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Reddit mentions of Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism

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We found 6 Reddit mentions of Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism. Here are the top ones.

Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism
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Found 6 comments on Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism:

u/professorgerm · 34 pointsr/TheMotte

Of some local interest given TheMotte's relation to utilitarians, negative utilitarians in particular:

Quillette, How Anti-Humanism Conquered the Left

> Today is International Workers’ Day, a holiday with socialist origins. Its name hearkens back to a time when the political Left was ostensibly devoted to the cause of human welfare. These days, however, some on the far Left care less about the wellbeing of people than they do about making sure that people are never born at all. How did these radicals come to support a massive reduction in human population, if not humanity’s demise? Whether it’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez questioning the morality of childbearing, a birth-strike movement that encourages people to forego parenthood despite the “grief that [they say they] feel as a result,” or political commentator Bill Maher blithely claiming, “I can’t think of a better gift to our planet than pumping out fewer humans to destroy it,” a misanthropic philosophy known as “anti-natalism” is going increasingly mainstream.
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> Recent examples of writings that are warming to the idea of human extinction include the New Yorker’s “The Case for Not Being Born,” NBC News’ “Science proves kids are bad for Earth. Morality suggests we stop having them,” and the New York Times’ “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?” which muses that, “It may well be, then, that the extinction of humanity would make the world better off.” Last month, the progressive magazine FastCompany released a disturbing video entitled, “Why Having Kids Is the Worst Thing You Can Do for the Planet.”
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> Once anti-humanism had infected the environmental movement, it soon spread through the political Left. Robert Zubrin’s book Merchants of Despair gives an overview of the Left’s reversal of its traditional commitment to advancing the human condition, in favor of a project that viewed humanity as a plague upon the Earth:
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>>Instead of The Grapes of Wrath, they carried copies of The Population Bomb … Instead of “Stop the War,” their buttons read “Stop at two” [children]; instead of “Power to the people,” their slogan was “People pollute.”
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>There are some notable environmentalists who recognize the fact that humans are capable of creating abundance instead of scarcity. Environmentalists who take the rational and techno-optimistic view, sometimes called “enlightenment environmentalists” or “ecomodernists,” still believe in humanity’s ability to tackle environmental problems with innovation and ingenuity. Examples include Harvard University’s Steven Pinker and the Breakthrough Institute’s Michael Shellenberger, who both hold that technologies such as nuclear power can reduce emissions. And the research of Rockefeller University environmental science professor Jesse H. Ausubel, who was integral to setting up the world’s first climate change conference in Geneva in 1979, has shown how technological progress can allow nature to rebound, even while food and other resources have become more plentiful.
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>Unfortunately, ecomodernists are still a minority within the environmental movement. Too many people, mostly on the political Left, still agree with Ehrlich that humans are analogous to cancer cells and long for the reduction or even extinction of our species. One third of Americans in the millennial generation say they are deeply concerned about the environmental impact of having children. Not that long ago, well within the living memory of a millennial such as myself, a 2002 episode of Aaron Sorkin’s popular political drama The West Wing could still quip that “Death is bad” remained a left-wing position. The scriptwriter took it for granted that, on the political Left, everyone is in favor of human flourishing. If only that were still the case.

Interesting article, but I'd question the premise: just how widespread is this kind of thought? I note that they do not cite statistics other than VHEMT's facebook page having gotten 2000 likes in 5 months, which does not exactly imply a viral hit. I have little doubt this philosophy is more popular on the (new) left than on the right, but that's such a broad tent it's hard to treat the left as being "consumed" by it except for a few small or fringey subcultures.

However, what's also interesting and I wish they'd addressed it, telling people with already-low birth rates receives little pushback, other than this Quillette article, when it happens in the New Yorker or the NYT's opinion page, apparently. But compare to the reaction to Vox's Bill Gates interview where he suggested a region with especially high birth rates cut back a bit.

PS: This has been commented on previously, but I still find it interesting that people that care very (perhaps too) deeply about human suffering (negative utilitarians) and people that care not a whit about humanity's existence (I assume many eco-nihilists or whatever you'd like to call VHEMT) find the same conclusion of "end it all."

u/RobO2112 · 3 pointsr/Objectivism

Robert Zubrin's book, Merchants of Despair is excellent on this.

u/hfxdevdude · 1 pointr/technology

You seem reasonable enough to listen to this. People who are worried about robots and over population are idiots without any evidence backing up their claims.

http://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Despair-Environmentalists-Pseudo-Scientists-Antihumanism/dp/159403737X

TLDR: These antihumanists think robots will kill humans, when it will likely cube or square our standard and living and food yields.

All of it proven awesome for everybody. With MATH!

u/eclipsenow · 1 pointr/Mars

Now I'm depressed. Zubrin's a climate denier?