What portion of humanity would you murder if you could?

All of them.

All viruses.

Step 1: Find a genetic marker for intolerance of others
Step 2: Apply virus
Step 3: put myself on life support/in an isolation unit long enough to see just how much of the rest of the world dies with me

None

@SmashTheState: “And if you choose none, do you accept the responsibility if we destroy all life on Earth due to overpopulation and climate change when you could have prevented it?”

Yes.

The fundies.

Justin Beiber fans?

None, I am no way qualified to play God, or take His authority so I would bury the device where no one could use it ever.

The dishonest ones.

Anyone who touches the machine with intent to kill people.

OK, I’ll bite. Little Brown people. It seems almost every war has been caused by, or made worse by little brown people. Examples (modern day) Vietnam. Little brown people. Haiti. Little Brown people. Mexico drug war. Little brown people. The Middle east. Little brown people. Bosnia. LBP. Panama, Grenada, The Congo, South Africa, All problem spots started by, or exacerbated by, little brown people. WW2 is an anomaly…tall white people, but there are always exceptions. When we had dinings in when I was a solder and young, we used to toast LBP’s because they guaranteed us a job.

Could have just gone with warmongers.

@majorrich
Well, at least you’re honest about your opinion.

Slavery. The mass elimination of Native Americans. The Inquisition. The Crusades. The US Civil War. England vs. Ireland. The Holocaust.

Don’t discount the Anglos – we’re shitty, too.

@syz won’t get any disagreement from me. I just arbitrarily went Vietnam forward. But to your points, Indian wars, still involved LBP, The Crusades involved LBP, the Civil War, well… Brown people. England/Ireland.. Gingers and white people. Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Xerxes, all LBP. i had a First Sergeant pointed it out to me when I was a fresh shavetail out of OCS. I was amazed! pretty funny though.

Cat haters

Reddit users.

Just all the idiot drivers!!

It would be interesting to hear the LBP’s view on history, particularly as to who it is that is always exporting death and aggression to whom. It seems that it’s always the pale tall people heaping death and exploitation on anything they touch. Since the PTP’s print the books, they have the convenience of labeling the process “exploration” and “discovery”.

Manifest Destiny too.

The little brown people didn’t fuck with us until we fucked with them.

The only shocker for me was that 9/11 took so long. You can only be bullied for so long until you punch the dick.

And more dick punching is how we got ISIS.

@majorrich
Yeah, cause skin pigmentation has everything to do with behavior traits and nothing to do with evolutionary effects of climate.

Love the cherry picked list you’ve got there of world history. Also, it’s very telling how you are referring to the people you want to kill off as “little.” I guess that is your way Of being polite…

As for my answer, people that share the same ignorance as @majorrich

I’m glad not to have this power. Absolute power corrupts, and I could easily see myself making my list and checking it twice. An evil Santa, if you will.

Active child molesters.

I want to say racists, sexists, homophobes, etc., but some of them come around with education, so I’ll leave them off for now.

All of them.

And I thought I had a cynical viewpoint.

None.

I’d take a sledgehammer to the machine.

None. I’m not qualified to play God.

And if mankind destroys the Earth, then so be it. It would be the result of their own actions.

I think refusing responsibility for acting once you possess the capability to act is nothing less than existential cowardice. My own targets:

* All sociopaths
* All men who have sired more than three children
* All women of breeding age who have given birth more than three times
* All people with low capacity for imagination
* All people of disposition towards authoritarianism

This is likely to have killed off the vast majority of the population, and those left alive wll not repeat the mistakes which got us into this mess.

Everyone who would hypothetically refuse to kill anyone if they could use the machine.

Everyone with large carbon footprints. I’d have to work out the cut-off and possible exemptions for those in important scientific fields who have to travel long distances to conduct research.

All psychopaths and sociopaths.

Unreformable authoritarians.

@talljasperman You would be killed by your own standard, since you’d be using the machine with the intent to kill anyone who would use the machine with the intent to kill anyone.

”and those left alive wll not repeat the mistakes which got us into this mess.”
If there is one thing that is certain about humans, it is that mistakes will be repeated, likely within less than 50 years after the act of pest control.

LOL! Just for Y’alls information. I am also a LBP! and this is in the social section. Call ‘em as I see ‘em @Silence04 . And you can’t silence me here. Heh Heh Heh. And.. I was there for several of my citations. They were indeed little.

@ragingloli That’s easy cynicism designed to remove any need to actually put your own ass on the line to fix anything. The fact is that humanity has been slowly learning wisdom. It often seems like two steps forward, one step back, but we have learned. It took 1500 years, but we eventually threw off the shackles of the Vatikan. Slavery was abolished in most places, and subsequent attempts at the form – indentured servitude, minimum wage, etc. – have been met with swifter criticism and resistance. Forty years ago, when I was a child, I could walk into a corner store and purchase licorice candies called “nigger babies” and no one thought anything of it; today, such a product would generate headlines and probably criminal charges. In a century, homosexuality has gone from the love that dare not speak its name to the love that won’t fucking shut up and marches down the street in a parade every year in assless chaps and a pink feather boa.

There are specific and identifiable groups which are responsible for holding humanity back from achieving apotheosis. You may not be willing to commit mass murder of these people – though I suspect they will die regardless, one way or another, as the Universe has never been kind to fools – but that does not change the fact that they exist.

“The earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.” – Utah Phillips

@SmashTheState
* All men who have sired more than three children
* All women of breeding age who have given birth more than three times

Orphaning a bunch of kids solves what exactly? There’s no correlation that kids from larger families necessarily go on to have larger families of their own. Or that kids from larger families—whose parents are spontaneously killed by some maniac with a machine from the future—will go on to have smaller families.

* All people with low capacity for imagination

Imagination and creativity are often linked to higher levels of dopamine. Dopamine is also linked to a lot of mental health problems. There needs to be a balance to everything. You’ve supported neurodiversity in another thread. Yet you’re advocating wiping out people simply because you see no value of their own neuro-development.

Sounds like you might be offing yourself under your first criteria.

@fluthernutter This planet is already wildly overpopulated with humans. Bringing yet another human being into this world requires such a colossal level of narcissism, of having the belief that the world desperately needs your particular gene plasm ahead of everyone else’s, that such people are utterly delusional. And for someone to do this so many times that they not only don’t help with overpopulation but actively and deliberately INCREASE overpopulation by pooping out more hungry sprogs than it takes to replace themselves requires a degree of sociopathy, stupidity, ignorance, and selfishness which renders such a person unfit for life.

Something on the order of 80% of the brain is used in interpretation of visual data in some way. We are a highly visual species. People who have lost the capacity for imagination (or never had it) are not even truly human. It’s a stretch to even think of them as higher primates. A person without the capacity for imagination is worse than useless; they not only contribute nothing of value to this world but act as a phlegmatic barrier to those who do have imagination. The world is better off without them, always has been, and always will be.

@Kropotkin Me excluded of course. Edit I would smash the machine into bits.

@SmashTheState So are you trying to affect change in overpopulation? Or do you just want to punish people for overpopulating? (And their offspring who arent necessarily going to make the same mistake?)

There’s a lot of dopamine in my gene pool. Sure, that means we’ve got plenty of creativity and imagination in our family. But we also have autism and schizophrenia. Good times.

I think it takes a collossal level of sociopathy, stupidity, ignorance, selfishness and narcissism to be unable to see the value of neuro-development that is different than our own.

I’m glad the world is filled with people who are different than me. It would be a fucking mess otherwise.

@SmashTheState – Wrapped in your misanthropic world view seems to be some pretty radical assertions about the nature of homo sapiens. I’d be interested to see the data if we’ve discovered such a thing as the “sociopath”? Is this a specific indicator on a spectrum of human empathy, or is there a test for such a thing that I have yet to hear about? And what about this “authoritarianism” you refer to? Does it exclude people that are so convinced that they have figured everything out that they would be willing to wipe out most of the humans living on the planet?

While I answered “no”, I think that the only other reasonable option would be @ragingloli‘s “yes – all”. It would at least be consistent. Your methodology seems particularly personal and is bound to result in a need for phase 2 (and phase 3, etc). If you dislike homo sapiens, trying to breed the species’ characteristics out of the species might be more challenging than you describe.

@DoNotKnow That’s easy. The machine works out what sociopathy and authoritarianism mean.

@Kropotkin – And sociopathy and authoritarianism (features of the human species) disappear following the destruction of the current batch?

All bad bacteria.

@DoNotKnow For a generation at least.

And cancer.

And mosquitoes. And wild parsnip and hogweed.

Earwigs!

@SmashTheState ” And if you choose none, do you accept the responsibility if we destroy all life on Earth due to overpopulation and climate change when you could have prevented it?”

Overpopulation is because of dipshits not understanding contraception and even bigger dipshits railing against it.

But anyway, to answer your question:

serial rapists – scumbags, all of them. Anyone who says they are curable can be added to this list

people with serious psychologial issues – if they are not willing to take medication, then they are more harmful than not. Drug em

Anti-vaxxers – yeah, how do you like them virus filled apples, morons?

Anyone not named Lawn or Shakira. Adam and Eve had their chance to propagate the species and they F’d it up. It’s our turn now and nobody can change that. When I summon her from the depths of the sea, it’s going down as prophesized in the dream vision.

Seriously though, all extroverts…

I’m messing. Seriously though (somewhat) – for this thought experiment, I like to think of humanity as a large mass of granite and my task is to sculpt it into something respectable, like a horse maybe? I agree it’s big and unwieldy right now, so first inclination is to get out the sledgehammer. But I need to be careful or I might accidentally crush the part that was supposed to be its head. Once it’s gone, I can’t get that piece back. Oop.

Also, wiping out mass segments of humanity at a time would leave behind a “cluster” of overflowing hospitals, morgues, cemetaries and orphanages. Not to mention mass hysteria, trauma, neuroticism and the overwhelming stench of rotting manflesh. Pretty soon my sculpture looks like this.

Nobody wants that. Think about it, I’m being asked to make the most important sculpture of all time and I’m going to do it in two minutes with a sledgehammer? No chance. I’ll use a little chisel and take my sweet time. If it takes me thirty years, so be it – this is my life’s work. Remember, if absolutely necessary, I can always try the hammer later.

My first segment of humanity will be all supreme leaders of North Korea with trapezoidal hair.

@SmashTheState
I think refusing responsibility for acting once you possess the capability to act is nothing less than existential cowardice.

Lol that’s just…bizarre. Hinting at cowardice based on a scenario that no one here is ever likely to experience. :p
Excellent fuckin question that makes you think though. I’m a bit unclear on the details though; can we kill people from the past, or only in the present? I wonder if over population would be so dangerous if there wasn’t so much technology. Sure some undeveloped countries are overpopulated, but with all the technology we have, made for doing everything fast and in convenience, we’re really fucking shit up. Can I create a virus that rusts all cars and machinery? Force everyone to live like peasants and value shit more. No, that’s a stupid idea. Really I don’t know. Maybe I would keep the machine until some huge war breaks out and threatens a large portion of the world, then just kill all the opposing forces.
If I’m going to murder shit tons of folk, I’d want to think about it real good haha.

Bed bugs.

I would wipe out everyone who would want to use such a machine. Wait (thinks) Well perhaps not. (Phew that was close!)

Okay, which one of you has been using the Mr. Gene Splicer 9000?