Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

Will the Knack's of this world who roam in their mechanised tri-pods destroying everything with their heat rays eventually fall to simple bacteria?

“There are so many things wrong with this Malthusian proposal that it’s hard to know where to start. First of all, it’s not the number of people … it’s the first world’s consumption.”

What utter rubbish Malcolm King. You’ve got it totally wrong at the most fundamental level. It is very much BOTH numbers AND consumption.

“Indeed, the type of family planning that Ms Kanck suggests will rip birth control out of the hands of women and place it in the hands of the state..”

It seems that you don’t have a clue as to what Ms Kanck is suggesting. The policy revolves around incentives to have fewer kids. In other words, financial encouragement that is the opposite of the baby bonus and all sorts of other tax breaks that we have at the moment that support an artificially high birthrate in Australia. There’s nothing draconian about it.

And as for taking our population back to the order of seven million, the idea is put us onto a very slow track of negative population growth, with the birthrate and immigration rate being just a little bit less than the death rate and emigration rate, until we eventually reach a population level that sits well within the ability of the resource base and environment to support it in an ongoing manner.

Ms Kanck’s comments sound a bit radical at first impressions, but then a group like Sustainable Population Australia has to put out a message that it is a bit sharp or else just won’t get noticed by the media, public or politicians.

Malcolm, do yourself a favour and stop trying to find fault with the argument. Instead, why don’t you do what you inner self surely tells you to do, which is to side with SPA and fight against the future-destroying continuous growth paradigm, where endlessly rapidly increasing population and consumption is not only not tackled, but is strongly facilitated by our grossly irresponsible politicians.

Tragically the author of this article has fallen victim to the beat-up on Sandra Kanck propogated by News Corp's Advertiser newspaper in Adelaide. The Advertiser has been out to get Sandra for a long time and she cannot even open her mouth to discuss China's one child policy (which she would be expected to do seeing as she is now the president of Sustainable Population Australia) without being jumped on and mis-represented. Comments sent my me (and probably others) to the Advertiser's online site complaining about the mis-representation have been blocked.

The newspaper media (dependent upon real estate advertising revenues), the property developers and the Labor/Liberal parties (who get enormous donations from the developers) form an unholy triangle of self-interest that pushes very hard to increase population despite the fact that it is the core factor that undermines all other efforts to protect the environment. Australia's very high rates of consumption make its stunning rate of population growth (higher than Asia!) very damaging and unsustainable. Our leaders - including Sandra Kanck - must be allowed to speak out on this core issue.

<”Ms Kanck seems to have a knack of adopting “whacko” causes. A few years ago she advocated the regulation and decriminalisation of Ecstasy in South Australia. But her source credibility is not the issue here yet.”>

I see an ideological agenda here, coming from a politically correct source related to continuing along the same path as we are now. More and more people, unfettered consumption and bugger the consequences. Lunacy in the extreme.

<”It’s curious that the most striking manifestation of the loathing they have for every human can be seen in the idea that we need a significant reduction in the number of human beings from people who purport to love nature.”>

Nature consists of every life form on the plane, even those consumed with gluttonous greed by those feeding of the public purse. Why should humans be above other life, when they can't fit into any form of harmonious and responsible approach to nature.

Articles like this make me laugh, as they can only be brought to the light of day by those directly aiding and abetting, those responsible for the current world dilemma of starvation, war and collapsing ecology.

I find it fascinating that Malcolm Kirk joins the ranks of those who promote the false dichotomy of consumption vs population as a way of trying to discredit the global Green movement - of which they are clearly terrified.

Ludwig's quite correct that we must address both sources of resource and habitat depletion, and ultimately of anthropogenic global warming. It is not misanthropic to advocate a gradual reduction in the Earth's human population for the sake of its own ultimate survival.

While Kirk is correct that profligate first world consumption is probably the major driver of climate change, the planet simply cannot sustain population increases of the order that are now occurring, particularly if the developing world aspires to similar levels of material affluence that are evident in developed countries.

Anti populationists 0, reasoned opinion 4.

I wonder why the Unsustainable People lobby, full of bio-fascists and IT systems theorists selected Kanck? Did she select them? Were they drawn to each other?

King could have gone in harder here. It's too rhetorical but I get the drift. The anti-pops think this is a backlash, whereas its pretty much the standard line.

I wonder what the Greens think of this? Would they make this an election policy? Remember the Democrats and the GST. This is the Greens GST.

I checked out Kanck's press release. King got it right.

These people are 'life boat' theorists. Chuck out the Asians, blacks, aged and infirm. One would have thought democracy might have progressed a bit more than this. Maybe not.

Apparently "green" politics is a monolithic, worldwide movement, led by two individuals.

Why did the author choose to set up a straw man conspiracy theory rather than address the real population control argument? Why is the Right [and we all know this is an ideological gambit] so unwilling to engage rationally on this topic? If articles like this represent the standard we can expect, we are justified in believing that pro-populationists have so little faith in their own argument that they won't debate with reason rather than emotional baiting.

We also have to ask why the very idea of responsible breeding is so shocking to some. Personally, I think it's the last gasp of fundamentalism. Religion has been so abandoned, and its dogmas proven to be so harmful, that fundamentalists are now resorting to the defence of overbreeding as a religious pro-life principle.

Here is Kanck's press release - judge for yourself:

http://www.population.org.au/index.php/media/media-releases/media-releases-2009/333-end-population-growth-to-achieve-climate-targets

21 April 2009

If greenhouse gas emissions are to be cut to levels that the Federal Government has promised under the Kyoto Protocol, that is 60 per cent by 2050, then population numbers must be stabilised and then allowed to fall, according to Sustainable Population Australia Inc (SPA).

Speaking on the eve of Earth Day, SPA National President Ms Sandra Kanck says that population growth is responsible for 85 per cent of the growth in greenhouse gas emissions in Australia.

"Population now grows in Australia at 1.8 per cent per annum, and emissions at 2.0 per cent," Ms Kanck says. "Clearly population stabilisation and then reduction has to be part of a suite of measures that will ensure the cuts in emissions that the Government has promised.

"Population growth is a major driver of climate change. Forests are cut for farmland to feed an ever-increasing population; there are more cars on the road, more coal-fired electricity generated. It entails more houses and other consumer products. It uses more cement, energy and water which all results in more greenhouse gas emissions."

Ms Kanck says that it is critical that the world keeps CO2(e)emissions below 450 ppm or below 2oC warming.

"Once we go above that we will experience positive feedbacks such as release of methane from the tundra and loss of albedo as ice melts in the Arctic. Yet if we continue with business-as-usual, and that includes continued population growth, we will head for the higher end of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's projections of six degrees or more.

"That will ensure the end of civilisation as we know it," she warns.

BRAVO! At last someone gets it down!

The Malthusians are crawling out of the woodwork right now, doubtless cheering on swine flu and any other virus Prince Philip would like to become in another life (in a fittingly Hindu-Karmic reduction of his evolutionary status).

[Cm'on dagget - waiting, waiting, for the umpteenth dictum on "finite resources...thermodynamics...people-as-cattle", etc.]

The population issue is a most interesting one, as it is simply not mentioned most of the time.

This could be because nature has a simple, tried and tested method of solving the problem, and all it involves is four horsemen.

It is an elementary exercise in arithmetic that the only way the world could support a population of 9 billion would be with a substantial cut in first world living standards. Anyone in Australia advocating such measures is not in touch with political reality.

The population of the developed world is essentially stabilised, with almost all of the expected increase of 4-5 billion over the next 30 years likely to come from the third world.

Australia is in the fortunate position that our natural birth rate is below the replacement level, and that any increase in population level is due solely to immigration.

Apart from stopping immigration, which is by far the most simple, humane and effective way of controlling our own population, the main way we can influence the world population would be to target our foreign aid to educating young girls in underdeveloped countries, as the number of children a women bears is closely inversely related to her level of education. We could also join with other countries to pressure third world countries to implement population control measures with the threat of denying them any aid at all if they refused.

As the current economic depression gets worse the government may well emulate the action taken in 1932 when owing to the high level of unemployment immigration was banned for the duration, with all new immigrants being required to sit for the dictation test. If the current depression persists for years, this may solve our problem in a politically acceptable way.

(By the way, it is interesting to note that over the 57 year period that dictation tests were in force, only ONE gentleman, either Chinese or Indian, passed the test in 1909.)

Here's The Kankos story from Australian Associated Press. If you shot yourself in the foot last week, there's no need to shoot yourself in the foot in OLO this week.

But still they come ...

Green group calls for one child policy
Article from: AAP

April 21, 2009 05:07pm
AUSTRALIA should consider having a one-child policy to protect the planet, an environmental lobby group says.

Sustainable Population Australia says slashing the world's population is the only way to avoid "environmental suicide''.

National president Sandra Kanck wants Australia's population of almost 22 million reduced to seven million to tackle climate change.

Restricting each couple to one baby, as China does, is "one way of assisting to reduce the population''.

"It's something we need to throw into the mix,'' the former Democrats parliamentarian said.

The base line paramater for assessing population growth, sustainability, and most importantly, survival is the availability and quality of WATER.

Anyone who does not take this fact into account is self-deluded and hasnt done their homework.

This reference provides a good place to start.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_crisis

"If though, you believe that humans are more than the sum of their parts, then you have to reject the much of their thinking."

If humans were more than the sum of their parts then WAR would have been abolished centuries past. For those who can't read, War is flourishing from Somali to Nth Korea.

The fact is humans are essentially THERMODYNAMIC machines, and as we have seen in the HISTORY of this planet, everytime human numbers outstrip critical resources, WAR occurs.

Where will Mr King be when the global-war he is promoting via profligate indulgence of women seeking proxy-power through children, commences?
In a cave-of-his-mind no doubt, counting all his Gold and Glory.

There are advantages in viewing humans as Thermodynamic systems. Thermodynamic problems have advanced human satisfying-for-all solutions. The humanity, social-worker solution watches warrior children and their power-to-weight-ratio mother addicts die, all with the greatest sympathy and uniquely human emotion of course.

What this means is that equal-rights for women PLUS unfettered reproductive rights is a CONTRADICTION. What we have here is a CATASTROPHIC thermodynamic solution to human overpopulation: WAR.
The mindlessness represented here is as old as time. We ARE on the verge of a natural, calamitous reduction in human numbers. I mean, does Mr King really believe that Kim will not use a Nuke now that he has recommenced refining bomb grade material?

What is the alternative THERMODYNAMIC solution that keeps all our hard earned knowledge in tact and not burnt on pyres by zeit-Geist, Hitlerian ignorance, turning the human race back to year zero?

Think hard my pretties ....

Cheryl asks "what do the Greens think"?

Such is not a real question but a rhetorical device.

Specifically which person or persons is she referring to?

Names please---and lots of them.

What about my name for starters.

There are hundreds of millions of people on the planet who are in one way or another sympathetic to Green ideas.

Meanwhile the Green Domain was here first.

We human beings are totally embedded and dependent on the Green Domain and ALL of its processes and multiple feed-back loops for our well-being and survival.

My favourite Spiritual Philosopher points that we humans have been waging a war on the environment, or the Green Domain, for a very long time, and that if we dont change our collective modus operandi very soon, then the planetary ecosystems will collapse---or enact its revenge on us.

Put in another way, He points out that we are rapidly approaching a Tipping Point.

Put in another way Gaia is a vast totally integrated system in which everything IS inter-related and in which human activity does have major causative affects.

Like all integrated systems Gaia has a movement to self-rightening balance

The system that is Gaia is "governed" by the laws of physics. And like all systems, large or small, always moves, sooner or later, or in one way or another, to restore an energetic balance to the over-all system.

Green or gone, the choice is ours.

Ah! You're a LaRouchian, mil-observer!

I've often wondered why OLO wasn't crawling with them.
Tell us how the all-powerful British royal family secretly controls the world. You believe that Queen Elizabeth controls the US military directly, yes?

I'm looking forward to this immensely.

"Well, it's not quite the conflagration I'd been banking on. Never mind, lads, same time tomorrow... we must get a winner one day." - Peter Cook, Beyond the Fringe.

You know, you've got to give credit to the Malthusian, hippy Jeremiahs who've been predicting the End-Of-Civlization-As-We-Know-It for the past 40 years and more: They're tenacious little beggars.

No matter how often they're proved wrong, they just patiently reset their doomsday clocks another decade or so ahead. Meanwhile, civilization as we know it just keeps rollin' along.

Still, I will grant them this; although it is demonstrable that the Earth as a whole will be able to support the expected plateau of the human population in the next century or so, there are undoubtedly *regions* that are ill-suited to high population densities. Australia, I believe, is one of those. Our continent is quite geologically unique, and is for the most part characterised by poor, ancient soils.

So there is perhaps a case to be made for stabilising, and probably reducing, Australia's population. However, this doesn't need such draconian measures as one-child policies. Reduced immigration - on a strictly non-racial basis, I might hasten to add - would more than take care of that.

But saints preserve us from the profoundly misanthropic eco-fascism wing of the "deep greens", and their puritanical self-righteousness: "those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C. S. Lewis

The BBC "World Debate", had a debate about the topic of a global
sustainable population, just yesterday.

Eliya Zulu, the head of the Union of African Population Studies
comfirmed what I have been claiming on OLO. Women in Uganda
etc don't choose to have 7 kids. Usually its a lack of family
planning hardware that is the problem. Many people just can't
afford them.

The head of the Optimum Population Trust made a similar point.

None are suggesting forcing women to have less children. What
they are suggesting is that women be given that choice, something
which hundreds of millions in the third world do not have right now.

The fact is that people will have sex and if they have sex without
family planning aids, they will have children that they don't
want.

Why is this so frigging hard to get through to some of you people ?

.

mil-ob wrote, "[Cm'on dagget - waiting, waiting, ...]"

Actually, mil-ob, I was waiting for you to respond to my arguments in the "Federal government and China" forum at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2644&page=9#60282

Of course I won't be holding my breath waiting and I know not to expect any better from you on this forum.

---

The article, itself, is, of course, abysmal as others have pointed out.

The fact that there are still people who are prepared to defend the idiocy of population growth must be a source of bewilderment to many thinking people.

If anyone wants to understand what anyone could possibly hope to gain from what must necessarily make each one of us, on average, poorer, and which threatens our environment and our future, can I suggest that you read "How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future" of 9 Feb 09 at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8485&page=0 at which is based upon Sheila Newman's 2002 Master thesis downloadable from http://candobetter.org/sheila

"what must necessarily make each one of us, on average, poorer, and which threatens our environment and our future"

Sorry, daggett, but history has self-evidently proved you wrong.

The world's population is not increasing exponentially and without end, and we are all, on average, getting better off all the time.

There will be regional exceptions, of course, but taken globally, the whole "Soylent Green" scenario of "Limits to growth" is a crock.

"It’s curious that the most striking manifestation of the loathing they have for every human can be seen in the idea that we need a significant reduction in the number of human beings from people who purport to love nature."

And it's curious that anyone who purports to love nature can promote the notion that allowing a massive overabundance of one species is the best way to preserve it.

To anyone who doesn't think population growth is a problem, here is a challenge. Specify the highest human population that you think Earth can handle without society collapsing - call it P2. Halve that figure and call the result P1. Now -- since the human population currently doubles every fifty years -- please explain: what do you think will happen in the fifty years between P1 and P2 that will somehow avert catastrophe?

Whatever it is, I can guarantee that it will involve a lot more violence and suffering than encouraging people to exercise a bit of voluntary birth control right now.

"-- the world's population is not increasing exponentially ---." (Clownfish).
That is pretty much of the same flavour as the article itself.

The Population reference Bureau 2008 Data Sheet estimated that the world's population was indeed increasing. The rate of that increase, 1.2 per cent, an exponential rate. It was one which would - if continued - result in doubling numbers in less than sixty years. Of course it cannot carry on indefinitely - nature will take care of that if society does not make some effort to at least give women across the world the right, as Yabby points out, to control their fertility. Better that than have the Vatican and people like the author of the article impose their demands upon them.

Not to far in the near future.

Two country doctors out in the hills of West Virginia were discussing the population explosion in the world. One physician says, "Why, Bubba, thiseyer crazy birth thang isa gettin' so bad that perty soon, they ain't gonna be room for ever'body! There'sa gonna be standin' room only on this here planet!"The other doctor replied, "Heck, that sure oughta slow 'em down a bit!"

Just a little joke. Please continue.

EVO

colinsett,
A very well researched contribution!

Clownfish wrote, "Sorry, daggett, but history has self-evidently proved you wrong.

"The world's population is not increasing exponentially and without end, and we are all, on average, getting better off all the time."

You are forgetting that the improvements in living standards, to the extent they have occurred for the hugely increased human population of the world, are at the expense of the consumption of humankind's finite endowment of natural capital, principally fossil fuels and metals, but also, soil, rainforest, fishing stocks, and bore water.

Once those are exhausted, it is not known how the earth can support any more than the population that existed prior to the start of industrialisation, that is around 500 million at most.

I am not saying that it can't be done, but to not act urgently to stabilise the world's population which is now over 13 times that figure, when no-one can explain how, is unbelievable folly.

(I tried to explain this to mil-obfuscator in the "What's wrong with 'Islamophobia'" forum at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8326&page=32#135935 but it seems to have gone right over his head.)

Well said, daggett :)

Odd that Malcolm was a media adviser to the Democrats - that Party for a couple of decades had a population policy, voted for again and again by the great majority of the membership, pretty much along the lines of what Sandra has been arguing for.

But the policy was white-anted from within by the likes of Sid Spindler, Andrew Bartlett, and no doubt M King, making the idea of the party's policy formulation being democratic somewhat laughable. No wonder it went bust.

Somehow Malcom and his fellow-growthists have a brain seizure immediately they hear the word population, and come up with howlers like his conclusion that people arguing for population to come into balance with the environment have a "loathing for every human".

Just the opposite. If the human population grows to the point where it overhwhelms its support system (9 billion, which is the projected population for 2050, will do it), the only long-term consequence will be for the human race. The planet itself will recover within a few centuries and humanity will have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

The very reason humanity needs birth control (after a century of death control through modern medicine) is its future survival. Those who warn about the population do so not because they "loathe" humans but because they would like to see the human race continue to exist.

But for Malcolm, this is clearly hard to grasp. What do you want, Malcolm - the numbers to keep growing to the point where there ALL the resources have reached their limits? What then - resource wars, of course, famine on an unimaginable scale, disease running riot, and the whole of humanity in peril.

Malcolm 25,000 people a DAY are dying of starvation, now. This situation will not be made any better by the arrival of another 2.5 billion in the next half century. 2.5 billion was the entire population of the world in 1950!

Tenacious indeed, clownfish. And always good for a laugh. According to Ho Hum's fave Spiritual Philosopher who clearly has a penchant for Capitalizing Concepts like Green Domain and Tipping Point to make Silly Simplistic Ideas sound substantial, Gaia is self-balancing but our Planetary Ecosystems are heading for collapse. Well, which is it? I suspect most populophobes are first born or only child baby boomers who never did like the idea of more babies around. How dare these newbies take over My World!

Aust without immigration has negative pop growth.Even if everyone has 3 children the pop still falls because of accidents and disease,infertility etc.Population is really only the problem in poor countries where they have up to a dozen children.

So the Geeenies had better take the poor countries to task on this one,but ah they won't listen.Somehow ,it is all our fault even with negative replacement rates.

Economists have long been weighing and measuring Malthuse's ideas and the general concensus is that up until 1800 or so Malthuse's view of the economy was right and applied almost universally. After that he was wrong, with the major difference being the rate of innovation which kicked up sharply at that time. This is thoroughly discussed in 'A Farewell to Alms' by Gregory Clark, an economist at the University of California. You may not agreed with the main thesis of the book - which is not relevent here - but there is little doubt about the basic point above.
The argument now is that the rate of innovation and rise of populations using new technology has strained the earth's whole eco system and run into absolute limits on resources. This is a different argument which has nothing to do with Malthuse (although it is also pretty gloomy like his theories), but basically there is simply no support for it in any of the figures. There are some local eco-strains but global temperatures have been going down not up (look at the figures on Hadley, NOAA or UAH), and resource prices in real terms have been trending down over the decades not up. Of late, after a big spike, this even seems to be applying to oil, despite all the screaming about 'peak oil'. One would think that easy-lift oil must run out sooner or later, but when? Best to find another crisis..

plerdsus: "an elementary exercise in arithmetic that the only way the world could support a population of 9 billion would be with a substantial cut in first world living standards".

OK. Let's road test plerdsus' "elementary exercise in arithmetic", and the other Malthusians' "intuitive" mathematical processes around "the Human Being Question" (a la "Armenian Question", "Jewish Question", "Irish Question", etc.). Clownfish got in first on this screamingly obvious point, but I'll try getting Malthusians to follow the bouncing-ball here...

10,000 BC
Living standards: PRIMITIVE.
Population: very small.

200 BC
Living standards: STILL PRIMITIVE (a bit less crap). Localized occurrence of food surpluses and basic infrastructure.
Population: fraction bigger.

1850 AD
Living standards: LEAPS & BOUNDS DUE TO TECHNOLOGY. Majority at primitive, but hitherto unseen access to efficiencies in transport, manufacturing, information, food surpluses, etc.
Population: considerable spike upwards.

2000 AD
Living standards: WIDE ACCESS TO CIVILIZED ADVANCEMENT. Ongoing improvement since industrial and green revolutions. Still many challenges for neglected and underprivileged majority, but negligible total still in primitive conditions. Near-universal advancement in life expectancy.
Population: 6 billion, largest to date.

Looks like plerdsus won't be reappearing on 'Top Gear'! Maybe s/he could start a new, dark fantasy game show with a catchy title like "Malthus-matics" or "The Biggest Genocidalist"? Not suitable for children, of course...

[As I suggested earlier, these guys must be really getting off on the anthropogenic rolling crashes euphemistically aka "the GFC", and the conditionally related swine flu outbreak... licking their chops in anticipation of some hefty bodycounts]

Btw, dagget: "...Of course I won't be holding my breath..." Ah but you should do so dag. It'd be a respectable case of 'leadership by example' instead of what still seems no more than irrational misanthropic hypocrisy. After all, you're using up too much of that "finite oxygen" already so precisely calculated by your omnipotent Malthusian abacus-brain.

My, my. The growthist's above exude self-righteousness as they declare that all has been fine up to now and therefore always will be. The oil price may be low at the moment but, despite very high prices over a number of years the world was unable to increase production. Now that the high prices finally crashed the economy investment in new oil production has DIVED (e.g. down over 70% in the North Sea) which means that when the world tries to grow again it will slam into an energy ceiling due to the ongoing 6%+ yearly depletion in existing fields. The price will then skyrocket again. This will be the final hammer-blow that crushes the world economy. Wait and see what the food riots will be like then (if you think they were bad last year). Don't worry my dear growthists - you will not escape the coming food shortages and loss of your pensions. You will suffer like the rest of us and I will have NO sympathy for you because I know that you will never give up your silly fundamentalist neoclassical economic beliefs and will probably die hungry and embittered at a world that didn't quite turn out as you were expecting. (But we did try to warn you.)

The problem which will be caused by human population growth can easily be seen if we take a simple mathematical example – should the population of the World increase by just one person per annum, eventually every habitable square metre on the surface of the Earth will be occupied by one of us.
Currently, the problem is approaching us at a rate eighty million times as fast!!
We are not the only form of life on the planet.
We do not have the right to do what we are doing to the planet.
We cannot live anywhere else, and nor can the flora and fauna with which we share this planet.
None of the above axioms are too difficult to understand, and all are independent of race, religion, politics, money, or perceptions of human superiority over other forms of life.
The issue of human numbers on the planet should have been addressed before we rendered extinct the first animal or plant to suffer this fate at our hands. (anyone know what or when??)
There are only three basic differences between ourselves and those we regard as “lower” animals:
We are the only animal to communicate by means of both spoken and written word.
We are the only animal to make and use tools the sole purpose of which is the destruction of members of our own species.
We are the only animal to work, actively and continually, at destroying the only known place in the Universe where we can live.
We should, both as individuals and as countries, work to reduce the disastrous effect we are having on our planet, and one way of doing this is to reduce our numbers, rather than allowing an indefinite increase.

colinsett, nice job of cherry-picking quotes and data, and misrepresenting both badly!

Note that I said "exponentially AND without end": Population growth is steadily declining. As you pointed out, the current rate of growth is around 1 per cent. If you'd expanded your data a few decades each way, you'd see a different picture (but then, using short time-frames to distort trends is a favourite tactic of Malthusian doomsayers). The rate of growth just a few decades ago peaked at 2 per cent, and has been steadily declining ever since. It's expected that population will stablise some time in the next century.

Did you do your own math on the doubling time? I make it at around 70 years, but then maths wasn't my strong point, and what's a decade or two between apocalypses? In any case, as the population rate slows, that doubling time will surely move out further.

daggett: "humankind's finite endowment of natural capital, principally fossil fuels and metals, but also, soil, rainforest, fishing stocks, and bore water"

Um, rainforest, fishing stocks and water are not finite. Rainforest isn't even in serious decline. Fishing stocks and water need to be better managed, for certain, but the situation is nowhere as dire as dills like Ehrlich like to make out.

Fossil fuels and metals were supposed to have run out decades ago, according to the Malthusians, but we pesky humans just keep finding new reserves and better technology. It's estimated that, one way or the other, we have resources to last us at least centuries, if not millennia; although by then we will no doubt have moved on to better technology.

"The Stone Age did not end for lack of stones, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.”

Tough news for the Jeremiahs, who rightly object to the Vatican imposing control of fertility, but strangely have no problem with the state or the Cult of Gaia doing exactly the same.

Perhaps they should just work for what appears to be the best method of birth control of all: wealth and education.

The growthists are generalising from a tiny and quite atypical sliver of human history. Paul Ehrlich, the Club of Rome, and others were wrong about famines in the 1970s because they were unable to foresee the success of the Green Revolution, which doubled or tripled grain yields. However, collapses are not uncommon in the historical and archaeological records. Some well known examples include the collapses of the Sumerian city states (after their irrigated fields were ruined by salinity), the Maya kingdoms, and the Anasazi, as well as the Irish Potato famine of 1848, where 1-1.5 million people starved and another 1.5-2 million had to emigrate. See, for example, Jared Diamond's 'Collapse' and 'Constant Battles' by Harvard archaeologist Steven LeBlanc. If human ingenuity always saves the day and always keeps ahead of population growth, it ought to be impossible for such collapses to occur.

It is also quite possible for enormous technological advances to occur with no lasting benefit to human welfare, because the advances simply result in more mouths to eat up any surplus. Scroll down to the graphs in this paper, and you can see a graph of real wages for building workers and agricultural workers in Tuscany, Italy from 1370 to 1860. It is obvious that the average person was far better off in 1400 after the Black Death than in 1860, despite more than 450 years of technological progress.

http://www.issm.cnr.it/asp/cv/malanima/dati/PILIt1agg.pdf

This paper has a graph showing real wages from 1400-1800 in a number of European cities

http://www.ata.boun.edu.tr/faculty/sevket%20pamuk/publications/pamuk-black_death-final.pdf

If progress is always onward and upward, why did world grain production per person peak in the mid 1980s?

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1116809

How bizarre that there are people who freak out at the notion that we should think of ways of reducing population growth. Especially people who live on this very dry continent.

Not only is water in short supply, but our cities are becoming large and unwieldy. High density housing is becoming increasingly necessary. Living like ants as is done in large high density areas like Japan and parts of Europe is not desirable for a whole raft of reasons.

Absolutely we need to support reducing population growth in developing countries. Was there any suggestion that there shouldn't be? Anybody who thinks that the women in the third world WANT to have many children must be bonkers. Especially in these countries pregnancy and childbirth is seriously high risk. And consider the difficulty of trying to raise a child to adulthood.

Are any of you for real thinking that a call for reducing population growth is because of a hatred of humans? What an irrational conclusion.

Weird. I wonder how many of the contributors against this idea are the same who scream the loudest about child support and single parent pensions.

Divergence

You present some interesting data. That the black death resulted in a prolonged but temporary increase in living standards is well know and not especially surprising – if a third of the Australian population was wiped out tomorrow then, once they recovered from the shock, the survivors would have more houses, cars, roads, hospitals etc per capita at their disposal. This does not mean they would have been equally as rich had the dead third never existed – they just benefited from the accumulation of capital and infrastructure that was suddenly shared among fewer people. Also, the black death prompted significant societal and economic change (such as the end of serfdom in Western Europe) that contributed to economic growth.

The Northern Italy study is interesting but highly specific to a particular region and economy. There are problems using real wages as a welfare gauge in a period when few people were paid in cash, however. And most of your data point to events before the industrial revolution, when the really large improvements in living standards began.

Probably the most authoritative study of broader economic trends over the longer term is Angus Maddison’s “World Economy: A Millennial Perspective”

limited Google book access here: http://books.google.com.au/books?id=6D01BTuzScwC&dq=Angus+Maddison&printsec=frontcover&source=an&hl=en&ei=v7H2Seq0HY3qsgO268CcBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#

updated spreadsheets of key data available here:

http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/Historical_Statistics/horizontal-file_03-2007.xls

This paints pretty much the picture mil-observer describes – slow but positive progress up to the industrial revolution, accelerating sharply after that.

Grains production per capita may have peaked in the 1980s, but food production did not:
http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/food_production_index

This is quite interesting. Does anyone else think that the unsustainable unpeople unaustralia lobby are acting like a cult? Text book group think. Bader Meinhoff, Red Brigades, the Weathermen - actually these guys are probably pinups for the anti-growth, anti-capitalism, anti-women, anti-society lobby.

This is all Kanck's fault. There wouldn't be such hysteria if she hadn't sent that media release, which has been held up to ridicule across Australia. If you want a laugh, check out Chris Berg's blog in The Age on Kanck.

We're all rooned and we'll certainly all die in a thermonuclear war or the seas will rise, fall, heat or cool and scorpions will rise out of the earth.

These whackos have a monopoly on the truth. Please let the genetic line end with you.

Thankfully, Divergence stolen a fair bit of my thunder in her previous post.

---

It's instructive that so much of the pro-population-growth posts consist of personal attacks and so little consists of substantive arguments.

Cheryl wrote, "There wouldn't be such hysteria if she hadn't sent that media release, which has been held up to ridicule across Australia."

I don't think Sandra Kanck can be held responsible for the words put into her mouth by others. Could you please tell us what specifically in Sandra Kanck's media release at http://www.population.org.au/index.php/media/media-releases/media-releases-2009/333-end-population-growth-to-achieve-climate-targets and included above you take issue with?

I am not quite sure why Cheryl assumes that everyone here, who argues against population growth is a member of Sustainable Population Australia, and why, if they are, they are behaving like members of a cult.

That seems to me to be far more the case with the population boosters.

---

Even if Rhian's point stands, I don't see how it deals with the fact that the increases in living standards has been made at the expense of the destruction of natural capital.

One serious problem with the spreadsheet Rhian has linked to is that it uses the flawed GDP as a measure of human prosperity.

The GDP measure, whether gross or per-capita, disregards any activities that don't involve monetary transactions and assumes that every monetary transaction necessarily results in an overall improvement in prosperity.

So a good deal of activity in societies that don't use money is disregarded, whilst the destruction of buildings by bushfires and their consequent reconstruction, as one example, is regarded as adding to prosperity.

These assumptions are clearly absurd, and that is why even Simon Kuznets, who devised the GDP in the 1930's for use by the administration of US President Roosevelt, warned against the misuse of the GDP by economists in the way they have been in that spreadsheet.

Sandra the real culprits in this anti-human population growth canker are the greens led by bob brown and the abc.s tony jones et al in their promotion of global warming and mans/womans over population of their garden planet.

*the real culprits in this anti-human population growth canker are the greens led by bob brown and the abc.s tony jones*

Err not so Dallas. For instance anyone who has read my posts on OLO,
would know that I am no fan of Bob Brown, don't vote green and don't
even class myself as "left".

What it comes down to is a number of points, the first being a basic
understanding of biology. If its not sustainable, eventually it
falls over and collapses. Secondly biodiversity cannot be valued,
for without biodiversity, you won't have a humanity. That is all
pretty basic stuff. Perhaps the planet will one day spin with little
but ants and cockroaches on board, for they are the ultimate survivors.
I won't be around to know or care, but it would still
be a bit of a shame, if human stupidity drives the whole thing to
that point. The problem is, we only have one chance.

Secondly, for me there is a bit of a moral as well as quality
of life argument. Will this really be a better place, with ever
more humans and concrete, at the expense of everything else?
What about other species and their right to a bit of the planet?

Right now, our closest relatives, chimps and bonobos, are being
shot for bushmeat, to feed the ever growing African population.
As population grows, their future is doomed. Gorillas face the
same fate and so do Orang Utans. Those are just our closest
relatives. I'll let you explain to the great grandkids, why
our generation wiped them out, along with a host of other species.

Thirdly, the problem of an ever growing human populatin would in
fact be quite easily solved, if we listened to what those third
world women are saying. As the head of African Population Studies
pointed out only this week on tv, Ugandan women don't want 7 kids.
Yes they will have sex, but the provision of some basic family
planning utensils is all they need, but often cannot afford.
Its hardly rocket science to provide these things

Daggett

We’ve been over this ground before, so I’ll be brief. Economists cheerfully admit the limitations of GDP as an economic welfare measure, but being imperfect doesn’t make it useless, it just means it should be used judiciously acknowledging its limitations. A better measure might be real per capita consumption, but it’s just not possible to estimate that over the geographical and historical range covered by Maddison. Real per capita GDP is in my view a better measure of welfare than real wages over the very long term, as it is broader and has more meaning for periods when very few people were employed for cash wages, and when the nature and content of work changed dramatically.

Furthermore, the objections you raise have less force with Maddison’s estimates than some modern uses. In particular, for older periods Maddison is estimating the volume of output directly rather approximating it through monetary transactions as modern GDP estimates tend to do. Offsetting this of course is the fact that such long-term estimates are far less accurate than modern statistics, and Maddison would be the first to admit the limitations of his data. But to my knowledge, no-one has come close to producing a better estimate of global long-term welfare.

Maddison also tracks life expectancy, which is less susceptible to the objections you have raised, and also shows a pattern of gradual improvement until the industrial revolution and rapid improvement thereafter.

Anansi

I’d agree with you 100% that we should support people in developing countries who want to limit the number of children they have. But I think that how many kids they have should be their choice, not ours.

Divergence, your sense of irony is truly dazzling. You accuse me of "generalising from a tiny and quite atypical sliver of human history", and hit back with ... "real wages for building workers and agricultural workers in Tuscany, Italy from 1370 to 1860"!

Actually, that's a good case in point of Malthusians carefully selecting their data to falsely bolster their argument: Here we have a specific date range - starting from a population crash that would inevitably briefly spike incomes for the chosen occupations astronomically, and ending just as modernisation was probably just taking off in that particular region. Nicely done, indeed.

You might also mention that Ehrlich was not just wrong about food production: His predictions about other resources were also spectacularly wrong - or did gold really run out in the 80s, and everyone's just been covering it up?

Oh, and world grain production peaked because the developed world started cutting back, because it had more than enough to eat - the developing world, meanwhile, continues to increase production, resulting in a net plateau. Places like Europe, have since embarked on environmental programs like reforestation - I might also mention how wrong the green lobby was about acid rain, too - so development has benefitted humans and the environment.

"when we look at the problems over time, the environment and economic prosperity are not opposing concepts, but rather complementary entities: without adequate environmental protection, growth is undermined, but environmental protection is unaffordable without growth" - Bjorn Lomborg.

Anansi, I'm not freaking out about reducing population growth at all - perhaps you should read my earlier points about Australia, especially. I'm just freaking out about the deep-greens and their misanthropic agenda. I'm also deeply disturbed by the taradiddle that is promulgated as unquestioned dogma, and its potential for disastrous, if well-meaning, decision making (see the point about the Exxon Valdez).

As I said, the best form of birth control is prosperity and education. I think it is disturbing that the mostly urban, western elites who dominate green agendas so vehemently wish to deny such benefits to the developing world.

As Yabby rightly points out, give women in developing world control over their fertility, and populations miraculously stabilise. Then all the shrill denouncements of the heretics by jihadists of the population growth cult can be given their richly deserved obscurity.

Clownfish,

Divergence's point about real wages rising following the Black Death also applies to many other eras in history. The fact is that most human history since the discovery of agriculture has been cycles of expansion and collapse and not of steady monotonic upwards progress.

Many times before in history, humans have experience affluence and many times before has that affluence changed into hunger, starvation and population collapse.

The exceptions to this overall pattern are the regions of the world inhabited by stable, and not exponentially growing societies that were able to live within natural limits such as Egypt, China and a number of agrarian and hunter gatherer societies.

I think you need to familiarise yourself with the more recently gained understanding of history as popularised by the Jared Diamond and Ronald Wright.

The only essential difference between 21st century globalised industrial civilisation and past failed civilisations, such as the Mayans, Angkor Wat, the Chaco Anasazi, the Ancient Romans, Greeks and Sumerians, etc, is that we have discovered fossil fuels. When they are exhausted as must occur, probably sooner rather than later -- if runaway global warming or other ecological catastrophes don't destroy us first -- what happened to those past civilisations will also happen to us, that is unless, we don't first quickly change our direction.

*Neo-Malthusianism by Numbers*

As pandemic disease threatens to overtake increasingly plundered, neglected, debt-burdened and speculation-impoverished populations, we need to understand the compatibly murderous and anti-human publicity that would deliberately or unwittingly encourage conditions for such catastrophe. We may call our subject properly "neo-Malthusianism": a revival of the barbaric pseudo-science of Reverend Thomas Malthus, who openly admitted his inspiration from free-trade ideologue Adam Smith. Both Smith and Malthus were paid to train imperialist bureaucrats at the British East Indies Company's Haileybury School. Smith appears most often in today's hegemonic agendas of free-trade imperialism known as "Globalization", but the other colonial-era hireling, Malthus, exerted profound influence on such modern strategic policy as the notorious (and failed) "NSSM 200" of widely recognized war criminal Henry Kissinger from 1974, intended for population reduction throughout the developing world.

Neo-Malthusians express very little critical thought or analysis in their beliefs, despite those beliefs' dangerous, anti-social, spurious and historically discredited qualities. For these reasons we can identify neo-Malthusians as devotees of a "cult". As political ideology, neo-Malthusianism conveys the following delusions and deceptions which combine as a most aggressive threat to the overwhelming majority of humanity...

1. FASCISTIC SENTIMENT. m_i_a's post best expresses the truly callous sentiment inspiring all neo-Malthusians, whether: the aspiring aristocrat daggett; the Dr Frankenstein KAEP in his dungeon of thermodynamic experiments, or; that much more vast Gaia Cult of vague but uniform "Green" fundamentalism and its sinister mix of pseudo-politics with pseudo-religion.

Notice how m_i_a relishes the conjured vision of mass suffering and offers fascistic brutality as a response: "...you will suffer...and I will have NO sympathy for you..."! Such is the petulant savagery and narcissistic delight characteristic of the true fascist's hatred for those who instead want all humanity to multiply and develop to reach their potential through civilization. Neo-Malthusians oppose that progressive ideal here by their view that humans must occupy a portion of the planet only in some fixed ration as befitting beasts i.e., uncreative, irrational, instinctive and uncivilized being, rather like cattle.

[cont.]

Such are the dark, emotional and spiritual aspects of neo-Malthusian ideology, as related closely to their inevitable parallel and ally in murderous social engineering of culling and/or sterilization in the aristocratic quackery of "Eugenics". On (more avowedly) intellectual and philosophical levels, neo-Malthusian dogma's corrupt logic is apparent where believers invoke notions around "economics" and "education" to support their case. As explained in the above introduction, certain ideological compatibilities between neo-Malthusianism and neo-Liberalism can be either deliberately calculated or unwittingly convenient.

2. COVER FOR NEOLIBERALIST POLICY. Firstly, neo-Malthusians uncritically accept equally corrupt liberalist claims around the privatization of infrastructure, and the speculative gambling on energy resources and food, especially. For example of the former, on drought-prone Australia's crucial water infrastructure neo-Malthusians claim that supply is inadequate because of increased population. However, Australian states developed almost no water infrastructure since their water privatization. One prominent illustration is the city of Melbourne's growth from c. 3 million to 4 million people. To credulous, simpleminded onlookers, this would seem a supply problem, as if some "law" of "supply-demand" actually operated.

But no such law operates when water supply is made into a traded and profit-speculated commodity like any other, rather than the freely available, state-supplied socio-economic lubricant that it was before privatization, developed in accordance with the needs of the population. Exaggeration and outright falsification of "drought" around water supply all help bolster the corrupt causes of usurious investors and lazy, irresponsible state apparatchiks alike. By such people's fraudulent claims in media publicity, greed and irresponsibility are not the issues. Neo-liberalist frauds - like their neo-Malthusian accomplices - claim that any water shortages must be the consumers' fault for merely existing and trying to use the resource as before!

3. MISREPRESENTATION OF SPECULATIVE EFFECTS. In more traditionally "private enterprise" sectors, the phenomena are much the same. Neo-Malthusians invariably lean on fervent beliefs in notions of "peak oil", "peak grain" and even "peak minerals". Such beliefs should not surprise given that prevailing liberalist and monetarist economics all emphasize the process of traded *values* over actual physical assets and necessary quantities of real commodities.

[cont.]

sooo..its time for a cull?
now?
perhaps your getting your wish in real-time

FLASHBACK..Scientist?..calls for..death to humanity..[gets standing ovation..[so suspect their serious this time]..the mex are dropping like flies reportedly..[even alex/jones is getting a cough..yeah me too]

AINT IT GREAT as we talk the-plan_goes_down]..but its taking out the healthy..[not babies]..that get reducated by the old also not dying,..neat eh
http://www.newsweekly.com.au/articles/2006apr15_s.html

anyhow the survivors will have their global warning tax
http://willyloman.wordpress.com/2009/04/28/gore-cant-remember-if-he-worked-with-ken-lay-on-the-carbon-tax-credits-plan-in-1997/

those face/masks dont do nothing..i recall the indians were given smallpox laced blankets[..virus are very small]expect the docters to wear particle/masks at least..[but the plan might well be that the docters die off later from their inoculations..[of cancer..[heck..you swallowed the lie of 19,000 deaths from the act of smoking,..[we didnt do autopsies in the good times..[why would they in a pandemic?

face/masks dont filter out micro-bugs]..didnt work for mexico,..did it?..[when you see the face masks go home or calmly take them/then go lie down at home..[whats the case fatality rate..[what races]..watch for racists killing mexicans..lol

anyhow the advice is wear your silver[much like when jews took their gold i guess]..sort of enritches the people going to bury many of us http://colloidalsilversecrets.blogspot.com/2009/04/colloidal-silver-and-swine-flu-7.html

so who knows at least the carers get some wealth before they die..[too]..anyhow take the lead from our past

http://www.rense.com/general74/amak.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkzUGguIKWA
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=92842&sectionid=3510212
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/simon-carr/simon-carr-we-must-be-gullible-to-keep-listening-to-these-scares-1674766.html

i guess i would say its the cry wolf sin-drone,as i got a sniffle i presume it was something in the water..[im one of them homebound blogger nutters[who was dna tested,the last 3 times i was arrested,..anyhow as i blogged let me one of the first to go,..this isnt a case where survival;proves anything

its worth noting DONT panic
[remember those riot police will be on angel dust[tamilflue]..lol

anyhow i turned from news radio to easy listening music..speculation[or anger]is futile..[forgive them..[us]lord we know not what we do..lol..know this is satans realm[.the next is according as we did in this one[love is all we need][work not for the goods of the flesh]

http://whatreallyhappened.com/ http://www.prisonplanet.com/#
http://www.prisonplanet.com/flashback-another-flu-pandemic-causing-accident-occurred-in-2005.html
http://www.prisonplanet.com/ron-paul-warns-swine-flu-scare-will-be-used-as-precedent-for-more-big-government.html
http://www.prisonplanet.com/container-carrying-swine-flu-virus-explodes-on-swiss-train.html
http://www.prisonplanet.com/facemasks-could-make-swine-flu-pandemic-worse.html
http://www.prisonplanet.com/fda-approves-emergency-measures-for-mass-dosing-of-us-citizens.html
http://www.prisonplanet.com/baxter-gilead-make-money-from-swine-flu.html
http://www.prisonplanet.com/flu-fears-dampen-talk-of-tentative-world-recovery.html

lol..what use guilt/and wealth without health..[or open shops to spend it in]..who needs workers/when the'work's..done..lol

<”This is quite interesting. Does anyone else think that the unsustainable unpeople unaustralia lobby are acting like a cult? Text book group think. Bader Meinhoff, Red Brigades, the Weathermen - actually these guys are probably pinups for the anti-growth, anti-capitalism, anti-women, anti-society lobby.”>

Cults are associated with religious beliefs, over population unlike religion, is a fact. I doubt you could put curtailing population in the category of anti-women, it's those who advocate more people and are anti prevention and abortion who display the most anti women attributes. When you look at how beliefs supporting unfettered population growth see women and how they subjugate women, I don't think you know what your talking about Cheryl, unless you're a practising sadomasochist.

Rhian,

The survivors of the Black Death undoubtedly did have the advantages of previously accumulated capital and infrastructure, but you are ignoring land per person and other considerations. You might recall that there was massive emigration from Europe to the New World in the last two centuries (and not the other way around), even though the infrastructure, etc. had to be built up from scratch. Likewise, no one disputes that the industrial revolution raised living standards, just the capacity of our technology to go on supporting unending growth in population and consumption.

Mil-observer,

Why do you think that people worried about limits to growth, who can range from the Far Right to the Far Left in their political views, automatically agree on anything else and are part of some conspiracy? If our water problems (outside of Tasmania and the tropical North) are entirely due to the politicians' (very real) neglect of infrastructure, why are they building expensive, power hungry desalination plants and buying back irrigation water, even though it will cost agricultural production? See Asa Wahlquist's "Thirsty Country" for the details on this.

Cheryl,

If people listen to Ludwig and future generations decide that he was overly cautious, they can always increase the population later. If they listen to you and you are wrong, it means a high probability of dying in the famines, epidemics, and communal violence that accompany a collapse.

Mil-observer, you haven't answered my previous question. Fair enough. A single post is easy to miss.

Just to confirm, your group, The Citizen's Electoral Council, believes that Martin Bryant carried out the Port Arthur massacre on orders from the British Royal Family. Do you share that view?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Electoral_Council

It would be nice to know the sort of things you'll believe before taking your arguments seriously.

Whether or not one believes the earth is heating up, its not a bad idea to reduce carbon emissions. That's a starting point.

If though, you load the equations with the maximum values, as some people have done, the results will allow some reprehensible people to run scaremongering campaigns as the Unsustainable Unpeople have done.

The notion of reducing population means enacting sterilisation campaigns that we saw in India, China and South America, as King has pointed out. I'm old enough to remember the reason why - people in the first world feared a population explosion in the third world.

So we stood back and watched women's rights be handed over to the state. The Unsustainable Unpeople lobby have a monoploy on unscientific scare campaigns. Their motivation is quasi-religious - apocalyptic visions of a world burning, floods, fire, famine, etc.

In short, they are the lunatic fringe who have, in this little blog, done more damage to Brown's Green Party than they can ever hope to repair.

Whether or not one believes their feet are walking them into dangerous ways, like showing up to have too many more CO2 profligate children and grandchildren, its not a bad idea to chop them off.

Now THAT's a starting point '.'!

Lester Brown has published an article in the May Scientific American on the potential of the global food crisis to cause breakdown of public order in certain Third World countries and turn them into failed states. He is mainly concerned about very low levels of world food stocks, shortages of fresh water and the pumping dry of aquifers under major food growing regions, loss of topsoil, population growth, and the potential for real trouble from climate change.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=civilization-food-shortages&sc=WR_20090428

Brown is an agronomist and the head of the Worldwatch Institute, which is supported by grants from a number of US foundations and the German and Norwegian governments. Hardly your garden variety lunatic.

Divergence

There has been steady and sometimes massive migration to the USA in the past 400 years, but during the first 250 years of that average living standards in the USA were well below those in Western Europe. This was not in spite of, but because of, the USA’s low population density. Read John Locke’s second treatise on government published in the late seventeenth century, which draws some fascinating comparisons between (then) land-rich people-poor America and the UK. Locke says:

“There cannot be a clearer demonstration of any thing, than several nations of the Americans are of this, who are rich in land, and poor in all the comforts of life … This shews how much numbers of men are to be preferred to largeness of dominions.”

http://www.constitution.org/jl/2ndtr05.txt

It was only in the 20th century – when its population had reached 75 million - that the USA overtook the UK’s per capita GDP.

I accept that the world’s population can’t continue to grow indefinitely. I just don’t think that policy intervention to stop growth are necessary, feasible or desirable.

It’s not necessary, because the evidence suggests that population growth is slowing and population will probably peak anyway within a few decades.

It’s not feasible because policy interventions don’t have a major effect on fundamental demographic variables unless they’re horribly draconian and intrusive (e.g. compulsory sterilisation, one-chid polices).

And it’s not desirable because growth in population in the past 200 years was mainly due to falling mortality rates and consequent longer life expectancy. Birth rates have fallen too, but not quite as fast as death rates. I think the falling death rate is a good thing, and am not concerned that it causes population growth.

See demographic transition here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition

Lester Brown is a flake who continually fudges data to try and prop up his endless litany of failed predictions.

I have read Jared Diamond, and he's an engaging enough writer, even if he does have a curious approach to scientific method: I just know that I'm right, and it's up to the other guys to prove me wrong.

"Collapse" was an interesting study, but its problem was its inherent bias: Focussing on a handful of - usually extremely isolated, pre-technological - societies that did indeed collapse, but ignoring the majority that didn't.

Rhian wrote, "We’ve been over this ground before, ..."

We have indeed, in discussion at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=6326&page=0 in response to my article "Living standards and our material prosperity" of 6 Sep 2007 at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6326&page=0

Rhian wrote, "A better measure might be real per capita consumption, ..."

I don't think so. As one example, a family that can afford the two cars that are typically needed to meet its transport needs in today's polluted and badly congested cities can scarcely be said to be better off than a family of a generation ago that could cope with only one car.

I would suggest that if Maddison argues that the English, who had been forced to work in the Satanic mills and hellish mine pits of 19th century England, had a higher quality of life than did their forefathers before they were driven off the land, then he is mistaken.

---

Clownfish wrote, "Fossil fuels and metals were supposed to have run out decades ago, according to the Malthusians, but we pesky humans just keep finding new reserves and better technology."

Nevertheless the new reserves we find are vastly smaller than those already discovered and largely exhausted. Oil geologists have a fairly good idea of how much oil is left to be discovered. Even if their most optimistic estimates are correct -- and I hope they are -- we only have a decade or two at most before the rate of petroleum extraction declines, so we will face difficulty maintain current living standards for the earth's 6.7 billion inhabitants let alone for the 9 billion that world's population could reach.

---

It's noteworthy that mil-obscurantist adamantly refuses to tell others the source of his profound knowledge of the diabolical Malthusian/neo-liberal/globalist world conspiracy (being so well noted, myself, for my own outspoken support for economic neo-liberal globalisation).

I had actually thought the Larouchians had a few worthwhile ideas, but if, as Sancho suggests that this may be the origin of the content of mil-obscurantist's inflammatory rantings, then that would cast them in a somewhat different light.

[ROFL! What creative little muffins, conjuring the accusation: "mil-observer conspires to plot conspiracy theories with scary conspiracy theorists". They'll probably feather-duster me with equally inventive youtube "research" next.]

(*Neo-Malthusianism by Numbers*, cont.)

Many of these free-trade speculative effects were inter-related and, unsurprisingly, compatible with the callous disregard for human welfare as espoused by neo-Malthusianism. A conspicuous example came with bourse gambling around "biofuels" i.e., inefficient and intensively processed extractions from food crops, promoted as substitutes for fossil fuels. Biofuels expanded the futile indeed destructive inflation of fuel prices directly into the wider market of foodstuffs. In turn, the unnecessary expansion of biofuel industry encouraged the delusion that such fuel sources were indeed necessary to cover presumed crude oil and other fuel shortages (some added outlandish claims about "biofuels' environmental friendliness"). Generally unaddressed for the corrupt scandal it so clearly was, such speculative, monetarist futility and greed intensified perceptions among the more gullible that demand from populations exceeded reserves of both food and fossil fuel.

But the barbarism of such mismanagement and immorality was clearest when many developing countries reported increased malnutrition where diversion into biofuels smashed staple food stocks. Again, neo-Malthusians either ignored such events, or quietly celebrated them.

When monetarist speculation on world bourses drove crude oil to absurd prices of USD100 and higher (seemingly set to reach USD200), neo-Malthusians crowed instead about "peak oil", convinced the situation proved simple supply problems. Of course, speculators from the parasitic, non-productive realm of hedge and equity funds never contradicted such claims: to do so would endanger their freedom to profit as the fickle inflation strangled productive businesses and workers alike, while liberalist state apparatchiks discreetly played their passive looter's role, taking advantage of speculation by increased consumption tax revenues. However, later much-reduced crude prices described no significant oil shortage, even though the oil cartels themselves (like the banks too) refused to reduce prices fully, preferring to use higher price plateaus to feed their own speculative interests and residual debt obligations. In all these processes, corrupt liberalist states were complicit, guided by notions of self-interest as facilitating, opportunistic pirates.

[cont.]

Nonetheless, significant later falls in crude prices after that spectacular binge in fuel speculation never shook neo-Malthusians from their dogmatic passion for ideas about teeming, beastly humanity made inevitably more savage and debased by some notionally vast deprivation from the natural environment itself. They held their mantras of "peak oil", "peak food", etc., to be just as sacred as their shibboleth "peak humanity" - a "peak" they wish to see cut down to mere foothills (as expressed gleefully by one of the more openly psychopathic neo-Malthusians KAEP: "their feet...walking them into dangerous ways, like...[having] too many more CO2 profligate children and grandchildren...chop them off").

4. HOSTILITY TOWARDS THE FERTILE POOR & WOMEN. A favorite preoccupation of Malthusian imperialists is the matter of birth rates among the poor (obsession common to the later pseudo-science of "Eugenics"). Today's neo-Malthusians unashamedly adopt the same arrogance and contempt, regarding reproduction among the poor as a problem similar to plagues of cane toads or locusts.

Posing concern for "women's control over their own reproductive systems", neo-Malthusians insinuate their vile misanthropic hostilities into faux-feminist assumptions! But the implication is a condescending one i.e., that women will naturally choose to avoid pregnancy and childbirth as yet more acts of primordial male oppression, and not possibly a progressive, healthy or well-adjusted choice by the pregnant woman herself if she is significantly educated. Unsurprisingly, neo-Malthusians spit more toxic venom still towards poor women, especially in developing countries. By such views, high rates of childbirth do not reflect the hard conditions of areas experiencing uncertainty around life expectancy. Yet such are the classic motives behind human beings' choice to create more offspring, just as some disadvantaged people choose to gamble in lotteries often as a more selfish, non-generational effort to overcome their misfortune.

In fact, development, technological advancement and responsible, compassionate but strong and highly-principled government have always been the most reliable, long-term sources of population stability. The opposite of such civilized preconditions are: cultural degeneracy via encouragement of self-interest; prostitution of public services, and; enslavement by fanatical monetarist illusions meant to be untouchable for community and government.

Mil-observer, do I understand you correctly when I interpret your point 4 that you think poor women 'choose' to have more children in the hope that at least a couple will survive as there are poor survival rates of children reaching adulthood?

"[ROFL! What creative little muffins, conjuring the accusation: "mil-observer conspires to plot conspiracy theories with scary conspiracy theorists". They'll probably feather-duster me with equally inventive youtube "research" next."

No, I surmised that you're a member of the Citizens Electoral Council, and asked if you agree with their bizarre conspiracy theories. The answer is, apparently, "yes", although you've chosen to dodge the direct question rather than defend your beliefs. It looks dishonest.

Why should we pay attention to your arguments if you won't own up to your philosophy and political allegiance?

Dagget,

You seem to dismiss any evidence that doesn’t suit your preconceptions.

If real wages, consumption or GDP won’t do as indicators of material well being, how about life expectancy? Not only is a longer life a good thing in itself, it captures a lot of other welfare variables – diet and nutrition, access to shelter and fuel, public infrastructure and services, health and safety, wars, disasters and diseases, medical services, technology etc. And it’s egalitarian – if the rich are living longer but the poor are dying younger, life expectancy will fall.

Here are Maddison’s estimates of life expectancy in England up to the early industrial revolution, and in the UK for the past 100 years or so:

England:
1300-1425 _ 24.3
1541-1556 _ 33.7
1620-1626 _ 37.7
1726-1751 _ 34.6
1801-1826 _ 40.8

UK:
1900 _ 50
1950 _ 69
1999 _ 77

There was slow and uneven progress through the middle ages and renaissance (the drop in the late 17th century was probably due to plague) but in the early industrial revolution at the start of the early nineteenth century, life expectancy rose above 40 for the first time. The improvement accelerated over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the end of the 19th century life expectancy was double its rate in the high middle ages. By the end of the 20th century, it was more than triple the rate.

Maybe those “dark satanic mills” did some good after all!

(incidentally, many scholars Blake’s phrase was a metaphor for the church and educational establishment and not an attack on the industrial revolution)

Well MOs posts are about as crazy as the newspapers put out by
the CEC, so he could well be away with the fairies, supporting them.

Sounds more like a bit of a cult to me. They throw in the bible
there somewhere too.

That could well explain it.

The Kanksters latest release from Unsustainable Pops.

“The extension of Plimer's view is that ultimately nothing matters and that would be a justification for never caring for anyone. We could recklessly grow our population for a few more brief years, and really go out with a bang as humanity confronts the four horsemen of the apocalypse: pestilence, war, famine and death.

"It’s a slippery slope and before long you wind up with a world that is dog-eat-dog...."

Dogs eating dogs on slippery slopes. They had better be quick, what with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse!

Clownfish,

If Lester Brown is such a flake, why would the Norwegian government fund his institute or the editors of Scientific American be willing to publish his rantings? I find it interesting that you dismiss Lester Brown, but rely on Julian Simon, who was a mathematical ignoramus. Here is a review of his book by the economist Herman Daly, which points out the very basic mathematical fallacy that underlies his work

http://www.mnforsustain.org/daly_h_simon_ultimate_resource_review.htm

Rhian,

My position is not that fewer people are always better, just that for a given level of technology, there is an optimum population that allows ordinary folk to enjoy decent living standards without destroying the environment or oppressing other people. If there is severe depopulation, then living standards are likely to fall. Villages that were hard-hit by the Black Death were sometimes abandoned altogether. By the same token, it is possible for people to outbreed their resources. This clearly happened in Rwanda, where the population tripled from 1950-1990 and arable land per person was reduced to 0.03 hectares, well below the UN FAO minimum for an adequate diet.

I find it curious that people would migrate in large numbers over centuries to places where they would be poorer. It certainly doesn't happen now. One reason why those Italian average wages dropped so much more than in Northern European cities may be a lack of colonies to loot and use as sinks for surplus population.

Lester Brown, whose work has been described as "audacious and seriously misleading", gets his funding because some European governments are in thrall to Jeremiad "green" doom-obsessions. To even question the dogma of environmental apocalypse is to invite a veritable auto-da-fe upon oneself. Just ask Bjorn Lomborg.

But, like the congregation of a fundamentalist preacher who gets caught doing drugs with male prostitutes in his hotel room, the faithful just steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that their emperor has no clothes.

Twerps like Brown only get the traction that they do by trading on their assumed aura of virtue. Just as so many people assume that Mother Theresa really did work to reduce suffering in the developing world, despite all evidence to the contrary, because to say otherwise risks approbation for questioning the virtue of a supposed "saint".

In fact, reading Lester Brown's work, his dodgy and selective use of data, and his endless list of failed predictions, one has to wonder whether, like the Creationist leaders, he is actually so colossally inept, or just a plain liar.

It's fair to acknowledge that Julian Simon made mistakes, nonetheless, his general thesis has still held up well. I do love how the neo-Malthusians like to dredge up the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Just as Umberto Eco observed that every bizarre conspiracy theory inevitably ropes in the Knights Templar, Creationists and their ilk inevitably abuse the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

Still, if I was a betting man, I'd stick with Julian Simon.

Yes, there was a pun there.

Rhian's figures which purport to prove increased life expectancy as a consequence of industrialisation have massive gaps in them. These include:

1425-1540 (115 years)
1557-1619 (58 years)
1627-1725 (98 years)
1752-1800 (48 years)
1826-1999 (73 years)

... fairly substantial gaps, particularly the last one I would have thought if we are to conclusively establish that the destruction of rural society and the drafting of people, who were consequently landless, into the Satanic Mills and mines, was to their benefit.

On the face of it, it seems highly unlikely given what we know of working conditions in the mines and pits were like, so I would need to see a more complete set of figures and I would need to look more closely at how those figures were derived.

Barbara Friese in "Coal - a human history" (2003) writes on pages 81-82 "An 1842 government report on the sanitary conditions of the working class ... stated that 'it is an appalling fact that, of all who are born of the labouring classes in Manchester, more than 57 percent die before they attain five years of age.' The report makes it dramatically clear that the high death rates were a function of both poverty and urban surroundings. The childhood death rates gave the poor of Manchester an average life expectancy of 17 years; the professionals and gentry of the city could expect 38 years. By contrast, the rural poor (taking as an example one region where wages were reported as half of those of Manchester) had an average life span of 38 years (the same as the well-off in Manchester), and the well-off in the country side had an average life span of fifty-two."

Note that the year is 1842 and that only the well-off in rural England had life expectancy higher than the 40.8 years average life expectancy of 40.8 estimated by Maddison from 1801-1825 would most likely work out Everyone else has lower life expectancies. So, if we are to accept Maddison's figures as accurate, life expectancy went down and not up after 1826.

(tobecontinued)

Note also, in spite of having half the wages, of city workers, the rural poor had a vastly better life expectancy, even if low in absolute terms.

This lends further weight to my point that increases in 'real wages' as measured by economists are not a good indication of prosperity as I wrote in "Living standards and our material prosperity" of 6 Sep 2007 at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6326&page=0

In fact the real step backwards in living standards in the second Millennium occurred as a result of the Norman conquests. Prior to then, the quality of life in much of England, in terms of life expectancy came pretty close to what we have enjoyed in Western Countries in the 20th century.

The Black Deaths did improve the quality of life for the survivors (if, obviously, not for the victims), but the evidence suggests that it never returned to what it was prior to the Norman conquest and, at that, at a terrible cost to the earth's natural capital.

Rhian's stats also neglect the terrible price paid by those who were colonised who were forced off their land and made to work for a pittance or as slaves on the large ecologically ruinous plantations (see "Dirt - the Erosion of Civilisation" (2007) by David Montgomery) that were necessary to feed Britain's Satanic Mills.

So, the evidence that humankind has enjoyed sustained improvements in its quality of life and without cost to the environment as time has progressed would seem to be very shaky indeed.

---

At least Rhian has attempted to argue his case with some reference to facts and figures which is a lot more than what can be said of Clownfish, Cheryl, mil-ob, etc.

Argue the case? Here goes.

Look at the IPCC report. Their scenario to reduce population is globalisation.

http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_sr/?src=/climate/ipcc/emission/093.htm#1

"In the A1 scenario family, demographic and economic trends are closely linked, as affluence is correlated with long life and small families (low mortality and low fertility). Global population grows to some nine billion by 2050 and declines to about seven billion by 2100."

Roughly speaking, the A1 family is where we pursue a global capitalist economy as opposed to A2 (capitalist and regional), B1 equitable and global, B2, equitable and regional.

That's not just some wild eyed classical liberal (myself) speaking. That's actually the IPCC. Your mates. And it's one of the basic assumptions which underlies the entire study of climate change. Yes, the whole of the IPCC program to look at climate change depends upon those four families of economic models.

Be useful if those pontificating on climate change, on mass sterlilisation programs and pushing refugee boats back out to sea, had actually bothered to read the report, don't you think?

*It's fair to acknowledge that Julian Simon made mistakes, nonetheless, his general thesis has still held up well. *

Well yes he did make mistakes, for Simon was an economist.
He tried to value biodiversity. Sadly his knowledge of biology
was lacking for without biodiversity, you won't have a humanity.

Rhian, I admit to not reading all your posts in every detail,
but I get the gist of your argument. Where I have a problem
with it, point out where I am wrong, your implication seems
to be that higher population leads to higher standard of living
and longer life expectancy.

Clearly it is innovation that has brought about those changes,
like the development of anti biotics, vaccines, etc.

We can show that when people have smaller families, their
kids land up being better educated. So I do not confuse
optimum human population, with breeding like rabbits.

Bangaladesh, Philipines, Rwanda etc, don't make huge contributions
to scientific progress, despite breeding like rabbits in the
past.

After reading several neo-Malthusian responses , it becomes clear that there is a profound degradation at play here, not only in a simple moral and philosophical sense, but also in the more straightforward processes we call "logic and reasoning".

Notice how neo-Malthusians alter opponents' original statements in order to extrapolate altogether quite different arguments. My point about poor countries' higher birthrates got twisted and reduced into some neoliberalist, individual-cultish and liberal-feminist tosh claiming that I asserted instead that women in poor countries make an individual CHOICE to have more children [anansi]! Collective factors of family, wider society, religion and state could have no compatible or otherwise positive role by such a worldview either; they would be factors intrinsically opposed to the mother's own self-interest. And by such a simplistic and blinkered view, any woman must be deemed "oppressed" if NOT choosing to have few or no children ["Anybody who thinks that the women in the third world WANT to have many children must be bonkers"]

Next we have Yabby's simplistic claim that "your [Rhian's] implication seems to be that higher population leads to higher standard of living and longer life expectancy". Yabby gets little "gist" of anything in Rhian's detailed, lucid explanation of inter-related and long-term trends in population, life expectancy and living standards.

The neo-Malthusians' linear thinking and reptilian urges keep putting carts before horses, then they just keep cracking their whips.

Except dag. His approach is to conjure mystical "blood and soil" sentiments against industrialization, a la the inbred Prince Charles' typically regressive musings, or the feudal lifestyle of "green" neo-aristocrat Sting, who boasts of feeding on organic produce grown and harvested by tenants on his estates.

But we should be grateful for dagget's (comparative) honesty. Without dag's creative, regressive and infantilist nostalgia for pre-industrial society, we could fail to see the neo-Malthusians' essential political prescription for humanity i.e., fascist primordialism. Whether they wish slaughter, disease, sterilization or compulsory birth control are just side issues of detail, or personal style.

What else do these fascists call humans they deem beneath themselves? "Ants" [anansi], "rabbits" [Yabby] or just "bacilli"?

Neo-Malthusian apologias for genocide are not new: divergence touted Rwanda's case (and Ireland's) previously [see: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8409&page=0#133300 ]. Perhaps the most sinister aspect of such claims are that they are at odds with one overwhelming fact: Rwanda had no actual widespread death toll from a malnutrition crisis prior to the Rwandan genocide. Therefore, details of organization and logistics contradicted such claims of a Rwandan "finite resources" problem before the mass murders. Does Q&A imply that mass murders were somehow a preventative effort *in anticipation* of such famine later? If so, it must be Q&A's wishful thinking only, unsupported by historical facts.

In these regards neo-Malthusianism seems more "occult" than mere "cult".

Let's look beyond divergence's claims about "arable land per person" in Rwanda's case.

Studies show very convincingly how Rwanda's 1994 genocide arose from policies associated with ethnic-based state power structures, migration, and the local Ruriganiza Famine of 1989. But note that the "famine" itself was not a famine in the sense that it brought widespread death from starvation; rather, it was a food crisis that disrupted society by:

- encouraging local Rwandan emigrations;
- intensifying pressures of deliberate migration from outside, especially in a Tutsi-based rebel "return" invasion based from Uganda (as repeated and manipulated in the Congo cases since), and;
- combinations of defensiveness, brinkmanship and neglect from Rwanda's ruling government.

In short, the Ruriganiza Famine largely affected Rwanda's cattle-herding Tutsi in the south. To their misfortune, Rwanda's president was:

- a Hutu from the north;
- little supported in the affected area,
- keen to avoid directly or indirectly supporting revanchist Tutsi opposition elements and, accordingly;
- against distributive or other relief measures, adhering instead to his long-established agenda of "local self-sufficiency".

Therefore, President Habyarimana opted for a local famine "response" of "no response". In other words, his approach was either deliberately or unwittingly Malthusian; his neglect for the local southern Rwandan famine sought political stability from population and agricultural instability.

Into this tinder box, Habyarimana was assassinated when his presidential aircraft fell to a missile attack, responsibility for which remains unclear and disputed.

Good old Daggett, yet again using data from a highly specific time and place - in this case, Manchester in the early throes of the Industrial Revolution - to argue that our quality of life has barely improved since before the Norman Conquest! (OK, perhaps I'm interpreting him wrong, if so, I stand to be enlightened).

But, Daggy demands facts and figures, so facts and figures he shall have.

First, I might direct him to DeLong's estimates of global GDP per capita, from 0-2000CE, which shows a slight increase from 0-late 1800s (with the occasional dip for such events as the Black Death), from whence it skyrockets upwards with nary a break.

DeLong actually estimated global GDP back to 1MCE, as can be seen here: http://econ161.berkeley.edu/TCEH/1998_Draft/World_GDP/Estimating_World_GDP.html

Increased prosperity can also be seen from such indirect indicators as infant mortality from 1950-2050 (prediction from 2000, UNDP), the average height of adult men 1775-1975 (Fogel 1989:50, Burnette & Mokyr 1995:144), daily intake of calories per capita (FAO 2001a) and even illiteracy and education.

Ah, but what of the future, Daggett will ask? All these good time can't continue forever - Malthus said so!

The most amusing set of figures here come from that holiest-of-holies, the IPCC itself. In its various scenarios, the IPCC envisages that income for developing countries by the end of the next century will, at worst, be on a par with developed countries today! Not only that, forest cover will most likely have increased and renewable energy will most likely explode. (IPCC 2000b, 2001a, IPCC/DDC 2001).

Surely Daggy's not going to argue with the IPCC?

Divergence

I don’t deny that there was an economic dimension to migration to the USA, especially during events like the Irish potato famine and the failed harvests in Europe in the late 19th century. But there were lots of other reasons – to found religious communities and escape persecution, political freedom, coercion (slavery, transportation of criminals, indentured service), adventure, social mobility…

Yabby
I’m not arguing that population growth causes prosperity. I’m arguing that the economic, technological and social revolutions of the past 250 years caused a reduction in death rates and improvement in life expectancy. This caused a one-off shift in population levels as societies moved from having high mortality and birth rates to low mortality and birth rates – know as the demographic transition. For as long as death rates are lower than birth rates, populations grow.
See demographic transition here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition

This phase is pretty much complete in rich societies such as Australia, where birth rates are now below replacement rates of about 2.1 births per woman. They are also well advanced in developing economies, where birth rates are falling, but have not yet caught up with (still falling) death rates. Until the two match up, and until the population profile of developing countries returns to normal (at present an unusually large proportion of the population is of child-bearing age) further population growth is, for practical purposes, unavoidable.

Dagget,

Even if your data for Manchester are right, conditions in a particular place at a particular time are not necessarily going to tell you what’s happening on average and over time. There have been many estimates of life expectancy in England, the UK, and Western Europe. All, to my knowledge, show rapid improvement over the 19th and 20th centuries. Here are some more:

http://ftp.iza.org/dp585.pdf
http://www.princeton.edu/rpds/papers/pdfs/cutler_deaton_lleras-muney_determinants_mortality_nberdec05.pdf
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VC6-4N2D67K-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=4e52e88a46805005d531ed07d37e583a

I challenge you to find any serious academic paper showing that average UK life expectancy did NOT increase in the 19th or 20th centuries.

And as Clownfish points out, other objective welfare measures – literacy, infant mortality, height, diet etc – improved too.

Rhian, this snippet from your URL matters:

*Improvements in contraceptive technology are now a major factor. Fertility decline is caused as much by changes in values about children and sex as by the availability of contraceptives and knowledge of how to use them.*

Sure, people in industrial societies have the means to purchase
contraception, many in the third world do not have that option.
If we look at what women in the third world are actually saying,
many would prefer less children. So the point is, why not
assist and provide them with that option? Why wait until they
are an industrial society and can afford to purchase their own,
in perhaps a hundred years?

Talk to a few oldies who had 12 kids or whatever. They will tell
you it happens when you have sex and no pill was around in those
days.

Yes, the advent of the pill has had a dramatic effect on population
numbers in the West. So has the legalisation of abortion.

Many third world countries lack these options. Either women can't
afford contraception or abortion is commonly banned, due to such
influences as the Roman Catholic Church. We in the West luckily
told the RCC to get stuffed, some time ago. Politicians in the
third world are perhaps still more gullible, when it comes to
buying their ticket to heaven.

So unlike the claimed rubbish posted by MO, my point is- give
third world women the same choices as Western women and you might
be amazed how they might choose to reduce their family size, which
is one of the reasons they are on the poverty wheel in the first
place. They are seemingly quite aware of that, but people will
have sex, its a human instinct.

So my basic argument is about choice for third world women. For
just sending more boatloads of food, without family planning,
only creates even more starving little babies

Exactly which century/ies in human history were without the four horsemen of said apocalypse - pestilence, war, famine, death? Are the Unsustainable Poppers deliberately trying to sound like those late night bible phrophecy infomercials who see armageddon in the occurence of earthquakes, tsunamis and the stock market crash? And then ask for your money so that you might be saved.

Mil-observer sounds knowledgeable, but he cites no sources and says vague things like "Studies show very convincingly how Rwanda's 1994
genocide arose from policies associated with ethnic-based state power structures,". I'd give the piece, off-hand, the same credit as a competently written journalistic piece by a journalist offering an interesting "take" on a vexed issue -- the sort of article you feel quite impressed by, but are not surprised to see contradicted in next week's articles or news. e.g. deaths due to hunger might be masked if when persons in weakened condition were carried off, according to the doctor's certificate this was credited to various diseases even though these diseases would not normally have killed them.

Mil-observer wrote, "Perhaps the most sinister aspect of such claims are [sic] that they are at odds with one overwhelming fact: Rwanda had no actual widespread death toll from a malnutrition crisis prior to the Rwandan genocide. Therefore[sic], details of organization and logistics contradicted such claims of a Rwandan 'finite resources' problem before the mass murders."

So the claims are sinister even before they can be disproved, and the disproof is that people were not dying in droves before the killing began. It is a hard-hearted person (sinister?) who doesn't believe people are in pain from hunger until they actually die. It is also dubious that uprisings motivated by hunger/scarcity don't occur until deaths are numerous. Indeed people who are actually starving are unlikely to have the energy for an uprising. There was no uprising during the Irish potato famine. Conversely, many people, perceiving their circumstances steadily declining, might get angry take action long before they were in danger of starving. The pain of hunger begins long before death. (Ask any dieter.)

Mil-observer's argument reminds me of Dickens's comment in Oliver Twist:

[TBC]

[Continued]

Everybody knows the story of another experimental philosopher who had a great theory about a horse being able to live without eating, and who demonstrated it so well, that he had got his own horse down to a straw a day, and would unquestionably have rendered him a very spirited and rampacious animal on nothing at all, if he had not died, four-and-twenty hours before he was to have had his first comfortable bait [snack] of air.

Similarly the philosopher, mil-observer, refuses to believe that anyone actually dies of hunger, or rebels because of hunger. And to the extent he admits that there was serious hunger, he insists that it was only fatal because of less than optimal distribution of food within the country, factional leaders, etc. He implies it should have been easy for the president to remove food from regions or an ethnic group that were/was already hungry in order to feed their former enemies whose case was worse. Such logic would mean that no one ever dies from scarcity of food, only from sub-optimal distribution. In a sense that is true. The level of starvation that bred desperation might have been staved off for perhaps another half generation of continued population growth had all other circumstances been ideal. (But when was distribution ever perfect?) Like Dickens's philosopher, mil-observer can be suspected of refusing to face the underlying cause.

"Mil-observer sounds knowledgeable, but he cites no sources and says vague things like 'Studies show very convincingly...'"

Thereupon MS proceeds to make generalized counter-claims by citing no sources, asserting no claims of specific fact, and saying vague things like "everybody knows the story of a philosopher..."

Is this a sock puppet/reincarnation of dickie?

And why the hell does MS give a special reference of authority to men named "Dieter"?

On the vast and rich continent of Africa, of which Rwanda is a small but representative part, I must add the following statements of fact:

1. Africa is actually UNDER-populated by standards of modern civilization and when viewed against its under-developed means of food production and infrastructure. Properly developed and freed from ruthless exploitation, Africa's population should more than double to exceed two billion.

2. Starting in infancy, Africans generally suffer much higher effects of malnutrition than people on other continents. I certainly make no claim that such crippling and often lethal effects did not apply to Rwanda's Ruriganiza Famine from 1989. However, that local famine did not register as anything like the scale of full-blown starvation catastrophe like such events as the Biafran or Ethiopian famines.

3. The main cause of Africa's stunted growth is the western-based debt-farming from such monetarist agencies as the IMF and World Bank. The effects of such usurers' onerous debt on Africa have been more or less "genocidal" for the past fifty years, in a process that can be seen to standardize and centralize similar effects from a preceding century of European colonialism.

Therefore, to qualify my previous background account of Rwanda's genocidal war in 1994, it is fair to assert that any local "Malthusian" policy by African leadership may have certain mitigating factors of local political circumstance: such particular pressures cannot be said to apply to the usurious regimes of monetarist empire. In that respect, the Malthusian policies of British leadership over Ireland can be compared to Rwandan President Habyarimana's calculated and callous decisions of non-relief and non-assistance to Ruriganiza's famine-stricken Tutsis. Nonetheless, Habyarimana confronted also the related pressure of armed Tutsi threat and its foreign, imperialist backing.

Cheryl, Rhian,

Those who assure us that demographic transition will fix everything would have us ignore the serious resources shortages crises that are happening now.

How about this story:

"Mexico City shuts off water supply to millions" of 10 April 2009 http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/americas/news/article_1470255.php/Mexico_City_shuts_off_water_supply_to_millions_

"Up to 5 million residents in Mexico City will be completely or partially without water over the weekend, after authorities shut down a main water pipe to preserve the scarce resource.

"The capital city's water authority, Conagua, was forced to shut off the supply for two days after the Cutzamala water system hit an historic low amid an ongoing dry spell. ..."

... or:

"Dry Taps in Mexico City: A Water Crisis Gets Worse" of 3 May 09 at http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1890623,00.html

"The reek of unwashed toilets spilled into the street in the neighborhood of unpainted cinder block houses. Out on the main road, hundreds of residents banged plastic buckets and blocked the path of irate drivers while children scoured the surrounding area for government trucks. Finally, the impatient crowd launched into a high-pitched chant, repeating one word at fever pitch: "Water, Water, Water!"

"About five million people, or a quarter of the population of Mexico City's urban sprawl, woke up Thursday with dry taps. ..."

Given that the water crisis predated the swine flu out break, it seems highly to me that the former.would have contributed to the latter.

Mexico City got this way because the population was allowed to grow unsustainably on the assumption that its underground aquifers were infinite when anyone should have been able to see that they were not. Many other regions of the world are similarly unsustainably dependent upon underground water. These include the West of the United States and India much of the agricultural system of which is dependent upon underground aquifers which must eventually run dry.

Even if it can be argued that demographic transition will lead to a sufficiently low birth rate, much of humankind appears to be headed towards dying of starvation or thirst long before it takes effect unless we act with a sense of utmost urgency now.

(tobecontinued)

(continuedfromabove)

I commend Brian MacGavin's article "Why is the UN so complacent in the face of over-population peril?" of 3 July 2008 at http://candobetter.org/node/631

More recently Brian McGavin has written "Where's the big debate we really need on the (economy?" at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8818&page=0 http://candobetter.org/node/1209)

---

I note mil-ob has avoided answering Moronslayer's essential arguments.

mil-ob,

1. Do you or don't you insist that, unless people are literally dying of malnutrition, a resource shortage problem does not exist?

2. If Rwanda had a perfect means of distributing food and other resources, that has never yet been established for any significant period of time anywhere in the world in modern times, by how much more do you believe that Rwanda's population could have grown before people began to starve?

---

mil-ob wrote, "Africa is actually UNDER-populated by standards of modern civilization and when viewed against its under-developed means of food production and infrastructure."

This a sweeping generalisation that ignores the fact that 'developed' means of food production and infrastructure are unsustainably dependant upon fossil fuels and other finite non-renewable resources such as metals.

Of course, mil-ob, just happens to know that all conceivable resource shortages can be overcome with technological fixes that have yet to be demonstrated and implemented on the necessary scale. As an example, mil-ob has no doubt whatsoever that India will be able to replace the fresh water upon which much of its agricultural system depends, when the underground aquifers, from which it is pumped, run dry, by nuclear-powered desalination plants, pipes and pumping stations. (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8326&page=31#135445)

Others, who don't share mil-ob's boundless technological optimism, believe it would be far more prudent to limit human numbers, at least until such time as we can be certain that these techno-fixes will work.

Someone needs to tell mil-observer the difference between explaining something and excusing it. There have been collapses without genocides and genocides without collapses. No one has claimed that population pressure was the sole cause of the Rwanda genocide or that some of the factors mentioned by mil-ob were not also significant.

For the significance of declining land per person, see this link to the "Malthus in Africa" chapter of Jared Diamond's 'Collapse'. Diamond discusses districts where there were few Tutsis and Hutus killed other Hutus.

http://72.14.235.132/search?q=cache:dB-005UbcxwJ:www.ditext.com/diamond/10.html+Rwanda+genocide+land+per+person&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au

Another source is this paper: Paul J. Magnarella, International Journal of Criminal Justice 3 (2005) 801. "In short, the ultimate cause of Rwandan genocide was the increasing imbalance in land, food and people that led to malnutrition, hunger, periodic famine and fierce competition for land to farm. Too many people were relying on rapidly diminishing amounts of arable land per capita for their subsistence level existences."

http://jicj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/3/4/801

This conference presentation by van Ginneken and Wiegers has a number of very informative graphs at the end. Mil-ob might take a look at what happened to calories per person after 1984.

http://paa2005.princeton.edu/download.aspx?submissionId=51066

"Properly developed and freed from ruthless exploitation, Africa's population should more than double to exceed two billion."

This underlies a problem of population growth. The fact is that in order to provide a modern living standard for a population, you need to have the infrastructure in place and a skilled workforce to build it. Grow you population at a huge rate and the cost becomes prohibitive and education suffers, making the task of developing far harder. Testament to this in Australia in recent years is the huge accumulation of government debt, all resultant from infrastructure costs. Without a rapidly growing population you do not have this infrastructure burden. As a comparison you might look at a country like Japan, which is able to provide its citizens with a far higher level of amenities and services without incurring huge debt.

"The main cause of Africa's stunted growth is the western-based debt-farming from such monetarist agencies as the IMF and World Bank."

Here is a list of per capita foreign debt of the world's nations:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_deb_ext_percap-economy-debt-external-per-capita

You might note that Ethiopia has a per capita debt of about $50, which is less than one percent of the per capita debt in Australia.

The question of what benefit is derived from a growing population forms the basis of my opinion.

*The question of what benefit is derived from a growing population forms the basis of my opinion.*

A wise question and it will be interesting to see if MO can answer
it. I still think that he is little more then a bit of a troll,
against everything but not prepared to say what he actually
stands for.

Fester's question goes further. Why should the other species of
Africa, not have a right to a bit of their planet too? Why just
ever more humans, when it can be shown that many mothers simply
lack effective family planning?

People in say Zimbabwe, are not starving because of the World Bank
or IMF. They are starving due to Mugabe and his policies.

MO, its time to finally come clean and not just act like a regular
troll on OLO.

On dag:
OLOers: read these quotes and remember their creator. Dag said: "In fact the real step backwards in living standards in the second Millennium occurred as a result of the Norman conquests. Prior to then, the quality of life in much of England, in terms of life expectancy came pretty close to what we have enjoyed in Western Countries in the 20th century. The Black Deaths did improve the quality of life for the survivors..."[sicX4]

No careful selectivity, context-removal or word-twists there; all pure dag in one unbroken skid mark...

Mad as a cut snake? Thank God, and the people of Brisbane's Mt Coot-tha area, that he failed spectacularly to get anywhere near enough people to back his bid for a parliamentary seat. On behalf of all southerners, my deepest apologies to Queenslanders for the commonly unfair southern habit of disparaging their political tendencies.

---

divergence: "Diamond discusses districts where there were few Tutsis and Hutus killed other Hutus."

Yes, such was Rwanda's politics at the time: many Hutus opposed Habyarimana's Hutu regime; some worked in the Tutsi-dominated rebel forces. But Diamond's case is very inconsistent: not only unclear but self-contradictory. He is a very highly publicized sensationalist, as his chapter's title would suggest, and his inconsistent musings are an historiographical self-indulgence.

For example, consider his overriding Malthusian assertion (as expressed in the chapter's sickening title) that Rwanda's population density is "one of the important factors behind the Rwandan genocide".

Earlier, Diamond compares densely populated western Europe, claiming: "But the United Kingdom and Holland have highly efficient mechanized agriculture...only a few...working as farmers can produce much of the food for everyone else, plus some surplus food for export. Rwandan agriculture is much less efficient and unmechanized; farmers depend on handheld hoes, picks, and machetes; and most people have to remain farmers, producing little or no surplus that could support others."

But be in no doubt that Diamond's chapter is an apologia for genocide. Complicit in such misleading historiography and its Malthusian cop-outs are those international jurists and diplomats

[cont.]
seeking excuses for their own failures to fully investigate and prosecute that massive atrocity and its ongoing paybacks and repetitions in and around the Congo.

There are many ways to impose Malthusian genocide. Mid-19th century Ireland was one particular previous case where imperial rulers deliberately prevented and forbade efforts to relieve the famine-stricken and mostly tenant populace in its homeland. Dutch efforts against Javanese peasants were very similar; in many ways much harsher with their more explicit Apartheid-style discrimination. The Warsaw Ghetto in 1942-3 revealed creation of yet more intensive preconditions for such Malthusian practices: fascist film propaganda of that time expressed the same Malthusian (and Eugenicist) prejudices, stigmatizing the ghetto populace for its poor sanitation, malnutrition, and routine petty "crimes" of survival. On Rwanda's case, and contrary cases of the (more obviously) Malthus-confounding densely populated areas of the UK and Levant, Diamond avoids making the connection between catastrophic political and economic organization on the one hand, and the various effects of such preconditions in that latter-day imperialist barbarism we may term "Malthusian genocide" - a specialization of empire ever since the Reverend promulgated his theories for the British East India Company.

Malthusian dogma has far-reaching, insidious effects. Consider the example of those neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers who exaggerate the death camps' tolls from starvation and disease - as if in defence of Eichmann's transports and the close confines of cantonment for whole populations! Similar Malthusian apologia attended the Armenian Genocide, or the yet earlier British imperial practice against Boer civilians.

Throughout modern Africa the Malthusian template has relied chiefly on onerous debt regimes combined with imperialists' barbaric confinement of local economic opportunity to cash-crops and mineral extraction, both of which still compel an intensive labor effort when denied the developments of infrastructure and automation.

Diamond identifies that last point, but he fails to "join the dots" of historical causality and culpability. Whether Diamond's politically sanitized history is "corrupt" or "intellectually deficient", the result is the same: a perpetuation of the corrupt dogma of one Thomas Malthus, economist of a ruthless, depraved empire.

The UK, the Netherlands, and Japan are not comparable with Rwanda, because they are not and haven't needed to be self-sufficient in food. European countries export high value food products such as wine and cheeses, but most of them import large amounts of corn, soybeans, fishmeal, etc. A lot of those soybean plantations in the Amazon are producing feed for European chickens and dairy cows. Japan is only about 40% self-sufficient in food. If someone put up a wall around any of these countries, people would get very hungry, very fast. So far, they have been able to trade goods and services for food with no problems, but this may not be true in the future as food dries up on the world market, and food exporting countries put restrictions on exports to protect their domestic consumers, as happened last year, when there were food riots in 34 countries. This is why food importing countries have been trying to buy land to feed themselves in Madagascar and elsewhere.

I actually agree with you about diverting grain to biofuels, and the potential for expanded production is scary, but they were only responsible for about 30% of the increase in global grain prices last year (39% for maize, 21% for rice, and 22% for wheat).

http://www.ifpri.org/pubs/testimony/vonbraun20080612.asp

According to the CIA World Factbook, Rwanda currently has a 2.78% population growth rate, implying a population doubling time of less than 25 years. The land holdings per household and calories per capita were already clearly inadequate at the time of the genocide. I suspect you would need to see standing room only before you recognised a problem.

I note that mil-ob has responding to hardly any of the points in my most recent posts including two perfectly simple direct questions.

Instead, he has focused on what he thinks is my weakest point. On top of that he has dragged a stack of red herrings across the trail, including personal attacks.

In regard to living standards in pre-Norman England, they were clearly better, by all measures, than those for hundreds more years until the late 19th century, at least, certainly for labouring classes. How close they came to living standards in prosperous 20th century societies in terms of life expectancy may be subject to dispute, but I did hear on a documentary on ABC Radio National about 10-12 years ago in which it was claimed that they came pretty damned close.

That's a view held by people I know who are knowledgeable about that period of history.

Living standards went down after then, because the Normans uprooted communities and destroyed their ability to control their population numbers. As a consequence populations grew and living standards declined and, I would expect, the environment would have been degraded also.

This demonstrates that the view that history comprises steady improvements is wrong.

Clearly many societies have progressed phenomenally in some senses since we discovered fossil fuels, but that progress appears unlikely to be sustainable after our endowment of fossil fuels is depleted, that is, unless we act with a sense of urgency now to limit our numbers and act in other ways to care for our environment and our finite endowment of fossil fuels, metals, bore water, soil, etc.

Mil-ob wrote, "No careful selectivity, ..."

Rubbish!

This is the second time you have deliberately left out words which acknowledge that the black deaths were a tragedy for its victims. Mil-ob's quote strangely ends just prior to the parenthesised "(if, obviously, not for the victims)"

I think the lesson to be drawn from this is that people would be well advised to read for themselves the words of those whom mil-ob attacks and not just take his word for it, ...(tobecontinued)

From Jared Diamond's *Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed* (2005), Ch.10 'Malthus in Africa: Rwanda's Genocide' (with thanks for divergence's reference):

"...Rwanda's economic improvement became halted by drought and accumulating environmental problems (especially deforestation, soil erosion, and soil fertility losses), capped in 1989 by a STEEP DECLINE IN WORLD PRICES FOR RWANDA'S PRINCIPAL EXPORTS of coffee and tea, AUSTERITY MEASURES IMPOSED BY THE WORLD BANK..." (my upper case). Diamond thus refers to Rwanda's cash-crop and World Bank debt vulnerabilities as if just added stressors, or even side-effects, of a Malthusian "over-population" problem.

However, if we sought a flowchart of causality in the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, logic would compel us to give early entry, if not primacy, to such entirely artificial and political factors as "austerity measures imposed by the World Bank" and "a steep decline in world prices" for Rwanda's cash crops. Without these oppressive, retarding obstacles, Rwanda's economy and population would not have been vulnerable to the explosive dynamics at work by 1994. In fact, Diamond betrays this fact himself when describing how economic and technological development in densely populated Britain and the Levant prevented any such situation as that seen around the 1994 Rwandan Genocide!

In his chapter on Rwanda, Jared Diamond mentions those matters of cash crop monetarism and World Bank usury just twice, briefly in passing, apparently to either flesh out his discussion or even to just appear learned, if not also to flash some token of "anti-establishment leftism" and "freethinking credibility". But for Diamond to then avoid examining those factors any further, or identifying their causal significance far ahead and above his pet neo-Malthusian "explanation", seems itself to lend his historiography itself a repugnant genocidal quality. Notice how he does not even hint at any reason just why we should not pursue those strategically critical circumstances that render countries like Rwanda so vulnerable, exacerbating as they do intense, and often catastrophic, domestic and foreign pressures.

And Rwanda's place in Jared Diamond's entire book and its summarizing sub-title: "How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed"?

[cont.]

Diamond implies that the Rwandan Genocide was due either to: Rwandan society's "choice" of population density, or; the developed world's "choice" to not enforce limits on Rwanda's population. It's as if Diamond conjures some neoliberalist, free-trade supermarket, with Rwanda out shopping one day: "Now, should we choose the high population density and Malthusian disaster, or opt instead for western European high-tech civilization. But first we just HAVE to get that monetarist cash-crop dependency and seasonal employment slavery, World Bank debts and IMF accountancy!"

Jared Diamond writes sleazy, dishonest history.

[daggett: if it's any consolation, I've focused on Diamond instead because he seems more influentially dangerous than yourself]

[Fester: "You might note that Ethiopia has a per capita debt of about $50...less than one percent of the per capita debt in Australia."

Note that I referred specifically to World Bank-centred debt regimes in Africa, not to the other largely western-based derivatives casino that has overtaken the global economy since let loose post-87. You might find Australia's debt is actually much larger than that when considering its $14 Trillion+ derivatives exposure. Ethiopia would not be in the ball park there, but there is hardly any comparable functions between the two countries' respective debt liabilities. Of course, the two types of "debt regime" have related money trails and interests, but the dynamics have been essentially different in Africa's under-developed condition.

Nonetheless, interesting to consider how the western-based debt flood will inundate hitherto advanced societies in ways that Africa became all too accustomed.

Btw, Mugabe's Zimbabwe underwent embargoes. The background for such bullying against Zimbabwe was:

1) Tony Blair's removal, in the late-1990s, of financial aid (negotiated post-independence war) to compensate for the colonial structures of a largely European-owned agriculture sector. Thereafter, ZANU-PF had no domestic (or economic) justification to fend off veterans' persistent calls for the sector's nationalization.

2. Mugabe and ZANU-PF continued to reject most of the usurious "credit cards" on offer as "development" loans.

But they took his British Empire knighthood off him! As if Mugabe was really cut up about that!]

Sorry, the first sentence in the previous post should have been:

"I note that mil-ob has respond[ed] to hardly any of the points in my most recent posts including two perfectly simple direct questions.

---

(continuedfromabove) ... particularly when he fails to include any actual words of those he attacks, such as Jared Diamond.

(BTW, I happen to think that Jared Diamond's books have limitations and flaws, but they remain groundbreaking and invualuable.)

---

Regarding, mil-ob's cheap shot at me for my election result (his 2nd, so far):

I stood as a candidate, because it seemed unlikely that any other would raise issues that I considered critically important. These included, apart from opposing population growth:

* Opposition to privatisation

* Opposition to Premier Anna Bligh's environmentally criminal plans to triple Queensland's already record high coal exports by 2030;

* Opposition to the destruction of farmland and wildlife refuges in order to increase our coal exports;

* Implementation of a proper full employment program along the lines of that proposed by Professor Bill Mitchell of the Newcastle University The Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE) at http://e1.newcastle.edu.au/coffee/pubs/reports/2008/CofFEE_JA/CofFEE_JA_final_report_November_2008.pdf downloadable from http://e1.newcastle.edu.au/coffee/

* Opposition to water fluoridation and water recycling and the Traveston and Wyaralong dams;

I would have gladly thrown my weight behind any other candidate who would have stood on a platform as broad as mine, but there were none of which I was aware.

The alternatives to standing as a candidate myself would have been:

1. to have tried to raise these issues as an onlooker, rather than a participant in the elections;

2. to be a footsoldier in the Greens' election campaign even though the official Greens' campaign only touched on a fraction of the issues that should have been raised,

3. Campaign whichever of the Labor Party or the Liberal National Party that I judged to be the lesser evil.

4. Do nothing.

I believe the choice I made was sound.

Unfortunately the newsmedia, including Your ABC savagely discriminated against myself, other independents and the Geens.

I have written of this at http://candobetter.org/node/1159 in an ... (tobecontinued)

Daggett has raised an interesting point.

The question must be asked. What are the chances of the Federal Greens running on an anti-population platform?

It would do to them what the GST did to the old Dems. King makes this point and others have as well.

The Greens might try it out at a local level and I they may get some support from the misanthropic, anti-capitalist left but they've got more chance of bringing back Trotsky.

It's quite fascinating how the Unsustainable People lobby use third class evidence to support an unelectable and unsubstantial position.

Lets cut to the chase. They would Enforce their views if they could.

Daggett

Your recollections of an old ABC program and the reported opinions of some of your unnamed mates are not sufficient evidence to support your preposterous claims about pre-conquest Britain.

They weren’t called the dark ages for nothing.

Maddison says:

“In the year 1000, the average infant could expect to live about 24 years. A third would die in the first year of life, hunger and infectious disease would ravage the survivors.”

Doesn’t sound like the 1900s to me.

And you still haven’t responded to my challenge to provide evidence in support of your contention that life expectancy fell in 19th century Britain.

*Religious ideology also contributed to the country's deepening demographic
problems. The majority of Rwanda's population were Catholic. Despite Rwanda's
evident overpopulation, those in the church and government hierarchy not only
refused to promote birth control programs, they actively opposed them. Radical
Catholic pro-life commandos raided pharmacies to destroy condoms with the
approval of the Ministry of the Interior*

A snippet from http://www.du.edu/korbel/hrhw/volumes/2002/2-1/magnarella2-1.pdf

which explains the reasons for genocide in a bit more detail.

I love MOs simplistic analytical skills. Rwanda owed the World Bank
money, commodity prices dropped, ah, that must be the cause of
genocide! Never mind that lots of countries owe the World bank
money or have commmodity prices drop, we will forget all that.

Mugabe has of course shown us all how you can give a man like
Mugabe a country on a plate, with infratructure in place and he
will trash it completely in some cases, given half a chance.

Even now Africa's population is unsustainable, or they would not
need to shoot the remaining wildlife for meat supplies, as they do.
The bushmeat trade is cleaning out the forests, all very sad
really. Clearly in MOs world, other species have no right to a bit
of space on this planet, just wall to wall humans it seems

"You might find Australia's debt is actually much larger than that when considering its $14 Trillion+ derivatives exposure. Ethiopia would not be in the ball park there, but there is hardly any comparable functions between the two countries' respective debt liabilities. Of course, the two types of "debt regime" have related money trails and interests, but the dynamics have been essentially different in Africa's under-developed condition."

I believe that the problems of Ethopia can draw little source from foreign entities. About as much as Yabby would attribute Zimbabwe's collapse to foreign entities I would think. If Mugabe had concentrated on Zimbabwe's development instead of getting even with the foreign settlers, there might have been a few more skilled workers to keep things going today. There comes a time when you have to stop blaming mum and dad and take responsibility for your own circumstances.

I am no fan of the World Bank or the IMF, and no doubt they contributed to the problems that led to the genocide. If they and the Rwandan politicians, who had their own motives for promoting trouble, had all behaved like angels, then the collapse might have been delayed.

To understand why it would have only been delayed and not prevented, you need to put yourselves in the position of a typical Rwandan farmer. You have an area of land equal to three quarter acre blocks, including the land occupied by your house and any outbuildings. Many families have even less. On this land you need to supply all the nutritional needs of 6 people, and quite possibly more. This means growing fruit, vegetables, and legumes, as well as corn or cassava. You also need a cash crop for the goods and services that you cannot grow, make, or provide for yourselves: tools and other agricultural inputs, cloth or clothing, school costs, health care costs, taxes and government charges, etc. Now consider that the population has a doubling time of less than 25 years, so the next generation will have half as much. Only Cheryl or Mil-ob would think that this is a great situation.

Cheryl: there's a scary aspect that I think you miss in this talk of "Malthusian depopping as the Greens' GST" (as stated in King's article too).

Remember that the GST was passed, and now all workers pay that regressive tax - a levelling of tax responsibilities among rich and poor, thereby a more intense stratification between haves and have-nots, and (more disturbingly) between workers/creators and speculators/inheritors. In the bigger economic picture, the haves diverted greater excess of disposable income into more ephemeral activity; the have-nots became more constrained in how much they could contribute to the market of essential goods and services. Over time, bad news for all.

Therefore, GST is part of the furniture now. So what of Malthusian depopping in Australia? Surely the real danger comes from the mainstream party people picking it up and enforcing it by direct or indirect means?

Indications are that they have probably already done so. On a question about water infrastructure, Victorian Premier Brumby stated not so long ago that Melbourne had just "too many people". Then at the federal level, ETS/CRTS, etc., implies anti-population measures where monetarist valuation is applied to every adult and child. Such is the behaviorist quackery in vogue among these model-makers now.

Sure, the anti-people agenda could spiflicate the Greens, which I perceive as no bad thing in itself. But the resulting shrapnel could become more subtle, and thereby more dangerous, when harnessed into the mainstream party apparatus.
---

R.I.P. Jared Diamond: you just got a supportive review from the dag-man himself...perhaps all of Diamond's admirers reek of the beer hall (albeit one where daggett is often seen muttering away to himself, scaring even the most hardened neo-Malthusian genocidalists).

Diamond's sure got company here. Useful to examine their thought processes, away from the glitter of publicists who spruik Diamond's books, TV documentary, even his career.

I put a disclaimer here around Yabby: Yabby backs the bail-out heists, even justifying them on an imagined new "domino theory" without even identifying actual bankruptcy, or distinguishing between such entities as normal commercial banks versus investment banks, hedge funds, etc. Genius!

[cont.]
Yabby seems terribly challenged in discussion of details; much more so in that area we call "nuance" which, for Yabby, would be an entirely foreign country. Yabby finds comfort from single-phrase algebra like: "high population density+resource problems = mass slaughter".

So, my previous (with correction on "Levant"): "However, if we sought a flowchart of causality in the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, logic would compel us to give early entry, if not primacy, to such entirely artificial and political factors as "austerity measures imposed by the World Bank" and "a steep decline in world prices" for Rwanda's cash crops. Without these oppressive, retarding obstacles, Rwanda's economy and population would not have been vulnerable to the explosive dynamics at work by 1994. In fact, Diamond betrays this fact himself when describing how economic and technological development in densely populated Britain and the (low countries) prevented any such situation as that seen around the 1994 Rwandan Genocide!".

Watch the bouncing ball, genocide cheerleaders: "such entirely artificial and political factors" are the difference between surplus production with comfortable, high population on the one hand, and an exploited, vulnerable high population on the other. Fertile Rwanda has been Africa's breadbasket. But undeveloped and exploited by imperialists, Rwanda has had to produce with primitive labor-intensive methods, hence its vulnerable and high population!

To just one of the loaded questions that makes some of these Malthusians seem so proud of themselves when left unanswered...

Q: "...what benefit...from a growing population..."

A: For starters (and forgive the tautologies, inevitable when explaining matters to many neo-Malthusians), there would be more people to settle areas suffering the effects of demographic degeneracy and decrepitude (Australia, Italy, Germany, etc.).

Next is the added bonus of competition. The many dynamic people in the developing world already know this, but it should be stressed here that humanity's evolutionary climb continues to confound the dull and hopeless, overtaking such people as if ridding humanity of the dead weight they represent, gradually improving the gene pool, leaving many people like neo-Malthusians alone with their friends the baboons and bonobo chimps. And Hitler's beloved dog "Blondi".

*Only Cheryl or Mil-ob would think that this is a great situation*

Of course those two can afford to be typical rich, Western, arrogant,
ignorant hypocrites, ignore all empathy for women in the third world
and simply chase their political hobby horses.

Both have the benefit in their own lives, of easy choice about how
many kids to have. Cheryl can run to the pharmacy for the pill,
or have a Norplant, or have her tubes tied, whatever she decides
really, when she decides it. Even a quicky abortion could be sneaked
in between work hours, if the need arose. MO can have the snip, go
pick up his condom supplies at any corner store. He decides how
many kids to have and feed, along with his partner.

So bugger those third world women, they are ok Jack. Lets just
push the political hobby horse in our hypocritical little world.

None can seemingly tell me why those third world women should not
have the same options that they seemgingly take for granted.

According to MO, humanity's evolutinary climb seemingly depends
on more millions of third world women popping out starving babies.
6.5 billion is not enough genetic diversity for him, never mind
educating or feeding the ones we have. Never mind that other species
should be able to have a patch of this planet too. Never mind
biodiversity or sustainability.

Never mind preserving even our closest relatives, bonobos and
chimps, which reveal so much about our own species and share
98% or so of our dna. Just ride that political hobby horse
of his into the dirt, is the answer. Ha!

I thought sooner or later the anti-pops would end up with the Bonobos. It's logical extension of their 'argument'.

You could be right about the GST mil-ob. But turning to the no-kids, one-kid or xxx kids policy of Yabby and his ilk - so Yabby, you reckon Kanck and middle class, white socks and sandle-wearing regressives from the Unsutainable People lobby are going to do third world woment a favour.

Listen: they are advocating sterilisation programs for third world women. Let me say that again. They are advocating sterlisation programs for third world women. Their reproductive rights will be taken from them and delivered in to the hands of the state.

Do you understand that bit.

Secondly, 90 percent of the feral Unsustainable Unpeople lobby reckon it's TOO LATE. They've given up the ghost. We're goners. See ya Gaia. They have shut the gate after them and said, well, all we can do now is limit the fall out. Slash and burn population - in the third world.

I don't believe it's too late but I agree that we should reduce carbon emissions mucho pronto. I know you guys think you're in some avant guard humourless revolutionary 'save us from ourselves mode'. But really, you're just being very silly.

The problem with you Yabby is that you're rabbiting on about the Bonobos while Mil and others have so effectively trounced Kanck and her Unsustainable Unpeople argument.

I'm going off to check my contraceptive device.

it seems freaky that a few nutters get off on phyco babble[little realising the grabbing at straws they resort to in furthering their phocopathic murderous adgenda's]

we long heard how science will feed the world[little realising this feeding of the world would consist of mutating the worlds food supply[that feminises the males..reflecting the wide infertility of the soy/canola/transfats..raised males realise their infertile,..due to femail estrogenes in our waters and foods]

the greenie adgenda is able to achieve both their extreemist aims with the global carbon tax,on both big bu-sin-nes and the useless eaters..[as they see it]

they spout on about giving woman back control over their procreating when the real adgenda is to sterilise them via a racist campain of genocide of the unborn of those deemed infiriour race

we could have plenty if the worlds bread baskets wernt made into war zones...[if kids were given plows not guns..[if food was grown not cotton]

the adgenda to sepperate mankind from the means to produce their own food, has greated giant cities as the kids left the family farm,to go work for food and rent in the multinationals factories

we were sold fluffy dreams in the seventies how oceans of food would be made in seas and deserts..[yet we just create more deserts and have near fished out the sea..[thus we see fishermen turn to piracy]see kids with guns and multinationalistic food cartels raping and plundering the last of the food growers

with carbon credit the final nail in mankinds coffin is fitted..[that may mean shutting down the net first,..but they have proved capable of doing whatever it takes to extinct the human race,..dupont and MON-santos and murdoc...gates,rothchild and the bilderbergers,cfr,imf,world bank have spun their vile murder completly and skillfully..[but by their deeds are revealed and reviled]

[yabbies delusion re 98 percent sameness..[2 percent=3000 mutations]..lol..has been rebutted many times and like most of his other delusions dont even deserve a fullsome corrective response..again.

mil-objectionable wrote, "R.I.P. Jared Diamond: you just got a supportive review from the dag-man himself..."

Huhh!?

This is what I wrote: "I happen to think that Jared Diamond's books have limitations and flaws, but they remain groundbreaking and invaluable."

Because I don't claim that Jared Diamond is absolutely right on every question, mil-ob presumes the right to claim that I accept his complete dismissal of Jared Diamond.

---

I note, mil-ob has finally brought himself to quote Jared Diamond's own words, but, interestingly, not one of which he challenges.

Rather, he attempts to attribute all sorts of nefarious motives to Diamond for either not agreeing with him that the World Bank, globalisation and misgovernment were entirely to blame for Rwanda's genocide or for having omitted other information and thereby not having expanded "Collapse" to a 3,000 page tome.

---

Notwithstanding all of those 43 of Jared Diamond's own words quoted on this one occasion by mil-ob, I think my earlier point stands:

"... the lesson to be drawn from this is that people would be well advised to read for themselves the words of those whom mil-ob attacks and not just take his word for it, ..."

---

The list of points that mil-ob and Cheryl have neither acknowledged nor responded to continues to grow ever longer:

1. Divergence's point about how a typical Rwandan family of six can be fed and have all their needs met on half of the current three quarters of an acre now available to them on average if Rwanda's population doubles in 25 years;

2 Yabby's point that many other countries, that have also been treated poorly by the World Bank and the IMF, have not endured famine and genocide similar to what occurred in Rwanda;

3. My point about Mexico City's current water crisis. Where do mil-ob and Cheryl imagine the water needed by residents of Mexico City after the population doubles again and the aquifers run dry?;

(tobecontinued)

(continuedfromabove)

4. My point about mil-ob's unlimited faith that techno-fixes will provide all the other sources of fresh water needed by a still larger Indian population once the aquifers beneath the Deccan, upon which much of India's agriculture depends, run dry.

5. Two direct questions that I put to mil-ob;

6. etc., etc.

---


Cheryl and mil-ob,

Don't you think it is rather rude to talk of other people in their presence without acknowledging them?

If you are truly conducting a private conversation, and not simply pretending to do so as a ploy to allow you to make unfounded assertions, then why not conduct your conversation off-line?

---

Mil-ob wrote, "On a question about water infrastructure, Victorian Premier Brumby stated not so long ago that Melbourne had just 'too many people'".

Where did John Brumby say that, mil-ob?

What I thought he said was:

"I think we are probably at the limits of growth." (http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24086806-661,00.html)

... and:

"We don't want to push the accelerator even harder and add even more to that rate of growth," he said. "We are not saying halt immigration or stop immigration … but I think current levels are about right and steady as she goes is the right policy."(http://www.theage.com.au/national/brumby-blaming-migrants-20080801-3olu.html?page=-1)

Previously he was pushing population growth as hard and trampling on the rights of Victorian communities to get his way.

For a few brief hours, the calamity that this had brought upon Victorians appeared to have dawned upon him and he momentarily spoke a small amount of sense.

But the pro-growth Victorian media and Opposition jumped on him for having done so, and he has since reverted to his anti-democratic pushing of breakneck population growth to suit his developer and other corporate benefactors (See http://candobetter.org/taxonomy/term/481)

---

In regard to Cheryl and mil-ob's attempt to depict the situation being one in which a small unrepresentative elite are seeking to impose population stability on the rest of the country, Bob Hawke boasted in 1993 that his government had imposed 'elite as opposed to popular views on immigration' ("Overloading Australia"(2008) pp104-105, Mark O'Connor and William Lines.)

*Let me say that again. They are advocating sterlisation programs for third world women. Their reproductive rights will be taken from them and delivered in to the hands of the state.*

So there we have it Cheryl. Because some woman in SA is seemingly
advocating that third world women should lose their reproductive
rights, you refuse to ackowledge my point that third world women
should have reproductive rights as you have.

I point out to you dear, that many lost them a long time ago,
hijacked by the Catholic Church etc, as we can see in Rwanda.

Now the Catholic Church might well want more little Catholics
to increase its numbers, but if they denied you your reproductive
rights of choice, you would be screaming from the rooftops.

Now I'm not asking you to think deeply, for clearly you are busy
with your contraceptive device. I'm not even asking you to think
about a world without other species. But at least show that you
are not a hypocrite and concede my point.

If it is genocide to give women in developing countries control of their fertility, then isn't it also genocide to give women the same right in Australia? Perhaps it is a bit like mo's debt argument, where a $50 per capita debt in Ethopia represents a conspiracy of similar breadth to the elders of zion, whereas a per capita debt perhaps hundreds of times greater in Australia is a totally different fish. To believe such things must surely be akin to accepting a religious dogma.

Of course I am against conducting a campaign of genocide in the undeveloped world, but I am in favour of giving women rights which they enjoy in the developed world. What they do with those rights is their own business.

*To believe such things must surely be akin to accepting a religious dogma.*

Fester, I think you will find that MO largely parrots the beliefs
of his favourite guru, Lyndon LaRouche. Yup, they are
very much like a religious cult.

i see the destractions are still festering[so ignoring the gabby i will respond to the quote from fester<<..If it is genocide to give women in developing countries control of their fertility,then isn't it also genocide to give women the same right in Australia?>>>..no its not[by and large it comes down to the conspiricy a-thiests creating miss-info

to claim educated modern/australian woman is in any way equivelent to impoverished uneducated/peasents getting mass-sterilised in ethiopia[by ngo's feigning compassion is absurd],..its genocide by racists seeking to take over the mineral-wealth of those they regard as infiriour darkies..[at kindest]

<<Perhaps it is a bit like mo's debt argument,where a $50 per capita debt in Ethopia represents a conspiracy of similar breadth to the elders of zion,>>oh dear a clever likage..[that demands the proof the elders of zion is a conspiricy[..for egsample the disclosed plan[who would bother to write a plan..that well concieved..for an enemey?

we see it being fullfilled as we speak..[at worst if it isnt written by zionista conspiricy,it is prophetic..[to anyone knowing the manipulations inherant is usa politics and global/banking and the law and media..,in investement and news gathering..[or policing and warfare,..he plan clearly is being followed by some natzi/zionists[however much those supporting greater israel..may seek to decry it as conspiricy]

<<whereas a per capita debt perhaps hundreds of times greater in Australia is a totally different fish.>>baulderdash..[where the 100 times greater debt?]..reveal the 50 dollar compared..debt/equity ratio..to validate your absurdities

<<To believe such things must surely be akin to accepting a religious dogma.>>..or maybe the postulating it as an absurdity is serving some special intrest?..a..[potentially genocidal,surely racist,and surly colluded/planed and exicuted,by an intrenched and influential elite..over yet another indigenant race

<<What they do with those rights is their own business.>>..words are cheap[your other words reveal volumes]..

before sterilising'them'..educate and feed and house'them'..[then make sure those stealing their assets stop their thievery]..and the murder/rape/pillage of war

[you might begin with those who built up this 50 dollar debt over their heads..[which peasent qualified for the debt?

[they didnt get the cash..[why they get the debt?]

Cheryl:

Kanck's mob gets official support from the likes of "Australian of the Year" Tim Flannery (It's specified on SPA's site). Flannery, in turn, has had a dream run from ongoing support - and obviously guidance - via such oligarch-corporate outfits as The Wentworth Group. The mainstream potential from such quackery is obvious. Expect to see it touted on ABC TV's apparatchik-group carbon emission program "Q & A".

Remember Flannery's the guy who mooted a plan to pump sulphur into the atmosphere "in order to stop Global Warming", etc. Crackpot? Nah, Oz of the Year!

If its "forced sterilization" they want, then Kissinger's NSSM 200 from 1974 offers the original effort in that direction. Under NSSM 200, developing countries were compelled to apply not only dodgy contraception (like the notoriously unsafe Dalcon Shield IUD), but also sterilization, and via the usual monetarist big sticks of loan conditions at the national level, with meagre welfare handouts down at the street level.

The mainstream potential for Malthusian templates is clear from its institutional and strategic precedents and media publicity.

So who is actually promoting "forced sterilisation"?

It seems to be mainly in the minds of well known OLO conspiracy
theorists MO and UOG.

Meantime both posters have the choice to benefit from modern
family planning, as part of their lives.

Neither poster has the empathy or testicles to admit that third
world people should have the same rights as they take for granted.

Both posters would be screaming from the rooftops if the Govt
denied them and their families these rights.

Both posters seem to know better then African women, what is best
for African women. Perhaps they should let third world women
decide these things, not try to force their own crazy agendas
on the rest of us.

i suggest you educate yourself on the topic gabby
forced sterilisation
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=MEDA,MEDA:2008-36,MEDA:en-GB&ei=Zc8HSun_CYHi7APbuMGnAw&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=family+planning+is+forced+sterilization&spell=1

involentary sterilisation
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=MEDA,MEDA:2008-36,MEDA:en-GB&q=involuntary+sterilization&revid=564450877&ei=3s8HSrX-J4TG6APeiemoAw&sa=X&oi=revisions_inline&resnum=0&ct=broad-revision&cd=4

population eugenics
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=MEDA%2CMEDA%3A2008-36%2CMEDA%3Aen-GB&q=population+eugenics&btnG=Search

maybe reading about preaching sterilisation
http://books.google.com/books?id=DrKgIIxCHVIC&pg=PA46&lpg=PA46&dq=sterilization+catholic+church&source=bl&ots=Ch-lQkt6OI&sig=GjTO-spleJ25FXPLGoFwWhxdcZo&hl=en&ei=mNAHSsecGobk7APKzqClAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7

even going so far as the catholics taking about it
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=MEDA,MEDA:2008-36,MEDA:en-GB&q=sterilization+catholic+church&revid=564450877&ei=3s8HSrX-J4TG6APeiemoAw&sa=X&oi=revisions_inline&resnum=0&ct=broad-revision&cd=2

how about eugenics
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=MEDA,MEDA:2008-36,MEDA:en-GB&q=eugenics+forced+sterilization&revid=564450877&ei=3s8HSrX-J4TG6APeiemoAw&sa=X&oi=revisions_inline&resnum=0&ct=broad-revision&cd=3

ngo's forced sterilisation is revalotory
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=MEDA%2CMEDA%3A2008-36%2CMEDA%3Aen-GB&q=ngo%27s+forced+sterilization&btnG=Search

so is indiginous sterilisation
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=MEDA%2CMEDA%3A2008-36%2CMEDA%3Aen-GB&q=indigenouse++forced+sterilization&btnG=Search

or try the eugenics adgenda
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=MEDA%2CMEDA%3A2008-36%2CMEDA%3Aen-GB&q=eugenics+adgenda&btnG=Search

or think to ask eugenics WHY?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=MEDA%2CMEDA%3A2008-36%2CMEDA%3Aen-GB&q=eugenics+why%3F&btnG=Search

mate if your not getting it..[your not trying to find out the facts of the matter]

maybe its time to name names
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=MEDA%2CMEDA%3A2008-36%2CMEDA%3Aen-GB&q=eugenics+name+names&btnG=Search

No thinning of vegetation, but plenty of support for the thinning of our families human population!! That's life, Now we know who has their priorities right, and which prescribed species will survive when this human trash has gone and the vegetation species continue to roam as the hardiest dominant inhabitant. I'll bet, that vegetation is hardier than these misguided lost souled human thinning experts. But whats new, when the greens can hug, talk and form relationships with trees and their cousin types in conjunction with politicians from planet possible.

Well, some people like to interpret an Ayn Randian view for the term "forced" i.e., holding people at gunpoint. Such snake-oilers try the same superficial and limited distortion for the term "fascist" too; studies since Gramsci confirm in detail the much subtler enticement, persuasion, coercion and compulsion that characterize fascist behavior.

NSSM 200 effectively "forced" much sterilization in the developing world, as in East Timor, for example (another Kissinger-backed program for friendly free-trade swindler Soeharto). These are simple historical facts, uncontroversial and widely sourced from explicit public records and studies. Probably no YouTube on it yet...

But there was rarely any explicit and direct "forcing" by individuals against other individuals; it was really through institutional and systemic conditions of extortion and coercion. That's how free-trade debt regimes and empires usually operate, since Roman times: the conditions of loans, their top-ups, and interest terms, etc., all have strings attached in details of strategic policy.

I state all this for the record on this forum only, and not as some engagement with any of the "feedback fruitloops", who will certainly keep up their desperate efforts at "conspiracy" smear, etc.

mil-observer,Ask the greens what a soul is and their likely response would be a type of soup.

UOG

"<<whereas a per capita debt perhaps hundreds of times greater in Australia is a totally different fish.>>baulderdash..[where the 100 times greater debt?]..reveal the 50 dollar compared..debt/equity ratio..to validate your absurdities"

The 2007 figure is actually over 1000 times when comparing per capita debt between Ethiopia and Australia. Ireland's per capita debt (2007) is over 10,000 times that of Ethiopia's.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_deb_ext_percap-economy-debt-external-per-capita

Hey, but all that African population increase might not be all bad. MO claims:

"Next is the added bonus of competition. The many dynamic people in the developing world already know this, but it should be stressed here that humanity's evolutionary climb continues to confound the dull and hopeless, overtaking such people as if ridding humanity of the dead weight they represent, gradually improving the gene pool, leaving many people like neo-Malthusians alone with their friends the baboons and bonobo chimps. And Hitler's beloved dog "Blondi"."

Wow, so all that mass of humanity is cooking up an uber kind as per Nazi philosophy. But hang on, according to Cheryl all those arguing the benefits of a stable population are closet Nazis. So surely I should agree with MO? Perhaps if MO could provide evidence that overcrowding is a driver of human advancement I might be more enthusiastic.

All I have argued for in this thread is for all women to have access to contraception. Perhaps I should expand that to giving access to contraception to all men as well. How does this make me a Nazi?

And a little more about corruption vs conspiracy as a cause of Africa's lack of development. The African Union has released a report estimating an annual cost of $150 billion for corruption in Africa.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/2265387.stm

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/101817

I think the articles outline a more logical cause than the belief in a malicious conspiracy of the developed world. Call me a heretic if you wish. If you prefer to sit in your easy chair, comfy and cosy with your ignorance and dogmas, then so be it.

Ok UOG, we know that you are proud that you learned to use your
google bar, claimed as a gift from god. Mine came from Google :)

Clearly you have no knowledge or opinion of your own.

Now we all know about China's one child policy. Apart from that,
nobody has named a country which enforces sterilisation. Yet
we can show many countries which deny women modern family planning.
So your hysteria is unfounded and you can show no good reasons why
third world women should be denied their rights.

Fact is that we know, when people are given a choice, they opt
for smaller families. Its one of the most helpful ways to get
out of poverty. Adding 80 million a year to the planets population,
mainly in third world countries where people are hungry, hardly
adds to the standard of living or quality of life for these people.

So I agree with Fester, give them choices about their lives, do
not deny them rights which we take for granted, including yourselves.

Fester, thanks for the interesting links

Apols, I left when we started talking about Bonobos.

Yabby, me thinks you spin too much. Go back to the original article and see what Kanck and Unsustainable Unpeople are proposing. They want to shrink the size of the Australian pop to 7 million. How are they going to do that.

Me, the UN and many other posters here who are railing againts the anti-populationists are all for women's rights to reproductive choice in the Third World. All for education.

Look, I know that you know that Kanck and the Unsustainable People argument is tottering on the edge of madness. You seem to have some good ideas and at least you're making some strong, reasoned comments.

Do you really think we're going back to 7M.
Do you really think we're going to collapse our trade back to what it was in 1929.
Do you really think that African nations give a flying fig about the Unsustainable People in little old Adelaide.

Finally, do you really, really think we're all going to hell in a handbasket based solely on population.

No. We'll educate and adapt. We should be talking about how Africa copes with their expanding urban areas. There's an issue.

MALTHUS, IMPERIALISM AND THE “RACE” DELUSION

As I stated many times on OLO and elsewhere, the concept of “race” as a system of divisions within humanity is, by definition, racist and scientifically absurd. It is profoundly misleading and immoral, because all people – even the most deluded in-breeds among royal houses and aristocrats – are comprised ultimately of mixture, indeed often much the healthier where most diversely mixed “hybrid vigor”-style. Except for “the human race”, any concept of “race” is itself “racist” poison, at once an insult and insidious threat to us all.

Therefore, consider the words of Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in international law. A “genocidal act” is defined, inter alia, as: "imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group". In this sense, any incentives or deterrents meant to encourage contraception and sterilization are clearly genocidal (just as they could be even more definitively “Malthusian” in this discussion's context). Of course, it is well known that the Convention was drafted in response to, and in mistaken acceptance of, basic and primitive notions around that “race” concept, which were hitherto propagated so murderously by fascists before and during the Second World War.

Despite persistent and widespread confusion and distraction around “race” mythologies, international law determines that perpetrators of genocide are guilty of “crimes against humanity”. That implicit defence for all “humanity” reminds us further that genocide is an act not just against some arbitrarily defined segment or culture within humanity, but against all of us together (whatever the perpetrators' delusions around what constitutes “human” or particular “races”, etc.).

How typically and more obviously “fascist” those who would encourage, coerce and/or compel population controls over developing countries! That broader and appropriate context of “race” i.e., “the human race”, simply reminds us of the universally genocidal quality of Malthusian advocacy for controls over developing countries' populations since 1945, whether targeted in isolation or as a collective entity termed “the third world”, etc.

[cont.]
And this forum has exposed several people indulging in an obsessive and condescending emphasis on demographic conditions in such developing countries. To highlight the irrational i.e., “obsessive” quality of their focus, these people have resorted to casual hyperbole when referring to those countries' populations e.g., “breeding like rabbits”, “living like ants”, “standing room only”, etc., as if people in developing countries have no really human faculties of reason, cognition, self-control, or adjustment to their environment, but instead an unchecked savagery, indeed beastliness. Such explicit dehumanization of entire populations is not only a typically fascist mentality; it is a fascist specialization.

But as we also know from the pompous theories of eugenicists and similarly fascist crackpots, such “population controls”, as implied in Malthusian dogma, inevitably express a brutal self-selection of privileged, superior “survivors”, supposedly ordained for their special sensitivity to, and place in, a stagnant and discriminatory hierarchy or “natural order”. Combined with Malthusians' arrogant disdain for their targets' supposedly animalistic and unchecked “breeding tendencies”, such delusional high self-regard is also characteristic of that peculiarly “fascist” level of deep narcissism and revanchist feudalism.

These are just some of the main reasons why we hate fascists, and why we are 100% right to seek them out, expose them, and wage war on them. Our cause is for humanity, and the special promise of further discovery and advancement that civilization promises. Our fight is for a clear-headed appreciation of humanity's special faculties and potential above and beyond the beasts, and against the alienated narcissism that would regard other humans as beasts, while delighting in – and exaggerating – any evidence that their targets somehow distinguish themselves by beastly behavior, for example. That last point explains fascists' enjoyment over cases of corruption in developing countries, and the fascist narcissism that minimizes even ignores the political and strategic origins of such corruption i.e., in the black hearts, perverse minds, and depraved machinations of fascists and other imperialists themselves.

Cheryl wrote, "Go back to the original article ..."

Cheryl then wrote, "They want to shrink the size of the Australian pop to 7 million."

Where did Sandra Kanck say that, Cheryl?

Perhaps, Cheryl, herself, needs to "go back to the original article".

---

Rhian wrote, "Your recollections of an old ABC program and ... are not sufficient evidence to support your preposterous claims about pre-conquest Britain."

Perhaps my recollections are not sufficient to conclusively establish that to be the case, but at the moment, in regard to the pre-Norman Britain, they are no less substantial than your own sources.

You have yet to show that Maddison's measures of prosperity back then are any more accurate than the way GDP is in the 20th and 21st centuries.

See, for example, this review of Dr Jeffrey Sachs' "The End of Poverty":

There are many (African or South American) villages where “basic needs” of their residents as they conceive them are satisfied, but whose collective income is less than $365 a year per person. Are these villagers extremely poor and, if so, in what way?

Technically, (a) is a “use value” definition while (b) is an “exchange value” definition. ... For example, in many villages in Africa adults (including, in certain areas, women) have access to (although not ownership of) land that they can use for subsistence. This is an enormous wealth (“use value”) that cannot be alienated and hence does not have an “exchange value.” ... (http://info.interactivist.net/node/4530)

end-of-quote

Later he makes the point that anyone American receiving only $1 per day, even though by economists' definitions is no poorer than those Africans and Latin American villagers.

I suspect that Maddison's way of measuring the prosperity of pre-Norman are similarly flawed as would also be the incomes of people living in rural England in comparison to those living in Manchester in England in 1842.

Maddison's claims that the life expectancy of the life expectancy of people in England born in 1000 being only 24 years are certainly disputed by other historians. I would like to know the basis of his estimates.

The third last sentence above, should have been, "Later he makes the point that anyone American receiving only $1 per day, even though by economists' definitions is no poorer than those Africans and Latin American villagers [would be soon dead]."

Also, my point 3 about Mexico City should have ended:

"Where do mil-ob and Cheryl imagine the water needed by residents of Mexico City after the population doubles again and the aquifers run dry [will come from]?

---

Like Fester, I was also most impressed by mil-ob's point:

"... it should be stressed here that humanity's evolutionary climb continues to confound the dull and hopeless, overtaking such people as if ridding humanity of the dead weight they represent, gradually improving the gene pool ..."

Interesting that many employers and landlords also welcome the "bonus of competition" for jobs and housing driven by overcrowding.

---

As for mil-ob's latest hysterical, self-righteous rant:

Note how it still fails to even acknowledge any of the 5 points listed in my previous post, nor does it respond to my question asking him to substantiate the quote he attributed to John Brumby, nor does it respond to my point about how Bob Hawke imposed "elite as opposed to popular views on immigration", nor to almost countless other arguments made by other contributors.

*many other posters here who are railing againts the anti-populationists are all for women's rights to reproductive choice in the Third World.*

Cheryl, that is a refreshning admission on your behalf and is what
people like myself and Fester are proposing. It is certainly not
the common view on this thread. UOG seems to think we want to knock
off those black fellas, MO wants to call it genocide. OLO is not
short of fruit loops :)

The good thing about liberal democracies is that we can tolerate
extremists like these posters and voters, but the large majority
of people usually show some common sense.

See the big picture here. Clearly if humanity does want to survive
long term, global human population has to be sustainable. Biology will
tell you that for that to happen, we'll need some biodiversity.

Right now humanity is not living sustainably, we are simply relying
on cheap oil to get by. So the question does need to be addressed,
how many humans can the planet handle and still be sustainable?
I think its at least now open for discussion, which has to be
a good thing. Australia's optimal population? Again its open
for discussion.

MO, your very own personal guru, LaRouche, is often called a fascist.

http://www.laroucheplanet.info/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Cult.Ideologies

.

Daggett

GDP measures for distant periods of time are based on direct measures of output and therefore not subject to the undercount of the non-cash economy that might apply to GDP estimates for developing economies today.

Anyway, the quote I supplied from Maddison refers to life expectancy, not GDP. Life expectancy data for those periods are derived from archaeological evidence, mainly grave sites. These are sufficient to demonstrate that few people lived to what we’d consider old age (or even middle age), many died as children, and those that made it to adulthood suffered hunger and disease. Hence low life expectancy.

Maddison is an internationally respected source. You have supplied no sources whatsoever. I repeat, where is the evidence to support your claim that “Prior to [the Norman conquest], the quality of life in much of England, in terms of life expectancy came pretty close to what we have enjoyed in Western Countries in the 20th century.”

Yabby, Fester et al

I fully support moves to give people in developing countries the same fertility rights that I have. So I don’t support the anti-birth-control agendas of e.g. the Roman Catholic church, nor the coercive pro-birth-control agendas of the Chinese government and some others. Let people make their own choices about how many children they have. I believe we have no right to try to push them either way. Do you agree?

Rhian wrote, "You have supplied no sources whatsoever. I repeat, where is the evidence to support your claim that 'Prior to [the Norman conquest], the quality of life in much of England, in terms of life expectancy came pretty close to what we have enjoyed in Western Countries in the 20th century.'"

If the evidence in regard to life expectancy is not at hand, there is certainly evidence in regard to height:

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/medimen.htm

MEN FROM EARLY MIDDLE AGES WERE NEARLY AS TALL AS MODERN PEOPLE (1 Sep 2004 (or 9 Jan 2004(?))

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Northern European men living during the early Middle Ages were nearly as tall as their modern-day American descendants, a finding that defies conventional wisdom about progress in living standards during the last millennium.

Richard Steckel

"Men living during the early Middle Ages (the ninth to 11th centuries) were several centimeters taller than men who lived hundreds of years later, on the eve of the Industrial Revolution," said Richard Steckel, a professor of economics at Ohio State University and the author of a new study that looks at changes in average heights during the last millennium.

"Height is an indicator of overall health and economic well-being, and learning that people were so well-off 1,000 to 1,200 years ago was surprising," he said.

Steckel analyzed height data from thousands of skeletons excavated from burial sites in northern Europe and dating from the ninth to the 19th centuries. Average height declined slightly during the 12th through 16th centuries, and hit an all-time low during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Northern European men had lost an average 2.5 inches of height by the 1700s, a loss that was not fully recovered until the first half of the 20th century.

...

*Let people make their own choices about how many children they have. I believe we have no right to try to push them either way. Do you agree?*

Rhian, that is the gist of it.

I spent some time in Africa when I was younger, I guess that is why
I care about this issue, I saw the other side. Women dying from
knitting needle jobs etc.

There is this common perception that everyone in Africa wants to
have huge families, that is not the case. Much like us, they enjoy
sex and if one enjoys sex without proper family planning alternatives,
more and more babies are the result, wanted or not.

The cost and availability of family planning are a huge issue in
Africa, unlike us, who hardly give it a second thought.

The West really went through a revolution with the advent of the
pill in the 60s and 70s, smaller families were the result. Where it
was not freely available, ie Ireland, smuggling the pill into that
country became big business, as that is what consumers wanted, much
to the disgust of the Catholic Church.

There are many claims that one needs economic development for people
to have smaller families in the third world. Well yes, for with
economic development, people can actually afford contraception and
are educated enough to put their Govts in place, when they try to
deny them these basic rights.

But if we provide third world women the same options that we take
for granted, you would be amazed how they would respond, for even they
realise that feeding and educating 3 kids rather then 8, makes perfect
sense.

A real piece of work: “There are many claims that one needs economic development for people to have smaller families in the third world. Well yes...But if we provide third world women the same options that we take for granted, you would be amazed how they would respond, for even they realise that feeding and educating 3 kids rather then 8, makes perfect sense.”

Therefore, lip service to the notion of some socio-economic justice for the developing world, followed by what actual effort at “development” assistance? Contraception! “Here, we care about you so much we want you to have the CHOICE of depleting your human capital and its hope for freedom, development and civilization. Err, sorry, we'll have to suggest that drinking water project later, once you can save up from those pittance-sales of tea harvests. Anyway, it's clearly 'unsustainable'. And those Chinese-built dams in the Sudan! How 'unsustainable' too, and an obvious cause of 'human rights abuses'”, etc.

Offer much-discounted contraceptive pills to Africa, after scum like Al Gore successfully led the campaign AGAINST African rights to generic AIDS medicines.

“But the choice to not reproduce is far more important than any of that”, the fascists say. That way, onerous debt to the west, corrupt opportunist-puppets, cash crops, malnutrition, and cynically manipulated warfare can all do their job with no replenishment of population.

Once again, the prescription is genocide...

Even on its simplest level of logic, such sleazy argument is rather like Bill Gates' infamous donation of computers to central African communities that had no electricity infrastructure.

A fascist in liberalist costume is still a fascist, just a more slippery variety.

Smash 'em hard folks, just like it's the Nuremberg trials all over again.

[I used to go yabbying with friends when I was unemployed. Good cooking and eating, but always best to squeeze out the brown runny goo from their head area. Make doubly sure in this case – it's toxic]

MO, you do a great job at shooting down your own strawman arguments.
Clearly you are having fun with yourself!

If you believe that people using family planning is so called
"genocide", that is what you believe. Tell that to 99% of thinking
Australians and they will roll about laughing, for family planning
is indeed considered as a right here and fair enough.

But cases like yourself, who have a guru, are a bit like the Jehohavas
Witnesses, fringe dweller true believers who don't let logic or
reason interfere with their beliefs. Fair enough, our society is
tolerant enough to leave space for eccentrics.

Bob Geldorf learnt one thing, after his campaigns to feed the poor
in Africa. Twenty years later, there were twice as many to feed,
as those boatloads of food had solved nothing, just created even
more starving babies.

If you think that forcing women to have ever more children that they
don't want, if you think ever more starving babies is good for
Africa, then so be it. I actually have some empathy for the people
there and wish they had a choice, as I have, in order for them
to turn their lives and continent around.

Actually I thought mil-ob's last contribution was witty, uplifting and tasteful, especially the part about how he prepares crustaceans for eating.

I think, from now on, we should all seek to emulate mil-ob's fine example by ignoring each other's arguments (that is if, on our part, we can find any to ignore) and instead, calling each other names.

Actually, we ought to appreciate mil-ob's and Cheryl's style of argument: the personal abuse and insults, and the failure to seriously address issues raised by others, such as Africans who actually want access to contraceptives, environmental limits, and lack of resources to raise 6.7 billion, let alone 9 billion or 12 billion, people to First World standards, even with the resources all divided equally, etc. They are really hurting their own cause. Once a person starts namecalling, he or she has already lost the argument. Rhian understands this and probably wishes that mil-ob and Cheryl agreed with us and not him.

Daggett,

I appreciate your reference on the heights. It agrees with my links on real incomes over this period. I doubt how much weight we can put on small differences in life expectancy for periods when infectious diseases were the biggest killers of rich and poor alike. Chance and genetic susceptibility might have been the most important factors. Similarly, GDP per capita says nothing about distribution. See

http://lanekenworthy.net/2008/03/09/the-best-inequality-graph/

Nope, I just won the argument, in detial, point-for-point with some clever if differently motivated support from others opposed to the neo-Malthusian depopulation lies.

"Fascist" is simply the practical conclusive assessment for the twisted and dishonest neo-Malthusians. That way, we know clearly what further political agendas will accompany their claims now that debt-austerity and mega-bailout redesign the strategic map of globalizing imperialism.

And then, if people were supposed to have lost when resorting to labels, then most of these clowns lost against me shortly after my first post in this thread.

*Nope, I just won the argument, in detial, point-for-point*

Hehe MO, in your little mind perhaps, nowhere else.

Just because you claim something, does not make it so. Like
I pointed out, go and tell your average person that because they
use family planning methods, they are committing genocide.
Careful that they don't lock you up lol.

If you read the link that I provided, the LaRouche movement
calls nearly everyone who disagrees with them, fascists. Perhaps
you guys need to buy a dictionary one of these days.

Sorry fella, but you are fighting a losing cause, no wonder
your party is largely ignored at the elections.

Fact is most people do care about the environment, don't want to
trash the planet for ever more humans and realise that other
species should have a bit of space too. Nope the WWF is not
an evil organisation lol.

But keep kidding yourself in your own mind, imagine as much as
you want.

Malthus' latter-day troglodytes are getting another hammering at a related forum. See:

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8911&page=0

This broader "debate" on the environment really puts them into their wider perspective now. No liberalist "free choice for contraception" hidey-hole there!

Quite right Mil Ob, and they will always get hammered as long as they equate people with units. They will be met by people across the political spectrum who find their imperialistic sterlisation programs and far right thinking abhorrent.

The anti-populationists are a seed of thinking that our fathers and grandfathers fought in Europe and Asia. They equate human life with that of ants. They make no logical or moral distinction. They are socio-biologists who side with Mao over Mill.

They have been beaten here and else where by logic and common sense but they won't give up. They are anti-humanist fanatics, bent on not only over throwing capitalism but co-opting women's reproductive rights and placing them in the hands of the state.

They use green politics to creep in to every section of modern life. They are cuckoos who side with the Greens but their intent is insidious and malevolent.

The question of why some countries enjoy higher living standards than others is pertinent. The reality is that a high living standard for an Earth with many billions can only be achieved with advanced technology, an educated population, and substantial infrastructure. The reality is that undeveloped countries with high population growth rates have no hope of meeting the cost of development, and so their populations will remain undeveloped cesspits of misery. If I were to hate such people, I would wish for no more than the status quo. But people like myself, Yabby, Rhian et al do not hate these people. Although we have differing opinions on many things, there is complete agreement amongst us on the issue of the right of people to access contraception.

Accusations of genocide and a debt conspiracy of the developed world as causes of the undeveloped world are the preserve of those not reliant on evidence. The belief that such places produce superior human beings is Nazism on steroids. For the rest of us the corruption, depravity and lack of development, compounded by high rates of population growth, are all too clear as causes.

Sheesh Cheryl, you and MO are not the brightest posters, you really
arn't.

All these little boxes that you imagine. FYI, the far right are
busy preaching abstinence over family planning. Preaching
crossing your legs for Jesus, has been a dismal failure, as the
evidence shows.

MO is actually against capitalism, for his guru believes it leads
to fascism.

Warren Buffet, hardly a paid up member of the greens, can see the
danger of simply too many people, for a sustainable planet.
You have yet to specify how many people the earth should accomodate
at anyone time, how many in Australia. Go on, be a devil, put
your figures on it.

I note that neither of you live in the slums of Calcutta or Bombay.
Go and ask people there, what their major problem is. They will
soon tell you, too many people.

Fact is that the population continues to increase by 80 million
a year and its not sustainable. Its basic biology 101.

MOs guru even believes that your taxes should pay to feed the ever
growing mass in the third world. Are you prepared to pay ever more
tax, to feed the extra 80 million a year?

So there is in fact a simple solution. Stop forcing third world women
to have children that they don't want, due to a lack of contraception.
Let them decide how many children that they want to raise, just
like you and MO can choose.

No forced sterilisation anywhere. More food, education and resources
focussed on those kids who are loved and wanted, a win-win for
all.

Quite logical and rational, but seemingly way above your intelligence
level to understand.

I think you got it in a nutshell, Cheryl (pun intentional - we've shelled these nutters into pathetic diversions and provocations on this one).

On this issue especially, whatever our apparent tactical differences, I heed the lesson that we should never relax our guard when identifying those recidivist types who casually degrade other people as "sub-human" i.e., "ants", "rabbits", etc.

They hang themselves by their own vile attitudes to humanity and civilization.

mil-ob wrote, "we've shelled these nutters into pathetic diversions and provocations on this one."

(I am not quite sure what the 'diversions' and 'provocations' that mil-ob was referring to were, but, putting aside that minor quibble) I think both mil-ob and Cheryl should be congratulated for their magnificent victory on this forum.

It would be small-minded of we recidivist, fascist, elitist Malthusians to not acknowledge that their achievement is all the more remarkable for their having done so having acknowledged or responded to almost none of the arguments put to them by the rest of us.

---

Fester, Yabby and others: I do think that exploitation of Third World countries by the corporate elites, as well as population growth, is a critical factor in the world today.

I recommend you read Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" of 2007 to learn more about this. It's a towering work and absolutely riveting on nearly every page as many to whom I have recommended the book have attested.

However, "The Shock Doctrine" still has a few flaws and limitations. One is its disregard of immigration and population growth as a factor compounding the plight of the world's poor. Sheila Newman has written of this in the article "Why is Naomi Klein uncritical of mass immigration to the First World?" of 27 August 2008 at http://candobetter.org/node/686

(The other flaw, although somewhat off-topic in this discussion, is Naomi Klein's failure to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that the Bush administration, itself, orchestrated the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 - the absolute mother of all 'shocks' in the service of what Klein labels 'disaster capitalism', I would have thought. (Interesting that mil-ob, who has congratulated me in other places for having spoken out on the issue of 9/11, still chooses to label me as a genocidal, elitist, fascist monarchist on most other occasions, including here.) For more information, visit the "9/11 Truth" forum at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2166&page=0)

Good to see such recognition for a Stalingrad-style thumping against fascism.

But no response to genocidalists' arguments? Let's recall those arguments again: "finite resources", "breeding like rabbits", and "soon there'll be standing room only". Oh, he means rather that we didn't answer every silly leading question!

Yeah, if the dag-man gets his peerage from them, he'll call us on such flagrant disrespect for his interrogation here: "Ve haff vays of making you talk"!

mil-ob wrote, "Good to see such recognition for a Stalingrad-style thumping against fascism."

Yeah, whatever, mil-ob.

I guess someone will have to take you aside one day and explain to you concepts such as sarcasm and irony.

mil-ob wrote, "he means rather that we didn't answer every silly leading question!"

Like asking where John Brumby stated that there were 'too many people' or your basis for labelling John Brumby a Malthusian rather than the irresponsible population growth pusher that he is?

Or taking exception to your idiotic inference that if one is critical in any way of someone such as Jared Diamond, that we necessarily concede that none of what he says is any good?

Or challenging your insistence that we place all our faith on unproven technologies instead of taking prudent precautions?

etc, etc, etc.

---

If you choose to avoid making your stances clear by not answering perfectly simple straightforward questions, then that's fine by me, mil-ob.

However, I think I am entitled to draw the attention of others to your silence and allow them to come to their own conclusions.

mo

The idea that you can use a person's stance on population as a measure of their morality is stupid. Look at the history of the RC Church in South America. An advocate of population growth, yet their mo was one of exterminating the intelligentsia and destroying records of culture: In short, a cultural genocide.

Perhaps you and Cheryl might provide me with some compelling evidence for believing that a person's morality correlates with his attitude toward population growth.

Speaking of "silly", what's "cultural genocide"?

A pretty rancid-tasting red herring, only with some pointedly anti-catholic bigotry to wash it down.

mil-ob asks, "what's 'cultural genocide'?"

I would have thought it referred to what colonial nations did to (usually ecologically sustainable) indigenous cultures so that the people from those cultures could be used as fodder (either as slaves or on low wages) in ecologically unsustainable monoculture agriculture or in factories to serve the needs of the colonial nation. The church hierarchies of the colonial nations, both Catholic and Protestant were used as a tool to destroy those native cultures.

I would have thought that all this would have been second nature to the outspoken opponent of injustice that mil-ob purports to be, but it would seem not.

Rather, it seems that mil-ob shares the colonial rulers' disdain for indigenous cultures and views their destruction (as is now threatened in the Peruvian Amazon (see http://www.rainforestportal.org/shared/alerts/send.aspx?id=peru_amazon http://candobetter.org/node/1300)) as necessary for progress.

---

Perhaps, mil-ob was attempting to divert our attention from his own failure to substantiate anything he had written with documentary evidence or with any direct quotes from those he attacks by accusing Fester of using a term that may possibly be viewed by some anthropologists as less than rigorously scientific, namely "cultural genocide".

If so, it would be yet another example of someone in a glass house casting a stone.

---

It seems that this whole discussion is being re-run in the discussion forum "Anti-populationists - the new imperialists" by the same author, Malcolm King, at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8990&page=0 http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8990&page=0

As yet mil-ob has not joined in. Let's hope this situation endures.

Yeah, the Dag would've thought that, because the Dag can't see through an implicit tautology even when one infects his mind and takes over the wheel for a while (sharing the driver's seat, of course, with other controlling entities).