Among the people who argue that the world is overpopulated with humans and that there needs to be substantial reduction of the human population for the betterment of the Earth and society; I’ve wondered:
Do some of the hardliners quietly, discreetly, applaud such things as genocide, famine, epidemic, disasters, etc. that kill large numbers of people - provided that such events take place in an environmentally friendly manner?
Of course not. Those are tragedies.
Some of us believe they should have been avoided, but no one celebrates them.
(This is comparable to the canard that gun-control advocates are “gleeful” when there’s another large-scale gun murder. No. That’s dishonest rhetoric.)
I know someone who is anti-vaxx because she thinks we should let nature cull some of the weaker immune systems from the gene pool.
They are also utterly insignificant - a huge disaster like the 2004 tsunami killed 300k people. Sounds like a lot (and in human misery it certainly is) but when there’s 7B of us it’s completely irrelevant when it comes to overpopulation. Any disaster that was big enough to matter would have to be apocalyptic.
Now if we could get the Pope to declare that using birth control is acceptable, that would probably matter a lot more than any average catastrophe.
I think most overpopulation activists feel that we should voluntarily work on limiting population in order to avoid disasters like epidemics or famines. So their goal is anti-disaster.
No of course not, cats however are another matter.
And even that person…does he applaud deaths from disease? Or does he hold it to be a tragic result of our mistaken dependence on vaccinations? (My fingers feel dirty just typing this…)
Well, I laugh.
What do you think overpopulation does? Induced scarcity–there’s your famine. Wars over resources, sometimes explicitly genocidal. Overpopulation is a precursor to environmentally unfriendly disaster. It’s practically inevitable. And if you want to avoid genocide and famine, you have to manage your population before it gets to the size it is now. 
Concentrated urban populations can be hotbeds for epidemics, but they’re also more likely to survive them. That’s not the same relationship.
Now, a nice big tidal wave or earthquake? Well, I know it won’t really kill enough people off to make a difference. But the body count is “so high” because the population is so high. If the population were lower, the death toll would be “lower” and yet the event could do* more* damage to a society.
Presumably a sufficiently large event would change that calculus. In another thread Dopers were talking about how badly an electrified high-population society could be screwed if the Earth flies into a large enough coronal mass ejection.
I guess conservationists have to start being like Bob Barker: “Remember to spay and neuter your humans!”
As noted, none of those big disasters has made any sort of notable dent in the world population.
Wonder how she’d fee about it if “some of the weaker immune systems” turned out to be her own children? Folks like that always seem to assume they’re part of the superior crowd.
Hey, at least she believes in evolution ! 
And she apparently recognizes her place in it.
There is the gloat of “See, I told you so”.
Modern medicine is saving those who are deficient and keeping them viable until they are old enough to breed more of their own. Which has a multiplier effect on the number of births which will then require more medical intervention to keep the spiral going. In fact, we might even be preserving mutants and then releasing them into the breeding stock.
I’m willing to bet that “some of the hardliners” do applaud this sort of thing. Some people are sociopathic assholes who like it when other people suffer.
Not many, mind you.
People like, I don’t know, Stephen Hawking, who wouldn’t be able to naturally survive on their own in the wild.
By definition, famine, plague and natural disasters don’t happen in an “environmentally friendly manner”.
They can if they don’t cause long-term radiation, etc. If a million people died of starvation, but there were no toxic chemicals, etc., released in the process, the Earth’s landscape and environment would simply carry on. Whereas a nuclear war would kill many people, but cause long-term radiation poisoning of the environment.
A counterpoint to this is the belief prevalent among some hardcore antivaxers, that vaccines themselves are part of a plot to massively depopulate the earth. Of course, the Elites are also using other tools like chemtrails, water fluoridation and GMOs to accomplish mass murder, which will benefit Big Pharma and other large corporations like Monsanto by drastically reducing their customer base.
Just connect the dots (and watch the YouTube videos) and it will make sense to you too.
As for natural disasters, I’ve never heard any population control advocates applauding them. None have ever had a lasting effect on human numbers. Beyond the viciousness of imputing such beliefs to “overpopulation activists”, disasters are just not an efficient way of culling the herd.
This is the sort of message I am alluding to in this thread.
You could send a PM to ZPG Zealot for her thoughts.
My BIL is obsessed with overpopulation of humans and always celebrates natural disasters that kill lots of people. During hurricane Katrina, he was furious that all the dogs & cats were left behind to die & the people were rescued. He thought it should have been the reverse.
Okay, that’s a little creepy. Still, “A sigh of relief” isn’t quite a celebration or an applause. I think it’s wrong, and it comes across as callous.
Every time there’s a small earthquake, I breathe a sigh of relief, because I know it’s taking pressure away from the fault-lines, helping to postpone or reduce “The Big One” when it comes. Every time there’s a famine that only takes 10,000 lives, I breathe a sigh of relief that it wasn’t a mega-event taking 1,000,000 lives.
I dread that such events will happen, and there will be no relief then.
(In a completely unhelpful way, I first mis-typed "I dream that such events will happen. No, no, no, and no!)
