Overpopulation Will Be The Death of Us ALL!!!

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Originally Posted by The Man

What should really be done with money sent to the Third World is to buy land for the people who are starving, then teach them agriculture so they'll be able to sustain themselves.

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Yeah, I'm sure those hundreds of millions of people will be able to sustain themselves on that fraction of an acre of land. We've moved beyond the agrarian model. With the amount of people on earth it's not possible for everyone to be a farmer.

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Part of the reason you still need to catch up is because of deliberate actions by the west, so I'd say it's not all earned (especially considering the atrocities committed to the natives here in the first place).

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I agree, globalization isn't the greatest thing, but it's debatable if things would be that much better if that exploitation didn't exist. If foreign government isn't willing to protect its citizens from unfair wages and work environments, who's to say they would do anything to benefit the country if U.S. economic influence didn't exist?

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When capitalists talk about freedom, they're nearly always talking about the freedom for themselves to hoard as many possessions to themselves as possible. Such a parochial and egocentric view of the world.

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So the state should have the right to tell you when you've made enough money and when you've acquired enough possessions?

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Yeah, I'm sure those hundreds of millions of people will be able to sustain themselves on that fraction of an acre of land. We've moved beyond the agrarian model. With the amount of people on earth it's not possible for everyone to be a farmer.

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Of course not, but the people who are farmers will be able to produce enough food for the people who aren't. In the model we have now, what usually ends up happening is simply that no one produces food at all. Land that was previously used to produce food for natives is converted to produce, say, flowers for the American market. What's more, where there were hundreds of people working on that land originally, it's all machinized, so nearly all those people end up out of a job.

Simply converting the land back to its original use would solve quite a lot of the problem.

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I agree, globalization isn't the greatest thing, but it's debatable if things would be that much better if that exploitation didn't exist. If foreign government isn't willing to protect its citizens from unfair wages and work environments, who's to say they would do anything to benefit the country if U.S. economic influence didn't exist?

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My point is that on occasion, they have actually done things to hurt the vast majority of their citizens thanks to the influence of multinational corporations. For instance, raising property taxes to an insane level in order to force natives off their land; there are documented cases of this happening in southeastern Mexico.

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So the state should have the right to tell you when you've made enough money and when you've acquired enough possessions?

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Pretty much. That money and those possessions always come at the expense of someone else. Look at it this way: America is a nation of people who consume and don't produce (by and large), so the Third World is an antimatter universe of people who produce and don't consume.

The capitalist model is founded on the assumption, based on Adam Smith's conception of the "Invisible Hand," that everyone, in maximizing their own self-interest, is maximizing the self-interest of the public as a whole as well. Unfortunately, this assumption is demonstrably untrue. Let us take the example of the tragedy of the commons. For those who are unfamiliar with it, there is a commonly owned land where everyone is allowed to graze cattle. In this scenario, it is in every farmer's self-interest to have as many cattle as they can, so they can raise as much milk as possible and make as much money as possible. Unfortunately, after a certain number of cattle graze on the land, they eat the grass down to its roots, and after a point, milk production actually goes down. It's still in everyone's self-interest to graze as many cattle as possible, though, so no cattle get removed, some probably get added, and the commons end up completely unusable for any grazing purposes whatsoever.

This can be extended to so many scenarios - overfishing of the ocean, the case of driving cars versus using public transportation, and I could go on. The only solution to these problems is when a coercive outside entity, necessarily the government, steps in and says, "Enough is enough." Naturally, there are plenty of cases where the government itself can be corrupt, and that is why I favour as much transparency as possible in government and as much civic awareness as possible in the population (which naturally requires a solid education, and thus implying a number of other things as well, but that's irrelevant really).

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Originally Posted by Chemical

No one ever said that experimenting on animals was right. (MOOT!)

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The majority of people think it's right. You've yet to comment on whether you think it's right or not. If you don't think humans should be used, an you don't think animals should be used, since there is currently nothing else to experiment on to get the results we need, that would mean that we wouldn't be experimenting on anything. Few people agree that's a good idea, so it's most likely you agree with animals being tested on. If you thought otherwise, you'd have said so.

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Experimenting on people is wrong, them being a rapist doesn't make it any more right.

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Yes it does. If you had to choose whether a decent person or a rapist was experimented on, surely you'd choose the rapist. Their a despicable human being an deserve to suffer. Sending them to prison isn't a good enough punishment, an it's a waste of money an resources keeping them there.

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And yes, yes it is. Twisted like a twisted thing.

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No, it's not twisted. It's perfectly logical. Criminals serve no purpose in prison an aren't being appropriately punished. Their a waste of space. Experimenting on them would help other people, an animals, whilst giving them the punishment they deserve.

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We're supposed to be civilized human beings, the solutions we offer should be ethical and moral.

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Humans aren't civilized, they never have been. They like to think they are. The solution I've provided is ethical, an moral.

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It's easy to be angry at the world for being so frigged up. It's even easier to be angry at all the 'bad' people in the world who do terrible and bad things... but we shouldn't let our anger justify our own immoral actions.

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My actions aren't immoral. The reason why so many people do bad things is because their not adequately punished for it. If criminals knew they'd end up in a lab getting experimented on for life, they would be a whole lot less likely to commit the crime in the first place.

Maybe we could move to Uranus *snigger snigger*

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Originally Posted by The Man

]Of course not, but the people who are farmers will be able to produce enough food for the people who aren't.

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More people farming does not equate higher supply. Why do you think we've moved onto a mechanized form or agriculture in the last one-hundred and fifty years? There just isn't enough man-power alone to feed the entire world. Machines have made that possible.

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What's more, where there were hundreds of people working on that land originally, it's all machinized, so nearly all those people end up out of a job.

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There's also a large machine industry that employs people too. Those people and their skills will be put out of a job as well. What's more, we need those machines to keep production at a high rate. Manual labor alone cannot keep up production at the same pace as mechanized labor.

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My point is that on occasion, they have actually done things to hurt the vast majority of their citizens thanks to the influence of multinational corporations. For instance, raising property taxes to an insane level in order to force natives off their land; there are documented cases of this happening in southeastern Mexico.

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This has really been a domestic problem in Mexico. The domination of the PRI up until 2000 signaled close relations with the U.S. as a means to industrialize the country. Fox and the PAN have done very little to curb this.

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Pretty much. That money and those possessions always come at the expense of someone else. Look at it this way: America is a nation of people who consume and don't produce (by and large), so the Third World is an antimatter universe of people who produce and don't consume.

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I still don't agree with it. The state should have no right on the amount of money I can make within legislative conditions and how many things I can own.

In the two cases you described above the government steps in and compensates the farmer in exchange for the destruction of their product. This seems fair.

The topic is overpopulation

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Originally Posted by Anaisa

The majority of people think it's right. You've yet to comment on whether you think it's right or not. If you don't think humans should be used, an you don't think animals should be used, since there is currently nothing else to experiment on to get the results we need, that would mean that we wouldn't be experimenting on anything. Few people agree that's a good idea, so it's most likely you agree with animals being tested on. If you thought otherwise, you'd have said so.

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Unrelated.

And don't ever make assumptions about someone's oppinion it's quite rude and antithematic to the process of an intellectual discourse.

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Yes it does. If you had to choose whether a decent person or a rapist was experimented on, surely you'd choose the rapist. Their a despicable human being an deserve to suffer. Sending them to prison isn't a good enough punishment, an it's a waste of money an resources keeping them there.

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Unrelated.

If I had to choose? No no no.. see I wouldn't have to choose because experimenting on people, any people, is wrong.

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No, it's not twisted. It's perfectly logical. Criminals serve no purpose in prison an aren't being appropriately punished. Their a waste of space. Experimenting on them would help other people, an animals, whilst giving them the punishment they deserve.

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Unrelated.

People are a waste of space in general; which is the topic of this thread.

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Humans aren't civilized, they never have been. They like to think they are. The solution I've provided is ethical, an moral.

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http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu/index2.html

Morals are a set social standard of right and wrong conduct - I'm afraid experimenting on people doesn't make the bar.

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My actions aren't immoral. The reason why so many people do bad things is because their not adequately punished for it. If criminals knew they'd end up in a lab getting experimented on for life, they would be a whole lot less likely to commit the crime in the first place.

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Even more unrelated.

You're suggesting we put all our resources, time and effort in correcting a whole different problem. This doesn't assist with the overpopulation crisis.

I'll reiterate that overpopulation is a problem and the state has no ethical or moral manner in dealing with this issue on a mass level; right now. I feel the best that the government can do right now is educate, people need to know that making the choice of having children is contributing to a problem.

We each need to have the moral obligation of taking responsibility for our own actions. People who want to be parents should be considering the alternative of adoption. There's way to much in the world that needs to be taken care of and every day more and more mothers and fathers are dieing and more and more women are having children they don't plan on keeping, consequently leaving the children in a state of limbo.

I'm also advocating Yeuthanasia - the act of mercy killing, although not moral by our social standards, is practiced in some European countires. I believe Holland. I feel that allowing this system to function in certain and specific cases could relieve some pressure on the medical system and our own society.

I'm not against placing a limitation on the amount of children a person has; though I don't think this system would work in our culture as there are too many differing variables that would not allow for a communal justification... but I think that having children in our culture is rediculously unnecessary especially in the case of urban and suburban dwellers. The point of children was once to have farm aid, now there's no other reason except "I want." So I'd say maybe a max of 2... but again it would be too difficult to create a moral backing to justify this course... But 2 would be a good number because that would mean that 2 people are either sustaining the population or they're reducing it.

Education. Education. Education. People should be aware of the different types of birth controls, they should be aware of the different types of sterility treatments. These things should be pushed on a mass level. Let there be public service commercials and educational programs. Unfortunately the state isn't too concerned with the population level - Capitalists pigs. They won't worry either until resources have run out and every square inch of lang is consumed by suburban sprawl. Enough needs to be enough.

Stupid people should be banned from breeding. Along with pikies and the like.

I don't shower, or eat, or sleep, and I have no lights. Therefore I am the perfect human. :bigsmile:

But overpopulation. I suggest we screw morals and ethics, and just live like animals. In fact, that's probably what's going to happen eventually anyway. Let's start now!

That, or stop pissing around with our pointless wars, unite as a planet and figure out a way to sort ourselves out. 1 of those 2 options is possible. It's not the latter.