Well, truth be told I'm not really in support of cannibalism unless you're eating your dead. But then what would be the point?

Abortion, Suicide, and Sodomy are all top-notch ways to ease earth-stress. You'd think that suicide would be kinda dodgy, but really, your body is your own body. You should be able to do with it what you will.

Aside from the entertaining freakshow which is the Church of Euthanasia, I'd have to disagree with your viewpoint that disease is nature's way of thinning the herd. Pinatas are nature's way of thinning the herd. More pinatas? More sterile ballsacs. More sterile ballsacs? No babies. Damned
breeders and their baby-making genitalia. They don't understand that they're killing humanity in their quest for immortality.

I think they already dfound a cure of aids cuz Majik Johnson is still alive. I mihgt write a song about this.

Well now, this is certainly interesting, but good news. I have a few friends with HIV/AIDS, and every day I fear for their lives. If this is a serious article, and this cure is actually found, and not super expensive, that owuld be awesome.

But honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if Bush put an end to it.

Didn't read the thread thoroughly, but couldn't this over population argument be remedied with education...sex education in particular? I realize there are major religious/cultural issues to contend with in that area but there has to be some alternative. We can't just stand around making justifications for why it's a "good thing" for people to die, specially such a horrible death and particularly that of innocent children who contracted AIDs from a parent or sexual abuser.

Besides, I'm curious...Is there data to prove that the increase in population would directly harm us? From what I understand, the amount of grain we feed to cattle each year to support the beef industry would cure world hunger. What are some of the other concerns? I'm not being argumentative, I really want to know more about this.

hellyes!! wrote:Besides, I'm curious...Is there data to prove that the increase in population would directly harm us? From what I understand, the amount of grain we feed to cattle each year to support the beef industry would cure world hunger. What are some of the other concerns? I'm not being argumentative, I really want to know more about this.

Well, yes. It's called "carrying capacity" and is observable in every other biological species on earth. More people can likely be supported if we were willing to give up meat (as it is at the moment, we already have more than enough food to feed everyone worldwide though it isn't evenly distributed).

However, more people means: more pollution, more disease from living in close proximity to one another, more financial stress, more topsoil loss and erosion of suitable farmlands equaling less agricultural output, heightened extinction rates from loss of habitat, loss of genetic diversity due to extinction, more sewage and less non-toxic freshwater, more fossil fuel usage, etc. Overpopulation is pretty much considered the root cause of almost every environmental crisis the world is facing at the moment and I don't particularly think that one has to run a t-test or a linear regression or design a controlled experiment to see that overpopulation is a bad idea.

I'm certainly not advocating that we ignore trying to solve pandemics like HIV in order to decrease the population. What I do support is people getting over their archaic religious notions about birth control and sex and figuring out a convenient way not to spit out 10 children who will all live to see adulthood and proceed to consume mass quantities of resources themselves.

As a side-note, I'd like to point out how hypocritical I find it that the religious right in this country is fine with medicine going against God's laws and providing fertility treatments while all the while arguing that God's laws are being violated through the processes of birth control, stem cell research, and abortion. Apparently God really wants you to get pregnant even if He placed you on His earth hopelessly sterile.

-Amanda, pissed off ex-Field Biology and Ecology major

Amanda, thank you for that scientific-type answer! I personally don't have any science to call on to back up anything I'm saying, only what comes to mind when I think it through.

Hellyes, it's easy to picture. Think about your apartment, and how it is right now. Now add another 12 dogs, and look at what happens with regard to food, crap in the back yard, hair on the carpet, etc. And think about how much fighting there would be.

I wouldn't ever deny that the human race doesn't properly manage our food resource. I specifically said this in one of my posts above.

But here's the thing. There are a lot of people who don't *want* to stop eating meat. And a lot of people who don't want to use birth control to limit their offspring to a state of Zero Population Growth.

There are couples who are not religious who have more than 2 kids. There are people who are not religious that have no interest in using birth control in general.

It's not automatically a function of religion. That's an easy scapegoat though. Really, it's a function of people having their own desires, or sometimes just being unable to think things through very well.

If you're talking about educating people about how not eating meat is a good thing, and revamping our entire American way of life, I am all for that. If you are talking about teaching how birth control can keep you from making babies that you aren't prepared to provide for emotionally and/or financially, I am all for that. If you are talking about teaching how condoms (or better yet, abstinence) can help you not contract these diseases that can fuck you up or in cases like HIV kill you, I am all for that.

Education is excellent.

If you believe that everybody out there is gonna go for that stuff, you are being idealistic and not considering the way human beings act.

Does anybody here believe that education causes people to always do what they are taught is right? Or, for that matter, does anybody here believe that it's realistic to trust that most-to-all human beings will always do what they personally *know* to be right?

I've smoked more than 0 cigarettes today. I know better.

Nature has to have a system at its disposal to keep things in balance. That system includes a variety of ways of inducing death of any manner of life forms.

If there is enough air for 10 people to breathe, and there are 20 people, chances are, 10 people are gonna die. And then there will be 10 people with enough air. If there was enough air for 10 people, and there were only 2 people, there would be room for 8 more people. If 10 people came in and joined those 2, there would be 12 and two people would suffocate and then there would be enough air for 10 people.

This seems to me to be how nature works. It's pretty straightforward.

If you take away the bees, the flowers are gonna die. If you take away the trees, the birds are gonna die. And if you take away the predatory animals, like the cougars, you're gonna see a massive boom in population of the animals the cougars were previously eating and keeping in check.

That's why there's deer hunting season. Because with the encroachment of civilization, we've made a point of killing off entire populations of predatory animals, the ones that would eat your 2-year-old as quick as they'd eat a deer. And guess what? Then the deer population booms.

Humans have a way of spreading this sort of imbalance with our expansion and re-designing of natural order to suit our convenience. It took how many hundred million years for life to reach the balance it was at 1,000 years ago? And how much have we trashed that in the past 100?

Add more people and it gets worse. And disease is one kind of cougar, and people are the deer. Except we destroy everything around us in a way that no deer population would.

There should only be so many people here at once. Education is important. Legislating imposed restrictions is not gonna fly. Giving people good advice is only gonna go so far. And the further along the road toward dominating nature and shaping it into something that can't hurt us, ironically, the more we're gonna end up fucking things up royally for billions of humans and trillions of other living things.

scott wrote:There should only be so many people here at once. Education is important. Legislating imposed restrictions is not gonna fly. Giving people good advice is only gonna go so far. And the further along the road toward dominating nature and shaping it into something that can't hurt us, ironically, the more we're gonna end up fucking things up royally for billions of humans and trillions of other living things.

This I agree with. I guess part of my underlying reasoning for not being upset by researchers trying to cure HIV is that I am confident that something new will take its place in the world of things that will eventually kill us and cut our numbers down to sustainable sizes. That's the nature of things. Sad, kinda shitty if it's you or someone you like, but that's the way the world works.

Yes, it's idealistic to expect people to completely change their culture and religious beliefs at the drop of a hat, however overpopulation is something that the scientific community has been warning everyone about for 40+ years (trust me...I've watched the ancient films with the "beeps" where the frame should be advanced). What truly angers me is that so many aren't even being allowed the chance at an honest education and the opportunity to choose between their own health and irrational thought.

That is the point where things cease to be about natural selection or "survival of the fittest" and start seeping into the territory of socioeconomic dominance. I hate to see someone with a 160 I.Q. die of AIDS because he didn't have access to the proper information (like, a library with literature published post-1950) while some drunken/stoned frat boy who got handed condoms on pledge night so that he could go score roofed-out sorority chicks lives.

Is the world overpopulated?

Populations in Europe are in decline I believe.

Cranius wrote:Is the world overpopulated?

Populations in Europe are in decline I believe.

Yes. Europeans are doing quite well with the "not breeding" thing.

Unfortunately, the world outside of the people with sexy accents is still usually considered overpopulated in relation to the resources available to them and/or their >2 children/couple birthrates.

Mandroid2.0 wrote:

Cranius wrote:Is the world overpopulated?

Populations in Europe are in decline I believe.

Yes. Europeans are doing quite well with the "not breeding" thing.

Unfortunately, the world outside of the people with sexy accents is still usually considered overpopulated in relation to the resources available to them and/or their >2 children/couple birthrates.

I've got a "sexy accent" but I haven't done any breeding yet!