[Kosh]

You're the one who generalized about "the third world and it's problems", meaning all of it. What I gave was just one small example, that is true, but it is an example amoung many others. Since independence, each time there was a massacre, war, or genocide in Africa, it was always Africans on the other side of the machete or the AK. Should people not be held in account for what they do? We're not mindless animals, unlike other animal species we have the ability to think for ourselves and make decisions for ourselves.

Much of what is happening now in Africa is a continuation of what had been happening long before the colonizers showed up. They weren't sitting around the campfire singing kumbaya, they were having their own empires, slavetrades, and brutal, viscious wars. While certainly the Europeans did have a big hand in the current day mess, to pin the blame squarely on them while ignoring the other side of the equation really is absurd, not to mention somewhat racist.

[General Battuta]

You're the one who generalized about "the third world and it's problems", meaning all of it. What I gave was just one small example, that is true, but it is an example amoung many others. Since independence, each time there was a massacre, war, or genocide in Africa, it was always Africans on the other side of the machete or the AK.

Because they happened in Africa.

Should people not be held in account for what they do? We're not mindless animals, unlike other animal species we have the ability to think for ourselves and make decisions for ourselves.

Like any other animal, people are biological machines. Our machinery is just very complex and extends into the sociopolitical realm. What comes before determines what comes after, and in the case of Africa, the damage done by colonialism was so bad that all subsequent problems must subsequently be seen as causally connected.

Your belief in free will is admirable and has utility, but in fact people are mostly shaped by the environment around them, and nations are only aggregates of people. Holding Africans responsible for Africa is as ridiculous as holding Native Americans responsible for their current state.

Much of what is happening now in Africa is a continuation of what had been happening long beforethe colonizers showed up. They weren't sitting around the campfire singing kumbaya, they were having their own empires, slavetrades, and brutal, viscious wars. While certainly the Europeans did have a big hand in the current day mess, to pin the blame squarely on them while ignoring the other side of the equation really is absurd, not to mention somewhat racist.

In Koshworld everything is done in bright primary colors and arguments are either FOR ME or AGAINST ME!

Go reread my previous posts before Bad Horse mounts you.

I wonder if by 'viscious' you mean 'brutal and unpleasant' or 'very thick'. It's so tantalizingly ambiguous.

[Kosh]

this post accidentally overwritten by battuta

Holding Africans responsible for Africa is as ridiculous as holding Native Americans responsible for their current state.

So the African population was devestated to a tiny tiny fraction of what it was and the remainder were forced to relocate thousands and thousands of miles away to the other side of the continent?

No; they were economically exploited and their leadership and social structures were systematically dismantled. In both cases their current situation is significantly determined by actions taken against them by outside parties.

So based on your explanation, Ethiopia, a nation which except for a 9 year occupation under fascist Italy avoided being colonized, should be a modern, fairly prosperous state. Instead it's one of the poorest nations on Earth thanks to civil war, bad leadership, and wars with its neighbors. This is sounding a lot like most of the African nations that actually were colonized, yet it was not colonized. Please explain this discrepency.

That's actually not what my explanation predicts at all. It also neglects the role of systemic failure caused by colonization. Again, attempting to find simple case-by-case black and white explanations for things is not going to get you very far.

In Battutaworld it's commonplace and perfectly acceptable to launch personal attacks on people because they dont agree with you.

It's not that you don't agree with me, it's that your cognitive methodology is broken. You are insufficiently sensitive to the complexity of the global system.

If you want to know why the Third World is the way it is, you're going to have to work. One very well-substantiated, though not universally accepted, explanation is proposed in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel.

In general, you can strive to search for the weaknesses in your own thought; constantly fight your own heuristic biases by assuming you are wrong and assuming other positions. It helps self-check for blind spots. You won't win - nobody can - but you'll lose less.

[General Battuta]

 

I edited your post instead of replying to it!

Now I'm not sure what to do.

[Mobius]

So let's look at the state of the world. There are nearly 7 billion people. The world can scarcely handle what we have now. In 50 years it will double. The world will not be able to handle that, it is simply too many people. The growth rate has not diminished much seance the end of the black death, it did peak at about twice it's current level shortly after WW2, but the trend is clear that the population doubles every 50 years. There is only a limited amount of resources and it would take 20 years for any actual change in population growth to have any effect on the related growth of resource consumption. most of these resources are limited in total volume, that is when they run out they will be gone unilaterally reducing your own population growth will only provide those who do not with the resources you didn't consume, so the ones who act most responsibly will be naturally selected against.

What will the world be like in 50 years?

If the Earth's filled with humans it can't support, colonize (and terraform) Mars.

[General Battuta]

So let's look at the state of the world. There are nearly 7 billion people. The world can scarcely handle what we have now. In 50 years it will double. The world will not be able to handle that, it is simply too many people. The growth rate has not diminished much seance the end of the black death, it did peak at about twice it's current level shortly after WW2, but the trend is clear that the population doubles every 50 years. There is only a limited amount of resources and it would take 20 years for any actual change in population growth to have any effect on the related growth of resource consumption. most of these resources are limited in total volume, that is when they run out they will be gone unilaterally reducing your own population growth will only provide those who do not with the resources you didn't consume, so the ones who act most responsibly will be naturally selected against.

What will the world be like in 50 years?

If the Earth's filled with humans it can't support, colonize (and terraform) Mars.

The problem is that we don't have the ability to create a self-supporting ecosystem on even the smallest level, nor the ability to move people to Mars in any reasonable numbers. And we probably won't for at least a hundred years, possibly more.

[Sushi]

I edited your post instead of replying to it!

Now I'm not sure what to do.

OPPRESSION!

[MP-Ryan]

The problem is that we don't have the ability to create a self-supporting ecosystem on even the smallest level, nor the ability to move people to Mars in any reasonable numbers. And we probably won't for at least a hundred years, possibly more.

That, and it would be oh-so-much cheaper to deal with our **** on our own planet, instead of spending an insane amount of money to **** up another.

*Question about "organic" foods*

Karajorma answered you already more than adequately, but to expand on that, organic foods are bad for the environment because they propagate disease.  Forget for a second that an organic crop takes double the land for half the yield; even without that annoying [for the organic hype-types] fact, huge tracts of artificially seeded plants disrupting the ecosystem in place without the appropriate defenses to survive there are an invitation for mass disease and famine.

All plants have natural defenses against disease and predation, and one of those is synergistic growth - most natural ecosystems have dozens of plant species with supporting bacteria, fungi, and insect populations that sustain them.  Artificially-seeded crop plants do not.  For practical reason, we have to plant these in huge swaths.  Organic farmers have to plant even larger swaths to meet the same yield.  Once a disease can gain a foothold in an unprotected crop, it can wipe out the entire field - and the neighbouring field, and it's neighbours.  Until the invention of pesticides, this is exactly what happened, leading to a number of notable famines around the globe.  One of the more famous ones is the Irish potato famine, and it is a particularly good example because of the social, political, and migratory upheaval it caused.  Wars have started over this - big ones, with lasting consequences.

Pesticide use is much like vaccination - for large populations, it's necessary.  While more natural pesticides are preferred, and it is better to trade some efficacy for lesser toxicity, they are still a necessity for commercial growth of food.  Organic farming is capable of supporting only a much smaller population - under a billion, if that.

This is not to say that I think personal growth of foodstuffs without pesticides is a bad idea - far from it.  If everyone made use of yard, roof, deck, porsh, etc space to grow some sustenance plants and did so without pesticides and herbicides, it would do us all a world of good.

[BlackDove]

It's like you people never heard of wars and disease.

[karajorma]

Pesticide use is much like vaccination - for large populations, it's necessary.  While more natural pesticides are preferred, and it is better to trade some efficacy for lesser toxicity, they are still a necessity for commercial growth of food.

Thing is, there have been very few studies on the toxicity of natural pesticides. Everyone just assumes that cause they are from a natural source they must be safer. It's an absolutely retarded idea. There are plenty of toxic chemicals in nature and whenever someone suggests that the natural ones are better simply because they are natural I'm tempted to ask them if they were given the choice would they prefer to be struck by lightning rather than get an electric shock from a plug socket because it's natural.

Perhaps I should invite those people to drink some of my natural belladonna & foxglove tea.

Simple fact is that we have no idea if the pesticides used in organic farming are less toxic than the conventional ones, they could be more toxic, they could be worse for the environment (the fact that they are less effective and therefore used in greater quantities points to that possibility). What little research has been carried out has shown they are just as toxic as the synthetic ones. And even if the chemicals themselves are safe who knows what impurities are also in the organic pesticides?

[Flipside]

Thing is, if there's not enough food then people will starve and die, Nature doesn't cut us a special deal in that respect. We laughably do our bit for the environment, like those biodegradable bags, that are actually the cause of large swathes of rainforest being cut down in order to grow the material they are made from etc, but the truth is, even things like GM crops etc will not be able to keep pace with our rate of growth.

Our best bet is, always has been, and probably will always remain expansion, that's why I always hold that one of the stupidest things a Government to do is to cut funding to the Space Program because of financial/resource problems, Earth is a closed system, no matter how much we recycle, and we need to open that system up, there are, quite literally, metal mountains and hydrocarbon oceans out there if we can get to them, and the opportunities for Terraforming, particularly places like Mars, could be our only real way out of the problem we are in, at least one that doesn't involve mass starvation, or Logans-Run style Euthenasia.

I don't think mankind is on the brink of destruction or anything, but there's a lot of conceptual deadweight we've dragged with us through the centuries, there's still a distrust of science above and beyond our inherent fear of change, and, more dangerously, there's an apocolyptic tendency to humanity that means you get groups like the '2012'ers or the 'Rapture Ready', who have already convinced themselves we're already into injury time and the whistle is about to blow. It's people like this, who think some kind of third party is going to come along and either fix or destroy everything that leads to us sitting on our hands when we should be taking action.

[Rodo]

Life will go on.

A couple of things can happen (that I can think about now):

1)
Poor people die because of the lack of resources.

2)
Population grow stalls naturally (already happening in the old continent).

3)
Necessity opens the way for new technologies to be developed, which will solve these problems (until we stumble upon new ones)

[Liberator]

Life will go on.

A couple of things can happen (that I can think about now):

1)
Poor people die because of the lack proper utilization of resources due to some bull**** or another.

2)
Population grow stalls naturally (already happening in the old continent).
This is mainly due to the countries of that continent slipping into decadence.(See the topic that goober posted that no one seems interested in posting in.

3)
Necessity opens the way for new technologies to be developed, which will solve these problems (until we stumble upon new ones)

Fixed for correctness.

[Scotty]

I take issue with your correction to the second point.  Declining population growth rates has nothing to do with decadence, and more to do with how kids are a financial liablity rather than an advantage in a modern developed country.  Correlation != causation.

That, and people wanting to have less kids than the replacement isn't decadence.

[General Battuta]

I concur with Scotty. If anything, slipping population growth is due to maturation into excellence - societies understand that it's better to have smaller numbers of highly skilled, well-cared-for individuals than a swarm of expendable babies with a high mortality rate.

[BloodEagle]

[....] a swarm of expendable babies with a high mortality rate.

I'm going to make this game, now. 

[SpardaSon21]

[...] a swarm of expendable babies with a high mortality rate.

Zerg: High mortality rates by our swarms of expendable babies, and we win.

OM NOM NOM NOM

[General Battuta]

[...] a swarm of expendable babies with a high mortality rate.

Zerg: High mortality rates by our swarms of expendable babies, and we win.

OM NOM NOM NOM

Actually you really have to be careful not to spend too many zerglings. It's more of a matter of getting a critical mass than of attrition.