This is a tragedy and the man should face justice for it.
However, this sort of story really doesn't belong on this site. The fact that the guy wanted to play video games rather than take care of his kid has nothing to do with the entertainment he was engaged in. This is not gaming news anymore than a murder outside a movie theater is part of the movie industry.
To be honest with overpopulation I've been a big fan of mandatory, reversible sterlization on all people in the USA or anyone living here, and requiring people to get permission from the goverment to have kids, which would be granted only after being able to prove the abillity to support them, and an appropriate amount of parenting knowlege before the birth.
Because first-world Western countries with their high birth rates and relatively enormous populations are clearly excellent targets for contemplating solutions to overpopulation.
Well, functionally, intent is the operable legal phrase. You've committed murder if you were actively seeking to end someone's life. You've committed man slaughter if your actions were poorly thought out and resulted in someone's death. Of course, with something like this, it seems like an incomprehensible distinction...
A couple years ago I'd have read this and just been saddened by the weird and tragic nature of our world. Now, I have a four and a half month old son of my own and it really hits hard. I just can't imagine such a horrible act, or why this guy couldn't understand what he was doing to his poor son....just terrible. Please, people, don't have kids if you can't be responsible and caring for them, that's the top lesson we need to take away from this.
... and to answer the question more Nilistic than anti-social. I recognizing myself as having more than a few sociopathic traits, especially nowadays, but this isn't really based off of any general hatred of humanity as a whole or desire to see people die, it's simply an unpleasant reality.
Well, functionally, intent is the operable legal phrase. You've committed murder if you were actively seeking to end someone's life. You've committed man slaughter if your actions were poorly thought out and resulted in someone's death. Of course, with something like this, it seems like an incomprehensible distinction...
Well, it's not incomprehensible; if he did indeed commit this act (and we have no idea if he did), it would seem he shook the child out of frustration and in an attempt to make it stop crying. The intent wasn't to KILL the infant.
Florida, that's where the really weird shit happens. I mean really weird ones. Some of the stories down here are so weird, it makes me sometimes think there's an Elder God living under the state.
To be honest with overpopulation I've been a big fan of mandatory, reversible sterlization on all people in the USA or anyone living here, and requiring people to get permission from the goverment to have kids, which would be granted only after being able to prove the abillity to support them, and an appropriate amount of parenting knowlege before the birth.
While that could be abused, I think such abuses are a small price to pay for less people overall, and less incidents like the one we're reading about, not to mention helping to deal with all the ghetto children and associated contreversies in all directions. Rather than paying some lady to support children she couldn't afford, just don't let her have kids to begin with... that solves a lot of problems as callous as it might sound.
I assume you are suggesting requirements here somewhere along the lines of adoption requirements.
The problem here is that such a solution will drasticly effect the way parenting and the economy works. To start with most schemes are aimed at high income brackets, not the acceptabiliy of the individual. Also if this scheme was passed we'd end up with a lot of full time working parents who would be forced to higher care workers who, with the significant rise in demand, would be more strickly regulated than present. This could result in a nation of children raised on principles set by governmental standard. That's a big cultural step to take and overeaches the initial goal of making children safe.
There's the further issue of convincing people that they should be a part of your society to start with. Imigrants aren't going to want to come work in your country with these laws in place; the reason for their move probably being to give themselves and their family a better life. And who's going to fill the low-to-middle end jobs that are left vacant in their absence? Not the people who hope to have children some day. I can see a large social divide appearing between the low and high end earners if your suggestion was implemented.
Let me be painfully blunt, it's a global issue, ideally I feel this should probably be the case everywhere but we don't have a gloabl unity to force the issue... at least not yet.
The idea being to reduce the population, so things like immigrants become irrelevent, as it is I believe one of our big problems already is dealing with the influx of immigrants. Discouraging them to come to the US is not a bad thing to my way of thinking, no matter how you do it (but that's an entirely differant discussion).
You are correct that this is not something that is going to happen without repercussions, if it was ever to happen, it would be a HUGE thing. Those problems would however be dealt with, even if it required a degree of brutality, and over a period of time we would benefit, as would the world as a whole if the policy was implemented globally.
The problems I mentioned are more akin to a social divide. Basically if people have to apply to become parents and have their sterilization reversed, and such permits are not always granted, those most capable of raising children are generally going to be those from the upper echelons of society with the most resources to invest. Perhaps not universally, but it would be an issue. True or not, you'd probably also see people trying to make ethnic issues out of it by saying that it was an attempt to breed out [insert minority here] within the US.
That kind of thing would be a BIG issue, but again one that would be dealt with. Reduce the population drastically for a few generations despite the problems, and then you can work on stabilizing the situation. In the end I think the US would benefit from having it's population reduced by about 50% in the long term. Globally as frightening as it is, I'd say the figure gets to be about 80%, but largely because of how dense the overpopulation is in some places. With say China representing 1/3rd of the global population, and India coming close, cutting those nations down would have a much more extreme impact on the overall global population figure than elsewhere, since according to some figures, everywhere else that isn't China or India is cumulatively only a little over 1/3rd of the population.
I'm not to sure whether implementing this globally it would be a benefit (I'll adress why shortly). Besides I don't think it could be implemented anyway. A state of global acceptance would be required and that would be is extremely hard, perhaps even impossible to achieve. Not all countries are going to be accepting of state controlled birth rates and those countries are going to become havens for people who are being denied children. You then have a problem with imigration as I stated before. People will not want to be a part of your country, they will simply move elsewhere and this will result in the hit to resource consumption being negligable at best. (remember that imigrtation works both ways).
You also suggest that it would be good for the US to decrese its population to around 50%, but you don't seem to be taking into account that this would also mean a 50% decrease in its economic assets. You could raise the average earnings of the individual to offset this (and as we've already stated the favorability of high end earners for parenting would do this) but it would be nowhere near enough to cover the loss. Those who leave, or choose not to come in the first place, are going to take their assents and industry to another country; while those who are unable to move, but still wish to have children, are going to become anacronistic to society.
In the end you will be making a world where you have super rich countries dependent on the industry of the poorer countries who have a surplus of cheap product due to over population. That's already the way the world works, which is a good thing as it allows for strong global trading and wealth distribution. Targeted birth control could only promote this aspect and at current it is unnecesarry to do so. Refering back to my initial point about how a global agenda would not be benificial: it would destroy this balance and kill the global market.
Therumancer said:
Grey Day for Elcia said:
[]Feeling a bit nihilistic and antisocial today? That's cute and all, but it doesn't change facts; the U.S. isn't overpopulated. Step outside of a major city and actually look at a map. You see all that empty space? Yeah.
Christ. Ideas like that make me wonder how we as a species survived this long.
Space that is generally incapable of supporting people at a decent standard of living. Sure, technically people COULD live in abject misery in say the middle of the desert, but that doesn't mean they are going to thrive there. Not to mention that just by going there your looking at the cost in wood, metal, oil, and similar things to keep all those people going. Right now with just the people we've got, occupying the space we have, we're literally destroying resources globally, cutting down forests and mining out the earth far faster than it can replentish itself, and even engaging in kinds of resource gathering that greatly reduces the abillity of the planet to recover. Saying we should put people into all of the uninhabited areas (in the US or anywhere) sounds great until you consider that those enviroments require even MORE resources that we're already expending.
I don't have anything really to add here except that I agree with pretty much everything you said. Take a look at India and the tragedy they had with the floods not to long ago. A hundred years ago people would have avoided living on the flood plains, but thanks to the massive population problem they had no where else to go. It does make a case that the planet can only support a set amount of people. Also that nature has its own ways of addressing over population.
To be honest with overpopulation I've been a big fan of mandatory, reversible sterlization on all people in the USA or anyone living here, and requiring people to get permission from the goverment to have kids, which would be granted only after being able to prove the abillity to support them, and an appropriate amount of parenting knowlege before the birth.
I know this is off topic, but people like you who wants that kinds of laws should really do some reading about population and productivity. I agree that overpopulation is a problem if productivity of the people is not increased, through technology or education, but your idea of decreasing the younger population is dumb because old people are living longer, less young productive people are born (no matter what you think of someone, they produces something through participation in the economy), over time it increases the number of people that needs to be supported (old people) over the number of productive people (young people). See the Europe (especially GB) and Japan for real life examples.
Also do you really want someone else violating your body without your consent.
True, but once we pass the forced euthanasia law on undesirables and the unproductive the problem will just fix itself
It really does seem like people forget what Nazi Germany was really about.
The effects of population control are absolutely wide in scope, China's one-child policy fixed one problem and caused so many others.
... and to answer the question more Nilistic than anti-social. I recognizing myself as having more than a few sociopathic traits, especially nowadays, but this isn't really based off of any general hatred of humanity as a whole or desire to see people die, it's simply an unpleasant reality.
Lol, yeah. I just have a big dent in my head and brain damage. It's not like I've ever seen any doctors, or did any research into my condition. Us damn kids who were forced to basically retire and collect social security in our 30s. What the fuck do we know about anything.
Also for the record not only did I work 10 years in Casino Security (between two casinos) but was also a Criminal Justice: Forensics major, before I ran into financial problems (Casino Security wasn't my planned goal). I'm not a psycologist or psychiatrist but I did have to take a few classes on that (intro to psych, abnormal psych, criminal psych, etc...) which overlapped with classes like "criminal investigation", and even some of the law
related classes and surprisingly a little with the sciences given the orientation.
See, I was born with my "problem" due to my head closing up when I was a baby (no I was not dropped) and having a plate put in there (and later removed). I spent a lot of my childhood in residential facilities with some serious issues, as I got older they reduced, I went to school, got a job, and then things got worse when I was older but I knew what to expect. I don't see a "shrink" because there is nothing they can really do for me, my problems are physical.
I've mentioned this stuff before, but I can see how you missed it, but really you should be careful who you mouth off at. I actually had to delete and re-write a massive flame I was about to send your way... since I pride myself on not doing that.
... and yes, when it comes to certain topics that recur on these forums, I do know more than most people on these forums will ever know, not because of school specifically, but because of actual experience. You'd be bloody surprised at what I've run into and had to deal with (to put it bluntly).
As far as my comments about "recognizing sociopathic traits", it comes from having been mis-diagnosed as things like "Borderline Personality" (look it up), especially when I was a kid. As I learned more I came to understand why some people could have reached that conclusion, and might have similar thoughts (as I was accused of in this discussion) given my current mindset. Not that they would be right, it's simply that I have some thought processes and reach certain conclusions that tend to be associated with sociopaths, while not actually being one myself. I could get into it in detail, but it's kind of pointless and you know, us "Armchair psychologists" who try and learn about their own problems can't possibly know anything.
To be honest with overpopulation I've been a big fan of mandatory, reversible sterlization on all people in the USA or anyone living here, and requiring people to get permission from the goverment to have kids, which would be granted only after being able to prove the abillity to support them, and an appropriate amount of parenting knowlege before the birth.
While that could be abused, I think such abuses are a small price to pay for less people overall, and less incidents like the one we're reading about, not to mention helping to deal with all the ghetto children and associated contreversies in all directions. Rather than paying some lady to support children she couldn't afford, just don't let her have kids to begin with... that solves a lot of problems as callous as it might sound.
I assume you are suggesting requirements here somewhere along the lines of adoption requirements.
The problem here is that such a solution will drasticly effect the way parenting and the economy works. To start with most schemes are aimed at high income brackets, not the acceptabiliy of the individual. Also if this scheme was passed we'd end up with a lot of full time working parents who would be forced to higher care workers who, with the significant rise in demand, would be more strickly regulated than present. This could result in a nation of children raised on principles set by governmental standard. That's a big cultural step to take and overeaches the initial goal of making children safe.
There's the further issue of convincing people that they should be a part of your society to start with. Imigrants aren't going to want to come work in your country with these laws in place; the reason for their move probably being to give themselves and their family a better life. And who's going to fill the low-to-middle end jobs that are left vacant in their absence? Not the people who hope to have children some day. I can see a large social divide appearing between the low and high end earners if your suggestion was implemented.
Let me be painfully blunt, it's a global issue, ideally I feel this should probably be the case everywhere but we don't have a gloabl unity to force the issue... at least not yet.
The idea being to reduce the population, so things like immigrants become irrelevent, as it is I believe one of our big problems already is dealing with the influx of immigrants. Discouraging them to come to the US is not a bad thing to my way of thinking, no matter how you do it (but that's an entirely differant discussion).
You are correct that this is not something that is going to happen without repercussions, if it was ever to happen, it would be a HUGE thing. Those problems would however be dealt with, even if it required a degree of brutality, and over a period of time we would benefit, as would the world as a whole if the policy was implemented globally.
The problems I mentioned are more akin to a social divide. Basically if people have to apply to become parents and have their sterilization reversed, and such permits are not always granted, those most capable of raising children are generally going to be those from the upper echelons of society with the most resources to invest. Perhaps not universally, but it would be an issue. True or not, you'd probably also see people trying to make ethnic issues out of it by saying that it was an attempt to breed out [insert minority here] within the US.
That kind of thing would be a BIG issue, but again one that would be dealt with. Reduce the population drastically for a few generations despite the problems, and then you can work on stabilizing the situation. In the end I think the US would benefit from having it's population reduced by about 50% in the long term. Globally as frightening as it is, I'd say the figure gets to be about 80%, but largely because of how dense the overpopulation is in some places. With say China representing 1/3rd of the global population, and India coming close, cutting those nations down would have a much more extreme impact on the overall global population figure than elsewhere, since according to some figures, everywhere else that isn't China or India is cumulatively only a little over 1/3rd of the population.
I'm not to sure whether implementing this globally it would be a benefit (I'll adress why shortly). Besides I don't think it could be implemented anyway. A state of global acceptance would be required and that would be is extremely hard, perhaps even impossible to achieve. Not all countries are going to be accepting of state controlled birth rates and those countries are going to become havens for people who are being denied children. You then have a problem with imigration as I stated before. People will not want to be a part of your country, they will simply move elsewhere and this will result in the hit to resource consumption being negligable at best. (remember that imigrtation works both ways).
You also suggest that it would be good for the US to decrese its population to around 50%, but you don't seem to be taking into account that this would also mean a 50% decrease in its economic assets. You could raise the average earnings of the individual to offset this (and as we've already stated the favorability of high end earners for parenting would do this) but it would be nowhere near enough to cover the loss. Those who leave, or choose not to come in the first place, are going to take their assents and industry to another country; while those who are unable to move, but still wish to have children, are going to become anacronistic to society.
In the end you will be making a world where you have super rich countries dependent on the industry of the poorer countries who have a surplus of cheap product due to over population. That's already the way the world works, which is a good thing as it allows for strong global trading and wealth distribution. Targeted birth control could only promote this aspect and at current it is unnecesarry to do so. Refering back to my initial point about how a global agenda would not be benificial: it would destroy this balance and kill the global market.
Therumancer said:
Grey Day for Elcia said:
[]Feeling a bit nihilistic and antisocial today? That's cute and all, but it doesn't change facts; the U.S. isn't overpopulated. Step outside of a major city and actually look at a map. You see all that empty space? Yeah.
Christ. Ideas like that make me wonder how we as a species survived this long.
Space that is generally incapable of supporting people at a decent standard of living. Sure, technically people COULD live in abject misery in say the middle of the desert, but that doesn't mean they are going to thrive there. Not to mention that just by going there your looking at the cost in wood, metal, oil, and similar things to keep all those people going. Right now with just the people we've got, occupying the space we have, we're literally destroying resources globally, cutting down forests and mining out the earth far faster than it can replentish itself, and even engaging in kinds of resource gathering that greatly reduces the abillity of the planet to recover. Saying we should put people into all of the uninhabited areas (in the US or anywhere) sounds great until you consider that those enviroments require even MORE resources that we're already expending.
I don't have anything really to add here except that I agree with pretty much everything you said. Take a look at India and the tragedy they had with the floods not to long ago. A hundred years ago people would have avoided living on the flood plains, but thanks to the massive population problem they had no where else to go. It does make a case that the planet can only support a set amount of people. Also that nature has its own ways of addressing over population.
Well, I'd argue that warfare and our inherant aggression is part of how nature intended humanity to solve it's own population problems, but that's another entire discussion.
On the overall issue I will say that your right about global acceptance, but also understand that I'm an extreme militant. Issues don't exist in a vacuum and branch out into other things. I've been trying to keep this limited in it's focus for a reason, but that is difficult to do. Let's just say that there is a lot behind why in other posts I don't bat an eye when talking about the extermination of millions, or even billions of people in the pursuit of US interests. The big arguements being made about my comments about bringing Armageddon to The Middle East generally coming down to me being "insane" for being willing to casually kill so many civilians for example. The bottom line is that there are too many people anyway, so virtually wiping out entire civilizations is actually a good thing. Once you accept overpopulation as an issue (which I do) and that we need to get rid of people, having an justification you can use is better than just simply saying "well hey, we need to cut down on the population, and we've decided you all get to die because we're stronger, we don't have any other reason". I'm not a huge fan in slaughter for no reason, but when someone does cause a reason, even if it's a matter of point of view, I don't think "total eradication" should bee off the table when you look at the big picture.
In the big picture I believe that the world pretty much needs a global unity, that is one goverment, one standed culture everyone else gets melted down into. Who does it in the big picture really doesn't matter, though of course I prefer my own people and culture to be the driving force that will set the foundations even if it would itself wind up disappearing in the process. Such a unity can largely happen through the exchange of ideas, and people growing to accept the same basic conclusions. I see signs of this already happening, slowly but surely, though I believe time is of the essence. In the end there are entire people and civilizations who will not choose to give up self-governing for no other reason than personal freedom, while sympathetic in the end those people who don't join will need to be wiped out. You will see a global war, billions upon billions will die, and that will be a good thing as long as what is left standing is generally unified and can then carefulyl regulate it's reproduction to prevent the resulting "baby boom" from overpopulating the planet. With a global unity space travel then becomes a bit more viable, and if we can colonize planets (even ones in the solar system, by building habs) and do things like mine the astroid field we can lighten up on things like resources and birth control as we obtain more, and more living space and secure our own expansion.
I've intentionally been limiting this to a discussion of the US, because when the issue turns to the overall problems, I wind up being diametrically opposed to the morality of like 97% of the people on this forum, who would rather die than see what I suggest transpire or even be worked towards. Truthfully though since it comes down to the species as a whole I think this goes beyodn their objections, or even any code of morality that can be conceived. Discussion of things get derailed due to all the excuses by those not wantint to face reality like "everyone dying" or various reasons why it couldn't be made to happen, etc... all of which represent topics that could be fought for weeks in their own threads (and have been, if not presented in this overall context, over the years I've been talking about politics and such on The Escapist).
When it comes to the US-centric point, I will say that having an easily supported population due to less people trumps a lot of the needs of having a powerhouse economy to begin with. In general we want that economy to try and provide for our people (in the big picture) but our expanding population means we'll never be able to do that, since as soon as we become economically stronger, we expand to the point of needing even more economic force.
The US is one of the few nations that can be almost entirely self sufficient if we reduce our population. In the short term I sort of support the idea of the US focusing mostly on spreading ideas, so we can expand the seeds of a global unity, while more or less withdrawing from the global economic rat race. Let them all deplete each other and bicker without us playing global peace keepers, using our military entirely for our own purposes and benefit for a time. Then when the time comes we simply gather those who are thinking similarly to us when there are enough of them, start the final war, and either we win and create a unity and humanity survives, or we all die out with a roar instead of a tiny whimper as we deplete the planet and all revert to barbarism on a mudball unable to support the great civilizations we had once created.
That's a very simplistic version (no real need to point out problems, I'm aware of the, but I could probably write small books on the subject that would make this post look tiny in comparison).
Feeling a bit burned out on this topic at the moment, so may be I'll address this better later on. It certainly seems like you unlocked those renegade options though.
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