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A bird's eye view of the vineyard

offsite link Alternative Copy of thesaker.is site is available Thu May 25, 2023 14:38 | Ice-Saker-V6bKu3nz
Alternative site: https://thesaker.si/saker-a... Site was created using the downloads provided Regards Herb

offsite link The Saker blog is now frozen Tue Feb 28, 2023 23:55 | The Saker
Dear friends As I have previously announced, we are now “freezing” the blog.  We are also making archives of the blog available for free download in various formats (see below). 

offsite link What do you make of the Russia and China Partnership? Tue Feb 28, 2023 16:26 | The Saker
by Mr. Allen for the Saker blog Over the last few years, we hear leaders from both Russia and China pronouncing that they have formed a relationship where there are

offsite link Moveable Feast Cafe 2023/02/27 ? Open Thread Mon Feb 27, 2023 19:00 | cafe-uploader
2023/02/27 19:00:02Welcome to the ‘Moveable Feast Cafe’. The ‘Moveable Feast’ is an open thread where readers can post wide ranging observations, articles, rants, off topic and have animate discussions of

offsite link The stage is set for Hybrid World War III Mon Feb 27, 2023 15:50 | The Saker
Pepe Escobar for the Saker blog A powerful feeling rhythms your skin and drums up your soul as you?re immersed in a long walk under persistent snow flurries, pinpointed by

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Public Inquiry
Interested in maladministration. Estd. 2005

offsite link RTEs Sarah McInerney ? Fianna Fail supporter? Anthony

offsite link Joe Duffy is dishonest and untrustworthy Anthony

offsite link Robert Watt complaint: Time for decision by SIPO Anthony

offsite link RTE in breach of its own editorial principles Anthony

offsite link Waiting for SIPO Anthony

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Human Rights in Ireland
Promoting Human Rights in Ireland

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Lockdown Skeptics

The Daily Sceptic

offsite link Hancock Admits Do Not Resuscitate Orders Were Wrongly Applied During Covid as He Calls on Lockdown D... Fri Nov 22, 2024 17:10 | Will Jones
Matt Hancock has admitted "do not resuscitate orders" were "wrongly applied" during Covid and should be "reviewed" ? but defended lockdown and said its supporters need to "unite" to defeat sceptics.
The post Hancock Admits Do Not Resuscitate Orders Were Wrongly Applied During Covid as He Calls on Lockdown Defenders to “Unite” Against Sceptics appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link Government Hands Foreign Farmers £500m ? the Same Amount the Inheritance Tax Raid is Projected to Ra... Fri Nov 22, 2024 15:14 | Will Jones
Labour is continuing to hand out more than £500 million to foreign farmers ? about the same amount projected to be raised by its inheritance tax raid on British farms that threatens to "destroy" them.
The post Government Hands Foreign Farmers £500m ? the Same Amount the Inheritance Tax Raid is Projected to Raise appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link UN Shock: Risks of Trans ?Women? in Female Sport Highlighted in New Report Fri Nov 22, 2024 13:00 | Ramesh Thakur
In a wholly unexpected but welcome development, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls has released a report highlighting the risks to women of trans 'women' in female sport, says Ramesh Thakur.
The post UN Shock: Risks of Trans ‘Women’ in Female Sport Highlighted in New Report appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link The Emperor?s New Ad Fri Nov 22, 2024 11:16 | Laura Dodsworth
Once upon a time, two crafty Brand Managers approached the Jaguar board claiming they could create an ad so daring only the most discerning would understand its brilliance. Laura Dodsworth with a modern day morality tale.
The post The Emperor’s New Ad appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link If Labour Really Wanted to Ensure People Can Afford to Heat Their Homes it Would Ramp Up the Gas Fri Nov 22, 2024 09:00 | Ben Pile
According to Labour, "all families deserve the security of a home they can afford to heat". If the party really believed that, says Ben Pile, it would drop its commitment to over-priced green energy and ramp up the gas.
The post If Labour Really Wanted to Ensure People Can Afford to Heat Their Homes it Would Ramp Up the Gas appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

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The Timid and Intimidated Nature of the Pro-Abortion Movement

category international | gender and sexuality | opinion/analysis author Monday November 04, 2013 00:14author by Nick Nile Report this post to the editors

Not only should abortion be legal but it also is well worth arguing that having children should be made illegal (as in a crime). Now here is a statement even most sleeping Americans would agree is a radical proposition (so radical in fact you almost never encounter it). And yet it is a very practical and sane proposition, even to its extreme, logical outcome, that is allowing our very own human species to become extinguished (as in extinct). After all the ecological system of this world doesn’t need the human species and would undoubtedly be better off without it. Why would a baby want, for example, to be born into a world of global warming? Or why would a baby want to be born into a world of diminishing resources, in respect to the perpetually growing world population?

The Timid and Intimidated Nature of the Pro-Abortion Movement

By Nick Nile

[Note 1: This essay is being mailed to institutions because electronic mail and internet postings can be, and often are, easily ignored or lost in the haystack, whereas recipients of physical mail at least look at the first page of a printed copy, and they must decide what to do with it or where to place it. Still some electronic version will appear on the Internet in case people decide to share it with others, as they are invited to do, as well as to post, email, rewrite, debate, etc.]

[Note 2: The following argument that you are about to read is not likely to be popular with most people. Still it is appropriate and necessarily to confront what needs to be addressed. And it is especially relevant to discuss such fears around this Halloween season, as this is the time we face what haunts the soul, and we can contemplate what some of the dead might say to us if they could come back to life.]

The Essay: The Timid and Intimidated Nature of the Pro-Abortion Movement by Nick Nile

One reason America’s political center has moved more and more to the right over time is because there was little in the way of radical voice worth very much (not receiving recognition). Whereas the liberal versus conservative continuum has been mostly a false paradigm because although the idea of conservative represents a state of constancy and tradition (supposedly), the term liberal really should represent a sane middle (of a continuum). The true opposite of constancy is uproarious radicalism—not liberalism. So in essence the intellectual spoils of our corrupted nation (as it has been so for a long time) via its media mouthpiece, has been to cut out half the continuum—inevitably leaving a shift to the right wing by this cowed nation.

Whereas, sometimes, such as on a rare blue moon, a radical bent can actually be the closest thing we have to sanity—assuming of course there is such a thing as sanity to presuppose (a very iffy proposition indeed when speaking of the Homo sapient lot). Yet unfortunately this is the discussion we humans find ourselves—discussing radical ideas (‘radical’ meaning getting to the ‘root’ (radix) of a problem) in context of an insane sort of creature called Homo delusio—that is our primate species that is very capable of being brainwashed by words, ideologies, sentiments, lies, and political and religious propaganda.

Not only should abortion be legal but it also is well worth arguing that having children should be made illegal (as in a crime).

Now here is a statement even sleeping Americans would agree is a radical proposition (so radical in fact you almost never encounter it). And yet it is a very practical and sane proposition, even to its extreme, logical outcome, that is allowing our very own human species to become extinguished (as in extinct). Wouldn’t that be grand? After all the ecological system of this world doesn’t need the human species and would undoubtedly be better off without it.

Albert Camus argued life is absurd because there is no inherit meaning to life (which is why myths like Judeo-Christianity attempt to supply such meaning in their own contorted ways, such as expostulating a creation God identifies so much with the human race that he allows for its’ salvation as singular species into immortality to share of his Kingdom—nothing grandiose here). But of course all the other species are mere stage props put here to supply and cater to our egocentric needs and so we don’t need worry or think about their immortals souls.

Whereas the intellectual idealist Friedrich Nietzsche not only declared God was dead but wrote that Christianity created a ‘slave’ morality that stultified creativity and nobility. This somewhat deluded or maniacal genius expected some of mankind to evolve into a new breed of “noble” being (and look what we got instead—a bunch of psychopaths running the show in the name of American and Israeli exceptionalism).

Nobility (knowingness) ain’t all what its cracked up to be. To hell with Nietzsche’s “aristocracy of suffering” he argued brings meaning, courage and nobility to man’s life. How did American nuclear bomb explosions in Japan, or aerial napalm brimstone spray in Vietnam bring nobility to mankind? How did propping up right-wing death squads in Central America bring meaning, courage and nobility to the Guatemalans and Salvadorans?

Why do so many people (‘the herd’ as Nietzsche would have called them) think giving birth to a newborn child is inevitably a good and positive outcome? A truly aware (noble) individual would think twice, no three times, to any notion another soul would actually want to be born into this nightmare of human insanity and inevitable tension (and all its plentitude opportunity for human suffering). One has to be exceedingly naïve or deluded to assume a child would actually like the idea of being born human—a far cry from Nietzsche’s presumption of great opportunity for personal growth and individuation—because such a child would need to stay an intellectual imbecile in order to remain content with humanity (or where humanity is currently heading).

Of course no one will tell that you’ve been condemned to a life of questionable worth and meaning, albeit with plenty need to toil for one’s un-mitigating desires. Rather its expected you’ll inculcate the accepted lies, such as how precious life is, and is always presumed to be—to never question its ordained status as sacred value. Conditioned are you then to think you “should” be grateful for having been born into this human mess (more properly referred to as the insanity of humanity).

In these dark age times of the early 21st century we still have numerous anti-abortion proponents, almost all who are so because of their religious beliefs, attacking the very reasonable liberty of a woman’s right to choose (save of course that sexist double standard where men have little say on the matter and yet have enormous consequences as well).

So it is very much the Christian religion itself that must be confronted (which most progressive types and middle-of-the-roaders are too afraid to do), similar to an exorcism of getting rid of an evil spirit that possesses both the mind and soul—in this case the brainwash of a tyrannical religion called Judeo-Christianity. It was not enough for Nietzsche to describe a slave mentality when he should have addressed the terrorist tactics that such a religion incorporates to enslave the soul and mind. (And fortunately this argument has already been made in: “When God Became the Terrorist: The Authoritarian Personality in the Three Abrahamic Religions” by Michael Manchester @ http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2013/07/424158.shtml ).

So we focus on the question of why would any sane person consider bringing a child into this world that is literally being destroyed by humanity itself? Why would a baby want, for example, to be born into a world of global warming (or one of exorbitant amounts of financial lucre being pumped into manipulating this debate as to it’s reality or falsity), or the many other serious indications of environmental degradation even if the global warming turns out to be a hoax?

Why would a baby want to be born into a world of diminishing resources, in relation to the perpetually growing world population (maybe not geometrically but still increasing) amongst competing global nation coalitions (and too often resorting to Cold War tactics) leading to even more wars, more covert lies as too often official news propaganda (and all the other crime stories the mainstream media reports as our daily angst of fear-mongering umbilical cord)?

Instead of honest assessments, we hear some Christians arguing that “they” are the humanitarians speaking for the unborn or aborted child. They assume the child actually wants to be born into this world—which is quite a presumption—given even their religion is fraught with coercive power and terrorist tactic.

Yet too few challenge the idea that an unborn child would want birth like they assume—why? Such an assumption needs to be challenged. Their conceit of speaking for the unborn’s best interests is based on naiveté at best. Anti-abortion proponents assume far too much about life (as they know even less but then so do most people).

Even some children are realizing the precarious circumstances to which they are wrought early on in their lives—born into this world of conflict and disaster—scare stories of terrorism, political blowback, school shootings, drone bombings, murder by way of war (and war too is murder irrespective of cultural brainwash to it being otherwise—that includes the vast carnage people of the United States have tolerated over the decades in the name of its IMPERIAL WAR MACHINE and grandiose imperatives such as some special Godly mission to spread democracy by way of Murder and Torture Inc.).

Of course young children are not immediately exposed to the criminal nature of humanity—such as that of our own civilization—being protected in the nest of their own parents ignorance, and that of most of society at large. Besides there is acculturation rhetoric of our great American Revolution and Constitution, Bill of Rights and Founding Fathers to hide current day realities conveniently sweep under the rug (or secrecy and lies). It takes real time and energy to seek out and realize the true nature of American foreign policy and its elaborate culture of deceit and profit motive corporatism. Such truths are not obvious even to most adults who willingly want to believe in the goodness and Godliness of this land.

And this is why it is difficult to reconcile living in any culture—because most people are unable to distance themselves—and because we have been consistently lied to in regarding our goodness, sacrifice and greatness. Only now are more than a few people beginning to realize the Emperor has no clothes. Only now are they beginning to realize the extent of the secrecy, corruption, and tyrannical outlays of a future POLICE STATE that has been amassing—despite the fact that any average person could have investigated, for example, the official 9/11 story versus the 9/11 Truth Movement to see the huge Swiss Cheese holes.

A Bolshevik Cheka murder state seems just around the corner (at least the entire potential is there) and yet people blithely and joyously stroller newborn babies into a history likely of repeating itself. Isn’t it true the Russian Cheka started out in very similar fashion to the Department of Homeland Security with similar goals purported (but hey no budget cuts here when things get tight in Congressional debate)?

Haven’t people of the Western civilization had enough opportunity to understand the inherent evil of human nature and especially political nature?

How many death squads, decapitations, rapes, bloody and sadistic murders have to happen (which most don’t take much time or effort to learn about) before the American people gets a clue that maybe children don’t really want onto this planet as human enterprise? Maybe they don’t want human existence? Perhaps they have better things to think about than all the nasty shit history has in store for them to learn about—that is what their parents never bothered to learn about (or were too busy consuming all the distortions their government and media served up)?

Furthermore they might not want some Judeo-Christian brainwash of what is in reality based on an intolerant God who claims “owns” your soul (and life), and so He, according to the dogma, claims to be able to punish or reward you based on his arbitrary choice (but political in essence because in the final analysis Middle Eastern religions were primarily extensions of human politics). Furthermore any claim to own another’s soul and life is in fact a form of slavery because that individual is reduced to being chattel in some repressive cosmic game in which a hell of torture (at least for the imagination) is real possibility.

Hence such religions show us the human race cannot even create Gods and religions that don’t reflect their own human capacity for evil and war. (As it has always been humans who created religions and their various deities they came to label as Gods and wrote about in tomes labeled Holy Scriptural as propaganda.)

Still Chris Hedges is correct in his assessment When Atheism Becomes Religion: America’s New Fundamentalists (2008). He argues plenty of secular ideologies have turned murderous and evil. More importantly he tells us point blank: “There is nothing in human nature or human history to support the idea that we are morally advancing as a species or that we will overcome the flaws of human nature” (page 5). Equally he argues: “Religion, real religion, involved fighting for justice, standing up for the voiceless and the weak, reaching out in acts of kindness and compassion to the stranger and the outcast, living a life of simplicity, cultivating empathy and defying the powerful (page 5-6)”.

Yet the basis of Judeo-Christianity, analyzed from the Old Testament itself (powerful dogma), is justification for war, occupation, and authoritarian forms of Divine retribution (playing the role of first forms of printed propaganda before States began to separate Church and State). This is why the Abrahamic religions have been so problematic—because they contain so many mixed messages.

Think how preponderantly the human race has been manipulated over the centuries to believe in “terrorist forms” of Abrahamic religion—that manipulated enormous amounts of fear so as to motivate people into religious conformity. (See: When God Became the Terrorist: The Authoritarian Personality in the Three Abrahamic Religions by Michael Manchester @ http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2013/07/424158.shtml).

No just God (or any human leader) would demand that his subjects love and honor him (nor would he need to). What kind of preening God needs to be admired all the time save some alpha male? No just God would threaten people with a hell of eternal torture (nor would a country’s intelligence forces create a world apparatus of torture and secret renditions while claiming Holier-Than-Thou reasons for the perpetual existence of a Gulag Gitmo). No just God would claim to create all the circumstances that affect a people, including their very DNA, and then take no responsibility for human outcomes or choices although they are his very creation? Only injustice, that is so typical of the human species, would brainwash populations to such conspiracy theories (as centuries of built-up Church and Synagogue propaganda collated together in bindings called Testaments).

Yet the ancient Hebrew people and their evolving religion of Judaism got at least one thing right—an understanding that man is inherently evil—but not necessarily deliberately and cognitively so—rather because human beings are rationalizing creatures and they can, and will, rationalize anything (especially when they are naïve regarding the true nature of real political realities happening behind the scenes as black operations hidden from the populous that is instead fed fairy tales—be they religious or political and often comprised as both).

Children (and adults too) deserve better than what the crazy and lunatic majorities have defended with their blind appeals to religio-political bents. They use the idea of God’s divine justice to disguise evil (discussed in John Spong’s The Sins of Scripture or what seems the ethnocentricity of Israel’s Zionism) or they use political religion of spreading democracy to disguise ulterior motives (merchant of death profiteering), or they use the idea of economic faith and fanaticism to disguise greed (laissez faire capitalism allowing for complete anarchy of no laws regulating businesses). In all cases these pots brew more and more psychopaths—because none have a true moral basis for reasonable ethics—rather blind and naïve faiths that are ultimately based of false moralities. For example, demanding the crucifixion of anyone is nothing but torture and murder—not justice—let alone human justice.

Freethinking Americans need to stand up to the many extremists who want to shove their religious, rightwing delusions down everyone’s throat.

Rather than politicians and religious congregations arguing whether abortion should be legal or not, we as a society, should be arguing about whether parenthood should be made illegal (or at least dubbed insane) because the human race is too shallow and corrupted to maturely propagate enough sanity for a worthy civilization.

And not too surprising, the field of psychiatry once again has failed to equate the Abrahamic religions with any form of psychoses, when they came out with their new version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illnesses (DSM-V)? How ironic that a supposedly intelligent profession can find so many classifications and classes of mental illness within the individual and yet so few societal and cultural diseases? It couldn’t possibly be the case that societies and civilizations are somewhat deranged? Well don’t ask a psychiatrist because he or she wouldn’t have a clue, that is, wouldn’t have any authoritative book upon which to rely (maybe that is a disorder—inability to think for self?). Nevertheless terrorism today often enough stems from Middle Eastern religious belief systems (or those cultures who espouse those belief systems). But then it was some psychologists and psychiatrists who have helped do research in torture methods and breaking down people in the first place—so what can we expect from the authority of medical profession?

At least people should have space and gumption to vigorously argue against pregnancy and an option for pro-choice (while espousing active use of contraception methods) praising the legalization of all phases of abortion (after all the fewer births the fewer souls going to hell is a marketing strategy worthy of any consideration). And of course euthanasia should be humanely justified for all seriously suffering people.

Plenty feminists, in their reverse sexist assumptions, have seldom realized, at least it so seems, societies that encouraged female infanticide actually did those dead babies a favor—by not condemning them to deal with the curse of life as labor and cannon fodder (because life too often is a curse—or at least in some cases can be arguably so). The dead and unborn do not suffer and they don’t fear the thousand natural (and unnatural) shocks flesh (or mind or soul) is heir to. They are not cognizant of new technological ways of killing people, and they won’t be the first witness a hydrogen bomb or new strains of biological warfare. They worry about nothing precisely because they don’t exist. This is the real Nirvana the Buddhists attempt to explain as escape from ego-containment.

The world needs a new religion that tolerates abortion (and even suicide at least for the seriously ill). Its time to recognize the alienation of those who have become aware of the dangerous cancer that mankind itself has become to the rest of living nature (and to itself). Civilization now is not unlike a disease that will ultimately wipe out the entire spectrum of life. We need new paradigms for such challenges.

So-called Progressives, and so-called Leftists, and other goodie-two-shoe liberals, that continue to argue for welfare, social justice, jobs, etc., need to look beyond presumptions that mankind can fix any human predicament (as if one merely need be more tolerant and flexible). The human race must stop breeding more and more demand meaning the left has to come up with some effective countermeasures to deal with religious propaganda and its authoritarianism.

Forget all the subtleties and sublimities at cheese and wine parties or ship cruises that ultimately push for Democrat votes. Its time liberals get off their candy-coated, a-little-too-socialist-urbaneness and bullshit elitism, and get down to unmitigated plain earth truth (that allows in a few goyim white men even if so-called progressives continue to equate the rainbow coalition as eternal victim and of self-righteous cause—but consistently turn up democratic Administrations that support Wall Street, Defense Contractors and Right-Wing Zionism.

Stop offering children to a world of interminable war, corruption, poverty, disease, unemployment, lousy jobs, dysfunctional families, disillusionment, prejudice, deceit, hatred, starvation, water starvation, pollution, government excesses of power and potential oppression, spying, prisons, tortures, human ignorance, excess taxations, mass media exploiting fears and building on more distrust of neighbors and especially the male gender, or manipulated elections, escapist frivolity as distraction (all the while allowing for political crimes, torture and mass killings overseas decade after decade). What joy is that all about? Who would want to sign up for such an assignment let alone be President?

Or what child wants to contemplate plastic in the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch (or other hydrocarbon realities)? Sure there are colorful images found by Google of such patches but it is really worth living for? Advertising campaigns push for materialist lifestyles that breed the anomie and alienation residing inside our insatiable gas-guzzling speed along highways of reckless driver antics and traffic jams.

Isn’t the first step to problem solving to identify the very nature of the problem—in this case naïve American adults who can’t even think like children? If one really cared about children and human rights then why would one bring children into this mess in the first place?

Meanwhile you are expected to support yourself but jobs get harder and harder to find? Such a fate is thrust onto the self like shackles. And that is exactly what life often seems—because most people have to work for a living—assuming they are lucky enough to find a job (which is not guaranteed and often enough even if found is not especially decent or enjoyable).

Meanwhile this dystopia has employees of private firms, and other countries, reading our private mail. The Edward Snowden story is about massive secrecy and shocking revelations of a civilization that has backed right-wing dictators and murdering thugs for years. If push comes to shove they will murder the working class here in the United States too.

To bring a child into this dysfunctional insanity seems a form of child abuse. It should be criminal to care so little about the conditions one chooses to raise children.

Even before the two nuclear bombs went off in Japan, that is after eighty to one hundred Japanese cities were seriously destroyed by “massive” aerial bombing incinerations, not to mention everything else catastrophic and inhumane about WW1and WW2, it should have been clear enough to convince people then that humanity was not just insane but it was inevitably composed of evil. After that point in human history the population of our species should have decreased dramatically—that is had our species any real sense about human nature. It should have curtailed child rearing.

Let the unborn stay unborn. They won’t miss a damn thing, and they will never cry about it. In fact maybe they don’t want to know your humanity (or about human ignorance) or what humanity is all about. Furthermore maybe they don’t want to know about the circumstances human dogmas and technologies have justified.

Amen. The human race can focus on making people who are already born be more content. How much murder, torture, concentration camp and blind ambition and war is enough?

The End

[If you feel this is an important essay feel free to post, email, rewrite, debate, etc. Help get the word out. Send copies to legislators, etc.]
---

author by Indignantpublication date Sun Nov 10, 2013 01:53author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Fred's last paragraph suggestion that, in Western Europe and North America, government Family and Social Protection ministeries might issue newly married couples with pregnancy vouchers is most thought provoking. A satirical novelist might have literary material here. Raffles and auctions of pregnancy vouchers could be organised by entrepreneurs. The criminals could try their forgery skills. Like sub-prime mortgage bonds, baby-producing certificates might be gathered up into bonds and sold between financial institutions. Let literary imagination spread...

It's gotten late. Good evening and have a good social dream.

author by fredpublication date Sun Nov 10, 2013 01:23author address author phone Report this post to the editors

China had no choice but to grasp the nettle of overpopulation.

Western children are far more resource intensive. 25 times as resource intensive per capita in the case of Americans.

I wholeheartedly agree that we should start with westerners in the imposition of population restrictions. Also we need to stop stealing the resources of third world countries, such as fish off the coast of Africa etc as these destabilising activities are forcing these previously low impact populations to destroy their ecosystem in a desperate attempt to find alternative means of survival.

Thinking humans should be allowed to reproduce without restriction and that this is not a problem is delusional short term thinking. Get real.

The alternative to controlled reduction, i.e. devastating uncontrolled reduction driven by resource scarcity, disease, war etc is far more horrific scenario. Do you prefer that scenario? Well I guess it's true that that approach does not require any hard decisions to be made by PC lefties. It just happens anyway if we ignore the problem.

We westerners could implement a licensing, random lottery and a quota system for having children. Everyone gets an equal chance at reproduction that way. If you show you are capable of parenting, you get a licence. Why not? After all, you need a licence to drive a fecking car. Bad parenting destroys lives and has huge and expensive social fallout for many years in our societies. So why is there no preventative regulation of parenting?

author by Indignantpublication date Sun Nov 10, 2013 00:39author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Fred above says that if government incentives to reduce births fail "we should be prepared to escalate" measures in order to reduce the national birthrates to sustainable levels. The royal We is used here. I believe strong governments, not millions of married couples in society, is implied here. The reason is that married couples would never in the grand aggregate voluntarily regulate their family sizes drastically. The experience of (communist) China is an object demonstration. China's population has 'stabilised' but at human rights and demographic costs - pregnant women frogmarched to clinics for abortions; baby girls left to be found on footpaths; widespread bribes paid so illegal second babies can be registered; imbalance between baby boys and girls etc.

Demography has been skewed in Western Europe and North America as a result of rising abortion levels, birthrates reduced to less than the sustainable 2.1 figure per couple; declining male testerone levels; and the development of the pleasure principle that marriage is not permanent but serial and is for the private recreation and consumption fantasies of couples. All the necessary and lowly-paid non-white immigrant domestic, industrial, farmwork and services labourers that make up the labour market shortfall have sometimes been described as "the children we [caucasians] decided not to have". Which brings me to another point:- the strong governments that might 'escalate' population reduction measures in a hypothetical scenario would actually be directing these demographic measures at peoples outside Western Europe and North America. And might is right.

author by fredpublication date Sat Nov 09, 2013 20:40author address author phone Report this post to the editors

interesting related discussion here:
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/7/13/21018/2121

Jay hanson's dieoff blog:
http://dieoff.org/

author by fredpublication date Sat Nov 09, 2013 10:33author address author phone Report this post to the editors

If we grasp the nettle and start addressing this problem sensibly and soon then perhaps nation states should not need to intervene directly in a heavy handed manner, but rather provide incentives / disincentives so that having lots of extra children becomes unviable. however if such methods fail, we should be prepared to escalate in the longer term interests of our species.

Once a sustainable level is reached, matching births to deaths and adjusting policies appropriately would mean the human population remains in balance with available resources and the environment, resulting in a better quality of life for all, and the possibility of it remaining so for a long time to come.

author by indignantpublication date Sat Nov 09, 2013 05:34author address author phone Report this post to the editors

The apocalyptic and strident style of the piece and some of the writer's assumptions need cautious response by readers, many of whom may not wish to make a written response.

His mention of The Absurd concept of Albert Camus (a thoughtful writer) suggests that Camus believed life was absurd and pointless. Not so. Camus believed the absurdity caused by Nazis and others in the 1930s & 40s required thinking people to revalue their lives, avoid ideological excesses that demeaned humanity, and live in truth and justice. Camus was a secular moralist who encouraged his contemporaries to think and act morally. Some theologians found much to ponder in his existentialist writings. He thanked them for their kind attention but maintained that he was an 'incroyant'.

The point that the Abrahamic God (Judaeo-Christian god) "owned" a human's soul and ruled its thoughts and actions goes against the same God's endowing His creatures with free will. Jewish and Christian thinkers, artists, humanitarians and innovators throughout the history of western culture give the lie to a concept of 'ownership & control' suggested in the above article. Creative innovators have co-existed with murderous despots throughout western history. Often the thinking innovators have contended with the despots and warmongers.

The writer's idea that democratic states should make childbearing illegal in order to save the planet and its species is one which I suggest readers chew carefully. Should a state, however advanced and democratic in form, have the legal power to control women's fertility?

author by Crazy Catpublication date Thu Nov 07, 2013 16:34author address author phone Report this post to the editors

T,hen, if you are old enough and aware, why are there not more suicide and mass suicides, after all ,it is so intolerable.
And do we voluntary disappear? Ohf, the will for survival is way too strong.
Do we put our confidence in ' our children will make it better'?
With the hugh leap forward in industry and technology in the past few centuries we'er already over the edge, I reckon.
The communal idea of children. It was Monbiot ( yet again!) in his travel to Papua New Guinea wrote, that in certain tribes, the women waited at least 5 years between children.
And is there not something of a community of over 300 people getting out of harmony?

author by Crazy Catpublication date Thu Nov 07, 2013 10:26author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Hi Fred,

Here are two articles from Monbiot with calculations on population and food.

http://www.monbiot.com/2008/04/15/the-pleasures-of-the-...lesh/

http://www.monbiot.com/2010/09/07/strong-meat/

author by fredpublication date Thu Nov 07, 2013 05:59author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Well I agree that we don't want either Orwell's vision or Huxley's (although it's quite arguable that we already have an amalgam of both!!)

But neither do we want a giant size repeat of what happened on Easter Island.

This is likely what's coming down the tracks if humanity continues to behave like an insatiable resource consuming virus, rather than being somewhat more rational about it's environmental predicament.

I think the writer is correct in his assertion that we need to start facing reality on this topic and the likely endgame of unchecked expansion of the human population, given our limited remaining fossil fuel resources which are what props up food production at current inflated levels. That, and whether it is the quality of life or the quantity that matters.

The only credible study done on the subject that I know of estimates that, in the absence of fossil fuels, the planet can support just 2 billion people using traditional farming methods, and can only do that assuming everyone is a vegan and we compost absolutely everything including the bodies of the dead. Sobering stuff.

There are currently 7 billion+ people on the planet.
http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
And our rapacious capitalist system is busily ploughing through our finite resources like there was no tomorrow.

Fact: In 1970, there were roughly half as many people in the world as there are now.

Do the math. Or if you prefer, just stick your head back in the sand. Pity we can't eat it as well as sticking our heads in it. The sand I mean. Eh Mr "indignant"?

We should at least be having a rational discussion about this. It's delusional to think that the current situation can continue indefinitely.

author by Indignantpublication date Tue Nov 05, 2013 23:05author address author phone Report this post to the editors

I think Nick Nile, if that is a real name, is sounding like an extreme eugenecist who wants state power to control motherhood, apple pie and the procreation of children. It would amount to a dystopian totalitarian state. Huxley painted a picture of the test tube baby producing state. Orwell painted a bleak picture of a CCTV surveillance state controlled by Big Brother. I don't want Nick Nile's vision to come anywhere near reality.

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