Plummeting sperm counts, shrinking penises: toxic chemicals threaten humanity

[Apech]

Quote

As if this wasn’t terrifying enough, Swan’s research finds that these chemicals aren’t just dramatically reducing semen quality, they are also shrinking penis size and volume of the testes. This is nothing short of a full-scale emergency for humanity.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/18/toxic-chemicals-health-humanity-erin-brokovich

 

This explains the problems you guys have been having lately

[thelerner]

Wonder if the problem isn't really a cure.  We're closing on 7.8 Billion people in the world.  That's alot.  If population growth slows or stabilizes I won't shed any tears.  An organism grows until it overruns resources or begins to poison its environment.  This is a warning shot. 

 

We can sustain, even grow slowly but we need to keep our environment clean.  In any case if it becomes a real problem, people will  demand cleaner air, food and water.  Which is not a bad thing.  Mother nature  kicking us in the balls to wake us up.

 

 

random thought. I wonder if Space isn't the next frontier, but planned created islands?  With cheap energy and good desalination maybe it's not other planets but our own that we'll start colonizing.  

[Cleansox]

A shrinking penis is a true sign of an advanced Nei Dan practice, so I guess we are evolving spiritually? 

[dwai]

3 hours ago, Cleansox said:

A shrinking penis is a true sign of an advanced Nei Dan practice, so I guess we are evolving spiritually? 

Now, isn't THAT something George Costanza would have loved to have known...

[Apech]

3 hours ago, Cleansox said:

A shrinking penis is a true sign of an advanced Nei Dan practice, so I guess we are evolving spiritually? 

 

 

Thank god!!!!

[natural]

1 hour ago, Apech said:

 

 

Thank god!!!!

 

4 hours ago, Cleansox said:

A shrinking penis is a true sign of an advanced Nei Dan practice, so I guess we are evolving spiritually? 

 

That leaves me out!

[Taomeow]

Currently a couple hundred individuals consume as much of planet Earth's resources, past, present and future, as the rest of us combined.   The idea that there's too many of us reproducing too much is the problem, and therefore reducing our numbers the solution, may well be the plot of some intergalactic reality show titled "Lunatic Asylum Earth."  I can almost see gazillions of alien species watching it and rolling on the floor making whatever sounds correspond to laughter in their physiology.  

[Cleansox]

Yes, the idea of culling should be to remove bad traits from the population, not just keeping the population down. 

Kill the rich? 

[Apech]

5 hours ago, Cleansox said:

Yes, the idea of culling should be to remove bad traits from the population, not just keeping the population down. 

Kill the rich? 

 

 

Yeah kill all the successful people.

[Taomeow]

Successful in what?  I'm with Honoré de Balzac on this.  "The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed." 

 

 

[Apech]

2 minutes ago, Taomeow said:

Successful in what?  I'm with Honoré de Balzac on this.  "The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed." 

 

 

 

Well I've never been any good at business but I know it requires certain skills - including the ability to focus on material accumulation, which I am constitutionally unable to do - but I would not demean those skills I lack.  So I think that if you were to kill all the rich people you would remove from society a certain group which might in the end harm everyone.

 

 

[Taomeow]

30 minutes ago, Apech said:

 

Well I've never been any good at business but I know it requires certain skills - including the ability to focus on material accumulation, which I am constitutionally unable to do - but I would not demean those skills I lack.  So I think that if you were to kill all the rich people you would remove from society a certain group which might in the end harm everyone.

 

 

 

I wasn't the one proposing to kill rich people.  History shows it doesn't work -- if it happens, a few of the ex poor, who only have this model of "success" in their consciousness and no other, only this institutional mold to fill in, promptly take their place and become the new rich people.  Whereupon, after much bloodshed, the cycle repeats itself.  Ad nauseam.

 

Me, I've said many times that I don't think there's necessarily a solution just because there's a problem.  A society where the ability to "focus on material accumulation" is rewarded and, e.g., the ability to pour one's heart and soul into one's children's physical, emotional and mental health is punished is not ever going to find a solution if you ask me.  You think it would harm everyone if we lost the greedy.  I think we have already lost everyone because we made the greedy (for power, not just money) not only our lords and masters but our role models, templates of what we all must aspire to be.  Moreover, we are supposed to perceive our own lack of burning insatiable greed as proof of our deficiency, of lack of "success in life" -- as though the one and only meaning of life is to take more for thyself from your neighbor and never feel it's enough.  By any means at your disposal, legal and illegal, moral and immoral, creative and destructive -- nothing matters but your net worth and the number of strings you are in charge of pulling to make others dance to your tune.

 

Well, I find this kind of arrangement profoundly psychotic and sociopathic, and the idea that everyone should strive to be equally psychotic and sociopathic and feel bad about themselves if they can't, absolutely insane.  But that's just me.  I see lethal insanity where I'm supposed to see success, and vice versa.  

[silent thunder]

Most successful?

 

Or most successfully exploitative?

[Apech]

3 hours ago, silent thunder said:

Most successful?

 

Or most successfully exploitative?

 

Most spermtastic.

[Geof Nanto]

Reading Taomeow’s post above reminded me of D H Lawrence’s insights into Australian society from when he visited in 1922. He was perplexed by what he saw as an egalitarian society lacking in both the class distinctions that defined social rank in Europe and the wealth distinctions that defined rank in America. He didn’t feel comfortable with it. He found the classless Australia society of that time empty of meaning. Here’s and extract from his novel Kangaroo where he writes about his experience in Australia and gives some insight into old world power structures:

 

Of course he [Lawrence, writing as the character Somers] was bound to admit that they ran their city [Sydney] very well, as far as he could see. Everything was very easy, and there was no fuss. Amazing how little fuss and bother there was—on the whole. Nobody seemed to bother, there seemed to be no policemen and no authority, the whole thing went by itself, loose and easy, without any bossing. No real authority—no superior classes—hardly even any boss. And everything rolling along as easily as a full river, to all appearances.

 

That’s where it was. Like a full river of life, made up of drops of water all alike. Europe is really established upon the aristocratic principle. Remove the sense of class distinction, of higher and lower, and you have anarchy in Europe. Only nihilists aim at the removal of all class distinction, in Europe.

 

But in Australia, it seemed to Somers, the distinction was already gone. There was really no class distinction. There was a difference of money and of “smartness.” But nobody felt better than anybody else, or higher; only better-off. And there is all the difference in the world between feeling better than your fellow man, and merely feeling better-off.

 

Now Somers was English by blood and education, and though he had no antecedents whatsoever, yet he felt himself to be one of the responsible members of society, as contrasted with the innumerable irresponsible members. In old, cultured, ethical England this distinction is radical between the responsible members of society and the irresponsible. It is even a categorical distinction. It is a caste distinction, a distinction in the very being. It is the distinction between the proletariat and the ruling classes.

 

But in Australia nobody is supposed to rule, and nobody does rule, so the distinction falls to the ground. The proletariat appoints men to administer the law, not to rule. These ministers are not really responsible, any more than the housemaid is responsible. The proletariat is all the time responsible, the only source of authority. The will of the people. The ministers are merest instruments.

 

Somers for the first time felt himself immersed in real democracy—in spite of all disparity in wealth. The instinct of the place was absolutely and flatly democratic, à terre democratic. Demos was here his own master, undisputed, and therefore quite calm about it. No need to get the wind up at all over it; it was a granted condition of Australia, that Demos was his own master.

 

 

Australia is still like this but less so than it was.

[con.]

15 hours ago, Cleansox said:

Yes, the idea of culling should be to remove bad traits from the population, not just keeping the population down. 

Kill the rich? 

 

I think the correct term is „kill all the white men“.

Because of that song, please don‘t kill me..

 

But honestly, removing bad traits seems to me like something to do with myself. When I think about the population, I‘d vote for adding good traits instead.

Wich brings me back to sperms.

We‘re having our third Baby this year.

[con.]

Oh, and if anyone is lacking sperm, there is lots of it in the male sub- Forum.

[Apech]

1 hour ago, con. said:

Oh, and if anyone is lacking sperm, there is lots of it in the male sub- Forum.

 

But surely it's being retained.

[con.]

19 minutes ago, Apech said:

 

But surely it's being retained.

 

Retaind for people in needs

[Taomeow]

2 hours ago, Yueya said:

Reading Taomeow’s post above reminded me of D H Lawrence’s insights into Australian society from when he visited in 1922. He was perplexed by what he saw as an egalitarian society lacking in both the class distinctions that defined social rank in Europe and the wealth distinctions that defined rank in America. 

 

I found parallels in what you describe with the main drift of my Sumer thread -- don't know if  you ever chanced to read it.  Australia -- from its inception to the late 20th century at least -- seems to have reverted to the prior, much more decisive primary distinction, earlier and deeper and crueler than any class or rank or wealth disparity.  To wit, the distinction between the "civilized" newcomers and the "uncivilized" aboriginals.  How the "civilized" arrange their institutions of power and treat each other may vary a bit from epoch to epoch, from country to country, but this doesn't change the main tune: how they treat free humans outside the machine is invariably absolutely devastating.  Become part of the machine or die -- although "die" often comes first, and "become like us" is then demanded of the decimated survivors.        

 

Sometimes it takes longer for such treatment to be extended to the "civilized" populations, someone else's at first and only later that of one's own country.  But once a place has exterminated or subjugated all its native free humans, it starts coming up with more and more distinctions to fuel it with every next division into this and not this, that and not that, the embraced and the dehumanized.  It may have happened elsewhere sooner than in Australia, because Australia had fodder for the machine for longer.   In any event, in 1922 it was in full swing, far as I know...  but the "civilized" describing the situation in the country didn't find the fact worthy of even a footnote.  The problem with any kind of tunnel vision is that it shows the observer a very convincing picture that has nothing whatsoever to do with reality.

[dwai]

13 hours ago, Taomeow said:

To wit, the distinction between the "civilized" newcomers and the "uncivilized" aboriginals.  How the "civilized" arrange their institutions of power and treat each other may vary a bit from epoch to epoch, from country to country, but this doesn't change the main tune: how they treat free humans outside the machine is invariably absolutely devastating.  Become part of the machine or die -- although "die" often comes first, and "become like us" is then demanded of the decimated survivors.  

This is a "theme" that has repeated itself throughout human history.

 

I'm going into speculative territory here -- maybe it is because humanity was really a very weak species, which was not able to guarantee sustenance, shelter, and security from an evolutionary perspective. Hence the impetus to organize, "hunt in packs", horde resources, and fortify and take on defensive postures vis-a-vis nature (i.e., the elements, other animals, and later between competing groups themselves). I am not very familiar with tribal cultures, but it seems that tribal cultures were not affected/afflicted by this disease beyond a certain level, at least within the context of the tribe. Though it seems tribes waged wars against each other for similar reasons throughout history as well. 

 

This survival instinct took on more complex dimensions as we continued to get more "civilized". I feel it eventually boils down to the "self" vs "other" dichotomy. The more artificial the identities and identifications became, the greater was the tendency to discriminate "others" from the "self" and then either seek uniformity or wipe out differences. Maybe it is the ensuing conflict/struggle that leads to evolution. Apparently from a physiological perspective, humans don't need to (won't need to) evolve further. But from an intellectual/psychological perspective, the evolution is still ongoing. 

 

[Taomeow]

33 minutes ago, dwai said:

This is a "theme" that has repeated itself throughout human history.

 

I'm going into speculative territory here -- maybe it is because humanity was really a very weak species, which was not able to guarantee sustenance, shelter, and security from an evolutionary perspective. Hence the impetus to organize, "hunt in packs", horde resources, and fortify and take on defensive postures vis-a-vis nature (i.e., the elements, other animals, and later between competing groups themselves).

 

 

From the point of view of social biology, as a species we are unique in only one respect.  Many other animals hunt in packs, horde resources, and protect themselves against the elements.  We are only different in that our young are born extremely immature (in a state of inability to autonomously take care of their physiological functioning that, in other species, characterizes the state of a fetus, not a newborn).  Our young are born much more dependent on adults in every respect and remain so for much longer compared to other species, requiring a much longer time to mature toward being able to care for their own needs without adults providing sustenance, safety, and guidance. 

 

Is it a weakness of our species?  It was a strength for at least a million years -- because that's how you can capitalize on the acquired collective knowledge and learned skills that are not hardwired as instincts.  Did it become a weakness?  Yes -- it has become a huge, monumental disadvantage once we started messing with our natural hardwired developmental process.  Once we invented (debatable that it was "our" invention though -- I'm a proponent of the intervention hypothesis) things like cord cutting at birth (profoundly and imprintingly traumatic), premature/forced non-carrying of the baby on the mother's body, premature/forced weaning, prolonged or nearly constant physical aloneness and solo sleeping for the baby, social taboos on free as-needed elimination, and eventually punishments for babies for immaturity, in the form of all manner of enforced/forbidden behaviors and, eventually, physical violence -- from ritual mutilations (with knives, ingested or injected poisons, physical restraints/immobilization, etc.) to beatings and emotional abuse as "teachings," withdrawal or enforcement of food intake, and so on -- and then...  Then came what we have today by way of child-rearing that combines all of the above and more -- which I don't even want to talk about because it horrifies me most profoundly. 

 

By the way, to refer back to the original subject (please pardon a detour, OP), falling sperm counts are not our only reproductive problem today -- we also have record figures of female infertility and spontaneous abortions.  Every veterinarian scientist knows that if things like that start happening and progressing in a domesticated herd of, e.g., sheep, that particular herd is going extinct -- the deaths to births ratio will get reversed at some point and then the process of demise of all sheep in the herd will progress at an accelerated pace.  Those are very bad signs for the human race.  Very.   

[Apech]

21 hours ago, dwai said:

This is a "theme" that has repeated itself throughout human history.

 

I'm going into speculative territory here -- maybe it is because humanity was really a very weak species, which was not able to guarantee sustenance, shelter, and security from an evolutionary perspective. Hence the impetus to organize, "hunt in packs", horde resources, and fortify and take on defensive postures vis-a-vis nature (i.e., the elements, other animals, and later between competing groups themselves). I am not very familiar with tribal cultures, but it seems that tribal cultures were not affected/afflicted by this disease beyond a certain level, at least within the context of the tribe. Though it seems tribes waged wars against each other for similar reasons throughout history as well. 

 

This survival instinct took on more complex dimensions as we continued to get more "civilized". I feel it eventually boils down to the "self" vs "other" dichotomy. The more artificial the identities and identifications became, the greater was the tendency to discriminate "others" from the "self" and then either seek uniformity or wipe out differences. Maybe it is the ensuing conflict/struggle that leads to evolution. Apparently from a physiological perspective, humans don't need to (won't need to) evolve further. But from an intellectual/psychological perspective, the evolution is still ongoing. 

 

 

There's a postulated number (the name of which I have forgotten) which is the maximum number of people you can easily identify - it is thought to be around 150 (though figures vary but always in the few hundred range).  This is literally familiarity - as in your family - and is probably the rough number of people in a tribal group.  They would be the ones you 'know' - while the strangers would be 'others'.  I think this in-group, out-group thing is probably hard wired into us.

 

I think also there is a huge psychological shift that occurs when the hunter gatherer or pastoralist tribes start to settle in fixed places - which is the beginning of civilisation (in the strict sense of becoming 'civic').  I am not saying the nomadic tribes were less developed and so on - in fact the opposite.  I think we lost something fundamental about our relation to our environment, our selves and each other by forcing ourselves to live in one spot.  Also this is when disease would start to be quickly spread.  In fact it's kind of ironic that we now do 'lockdown' in response to pandemic when our ancestors would have practiced exclusion.  People would have been thrown out of the 'cities' if they became sick and made to wander in the wilderness beyond - the survivors becoming 'outlaws' and perhaps living as their forebears did, adapting to the wilderness and having no love for the City dwellers and their laws.  the same thing would happen, I would suggest to other law breakers and particularly those who broke sexual taboos.

 

Maybe I'm taking this too far but I like to think that humans are half compliant and half rebellious because of the mixing in the past between the city dwellers and the outlaws.  You can even see it in the various responses to the lockdown, wearing masks and wotnot - there's a tension between wanting to comply and resisting imposition from 'the Law'.

 

Hmmm just thinking out loud.

[Apech]

20 hours ago, Taomeow said:

...

 

By the way, to refer back to the original subject (please pardon a detour, OP), falling sperm counts are not our only reproductive problem today -- we also have record figures of female infertility and spontaneous abortions.  Every veterinarian scientist knows that if things like that start happening and progressing in a domesticated herd of, e.g., sheep, that particular herd is going extinct -- the deaths to births ratio will get reversed at some point and then the process of demise of all sheep in the herd will progress at an accelerated pace.  Those are very bad signs for the human race.  Very.   

 

 

@Taomeow

 

Just curious - does the cord and placenta fall off naturally after a while - rather than being cut?

 

I read the other day that our 'cousins' the Neanderthals lived in very small groups in Europe/Asia for hundreds of thousands of years but that because of the numbers there were significant signs of inbreeding and congenital problems therefrom.  Obviously, if one accepts the genetic results they did survive within us humans as did the Denisovans.

 

I feel, but cannot really justify with facts, that the sperm count/penis shrinking and low fertility is related to a lack of purpose.  I think that possibly not for the first time in history there is 'world tiredness' and a kind of lostness.  There doesn't seem to be any inspiring vision of the future - and I'm not talking about fervid dreams of utopia - but more a kind of confidence that the world we make for our children will be better than the one we inherited and be filled with value and virtue.

[Taomeow]

4 hours ago, Apech said:

 

@Taomeow

 

Just curious - does the cord and placenta fall off naturally after a while - rather than being cut?

 

The placenta, in a natural birth given by a healthy woman, is expelled right after the baby is out.  Most animal females eat it after that, including our closest relatives the chimps.  In humans, currently it is collected by the medical industry (alongside cord blood) and utilized in various drugs, surgeries, high-end cosmetic preparations, and genetic experiments.  It is the richest source of hematopoietic stem cells, hormones, immune and immunoprotective factors, and so on.  Nature took care to make this "supplement" for the female to restore her strength after the stress of giving birth, but we "conquered" nature and invented the word "yuck" for its best medicines, beginning with this one.  I don't know at what point humans started burying the placenta (typically in some kind of ritual aimed to preserve the spiritual connection between the mother and the child, and the family and the land) instead of eating it, but my guess is, it was a fairly recent innovation. 

 

In a healthy birth, the umbilical cord that's left uncut pulsates for an hour or more -- the blood exchange between the mother and the newborn keeps happening and ceases only gradually and smoothly, greatly easing the incremental transition to autonomous blood flow for the baby's organs and systems, without causing abrupt blood pressure drops and spikes that accompany the right-away clamping and severance (which cause micro strokes in babies, sometimes destroying some areas of the brain permanently right from the get-go -- to say nothing of the spiritual connection.  A friend of mine who's in his 50s was diagnosed with this kind of brain trauma just recently -- he's a very smart guy but he started having some cognitive and visual information processing difficulties recently which, upon thorough investigation, were attributed to a stroke he suffered at birth.  He had the motivation and the money for that thorough investigation.  Most people don't.  They just put up with all manner of limitations that they think of as their natural peculiarities -- some are "naturally" clumsy and discoordinated, some are "naturally" slow learners, and then there's a generous amount of diagnoses for all manner of "congenital" peculiarities, from mild to debilitating, from immediately obvious to delayed.)  After the cord stops pulsating, if left to its own devices, it starts drying up and eventually falls off.  It takes between 3 and 10 days.  (If nothing is done with the placenta, the same thing happens to the placenta.)