Population reduction: Why not?

Interesting I hope they start with you when they decide to off people. The less people who think like you on the planet the better for the human race.

[edit on 20-8-2007 by constitutionist 1971]

[edit on 20-8-2007 by constitutionist 1971]

Maybe that slew of microbiologists that were bumped off recently were working on the "cure".

Even "bumps" need a foundation. What does your foundation, consist of??

Originally Posted by: constitutionist 1971
Interesting I hope they start with you when they decide to off people. The less people who think like you on the planet the better for the human race.

I disagree with you completely. Overpopulation is a HUGE problem and if you dont think it is then you are very shortsighted. We as a human race dont live harmoniously with mother nature. And you obviously havent been to africa, or to the third world. I have. Ive been to africa in towns that have NO running water, where people are skinny and starved and 1 in 4 has aids. And after seeing that and taking into account that most of the people on this rock live in conditions similar to what i saw, I think that we MUST do something, or its only going to get worse.

Its easy for most people who have the luxuries of the internet and running water to sit there and call me evil for suggesting things such as liscenses to have children and mandatory birth control. But whats you suggestion? Millions of people die from starvation and disease. Our planet can only support so many people, and we are pushing that limit without any thought to consequence. What are we gonna do when the population reaches 10billion? 20billion? If we dont do something NOW that is what will happen. Of course you wont be alive to care by then.

So who cares about the lives our grandchildren and children will have?
RIDDICULOUS

If you are going to insult me at least put forth some of your own "great ideas" for us to all ponder. THE MORE PEOPLE that think like me, the better off the planet as a whole will be. Proove me wrong.

Let's put our money where our sex organs are! Educate the people about the repercussion of breading!

I do not advocate genocide or limitations on reproduction. I myself, refrain from procreating because I think of the greater masses. I believe that the intelligent know better.

I am not saying that some people are better than others. I am saying that some people think of our future as a whole. When I became of age I understood that it was not the life for me to bring another person into this so called "home".

Do you think the future looks wonderful? I don't.

Let's start to educate and really explain the duties of parental figures! Let's be good to our offsping and offer them more than what was given to us!

gravytrain
What data is there to support notions of overpopulation - I haven't seen any. I've read a lot of material that supports the notion that we cannot continue to live the way we have been if we expect to survive for long - and that's with current population levels.

Depopulation is not an option as far as I'm concerned, but lifestyle change is an option - in fact, as far as I'm concerned, it's our only option if you don't consider waiting for the blade to drop.

What's amazing is that we now have the technology to drastically reduce our impact in the long term, by expending considerable resources in the short term. We have very good (and constantly improving) long-term energy solutions, as well as water and even food solutions - the fact that we can condense them into a single functioning 'unit' that requires only one set of repair skills/materials, and it becomes more feasible. They cost money to start, money that nobody wants to spend.

I'm not a real charitable guy, I don't think we should help anyone if it doesn't help us (or at least doesn't hurt us). The thing is..helping others in this sort of way does help us. It could shrink long term reliance on aid packages and provide solutions to the globe-spanning air/water cleanliness/availability issues.

Overpopulation fanatics are so quick to point out population numbers, but people aren't numbers. Numbers don't invent, they don't engineer, they don't produce - people do, or at least, they can if they're educated and raised with the goal of being productive and virtuous. Overpopulation would be really scary if every single future human being was useless, but they're not, and even if they were, they don't have to remain that way for another day if folks are willing to make the necessary decisions.

Thanks to the miracle of genetics, we can expect mutations, we can expect surprises. I can't imagine a better way to doom ourselves than to start culling our own herd out of laziness or fear. Some animals do it, but they lack so many of the advantages we have. There are much better solutions, for everyone involved. It just takes a lot more trouble to think about - much easier for some people to use depopulation as an excuse to pick off whatever minority/ethnic group/religion pisses them off.

Just a final note - there is almost certainly a eugenics program working in my country, I just don't know whether or not it's an organized effort, or simply the working of consequence. I suspect it's the latter, but I could be horribly wrong...

I can't imagine a better way to doom ourselves than to start culling our own herd out of laziness or fear.

reply to post by WyrdeOne

Hi WyrdeOne: Generally agree with you that we really do not have to do anything about the population issue. It is really just another overhyped issue thanks to the Al Gore, Global control, liberal media crowd. We could do a lot better, hope we will, I certainly practice a green lifestyle but an organization that would have the power to dictate how we all live and reproduce is unthinkable. Not necessary. IMHO Earth is an incredibly resiliant planet irregardless of what you hear in the media!
Having said that there are some crying issues environmentally that I wish we could deal with like: Haiti has denuded its half of the island to an environmental disaster. Matagasgar was such a natural wonder with its biological diversity only a few years ago but is fast becoming a wasteland. China with its exponential development will soon have monumental environmental difficulties. There seems to be absolutely nothing we can do about any of these tragedies but sit and watch.
Any ideas? Thanks!

reply to post by plumranch

I was speaking of donor, not recepient governments. These, as you point out, are often corrupt, hidebound and incapable. Moreover, they sometimes privilege one group of needy citizens over the other, such as happens in Sri Lanka, where the government does its best to prevent international assistance reaching that country's oppressed Tamil minority.

This is why Western governments and big private institutions increasingly prefer to funnel aid, when they can, through non-governmental organizations and civil-society groups. It is only donor governments (and very large private charities) that have the clout to do this. Smaller private donors have far less power to dictate how their aid is distributed and used.

Of course, you can undertake 'guerilla' charity -- the current French Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, was into that sort of thing on a heroic scale during the 1970s -- chartering a ship and taking it up the Mekong to rescue Vietnamese boat people trying to make it to Hong Kong, for example. It can work if you're that kind of person, but not many of us are cast in Kouchner's heroic mould. Most are far more likely to fall at the first hurdle, or get shot dead.

For these reasons, foreign aid in Western countries should continue to be handled by governments and large private ('institutional' donors). Institutional charity -- your Carnegies and Guggenheims and Rockerfellers and all the rest -- is what built American civil society and culture, so its efficacy is not in doubt. If one really wants to make a perceptible, sustained difference, government and institutional charity really is the way to go. Freelance just doesn't cut it.

The topic was "Population Reduction, why not?"

The original poster did not advocate genocide, infanticide, race(icide)? or any other mass killing as a means of control.

He did however offer the proven effective method of "culling" as an example of the need to have population control in order to increase the health of the "herd" as a whole, and conserve resources. He did not use that example as a means for human control.

But then the trolls arrived.

I don't agree that the problem lies in aid to 3rd world countries though, it is the industrialized countries that have brought the world to the point we are at now. Our excess use of resources will be our downfall.

I do agree however that there's already too many people on this planet and believe we need a full 90% dieoff as a good starting point. My money's on mother nature to take care of business eventually, but the politicians and warpigs will engineer famine and war to help out for the meantime.

The line in Matrix where the agent tells Neo the human race is like a virus is absolutely true. No other animal on this planet will destroy its own environment for short term profit. No other animal will inflate its population to unsustainable numbers with technology. Its unfourtunate that those who think we can just continue down this path with no future consiquencies wont be around to see the misery they have advocated.

Water will be the limiting factor, I'm sure there will be some slimey corporations that will be flat out estatic when we finally have polluted all the fresh water sources and have to buy it from them.

reply to post by GAOTU789

I liked your first post on this thread; I gave it a star. However,

Originally posted by GAOTU789
(Multinational companies) make a large percentage of their profits off of exploiting these people so they could donate a share back to them.... They could build hospitals, schools, irrigation systems, proper farms instead of the one season crop monstrosities we have now. Maybe we could even get the central banks to forgive most of the imaginary debt that cripples alot of these countries.

How in the world can these greedy multinationals achieve all this without the cooperation of the governments of these countries -- warlords, kleptocrats and all?

International aid is political by its very nature; it cannot be otherwise. And politics is the art of the possible.

Already Happening

Originally posted by gravytrain
I think we should mesh several ideas together. We should hand out free birth control pills, and condoms, and spermicide to the contries with the highest birthrates, but first you have to educate them about birth control because there beliefs about pregnancy and contraception are different from ours.

This is pretty much what's happening now. It would help if the religious maniacs of the Vatican, the American religious right and the US Government weren't so keen on throwing money at ineffective, ridiculous 'abstinence' programmes instead of spending it on family-planning measures that work.

[edit on 21-8-2007 by Astyanax]

A troll, a troll, a happy troll am I

Originally posted by Galactic Overlord Stimpy
The original poster did not advocate genocide, infanticide, race(icide)? or any other mass killing as a means of control.

The original poster learnt long ago that his foul bigotry makes him a social outcast, in real life as well as on the Web. He confessed as much in his very first post. He has learnt caution, and now covers over his true beliefs and desires with ambiguity and doubletalk.

He did however offer the proven effective method of "culling" as an example of the need to have population control in order to increase the health of the "herd" as a whole, and conserve resources. He did not use that example as a means for human control.

Then why bring it up at all?

Do you remember him saying this? It's on page 4 of the thread.

Cutting off aid and letting people die is not genocide.

The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide says different:

Genocide (is defined as...) any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

But then the trolls arrived.

Never in my life on the Internet have I been prouder to be called a troll. Thank you very kindly indeed.

[edit on 21-8-2007 by Astyanax]

I'm happy that you have found pleasure and comfort in this

Sadly, I cannot say that I read every line of this thread. As soon as the baiting and name calling starts I generally skip to the next post.

Originally posted by Galactic Overlord Stimpy
Sadly, I cannot say that I read every line of this thread. As soon as the baiting and name calling starts I generally skip to the next post.

You can't have read many of the original poster's then. Are you sure you know anything at all about what's going on in this thread?

hi therre, I'll try explain where I see this, feel free to commennt

I think what we are trying to do is not trying to find the root cause of overpopulation. other species are completely free to reproduce whenever they want right??? birth control seems to be trying to stop overpopulation by the effects of having surplus food to eat, not the cause, which is having surplus food to eat.... in my opinion

as long as we keep providing food en masse for ourselves, then we will keep growing I think. It can be seen amongst all species, if there is a supply of food to be eaten, then obviously the species will consume it because of life's inexplicable urge to survive!!!! and the species with grow with it until their food supply dwindles and so too then does the species, which then enables the food supply to grow back and it goes round and round etc ecology.

However humans have gained the ability to produce and grow food at will with agriculture and so can keep growing. What a marvellous thing yes a blessing, but sadly a curse on everything else on this planet... Even though in some individual countries we can see zero growth levels if we look at Earth as a whole and humanity as a whole then we keep growing as long as food is provided, of course. In fact the food supply per person has increased over the last 40 years by 24% as can be shown by the graph on this webpage graph(although it has no recent results) and how is this going to help in trying to stop overpopulation. where would all this food go if we were to control births?? we're not feeding the hungry millions right now..... it's coming at the problem backwards.

So an answer could be instead of increasing the food supply as we are doing, keep the supply steady. This will not involve mass killing or anything or mass famines, why would there be?? because we are simply supporting those that are alive now... and the babies would come... and the older would go... the population numbers will stay put because there will be no surplus food that would enable us to keep growing. The numbers may wobble one way or another around this balance but it will stay there. And we would be the stupidest species on the planet (if we arent that already, intelligence is such a curse!!) if we didn't realise that having a now limited food supply meant we had to watch our breeding too. I think it would just happen subconsciously as it does in the natural world. If we didn't listen, nature could take care of it anyway see. there's nothing menacing about this, it's just nature! then, ever so slowly, barely noticeable, over a large time frame we could decrease the supply.... ecology! the system that works for everything else. can we escape the laws of the world we ourselves live in??

I guess my main view is that overpopulation is a bad thing because we are destroying the world and living entities in the world at a rather devastating rate, however if you think humans are the greatest thing and believe in survival of the fittest etc. then this may not be a problem. nevertheless we would have to leave the planet at some point if we were to keep growing (steven hawking said if we kept doubling the population every 40 years as we are doing now then in 2600 we would literally be shoulder to shoulder!! fascinating) leaving this planet in a mess, then poop in another scattering lots of nappies across the universe? eww!! I hope we develop a completely new system to prevent this..... I don't know how or what it would be. there's too many people for one planet anyway. we got along just fine with Gaia for around 3 million years, then we cheated the system and grew our own food...whoops! I'm kind of relying on Mother Gaia to wake up and smell the poop in her moustache soon



many pieces of love.
Ellen Oneironaut

[edit on 21-8-2007 by Ellen Oneironaut]

reply to post by Ellen Oneironaut

Wonderful post, Ma'am.

You nailed the contradiction perfectly here:

birth control seems to be trying to stop overpopulation by the effects of having surplus food to eat, not the cause, which is having surplus food to eat.

I agree completely, and no, I am not being ironic.

However, the solution you propose, while doubtless helping curb Earth's population, will do nothing to alleviate the misery of those who at present have only enough to keep themselve alive in hunger, want and misery.

Besides, something like the kind of artificial curb on food supplies you propose already exists. It's called money.

Trouble is, growing food to feed the world is so damn' cheap. Do you know how much agriculture contributes to the world economy? A lousy two percent (or thereabouts; I can't find the latest figures).

Then again, if we followed your proposal, the price of food would rise and rise (it's called the law of supply and demand). Some people wouldn't be able to afford it. They would starve to death, and all their potential future offspring would remain unborn.

Which, I suppose, is the whole point of the thing after all.

reply to post by Astyanax

yes, that is pretty much the point of it... I cannot help but think of all other species' offspring that remain unborn because of us, too. We have lost the balance we once knew with the land...

the people that are suffering right now, in misery, in starvation, we can cure that. But all the surplus food that goes to creating more people must go to the people that are alive right now, not the ones that haven't been born yet. inevitably there will be people who would starve at first on a control of food, but again there are many now starving and we have done nothing practically.

we would have to start complying with Earth laws again...

Three steps to a Big Reduction, China,India and the Catholics.

Originally posted by 2believeor0
Perhaps we have a psychologist visiting this thread? If so, could someone with such a background please review slackerwire's posts. I see a hint of a genocidal maniac being outed here. A closet nazi perhaps. Another shooter out to remove the unwanted population.

Funny that you say that 2believeor0, because as I was reading a chapter of a book by P. McLaren, he quoted the psychologist Paul Smith's work from 1988...

In short...
* McLaren discusses paranoid perceptual mechanisms that perceive a citizen in relation to his or her value as a consumer.
* (from Paul Smith work...) Paranoia is a psychosis not a neurosis because a neurosis can be cured. A paranoiac exhibits similar symptoms to a neurotic person, but is fully aware of them and is resistant to listening to any outside opinion. They accept these problems as their natural state, and project everything negative about themselves to what they perceive as external to themsevles.

The external world is endowed with the subject's own worst qualities and characteristics. This process sustains the illusion or fiction of the subject's internal economy or the 'I.' Whereas the 'I' is perceived as good, everything outside the 'I' - perceived as external to this 'I' - is regarded as the repository of destruction, and it is where the subject expels its own impropriety and vomits up its termoils. This can be seen with predatory captialism in the reduction of the citizen to his or her labor power, and in the recent government attacks on immigrants, welfare recipients, and undocumented workers who are accused of stealing money from taxpayers.

One of the best quotes in this chapter is:
"One cannot reason with a paranoiac because, as Lacan notes, paranoia already exists as an interpretation." and "[p]aranoiacs reconcile their own defensiveness with what is considered to be an objective formation." "Paranoiacs seek to conceal their megalomaniacal obsession by revindicating their authority at each moment of conflict with the outside world."


God I love McLaren's wording!

if the religious maniacs of the Vatican, the American religious right and the US Government

reply to post by Astyanax
Hi Astyanax: You bring up religeon, good point. What about the billions of Muslim who do not care a hoot what Christians or the West thinks of their irresponsible birth rates and what we want them to do about it? How are we going to help them out? ... Really! I've live over there and I don't know other than somehow raise their standard of living as I previously mentioned.