NAT GEO PUBLISHERS SAY YOU SHOULD FEEL GUILTY FOR BEING ALIVE MORE OR LESS

So today, I read a story by Dennis Dimick of National Geographic in which Dimick uses rhetorical deception to lull readers into accepting hints at eugenics and behavioral control.



So what does Dennis Dimick do? Repeatedly, Dimick uses the pronouns "us" and "we."

Someone should have told Dimick, there is no "us." There is no "we." There are only individuals.

First, Dimick tries to pluck the heart strings of his readers by opening with an unsubstantiated, but seeming fact of "There are more than 7 billion people on Earth now, and roughly one in eight of us doesn't have enough to eat."

After hitting his readers with unsubstantiated, wild guesses about the future head count (11 billion vs nine billion in the year 2100), cloaked in the garb of mathematical authority, Dimick lures in readers by suggesting that "we" need to have a talk about how we relate "climate change, energy, food supply, and freshwater" with population. Here, Dimick lays foundation for a call to behavioral control and eugenics.

Dimick follows up quickly with "..how many of us there are, how many children we have, how long we live, and where and how we live..." Instead, Dimick should have written: How many individuals there are, how many children individuals will have, how long individuals will live, and where and how individuals live.

Dimick continues his witchery by suggesting to his readers that his readers have been breeding like rabbits when he writes, "We've been on a big growth spurt during the past century or so... Now, there are about 7.2 billion of us...In recent years we've been adding about a billion people every 12 or 13 years or so." If this were so, Dimick is suggesting to his readers that another seven billion individuals shall be upon the earth by 2100, pushing total population to 14.2 billion, or 3.2 to 5 billion beyond his reported mathematical authority earlier in his story.

Of course, Dimick fails to mention Africans. Sub-saharan Africans are those contributing most to population growth with the fastest growing population. Demographers estimate the one billion one hundred and eleven million sub-saharan Africans who now live shall grow to 3.5 to 5 billion by 2100. Nigerians alone are expected to increase from 200 million today to 900 million by 2100 according to a story published by the Guardian on 18 September 2014. In short, Sub-saharan Africans should constitute almost all population growth through 2100.

One would believe that a magazine publisher with a long history of geographic reporting would have revealed how population growth has been proceeding in relation to geography. For details on African demographics, check out what World Population Review published.




And soon thereafter, Dimick commits another appeal to authority fallacy by citing the long discredited Thomas Malthus and an essay Malthus published in 1798 in which Malthus, failing to see productivity gains from technological advances, wrongly claimed that food production could only increase linearly while population would increase geometrically. Malthus could not envision giant combines that produce the work of thousands of men in only a few hours. Malthus could not foresee fertilizers, weed killers and computer-controlled irrigation.

Worse, Dimick mentions Paul Ehrlich, the foolish academician who lost a bet with Julian Simon over resource scarcity. Idiotically, Ehrlich believed prices would increase for copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten under his false belief that such materials would become increasingly scarce. Simon bet that prices would fall rightly believing that mankind would become more efficient in extraction methods and utilization methods.

After side-tracking readers with more academic foolery, Dimick gets to eugenics with  a suggestive call for reducing fertility — the number of children any woman bears in her lifetime — for each woman on the planet.

Then Dimick shames his readers in attempt to elicit guilt feelings by calling his readers "an elite crowd of Earthlings" who should feel guilty for having "reliable electricity, access to Internet-connected computers and phones" as well as leisure time to read Nat Geo since "one-fifth of those on Earth still don't have have access to reliable electricity" and "reliable lighting and cooking facilities ... remain beyond the reach of about 1.3 billion."

Dimick's glaring misuse of pronouns is his attempt to trick readers into feeling guilt about how they live, to agitate for population control eugenics and to agitate for behavioral control all in the name of the false Gaia goddess, Mother Earth.

Dimick fails to congratulate his readers for achieving their material progress through their willingness to adhere to law, commerce and property in spite of incessant attacks upon his readers from politicians. Dimick fails to give thanks for the ancestors of Americans — Anglo-Saxon-Normans — who set the bedrock upon which Americans through time have made their achievements, escaping poverty, in spite of their sabotaging politicians.

To be sure, mankind never has suffered a shortage of meddling intellectuals, those toadying lackeys always in awe of authentic, manly men who can gain the reins of power, intellectuals with their Church of Academia en vogue theories, which almost always get proven wrong in time. When not given a public forum to spew their foolery, these intellectuals always seem willing to work as bureaucrats and technocrats in petty attempts at tasting the crumbs of power by wielding the scepter of government regulation.

Perhaps Dimick needs Captain Kirk. In the episode from the original TV series Star Trek, "The Mark of Gideon," a race of overpopulated aliens immune to sterilization and pregnancy control abduct Captain Kirk hoping a virus Kirk carries in his body, Vegan choriomeningitis, will infect the aliens causing deaths.