Here's to cannibalism and all the good it could do for the world! Over population? No food? Eat each other!
Cease and desist all talk of Vegetarianism. You're plants are of no use to us. Take in the fresh meat and be saved. Drink from the veins of your salvation. Never regret the power you are about to receive. We are meat. We eat meat. We die meat. We leave the world with meat to eat. Flesh is the secret of life. All electric impulses run thru organic symptoms. Dreams are invalid without meat to fuel their passages. Always remember to eat meat. Eat a friend. Eat your brothers and sisters. Eat Mom and Dad. Eat your friends and enemies. Try new and exciting flavors. Consume all meat. Never regret who you eat. They would have eaten you. Consume them all.

Speaking of overpopulation:

My sister and I were talking yesterday about society's ideal of beauty. I mentioned that Rubenesque women were considered beautiful in their time because people were dying of consumption and all other manner of nastiness, and therefore "healthy" was anyone who didn't look in any way thin and sickly.

My sister went on to say that larger women have also represented the classic mother-figure, women able to bear children, and therefore to satisfy our biologically driven desire to reproduce. She said that this principle is why she cannot understand how more modern thinking tends to find thinner, and actually even boyish figures appealing.

I proposed that this too is a biologically driven thing, a kind of internal shut-off switch. Like those frogs that switch gender and have homosexual relationships when their number has reached the point where their environment can no longer support their growth, I think that humans have biologically come up with ways to slacken our reproductivity. I think that the increase in women starting their families later in their lives, the increase in acceptance of homosexuality, and the fact that less motherly-looking women are the societal ideal of beauty are all clues to this.

This also led to a discussion about how medical science has done all kinds of horrible things to the gene pool by allowing to live the people that natural selection had marked for death (myself included - I should have died of cancer* in my adolescence, if not any number of childhood ailments before then), but that's another discussion.

What do you think, folks? Discuss.

* Mind you, I'm not a Christian Scientist or anything. I certainly will take the medicine that keeps me healthy and able to function. I still have the survival instinct, and I still have a social obligation to support myself as long as I can... but in a theoretical sense, I should probably never even have been created, because medical science has been preventing natural selection from working properly for years.

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I am a delicate fucking flower. https://beacons.ai/jesskent

It's a pretty morbid thought, but I've always wondered if modern medicine was running against the grain of nature. Cancer, infectious diseases, AIDS... all of these are wiping people out. We're doing our best to combat them, but it's a tough battle. If we sat back and let nature run its course, lots more people would be gone. Through natural selection, though, would we find a way to fight all of those? The cream would rise to the top and all of us that were prone to sickliness would fall by the wayside, leaving a planet of healthy superbeings. And hyenas.

I don't know. It's definately something to ponder.

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100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.

I believe that more robust women are still desirable in developing countries, as they are less common there. Also, big busts and wide hips (the two most important aspects in reproduction) are still in fashion everywhere.

Technology does allow a lot more people to live and reproduce when they wouldn't have otherwise. However, I think while technology will prolong the life of physically weaker people, it will also encourage the growth of mentally stronger people.

Creatures often malfunction when they eat large amounts of things they don't normally eat. If you will recall mad cow disease stems from the creatures being forced to eat ground up meat. There is in fact a parallel infirmity that has stricken some cannibal tribes in South America called the "laughing cannibal disease", but I believe has been traced down to a side effect of eating the brains of fallen friends and family. (It is also so delicious, one walks around in a trance constantly calling out for more "brains!") I imagine you would at least be prone to catch a lot of communicable maladies by eating human flesh too. You propose this practice as a cure for over-population though, so I suppose what you are really implying is mass-murder, with the eating of the meat as a side effect. Unless you are thinking corpses add to the total human population count; normally they do not, cabal.

I don't these things are imperatively biological. I think it is a sociological factor in countries like America that no longer need large families to both secure some survive (because the standard of living is so high, kids aren't dropping dead like they would say in colonial times) and they don't need a lot of children to work on a farm like in the dust-bowl days. I think couples also tend to wait until financial security or they are just done having their careers their focus of their lives when they have children. I think some women in fact ignore biological urges to have children, or channel them into their jobs or dogs, if things don't work out for them to have them.

Likewise I don't think an acceptance of homosexuality is biological. I believe there are some theories that instances of homosexuality itself is a side-effect of over-population, and that would make sense. It would be nice if nature could breed acceptance into us (but then could it also not breed hate into us?)

As for the reference to Rubenesque women I think they only time human females are "off-model" so to speak is a function of society, either from excess leisure time or an abundance of eating. And like extremely wealthy women having their feet bound several generations ago in China, this would have been a sociological, not biological sign. (Also, women being very pale in Victorian days meant they did not spend a lot of time in sunlight working, therefore were higher class). I am not saying what is and what is not attractive, but that whatever signs we look for have a lot less to do with biology these days (does this person have money/ would this mate impress others/ is she going to get coked up one night and shoot me in the face while I am sleeping for no reason with the kids sleeping two rooms over). Humans are one of a few creatures that don't only mate when the intended outcome is children, so we are somewhat unique from the beginning in the natural selection arena.

I think only one person's ideal of beauty matters and that's the person you are with right now.

Taking care of our sick and injured makes us stronger, Gabe.

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FABULOUS TREASURE

Not in my house!

I don't know why, but I do rather prefer slender, graceful, "boyish" figures in women. Big busts and wide hips do it for all sorts of people, but not me. I've often wandered if your logic (which is common) is true in this case; that I prefer non-"fertile"-looking women because I loate reproduction -- not the act, but the result: children. Ick.

I think I'd support pro-cannibalism if it meant I could eat all those annoying fucking children who scream at malls, on plains, in movie theaters... who play on rusty pogo sticks at SEVEN AM ON A SUNDAY RIGHT OUTSIDE MY WINDOW! What those kids need is a spit and a nice hickory fire.

I don't know... I've met a lot of really stupid people and a good deal of them are married -- and a few aren't and have reproduced anyway.

I also know a lot of really smart people who look like Bill Gates or Erkel who couldn't get a date if the fate of the universe depended on it.

And speaking of Bill Gates -- you can think he's evil or whatever, but you have to concede that he's smart -- he never would've been married if he weren't worth more than the economies of most of Europe. So technology might not be geared to producing smart people, but it may be geared towards producing rich people -- especially since they're the ones who can afford all the life-saving technology!

Haha.

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"Old" is the old new.

I think you're looking at it bass-ackwards. Our advances in technology and medicine have prevented nature from thinning the herd and strengthening the gene pool on the basis of certain traits, but there's no reason to look at it as a case of humanity vs. nature. Rather our evolutionary advances in intellectual capacity have allowed us to conquer in part or in whole what might have once been fatal flaws. Now the human gene pool selects on the basis of other things, based on the new realities, but that is no less natural than what was happening eons before,

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ken.kaufman@gmail.com