Live Long and What Now?

There are crazies, and there are crazies, and there are people even I'm moved to mock and shun. VHEMT goes beyond that last category and enters the world of movements I find myself actually despising. Seriously. Get this:

"VHEMT (pronounced vehement) is a movement not an organization. It's a movement advanced by people who care about life on planet Earth. We're not just a bunch of misanthropes and anti-social, Malthusian misfits, taking morbid delight whenever disaster strikes humans. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Voluntary human extinction is the humanitarian alternative to human disasters.

We don't carry on about how the human race has shown itself to be a greedy, amoral parasite on the once-healthy face of this planet. That type of negativity offers no solution to the inexorable horrors which human activity is causing.

Rather, The Movement presents an encouraging alternative to the callous exploitation and wholesale destruction of Earth's ecology.

As VHEMT Volunteers know, the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens... us.

Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the gloom.

When every human chooses to stop breeding, Earth's biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory, and all remaining creatures will be free to live, die, evolve (if they believe in evolution), and will perhaps pass away, as so many of Nature's “experiments” have done throughout the eons.

It's going to take all of us going."

Let's start with VHEMT's "arguments," which boil down to a list of varyingly clever straw men, which they predictably line up and knock down. Then let's carry on to their failure to engage with the logical conclusions of their philosophy: why not kill people, support disease and murder, if you despite humanity and want it to cease? Why propose humanitarian action and when the continued existence and comfort of humanity is counter to your goals? If there's anything I frown on more than depressingly nihilistic, rhetoric-poor, spinelessly genocidal whackjobs, it's halfassed depressingly nihilistic, rhetoric-poor, spinelessly genocidal whackjobs. Come on, people! I've seen more enthusiastic and better-argued evil in poorly written pulp novels. I know you can do better!

This brings me to my final point. What do we do with things who disturb and frighten us? We make art about it!

Creative prompt: you know the conventions of modern/urban fantasy. Take a good long look at these VHEMT folks, maybe even peruse their website (linked above) and tell me what they're really about.