onemuseleft:

abigailnussbaum:

baemy-santiago:

occamstireiron:

bionicle:

deadlykillerqueen:

Genocide……………………………….GOOD????????

overpopulation is a fucking shitty myth we as a species produce enough food and have enough shelter to feed and house every living human and then some.

it’s simply not profitable to do so.

capitalism is shit

Hey hot take!! Malthusianism has been broadly debunked since basically the 1970s and yet, much like Freud’s endless ramblings about secretly wanting to bone your own parents, it’s one of those fuckstupid ideas that refuses to die!! Also I’m really disappointed in the Russo brothers for buying into literally the dumbest incarnation of environmental “ethics” there is, holy shit

They didn’t,… buy into it. The point was that Thanos was…. wrong.

They totally bought into it.  Thanos is treated as wrong, but his wrongness is moral, not factual.  There is, for example, no pushback against his claim that killing half of Gamora’s people has resulted in her planet becoming a paradise, even though that’s factually unlikely (Gamora is maybe thirty, so less than a quarter century after losing half its industrial base, her planet is now prospering?  Sure thing, Thanos) and actually contradicted by some of the graphics in Guardians of the Galaxy, which state that Gamora is the last survivor of her species.  We’re meant to think that Thanos is wrong because his plan is evil, not because both his analysis and his proposed solution are mistaken.

The fact is, Hollywood has long been in love with Malthusianism for the same reason that post-9/11, it became so enamored of torture.  Because to the overwhelmingly privileged white men who make up its writing base, it reads like a Tough Question for which there are No Good Answers.  The fact that it’s a moronic idea to which there are obvious rebuttals hasn’t percolated because they don’t want it to, because they’re too in love with the supposed drama that comes from pretending that freaking out about overpopulation in this way makes any sort of sense.

The Russos bought into it, or at least think they’re being edgy or relevant or whatever by doing this. At no point in the narrative does anyone contest Thanos’ claims on anything but moral grounds even though his premise is extremely flawed. They’ve stated that Thanos wiped out half the universe’s resources as well as half its people so the universe is… exactly as fucked as it was anyway, but now it’s full of traumatized, grieving survivors. So all of this was for literally nothing, and I have no idea what the hell they thought that was going to accomplish.

It’s also worth pointing out (as @blossomsinthemist did in the notes of the post I’m reblogging from) that this “committing genocide to save the universe” bullshit is something they came up with. That wasn’t the premise of the original Infinity War comic at all. They decided that Thanos killing people for his own selfish reasons wasn’t good enough so they made up this resource scarcity bullshit and – I cannot stress this enough – did not challenge his beliefs in the narrative at all.

Like, we are absolutely supposed to think Thanos is a complicated character and we’re supposed to feel for the pain he’s enduring in his quest to save us from ourselves and seriously, fuck that.