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.