EBROWN:
It might be noted that no one will be correct until it happens! Yes?
10 Billion does not make me feel "warm and fuzzy", sorry. Particularly if everyone is grabbing for a "piece of the good life".
Don't get hung up on the Biblical stuff. The "Armageddon", as I envision it, will take a long time, generations even. But, as I suggested, this "Jihad" business may just be the leading edge.
I stand on my hypothesis until proven wrong. I suspect I won't be dancing on this earth to find out what the end game is.
Halfback
we're already suffering from overpopulation, but we'll have to do more of that before the world gets a clue.
i'm not in favor of any fascist, mandatory, or violent means of population control, but i don't think that education is "the answer" either. it can't hurt at all, education is great.
if people cared enough about overpopulation, they might find a way to deal with it amicably. the problem is that before that happens, nature will probably beat us back with a stick, or we'll continue fighting bloodier wars, which as far as i'm concerned is a symptom of overpopulation, not a solution to it.
the longer we sit on the issue, the more violence and suffering we'll endure, period. education is a great first step, but even with the facts in front of them, most people prefer to be sheep and wait until the sky falls to fix anything. and so it goes.
tinygiraffe wrote:we're already suffering from overpopulation, but we'll have to do more of that before the world gets a clue.
i'm not in favor of any fascist, mandatory, or violent means of population control, but i don't think that education is "the answer" either. it can't hurt at all, education is great.
if people cared enough about overpopulation, they might find a way to deal with it amicably. the problem is that before that happens, nature will probably beat us back with a stick, or we'll continue fighting bloodier wars, which as far as i'm concerned is a symptom of overpopulation, not a solution to it.
the longer we sit on the issue, the more violence and suffering we'll endure, period. education is a great first step, but even with the facts in front of them, most people prefer to be sheep and wait until the sky falls to fix anything. and so it goes.
All this hysteria... with no solution. It is almost as if you think running around with your hands on your head-- screaming... is a good idea. You say you don't want "fascist, manditory, or violent means"-- but you also say "education won't work". So what the heck is your proposal?
I tried to point out that we already have been successful at dramatically reducing the fertility rate-- both locally and on a global scale. But maybe I should know by now that trying to use reason to counter a hysterical rant is futile.
ebrown_p wrote:There are two separate issues.... population and consumption.
The population problem has known solutions that are proven to work.
1. Education (especially of women). There is a very strong inverse correlation between education and family size.
2. Birth control. The more available, affordable, and socially acceptable birth control is in a society. The smaller family sizes there will be.
Currently the wealthy countries are have low fertility rates.
Women need to have 2.1 children to sustain the current population level anything less then this, and the population declines.
The current fertility rate for the world is 2.55. For the US it is about 2. For several countries including England, France, Germany and Italy, it is well below 2.
The countries with the highest fertility rates (having 6.5 - 7.5 children per woman) are poor and war-torn countries... including Afghanistan (7.07) and countries from sub-Saharan Africa.
The solution is not difficult to understand. Fight poverty, work for peace, spend money on providing education. The US should do a lot more in these areas.
The good news is that world wide fertility rates are going down as a trend. The current population growth rate is much much slower than was predicted even 10 or 15 years ago.
"The solution is not difficult to understand. Fight poverty, work for peace, spend money on providing education. The US should do a lot more in these areas."
Thanks for your reply.
Well, yes and no.
I am all for education...but knowledge without application is useless.
In short population consumes things and the more people the more consumption.
And what they are consuming will be gone shortly.
See my post on global warming for further discussion.
http://www.able2know.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=105174&sid=f5b5f37a4d9c025a4cf77bb21b06f490
We could live as we do now as 'energy whores' almost indefinitely if there were only a few hundred thousand of us...but not the current 7 billion. And that figure will rise to 10 billion people in the upcoming years.
Take care,
V (Male)
Agnostic Freethinker
Practical Philosopher
Quote:but even with the facts in front of them, most people prefer to be sheep and wait until the sky falls to fix anything. and so it goes.
Quote:All this hysteria...
you might be responding to my post, but you're obviously responding to someone else allegedly posting it.
i do think that global war is always a negative thing... rarely if ever warranted, but always negative.
i'm sorry if that sounds hysterical. i said that people will come up with a proposal that makes sense when they care enough, and i also said that education can't hurt, i think it's obvious that i support it, even if i think it's insufficient. educated people still have to actually care, do they not? but they don't, that would be... hysteria? no i like to think there's something between "running around screaming" and apathy, but i'm optimistic.
ebrown_p wrote:tinygiraffe wrote:we're already suffering from overpopulation, but we'll have to do more of that before the world gets a clue.
i'm not in favor of any fascist, mandatory, or violent means of population control, but i don't think that education is "the answer" either. it can't hurt at all, education is great.
if people cared enough about overpopulation, they might find a way to deal with it amicably. the problem is that before that happens, nature will probably beat us back with a stick, or we'll continue fighting bloodier wars, which as far as i'm concerned is a symptom of overpopulation, not a solution to it.
the longer we sit on the issue, the more violence and suffering we'll endure, period. education is a great first step, but even with the facts in front of them, most people prefer to be sheep and wait until the sky falls to fix anything. and so it goes.
All this hysteria... with no solution. It is almost as if you think running around with your hands on your head-- screaming... is a good idea. You say you don't want "fascist, manditory, or violent means"-- but you also say "education won't work". So what the heck is your proposal?
I tried to point out that we already have been successful at dramatically reducing the fertility rate-- both locally and on a global scale. But maybe I should know by now that trying to use reason to counter a hysterical rant is futile.
And now you know what Conservative have to deal with.
There is evidence that fertility rates have dropped in industrialized nations, without reference to policies or political mandates. If this were so, then an equitable distribution of wealth in the world (which can be accomplished by simply reining in capitalist greed, with no need for "redistribution") would lead to a reduced birth rate.
But i remain unconvinced that we are reaching a population crisis. We are reaching a consumption crisis, but the only "dangerous" aspect of the consumption crisis is global warming, which probably can be effectively dealt with, although you face legions of gun-toting conservatives driving SUVs who will want to fight about it. (Hopefully, that will piss someone off.)
When i was a boy, the population of the United States was less than 200,000,000, and there were just barely 2,000,000,000 people on the planet. Dire predictions were the order of the day. This was also true when the planet's population neared 4,000,000,000. The disasters never materialized, and the evidence is that we have the agricultural resources to feed even more people--if properly managed. People in Darfur starve because of the incompetence of the government of Sudan, and the murderous hostility of Muslims for Animists--not because there are not sufficient resources in the world to feed everyone.
Basically, having seen the rise and fall of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist "communism," the capitalists of the world have been crowing and making an unsupported claim that this were evidence that capitalism is the best economic system. Setting the foxes to guard the world's hen houses, in my never humble opinion.
What we are doing wrong are things political, things economic--and, above all, things tribal. The human race badly needs to grow up.
I'll agree with that Set.
Setanta wrote:We are reaching a consumption crisis, but the only "dangerous" aspect of the consumption crisis is global warming, which probably can be effectively dealt with, although you face legions of gun-toting conservatives driving SUVs who will want to fight about it. (Hopefully, that will piss someone off.)
How is that old Jeep of your's doing anyway?
a brief look at the CIA-FACTBOOK gives some interesting information .
while INDIA has a high population growth rate and birth rate , the rates for CHINA are actually LOWER THAN those for the UNITED STATES !
it seems that the chinese "one child policy" coupled with an increasingly better education has brought the rates down quite a bit .
perhaps the rates for india will also come down as better education becomes more widely available .
hbg
INDIA
Population growth rate:
1.606% (2007 est.)
Birth rate:
22.69 births/1,000 population (2007 est.)
Death rate:
6.58 deaths/1,000 population (2007 est.)
CHINA
Population growth rate:
0.606% (2007 est.)
Birth rate:
13.45 births/1,000 population (2007 est.)
Death rate:
7 deaths/1,000 population (2007 est.)
UNITED STATES
Population growth rate:
0.894% (2007 est.)
Birth rate:
14.16 births/1,000 population (2007 est.)
Death rate:
8.26 deaths/1,000 population (2007 est.)
hamburger wrote:it seems that the chinese "one child policy" coupled with an increasingly better education has brought the rates down quite a bit .
That's a presumption that is unsupported by the evidence.
China's birth rate was over 16.12 per 1000 in 2000 and plummetted to 12.96 per 1000 in 2003. It has risen slightly every year since then. If the one child policy and better education were the reason for the 2007 numbers then logically 2007 should be the result of steadily decreasing numbers and that isn't the case. (It is the case for South Korea however.)
Additionally, pretty much every other Asian country saw a nearly identical drop in birth rates in either 2003 or 2004 to what China saw and none of them have a similiar one-child policy.
Almigthy God said, "Go and multiply"....I'm still waiting for him to say "Stop!"
Are you more intelligent than God?
anakpawis wrote:Almigthy God said, "Go and multiply"....I'm still waiting for him to say "Stop!"
Are you more intelligent than God?
Funny thing... God also said "take care of the needy", "love your neighbor", "do good to those who harm you", "don't oppress the poor"...
I don't understand why "Go and Multiply" has to be the ONLY freakin' command of God that anyone takes seriously.
fishin wrote:Setanta wrote:We are reaching a consumption crisis, but the only "dangerous" aspect of the consumption crisis is global warming, which probably can be effectively dealt with, although you face legions of gun-toting conservatives driving SUVs who will want to fight about it. (Hopefully, that will piss someone off.)
How is that old Jeep of your's doing anyway?
You mean my jeep with the two and half liter, four-cylinder engine? Just fine, thank you very much--always gets great mileage.
ebrown_p wrote:anakpawis wrote:Almigthy God said, "Go and multiply"....I'm still waiting for him to say "Stop!"
Are you more intelligent than God?
Funny thing... God also said "take care of the needy", "love your neighbor", "do good to those who harm you", "don't oppress the poor"...
I don't understand why "Go and Multiply" has to be the ONLY freakin' command of God that anyone takes seriously.
E_brown has a good point, and given that we have not reached a saturation point in our ability to feed the population of the world, loving one's neighbor as one love's oneself is not in conflict with going forth and multiplying.
The idiocy of applying biblical injunctions as though they actually were the divinely inspired word of "god" cannot find a more acute expression than that tripe-laden post by Anakpawis.
Let me take this opportunity to thank E_brown for "crisis of consumption," the use of which expression made in far easier to have written what i posted earlier in far fewer words.
Quote:The idiocy of applying biblical injunctions as though they actually were the divinely inspired word of "god" cannot find a more acute expression than that tripe-laden post by Anakpawis.
"are you more intelligent than [my own superior interpretation of] god?" funny how god's authority when cited this way, depends on whether some guy on the internet is better than picking out god(s) from a lineup than we are. well spotted, anak.
No Setanta, it does not piss folks off. However it does serve notice that members of the "peace, love, warm and fuzzy" side of societal politics can be just as nasty as hardcore Conservatives.
I guess a little hypocracy never hurt anyone, right?
Halfback
You have marvelously demonstrated just how thoroughly you failed to understand what i wrote. Once again, with a 2.5 liter, 4-cylinder engine, my jeep not only does not evem come close to pumping out the pollution of an SUV, it doesn't even match your average passenger car with a 3+ liter, 6-cylinder engine.
As for whether or not the comment pissed anyone off, it cannot be denied that it got a rise--which was the point.
I'll defer to you on the subject of hypocrisy (there is a spell-check, you know), as i suspect you have much more practice at it than i.
Was referring to your 11Oct07 4:29pm post Nr. 2895009. Whence the reference to "Pissing one off" came from. Sorry you missed the connection.
The post itself seemed to indicate "in your never humble opinion" that there are no crisis level sortages in the world. While I hold my opinions, for the most part, until I get a feeling of concensus from experts in the field(s), I do point out that there have been a number of reports indicating that there DO exist a number of areas of concern as to population pressure, food shortages, fresh water shortages, global warming, energy consumption, etc.
I have been reading of and about these various problems and potential problems for a long time now. From many sources; The UN, Liberal and Conservative publications, Government Reports, the list is full and varied.
Since you seem to have a "one world" idealism of how things might be equally distributed amongst all, and since you fall into the trap of blaming "the rich" for all the world's problems, I might point out that the mere fact that you own a computer puts you in the top third of "rich", world wide. In fact, there are many places on this planet where this Nation's "Poor" would be construed to be very "rich" indeed.
Equal distribution for all? Be careful what you wish for, your average member of "Western Civilization" would be exceedingly displeased with their resultant "share".
Halfback
"Exceedingly displeased" doesn't even come close.
