gunner1905 said:
Therumancer said:
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.
OT: The guy's dumb.
I see it as being nessicary, simply because if the population does not decrease drastically we're all dead. It's easy to make arguements about why we shouldn't do something extreme like this, but in the final equasion we're running out of resources, it's not a matter of production and producing enough stuff, but that things like wood, oil, metal and similar materials are being depleted faster than the planet can recover, and in the effort to sustain the current usage we're crippling the planet's abillity to replentish them at all through things like strip mining.
You are correct, what I propose would absolutly suck for a while, and would cause a number of problems that would have to be dealt with, quite probably with extreme brutality, in ways that would be offensive to current morality. It is however the right move in the long run. At least for a generation or four we need a massive decrease in the global population and then to stabilize it at that level.
As far as not wanting the goverment (or anyone else) modifying your body like that? In my opinion that's tough cookies. People knew that we needed ZPG (Zero Population Growth) generations ago and instead the population continued to expand. Like it or not, people have generally proven to be incapable of holding back their reproductive urges, so thus society as a whole needs to step in if the problem is going to be dealt with.
A lot of what I say is VERY nasty, and to many (on this subject and others) I seem like the devil. The thing is that it's all about the big picture, not simply the immediate effects over the next few years or even decades, but about what needs to be done when you look at things in terms of hundreds or thousands of years.
Sure it sucks to see a small young generation, and a huge old generation, and then to have to realize your going to have to basically leave those old people un-supported or dispose of them for a generation or two until society adapts to the much lower birth rate, but that's a comparitively small price to pay in the overall scheme of things, if we wind up depleting the world's resources we're going to wind up destroying ourselves. I could go into it point by point, but really it's not the time or place. It's something that has come up for discussion in the past.
In general this, and a lot of my personal politics and idealogy comes down to reality sucking, and trying to pretend that it doesn't just makes things worse.