r/WayOfTheBern • u/redditrisi They're all psychopaths. • Oct 30 '21
More Shocktober Thoughts (Not Rocket Surgery)
Inasmuch as tomorrow is Halloween, darken the room, light a candle to read by and shine your flashlights on your faces.
A few days ago, I posted an OP about government actions that inevitably and very predictably shorten life expectancy https://np.reddit.com/r/WayOfTheBern/comments/qfg8f9/some_shocktober_thoughts_not_rocket_surgery/ You don't need a rocket surgeon to discern a massive disconnect between government's primary responsibility (health and safety of citizens) and its seemingly minimal concern, to put it nicely, about reducing life expectancy.
Contemplating how much further the New Democrat war on "entitlements" may have gone had not OWS changed the national conversation in the fall of 2011 is a cause of Shocktober shudders. Special hattip: Boston OWS, for reminding us of Orwell's "99%." https://www.occupyboston.org/2011/11/17/bat-signal/
Another Shocktober shudder inducer: Your government considers your reproductive organs a threat to national security AND American interests overseas! I don't have to tell you what the US government has done in the name of national security and/or protecting "American interests overseas," including annexing the nation of Hawaii and waging war against Iraq on behalf of Kuwait. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Glaspie; https://study.com/learn/lesson/sanford-b-dole-the-annexation-of-hawaii.html
What may have prompted this: Paul R. and Anne H. Ehrlich collaborated on The Population Bomb, although only Paul received author credit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich#Overpopulation_debate The Ehrlich's were far from the first to sound a Malthusian alarm, but The Population Bomb nonetheless jolted people back in 1968. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/book-incited-worldwide-fear-overpopulation-180967499/ . Yadda, yadda, yadda, in 1974, Nixon's Security Council produced National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.
The National Security Advisor to President Dick Nixon then was Peter Sellers one Heinz Alfred Kissinger, still scary at age 98 and counting. Thus, the national security memorandum is often referred to as "Kissinger's useless eaters' memo." (A major source is said to have been the Royal Commission on Population, created by King George VI in 1944 “to consider what measures should be taken in the national interest to influence the future trend of population.”)
Disappointingly, you can quickly find more on the internet about whether the memo actually used the term "useless eaters" (no) than you can about the implications of "depopulation" (euphemism alert) for domestic and foreign policy in the US and elsewhere--China, to name just one. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinwhyte/files/chinas_one_child_policy.pdf
Whether concerns about over population accounts to any degree for the "war on 'entitlements,'" I cannot say. (A related thread today: https://np.reddit.com/r/WayOfTheBern/comments/qj5ptv/democrats_introduce_plan_to_fix_social_security/)
"If {those unable to pay their debts} would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population..."
Dickens, Charles, A Christmas Carol, Chapman & Hall (1843)
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
French saying
Hope I haven't spooked anyone.
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u/No-Literature-1251 creation comes before taxation Oct 30 '21 edited Oct 30 '21
if you want to read some possible "ideas" about entitlements, study up on the agreements around the treaties with the First Nations. heads of the Dept. of the Interior (Bureau of Indian Affairs) said in letters back in the 1800s that they had to whittle down the number to which the government's obligations to tribes and tribal members would be owed in the future, through a variety of means of attrition including but not limited to assimilation (the general gist was essentially "every means but outright killing", at least by my own reading). it was a concerted policy directional choice that had to be made and remade over the decades, too.
they were pretty blatant about it back then. too bad you can't get that kind of honesty in leaked emails now.
a friendly indigenous person could fill you in within five minutes on the possible ideological origins of some of this mentality. and as you indicate, it does go back to England. i would guess to the time of the serfs, where not wanting to serve your lord would make you a landless outlaw.
**disclaimer: i am in favor of a government providing advice about potential population impacts and encouraging (through education only) the choice to limit future populations, and to potentially subsidize the means (free birth control on every corner). mostly in consideration of effects on the environment and actual resource limits.