Wow, so much animosity Poirot.

'who persists with the erroneous notion that he is scintillatingly entertaining, witty and clever.'

I am, to me, and that's what counts. I am here to amuse myself.

'It's like engaging with a perpetual schoolboy who believes the behaviour that impressed his pimply mates still cuts it'

Cuts it with who? I'm not here to impress anyone, I'm here to enjoy myself.

'In fact, I've always given you the benefit of the doubt for your style on OLO, even chucked a bit of praise your way... I'm sure you'll impress them there.'

Oh, I'm supposed to impress you. Presumably so you can chuck some tidbit of praise my way. So that's how OLO works! Ah, what I always suspected. I must look to ingratiate myself with the mighty Poirot!

Hahahahhaa!

This just plays into my whole view of OLO. It's a little pseudo-intellectual club of people trying to impress each other.

PS: If you're talking about behaving like a teenager, all this overblown morose teen angst about the state of the world and environment and 'Big Business' and 'Greedy corporations' and 'neo-cons' SCoA and MIC is decidedly juvenile. Man I grew out of that cliched hobby horse in my 20s. Your one-sided anti-capitalist rantings really lack any kind of mature adult balance.

Houellie,

On the contrary, you come here to impress everyone.

You can't see how cliched is your own behaviour. It seems that to you we all represent the teachers you held in such disdain. You honed your technique - your acerbic routine - way back then when you realised you were more intelligent than your mentors.

What pisses me off is that you have one of the best minds on OLO, and yet you employ it almost exclusively to laugh at people. I am not mighty and I appreciate sharp wit as a vehicle for sharing ideas, but when contempt and mockery are your only lines of interaction why is it surprising that you receive a serve of animosity?

Dear Antiseptic,

"What a piece of work, is man?" exclaims Hamlet
in Shakespeare's play. "How noble is reason!
How infinite in faculty! In form, and moving.
how express and admirable! In action, how
like an angel! In apprehension, how like a
god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of
animals! And yet ...what is this quintessence of
dust?"

What are we? Hamlet's question is probably as old
as the unique human capacity for self-awareness,
a capacity that extends perhaps hundreds of
thousands of years back into prehistory.
Modern science can give no simple answer to the question,
for we are an extraordinary complex species -
the most intelligent, resourcesful,
and adaptable that has ever existed
on the planet. Yet today we do know infinitely more
about the human species than we did even a few years ago,
and if nothing else we have learned that many traditional
ideas about "human nature" are hoplessly naive and
misguided.

Therefore for you to make any sort of judgement about me
and my family -
you would have to know something about our social behaviour,
our values, and what kind of people we really are.
All extremely personal information - of which you have no
way of knowing. It is unfortunate that you feel such strong
animosity towards my attempt to do something about the famine
in East Africa. But that's something I can't do anything
about. I can only do what I feel is right.

Cheers.

Dear Poirot,

Sometimes we need what only certain people can provide -
their absence.

Lexi, I think you will find that Marie Stopes do a great deal of
good in the third world, for women who can't afford family planning.

But of course they are up against the great powers of the Vatican,
whose lobbyists made sure that George Bush cut off funding to them.
Many clinics in places like Ethiopia had to be closed at the time,
although I gather that some are now reopening. The thing is that
until the first world takes the issue seriously, not much is going
to change.

Obama has changed back to the Clinton policy which did so much
good, but those new tea party senators will make sure that this
is one of the areas where funding is reduced, as they squeeze him
fiscally into a corner. All very sad really.

Its going to take a serious addressing of the problem at the global
level, for action to happen. That will only happen when more and
more people die in famines, our species tends to learn the hard way.

Dear Yabby,

Thanks for your civil response.
I agree with you. Political, religious,
and other ideological influences affect
social attitudes concerning population limitations.
And as I stated earlier, family planning is an
essential element in population limitation, but
the strategy is not sufficient in itself.

I read that at the first International Conference
on Population in Belgrade in the late 1960s, the
United States was a lonely voice strongly urging
population control in the interests of the
planetary environment and the future of humanity.
Arrayed on the other side were the communist
countries, Catholic countries, and most of the less
developed nations - all of them arguing that
economic development would solve population problems.

At the most recent conference in Mexico City, the US
was again in isolation - this time arguing against
virtually the rest of the world, that "population
growth was a neutral phenomenon" whose problems can
be solved by capitalism. Apparently the reason for
the American change of position lay in domestic politics.
The government wanted to appease the powerful
right-to-life movement, which is hostile to population
control because in some countries it may involve
abortion. Only Chile, Costa Rica, and the Vatican
shared the administration's position - a position
that profoundly embarrassed most American demographers.

Lexi, I repeat, as I have done elsewhere, I don't feel any animosity toward anyone. I do dislike pretension, however and I'm afraid I find you frequently exhibit a streak of that. I get the feeling that if we met we'd like each other immediately and dislike each other within half an hour.

My only purpose in this thread and in a number of others is to provide a countervailing view; perhaps one that you tend to avoid considering for reasons of your own particular squeamishness, but one that is nonetheless valid.

You exist because a long line of your ancestors made survival of them and theirs the highest priority. It's only because we live in fat times in Australia that a librarian has enough spare cash to give some away to people in other countries instead of scrimping to do the best for her own children. By all means do as you will, but don't try to tell me to do the same. My family still means more to me than someone else's.