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Post by timfarney on Jun 23, 2018 10:01:37 GMT -5
Or we could also try to educate the men, instead of leaving the women to fight an uphill battle against their historical culture. But either way, Millring has a point. We’re stuck between patronizing cultural colonization or leaving them in their current state. The trouble is that leaving them in their current cultural state, without runaway population growth means also leaving famine, pestilence and genocide to do their dark work. And while we’re proving to be crueler than I thought we were, we’re not there yet.
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Post by millring on Jun 23, 2018 10:55:39 GMT -5
The trouble is that leaving them in their current cultural state, without runaway population growth means also leaving famine, pestilence and genocide to do their dark work. And while we’re proving to be crueler than I thought we were, we’re not there yet. And I say that's only "dark work" when we are applying the very cultural expectations that you include in "cultural colonization" or Don refers to as "they live in the dark ages". The choice is theirs. And that is a WHOLE lot less dark than saving them from themselves only to foist our expectation that they abort all those babies that they want but we (the Western culture with our expectations and our omniscience about the harm of population growth) don't. THAT is dark. It's the soft eugenics of Western thought. Make sure that only the right people populate -- and those people, not too often or too prolifically.
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Post by timfarney on Jun 23, 2018 11:04:10 GMT -5
I get your point, but I personally believe the work of famine, pestilence and genocide is pretty dark, regardless of the politics. And I think the solutions to overpopulation are education and growing economies. With any luck, birth control will naturally follow, and that doesn’t necessarily include abortion. I know I’m a godless liberal, John, but my views on abortion are probably not what you think they are.
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Post by jdd2 on Jun 23, 2018 11:10:02 GMT -5
With their parents already criminals, add a twist or two, and the situation won't be too different from what happened in australia about a hundred years ago--children being taken from their families for their own good.
You know, those kids could become really good workers if they were properly educated and assimilated...
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Post by timfarney on Jun 23, 2018 11:12:46 GMT -5
I have no problem with enforcing current U.S. immigration laws - which as a matter of fact are among the most generous in the world, despite what people tend to hear. I have no problem with comprehensive reform of these laws to reflect current facts on the ground. And I agree that the liberal wing of the Democratic party demagogues this issue to death, and tries to portray our laws as draconian and anti-immigrant, with an eye toward increasing the number of Democratic voters in this country. I also believe that creating orphans out of thousands of innocent children for the purpose of gaining negotiating position on immigration reform is every bit as cynical, if not downright evil, and, in my opinion, smacks of unnecessary cruelty, if not fascism. Two things we can be sure of: Democrats will exploit this horror to the hilt. And Trump will continue blundering around the world stage until he gets this country into serious trouble. This.
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Post by millring on Jun 23, 2018 11:50:31 GMT -5
I never assume the two go together.
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Post by timfarney on Jun 23, 2018 13:44:51 GMT -5
I never assume the two go together. Good of you. Thanks.
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Post by Chesapeake on Jun 23, 2018 16:16:13 GMT -5
I think your instinct is right on target. The world has a serious over-population problem. A dramatic example is the phenomenon of periodic famines in the Horn of Africa. The land is simply too fragile to support the current population. Famines kick in like clockwork. The world reacts by sending in emergency relief, which of course it should, but does little to nothing to address the underlying problem, and the cycle continues. So why don't they just stop having babies? The UN's answer is the correct one, I believe. These are patriarchal, largely agricultural societies that are still living in the past, when it was important to have large families. The patriarch was essentially creating his own labor force to feed himself and his spouse, especially as they approached old age. To put it bluntly, the guys kept "their" women barefoot and pregnant for most or all of their reproductive lives. The women went along with it because it has worked for people around the world for thousands of years. And also because, in patriarchal societies, by definition, they had no other choice. We're now at a historic watershed in human development, when families don't need to be large to survive. In this age of modern agriculture, we don't need the large work forces needed in the past to create food. Also at play: among the many benefits of modern medicine is a higher survival rate for infants, plus longer life spans, which together create more mouths to feed for longer periods of time. In short, a lot of people around the world haven't gotten the memo. The UN's prescription for bringing these cultures around to the realization that they don't need to have a constant stream of babies to survive is to educate, and thereby empower, the women: to let them know that there now can be more to life than spending most of it populating the earth. It's okay, now, for them to have a kid or two, and then go have a career. Naturally, the guys in these cultures aren't happy about this. They see these modern ideas as antithetical to what, for them, is a pretty good life, maybe even one ordained by God. Which puts a dangerous spin on the situation. One need look no further to see why so many traditional cultures, and I specifically include those in the Mideast, are hostile to the point of violence against Western ideas about women and their role in society. But until enough women are educated enough, and brave enough, to just say no, the problem of high fertility rates in developing countries will continue, and, with it, a lot of the social upheaval and violence that we see today. So we're trapped between that totally patronizing position in which we interfere as a superior culture who know better, and the option of leaving them alone to the life they know and love -- complete with a very young average age of death that is self-solving but that they are comfortable with. To me this sounds like a social Darwinist position not fully worked out. If left alone, people will solve their own problems (the theory might seem to go), even if an unintended result involves periodic mass starvation. Because that would be the life they know and love and are comfortable with. I suppose it is true that by not intervening in some way, one of the most catastrophic results of overpopulation, famines, could be taken care of simply by allowing the overage to die. And it is true in the natural world that species are subject to mass take-downs when they overpopulate their niches. But the problem (if you can call it that) is, the world won't leave starving people alone. Not when cable news is broadcasting 24/7 images of mothers cradling babies with flies in their eyes. The world unfailingly intervenes. We rush in with truckloads of emergency food and water, medical supplies, etc. This not only disrupts social Darwinism, it resets clocks. The countdown to the next famine begins. By my seat-of-the-pants reckoning, the world sees a catastrophic famine every decade or two. It seems we're overdue for one now, and in fact the UN last year declared that the conditions are right now, after a longer-than-usual hiatus, for another big one in Africa. I don't see anything wrong with letting women know that they don't have to be slaves for their whole lives, if that's what it takes to reduce fertility rates.
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Post by millring on Jun 23, 2018 17:34:08 GMT -5
I don't see anything wrong with letting women know that they don't have to be slaves for their whole lives, if that's what it takes to reduce fertility rates. So, then, we are going to express our cultural superiority? Do we tie our beneficence to their willingness to acquiesce to our superior ways?
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Post by Chesapeake on Jun 23, 2018 17:47:04 GMT -5
I don't believe the idea is to force girls and young women to go to school. It's more to convince them that they can be more than baby factories. Also, this is official United Nations policy, not just the U.S. or some cabal of do-gooder Western powers.
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Post by millring on Jun 23, 2018 17:48:26 GMT -5
Right, but we're still saying that they are culturally inferior, right?
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Post by epaul on Jun 23, 2018 17:49:40 GMT -5
I don't see anything wrong with letting women know that they don't have to be slaves for their whole lives, if that's what it takes to reduce fertility rates. So, then, we are going to express our cultural superiority? Do we tie our beneficence to their willingness to acquiesce to our superior ways? Yes and Yes.
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Post by epaul on Jun 23, 2018 17:59:19 GMT -5
Right, but we're still saying that they are culturally inferior, right? Yes. If a culture can't feed themselves and is unable to make the connection between over-breeding and starvation and are dependent on another culture for the technology and assistance they need to survive, yep, a superior culture is helping out an inferior one. Survival is a good measure of the worth of a culture. If a culture does not learn and can not provide for itself, then it is inferior to one that can.
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Post by brucemacneill on Jun 23, 2018 18:58:39 GMT -5
Right, but we're still saying that they are culturally inferior, right? Yes. If a culture can't feed themselves and is unable to make the connection between over-breeding and starvation and are dependent on another culture for the technology and assistance they need to survive, yep, a superior culture is helping out an inferior one. Survival is a good measure of the worth of a culture. If a culture does not learn and can not provide for itself, then it is inferior to one that can. Racist.
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