Greta wrote: ↑August 31st, 2020, 7:58 pmThe fact is that the corrupt players are us. They are who we become when we achieve power. If they die, they will be replaced, and their replacements, and their replacements ad infinitum. Look at how revolutions pretty well always turn out - with a new authoritarian regime. Human numbers are significant, allowing greater leverage and empowerment for corrupted people at the top.
That’s how history has played out. But the power monopolists wouldn’t have achieved that power if the great unwashed of society hadn’t granted it to them stupidly believing the rhetoric and the lies. Power, once granted is protected by every means available including armies. Numbers are less important in that respect than the gullibility of those they lead. Humans are nothing if not gullible either through fear or wishful thinking that a would-be autocrat knows exactly how to exploit. He doesn’t even have to be particularly intelligent at it. Consider Trump; it’s unbelievable he could convince anyone who isn’t demented but there are many still believing every lie, every insanity he utters. If his nose grew an inch for every lie he told it would be over 20,000 inches long which still isn't long enough to jeopardize his standing among a huge section of the electorate.
Yes, but that’s no surprise since the most intelligent and malicious animal, whatever it is, has the power, will and means to increase beyond anything else on the planet and would probably do so on any other planet.
The “selfish gene”, in whatever species including insects, is a juggernaut and will literally cover the planet if left unchecked. It’s the checking aspect which drives evolution forward which is how nature feeds on itself. Humans have removed themselves from this cycle depending on intelligence to do the job which is barely happening. Instead, to get biblical, it has corrupted itself and the cause why the Medea hypothesis is becoming much less hypothetical.
Greta wrote: ↑August 31st, 2020, 7:58 pmIn nature, when such exponential growth occurs in one spcies, it causes significant imbalances. So it's hardly surprising that humans have been wiping out animals at a record rate in the last century.
That correlation is not accurate! We’ve been a killing machine for sport unrelated to numbers going back to when writing wasn’t even invented.
Here’s a short summary of the Wild Beast Games of Rome:
Catastrophic Effects
The Romans imported exotic wild beasts from all over the empire and at times from well beyond their frontiers. In the first millennium BC, great cats such as lions, panthers, and tigers still roamed freely in Western Asia; in 51 BC, Cicero’s brother, who was governor of Cilicia, was asked to supply panthers from Asia. There were hippopotami and crocodiles on the banks of the Nile and elephants and ostriches could be found north of the Sahara. This rich fauna was devastated over the centuries as a highly efficient system of capturing and transporting them was established to satisfy audiences in Rome and in other great cities around the empire. By the 4th century AD it was becoming increasingly hard to find animals to satisfy the demands of the arena. Almost none of these great animals, with the exception of a few lions in the Rif mountains of Morocco, are to be found north of the Sahara or West of India today.
It took only a fraction of us to accomplish that.
Greta wrote: ↑August 31st, 2020, 7:58 pmHuman consumption per capita has also increased exponentially
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress. ... s_line.png. So we are dealing with an amplifier effect, with numbers and consumption boosting each other.
...which is due to a political system always needing more tax-payers and for businesses a never ending array of consumers. Abortions are mostly discouraged politically for that reason while corporations resent any limits to consumerism by limiting numbers. It’s all contained in a defunct, worn-out economic system where adding more to bad makes it worse. No question that numbers are important but the conditions under which they operate are even more fundamental ...which is not to say that limits don’t apply.