#ecofascism

To my great dismay, I did not record the source for this claim, But I found these pictures again, and of course I think...How do we know that?

How could we know that Paleolithic hunter-gatherers deliberately controlled their populations by periods of abstaining from sex? That would be incredibly hard to support using archaeological evidence. It seems easier to support infanticide using the archaeological record, so I was not initially troubled by that.

The author is also stating that Paleolithic humans killed their disabled. I have been searching high and low for evidence to support this claim and the closest I've come to any evidence regarding disability in the Paleolithic is this book chapter discussing whether or not it makes sense to assume compassion existed in pre-history. This book chapter gives the impression that the research has been...really dismal.

The two sides of the debate are essentially, "humans probably cared for their disabled in prehistory, because pathologies and injuries are common and they would have needed some kind of care" and "well maybe those people could survive just fine on their own and that's why they lived. We can't prove they were actually disabled."

Not an anthropologist, but I think it's pretty stupid to position a compassionless society as the "null hypothesis," especially based upon chimpanzees. Why would Paleolithic humans be more behaviorally similar to a relative separated by 5 to 13 million years of evolutionary divergence, than to their own descendants a mere few thousand years later????????

But the claim in Humans Vs. Nature isn't just that disabled people weren't cared for, it's that they were deliberately "eliminated," which is a statement with a much higher burden of proof. You would have to find the remains of disabled humans from that time period with clear evidence that they were killed because they were disabled, and you would have to observe this consistently in many sites, to come to the conclusion that it was a cultural norm.

We have many examples of elaborate, seemingly honorable burials for people that were apparently disabled and would have lived a long time with their disabilities. Nothing I've read has mentioned an archaeological record of killing people for being disabled, which would be a glaring oversight, unless it didn't exist, which I'm pretty sure it doesn't.

This is the last part of my series about making my first book, You Are a Sacred Place.

Read parts 1–5

"[...]Something that is vital to note is this; despite the fact that many of the assumptions of the ‘humans are the real virus’ rhetoric are shared with eco-fascists, not everyone who has spread it or internalised it is necessarily a fascist. Reality is sometimes difficult to parse, especially when so much is happening with such frequency. The difficulty is compounded by modern media, which bombards everybody with a deluge of barely intelligible nonsense composed of equal parts guesswork, blatant lies, misrepresentations, and government stenography. The baseline intuitiveness of the eco-fascist assumptions at work are easy to understand. For an individual lacking a systematic critique but searching for answers, it can be easy to adopt elements of this thought – this means that even people who would ostensibly baulk at the idea of outright genocide being discussed openly, such as liberals or social democrats, are able to buy into and spread the auto-virality meme without ever truly realising the dangerousness that underwrites the entire concept. So what’s the trick? How can this horrible concept become so natural that even relatively pleasant individuals can spread it and accept the logic at its base?"

So, last week I incidentally stumbled across something that frustrated me to no end.

Those who have been following my weblog for a longer time know that I am an defender of nuclear energy. The fear of nuclear energy is completely irrational and unscientific. I would even go so far to call it anti-intellectual. That is in general a conclusion I have arrived at almost a decade ago by looking at the science and realizing how pretty much any supposed argument against nuclear power is either based in people not understanding the science, or actively misrepresenting it - usually to prop up coal.

Because as I noted so many times before: the question is never "will we do nuclear or solar?" It is always: "nuclear or coal?" And coal is clearly the more dangerous, more environmentally destructive, and the more culturally harmful one.

Yes, there are a bunch of issues with nuclear. In many cases the way the raw material is mined does intersect with labor rights and also indigenous land claims. That absolutely is a valid criticism. And yes, building nuclear reactors has a large upfront cost (including also CO2 emissions that do indeed outnumber solar and in many cases wind). But it still will be needed in a futuristic environment because there needs to be a reliable source that is not dependent on uncontrollable natural variables. Nuclear can be that. And it is going to be better at this than coal or gas.

That was always my belief.

And now... I learned that part of the reason why people are so afraid of nuclear is not just Hiroshima, Chernobyl, and the fossil lobby, but fucking genocidal eugenicists. The same people, in fact, who created the "Population Bomb" narrative.

Nuclear fear is partially based in some racist fucking white people getting panicky in the 60s and 70s that fuck, nuclear energy could solve so many societal issues, and then less non-white people would die, and that would be bad, because poor white people would have to deal with that.

What the actual flying fuck?

I did not know that. And of course this ties back to the fucking Sierra club, because of course it does. I hate the fucking Sierra club so much. How much harm has been committed against people and the environment because a bunch of rich white people thought that nature needed to be pristine?

Fucking racist assholes.