News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl by tbrownaw on Tuesday June 13, 2017 @12:59AM (#14542933)
Problem is, that wouldn't satisfy the "humans are evil, and the cause of all nature's ills" narrative that underlays much of the activism around climate policy and other environmentalist causes.

The solution always has to be fewer humans and less human activity, with the possible exception of temporary "sorry, we were never here" cleanup efforts.

Re:Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl by jorangreef on Tuesday June 13, 2017 @04:42AM (#14543574)
Would you prefer the "humans are basically good" narrative?

Do you honestly find that to be a better explanation of human history the past few thousand years than "humans are evil, and the cause of all nature's ills"?

Personally, I find the latter proves true to life. Better to accept it and deal with it, than to sweep it under the rug.

Re:Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl by oblio on Tuesday June 13, 2017 @07:54AM (#14544119)
That's assuming that all the harm we do, we do it just to do harm. I think this assumption is false. Most of the harm we do is a side effect of things we're trying to achieve.

So, basically, we're just another (slightly smarter) animal.

It's not like, for example, invasive species introduced from another continent stopped for a second and thought: "hey! maybe we shouldn't breed too much and we shouldn't eat all the bees/birds/whatever!".

Life is like a gas, it expands to fill all the space given to it.

I don't think that's inherently bad. After all, life is the exception in the universe. And frankly, most of the universe is boring :)

Re:Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl by justicezyx on Tuesday June 13, 2017 @01:18AM (#14542974)
China did managed population growth, guess what happened, no one is happy. I doubt human can overcome their own nature to step ahead and regulate population effectively.
Re:Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl by josefx on Tuesday June 13, 2017 @09:14AM (#14544457)
Isn't population growth close to zero for most industrialized countries?
Re:Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl by justicezyx on Tuesday June 13, 2017 @11:58AM (#14545766)
What's your point?

I am not blaming other countries being irresponsible in controlling population. I was saying simply control population is not as easy a social policy to carry out.

Re:Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl by josefx on Tuesday June 13, 2017 @03:13PM (#14547689)
That it isn't human nature that is the problem with population growth, otherwise we wouldn't have large parts of the free world with almost none and even slightly negative growth. The problem is cultural/historical and the problem of chinas one child policy was that it tried to combat the effect while the people still saw having a male heir as important.
Re:Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl by justicezyx on Tuesday June 13, 2017 @10:05PM (#14550230)
I cannot seem to understand your statements.
Re:Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl by josefx on Monday June 19, 2017 @09:29AM (#14586741)
Fact: we don't have an issue with positive population growth in most western nations. Fact 2: the populations of these western nations are human. Q.E.D.: explosive population growth is not human nature.

It is a cultural, educational, social security and rights issue. The Chinese failed because they tried to fight the result instead of the cause(s).

Re:Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl by sillysaurus3 on Tuesday June 13, 2017 @01:06AM (#14542952)
A movement is composed of people, and those people can be reasoned with individually. If we reason with enough of them, the narrative changes.
Re:Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl by TeMPOraL on Tuesday June 13, 2017 @04:06AM (#14543474)
The tricky thing is separating those people from their support groups long enough for the reasoning to stick. Otherwise, all the effort only gets wasted on trying to overcome people's need of belonging to a group.