshit. There was never a victory of ideology in IW/EG. There was a victory of might, a victory of power, but ultimately, it was Thanos who was given a voice. It was Thanos who was made out to be correct, as the story characterized him as an intelligent and all-powerful villain by framing his motives as logical. Thanos had to be made out to be this sort of Supreme Being in order to make the heroes seem Super Powerful for being able to beat him. So even in his loss, he still has to be Great and Epic, because the heroes need a Great and Epic villain to beat. Which means that people watching still take him seriously. Which means.....the story tacitly uplifts his beliefs.

Compare this to Black Panther, as I would like to be fair in this argument and compare a story within the MCU to another story on the same playing field. In Black Panther, the villain also had an ideological motive. Killmonger’s motive challenges the status quo: he wants Wakanda to change its ways. T’Challa challenges his ideology, but he takes it into consideration and ultimately agrees. And although Killmonger is defeated, he wins the ideological battle. The events of the story have a profound impact on its characters and the world they live in. T’Challas position of power is challenged, literally and thematically, and ultimately, he understands the responsibility that comes with his power and the moral onligation to use it for the benefit of the powerless. The story had a purpose. IW/EG....just doesn’t. The status quo has been restored. And nothing is really all that different, at least from what we’ve seen in Homecoming, where the biggest issue is that Tony is dead, which could’ve happened regardless of anything Thanos did.

And it’s important to understand the emotional core of IW/EG: desire to stay the same. Rejecting change. Making sure that the people who have power stay that way, that their power isn’t challenged. It tells us that those with power will do the right thing with it always and we can trust them to defeat outside enemies.

I haven’t been, like, Emotionally Invested in Marvel movies in a while, but these have an undeniably huge cultural impact, so...it’s important to be aware of stuff like this. At the end of the day, these movies are made by powerful people who benefit from their consumers thinking a Certain Way About The World, y’know?

[fierceawakening]

Regarding MCU Thanos, I was wondering if you had any thoughts on him through other lens, like the older concept of Malthusian collapse, rather than contemporary climate anxiety. I remember the prominence of that worry back in my childhood. Science fiction stories that didn't include WW3 practically had to include it, so MCU Thanos read to me as unexpectedly old fashioned. He could have been the unambiguous hero in a more zero-sum, hard men making hard choices sort of story.

Yeah. I suspect part of the reason I wasn’t as bothered by the obvious flaws in his logic is because I’m older than the average Tumblerian myself. I remember antinatalist environmentalism being a thing. Like stumbling across VHEMT when I was in college and thinking it made a lot of sense. (Now I think that part of the reason it appealed to me is I don’t personally want kids.)

But yeah the idea there was to encourage us all to reduce the human population voluntarily by not having children and encouraging others to make the same choice, with the idea that it would lessen humans’ negative effects on the environment. So when I saw MCU Thanos I just went “omg lol it’s VHEMT exaggerated into HOLY SHIT EVILPANTS.”

Now antinatalist environmentalism is very fashy and very “we want THEM not to breed” rather than “we choose US not breeding” so it’s… different. (Or maybe that was always there and I never got deeply involved so I just didn’t see it. But what I read I parsed as encouraging ME not to breed, and to bring up to my FRIENDS that they shouldn’t either, not as stopping mysterious hordes of brown people or something.)

But yeah, there was definitely a period where even the environmentalism stuff was more Malthusian, and people weren’t as obviously and immediately dismissive of it. Where nowadays people are (rightly imo) like “hey, our cars are not the major source of the issue here. We shouldn’t consider en masse not making babies AT LEAST until we’ve changed energy use and policy first.”

(Also, i saw some theories floating around that more humans are gay now precisely because we breed too much and nature is trying to slow us down. I bought into that too. It made me being gay potentially useful rather than just weird/wrong. Now I don’t because nature isn’t… an entity with goals.)

So he made sense to me, as an over exaggerated version of it, made obviously evil.

Also antinatalism is still kind of a thing? “Not having kids because of climate anxiety” is something I see thinkpieces on every now and then…

Not sure if this is totally on point to your question, but… yeah. I have a lot of thoughts on it as someone who bought into voluntary antinatalist stuff before I realized other people need the opposite reproductive freedom that I do.