My response might have been a bit curt, but whether you realize it or not, you’re using ecofascist framing when you argue (even casually) that population decline is a serious solution for climate change.

Put simply: the problem isn’t with the mere number of homo sapiens. The problem is that some of those homo sapiens live unsustainably in a way that is destroying our climate and local ecosystems. In particular, some of those homo sapiens are capitalists who disproportionately command whole ecosystems to be obliterated, consume and waste like there’s no tomorrow (because there is no tomorrow while they’re in control), and command all the world’s governments to intentionally ensure that the vast majority of the other homo sapiens live in squalor and fight each other over scraps. Furthermore, ecofascists correctly identify the squalor, the fighting for scraps, and environmental obliteration that these capitalist scum impose upon us as injustices, but because they’re fascists, they then blame the victims of the capitalists, e.g. climate refugees and poor minorities in the large, instead of the capitalists themselves.

That does not mean that the Earth has an infinite carrying capacity for homo sapiens and that we can never ever have discussions about population size. But if we do that, we need to make it explicit that (1) reducing population size (involuntarily or otherwise) is not a serious solution for climate change or environmental destruction (voluntary reducing population size might be part of the solution to some problem, but…see the next point), and (2) we must resist any attempts to reduce population size in any way that violates our freedom to live and bodily autonomy. Any serious proposal for population reduction by a government or capitalist necessarily implies genocide and will likely involve eugenics since the capitalists are already racist and bigoted in a variety of intersectional ways. And even most “voluntary” population reduction schemes (e.g. of the kind “”“anarcho”“”-primitivists call for) are really just letting the worst-off victims of capitalism die off in squalor.

Hence why my answer is always “you first”. Because if you think that population reduction is so neat, you ought to be willing to be one of the population reduced, right? Otherwise, you’re implicitly putting yourself above others who, within a pro-population-reduction framework, ought to die and not give birth so that you may live without making any changes. Along what lines do you deserve to live more than the population reduced?

As climate change becomes increasingly difficult to ignore, ecofascism is the current iteration of fascist ideology. You might have been joking, but the ecofascist who put that thought in your head? They’re not! So yes, I actually do have to be curt when you do legwork for them, even by accident. There needs to be a(n extremely mild) social consequence when people do this kind of thing. You need to know that you’re stepping on a landmine.

And yes, it had to be this long and this detailed in response to a few words. Yes I could, in fact, infer all of this information about an ecofascist framing from an off-the-cuff comment of a few words length, because it’s a dog whistle, and therefore there’s a subtext that you are (I hope) accidentally invoking, and because I’ve seen it a thousand times before and I will see it a thousand times again. And yes, even if you knew all of this already and were just trying to make a joke, yes I had to comment this brick of text for the simple reason that someone else might have seen what you wrote and thought it was cool to say stuff like that without knowledge of its subtext… like I believe you did. Don’t prove me wrong.

And I hope this explains why your original comment got majority downvotes.