Pericles asks:

"Sorry, what was the question again?"

Not wanting to be in any way intimidating, Pericles, but I question whether there was ever any question of there being a question in BAYGON's opening post. Rather, I took it to be an invitation to those interested in the subject of population growth to explore some of the finer points of interpersonal communication, to read into the site what they would, to look, as it were, into a mirror of their own views, and, reflecting upon what they could see, share their enlightenment with the rest of the Forum.

I, for one, found the site to contain some hidden gems, like this beautiful piece of understatement found in the 'Responses to VHEMT from website visitors, with replies from Les: Misunderstandings; Volume I':

"At any rate, although there may be some satire
in what I've posted at the website, the purpose
of The Movement as a whole is not to satirize the left...."




I do so like understatement.




I also particularly like the way the Finder of the Movement signs off:

"For a better world,
Les U. Knight"

Gives the game away a bit, though, doesn't he? Definitely somebody with time, as opposed to blood, on their hands, don't you think?

It nevertheless seems appropriate to thank BAYGON for this topic (and especially the link supplied), and it is a measure of its quality as a topic that other posters are posting upon it, at least latterly, on the 'The coming liquid fuel crisis' thread, here: http://bit.ly/abM5mp . It would of course never do to post a link to this topic in that discussion, for that might be construed as diverting the discussion to the General Discussions area of the Forum, which is against the Forum rules.

It was interesting to see, too, an occasion upon which it was definitely better to be a little frog in a big pond, than a Big Frog in this little pond. Ribbet. Ribbet.

Behold! The word limit is nigh upon us. Must not waste words! Ribbet. Ribbet.

The following are from the opening lines of Noam Chomsky's "Hegemony or Survival":
"A few years ago, one of the great figures of contemporary biology, Ernst Mayr, published some reflections on the likelihood of success in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.He considered the prospect very low. His reasoning had to do with the adaptive value of what we call "higher intelligence", meaning the particular human form of higher intellectual organisation. Mayr estimated the number of species since the origin of life at about fifty billion, only one of which "achieved the kind of intelligence to establish a civilisation." It did so very recently, perhaps 100,000 years ago.....Mayr speculated that the human form of intellectual organisation may not be favoured by selection. The history of life on earth, he wrote, refutes the claim that "it is better to be smart than to be stupid," at least judging by biological success: beetles and bacteria, for example, are vastly more successful than humans in terms of survival. He also made the rather somber observation that "the average life expectancy of a species is about 100,000 years."
We are entering a period of human history that may provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart than stupid. The most hopeful prospect is that the question will "not" be answered: if it receives a definite answer, that answer can only be that humans were a kind of "biological error," using their allotted 100,000 years to destroy themselves and, in the process, much else.
The species has surely developed the capacity to do just that, and a hypothetical extraterrestrial observer might well conclude that humans have demonstrated that capacity throughout their history, dramatically in the past few hundred years, with an assault on the environment that sustains life, on the diversity of more complex organisms, and with a cold and calculated savagery, on each other as well.