Chimaera182 wrote:All forms of population control are valid and acceptable; mother nature taught us that. The fact that we've protected ourselves so well from several of them and that nature has thrown a few new ones in our face only shows that it's only natural. So yes, AIDS is an acceptable form of population control.
I cannot believe that any educated person would say something as ignorant as this.
These incurable diseases, not isolating the discussion to AIDs alone, aren't just "you don't wake up one day". Afflicted suffer for weeks, months. They languish, knowing they are dying but there is nothing that can be done. Their bodies decay right out from underneath them. That is not "acceptable".
Some time ago I discussed with some friends here that I was considering going on a year-long aid mission to an African nation with a relief team. When I was able to talk with the advisor he told me flat out that if I went I would more than likely make a friend that would die within the course of the stay. There would be intense psyche evaluations, repeated vaccinations for dozens of diseases, and very little - if any - medical treatment if I did fall ill. Then he recanted a story of how one volunteer, also from the United States, came home after his tour to find out he had contracted HIV. Such is the risk of being a good person.
The advisor asked me to consider if I had the mental endurance to sustain such emotional trauma. I'm not ashamed to say that I did not then, and still don't now. You would have to be inhuman to not be affected by some of the pictures he showed me.
Instead I volunteer with Special Education kids most days of the week. I was the first person a severely brain damaged girl, incapable of speech and complex thought, ever hugged on her own free will. So don't you feed me that crap about natural selection. Such is the thought process of a truly selfish person that doesn't want to deal with the terminally ill or handicapped because "Oh, there are just too many people in the world".
Hm. I would have thought you would have been happy about this. Since your concern seems to be narrowly focused with the population of humanity on a whole, isn't the decrease of one of the planet's most densely populated regions a good thing? Or does the fact that a country can't reproduce because there is an inadequate male/female ratio make it unfortunate, just so long as people are dying at a consistant rate from health problems in another continent?Chimaera182 wrote:As for pushing to lower birth rates, China has done it, and now scientists have been predicting some massive reprecussions which will hit them in a couple decades due to an inordinate disparity in gender. Swing and a miss.
A popular trend in history: when food is abundant, the population grows. It is hardly comparable to say that in North America, where even most financially strapped mothers have access to benefits like Social Security, food stamps, ect., birth control isn't utilized, so why should we offer it to poorer nations where a woman is on her own and know she'll probably have to watch the children she bears go hungry? Surely they won't use it, either.Chimaera182 wrote:As for birth control, people are educated in such things in the US and yet they still go and do without. How exactly will such a movement be more successful otherwhere?
If anything these families are more than likely to use birth control. That's not to say male dominated culture that demands sons and religion don't play a part in how many children a couple has, but I've taken enough population science classes to know that people won't stop having sex. Give them the option of using birth control to at least regulate when the woman wishes to get pregnant, and perhaps through this wait the couple can together learn if they are capable of having multiple children or not.
So the solution here would be not keep a herd? A herder without a herd is not a herder: he is a hunter/gatherer. Our population, United States - North America - the world - for the most part cannot rely on hunter/gatherer techniques to feed us adequately. It works in some areas, but for the most part not having livestock would cause many people to starve. I'm sorry if your field mice (also animals my family have poisoned for the sake of preserving our crop) have to relocate, but if a person must feed his family and must shoot either a man or an endangered deer for food, which is he going to kill? Yes, there need to be changes made to the way humans abuse the population of our fellow creatures, but the radical changes like the ones that have been suggested in this thread are not the way to go about it.Chimaera182 wrote:The herder/wolf analogy isn't exactly good here. Humans are preying on whlaes, creating a possibility of chaos in the ecosystem. When humans kill wolves to protect their herds, and wolf numbers die down, their prey becomes more abundant. Without predators to keep their numbers down, their former prey becomes a more dominant disruptive force in the ecosystem, outeating its competitors and causing them to either migrate (which may not be easy or even possible if they're too close to human settlements and fences) or die out.
He doesn't. What a person needs before vocalizing an opinion, particularly one as inflamatory as that, is to explain himself rather than sit and thumb his nose at people in distress.Chimaera182 wrote:Why is it that he needs to be a vegan conservationist energy do-gooder to complain or speak out?
Indeed.Chimaera182 wrote:Education does not always equal enlightenment.
A few discrepancies with your logic here. Many animals do this, but for example the orca is known for killing sea lions "just for the hell of it" and toss the corpse around for fun. They get bored, leave it, and it rots. Second, I assure you, not all human hunters are poachers or trophy seekers. Believe it or not some of us do have some ethic: we eat the meat that us consumable by humans, and whatever is left of the buck is taken to a plant where it is stripped, ground up and processed to be put into livestock feed. Don't classify us all as mindless, bloodthirsty morons, if you please.Chimaera182 wrote:An animal commits this so-called animal-on-animal violence as a means of survival; humans tend to do it not as a means of survival but for trophies, money, or even just the hell of it, and they waste parts of the animals when they do it. Big difference.
