[Unknown Target]

There are two debates that aren't happening. The first is about "What is Life?". That's been covered up with the simplifying and dividing language where Pro-Choice is pushed up against Pro-Life.

Except Pro-Choice doesn't mean you're in favor of killing babies, and Pro-Life doesn't mean you're in favor of the government throwing you in jail because what you do with your body doesn't adhere to their guidelines.

The second debate is "What the FLIPPING CRAP do we do about human-driven climate change?".

The phrasing on this is important, because whether or not you believe "Global Warming" is real, the REAL debate is:

"Should we use the God-like abilities of the human race we possess at this point in time to shape our own environment and change it? Can we handle the ability we have to shape transformations of the Earth? Should we start trying? When? For how long? Etc, etc."

So ok, wait wait....UT, you're crazy. What do questions of change control have to do with population management?

It's simple. Meat produces a lot of greenhouse gasses - either directly (cow farts), or indirectly (fuel burned to grow the food that feeds the cows, being one example). The more people there are, the more fuel they'll burn making food to grow cows to feed more people. If I locked you in a room full of fresh car exhaust, you'd die. So whatever it is, putting a lot of it into the air can't be good for it.

But I digress..let's get back to the first debate. "What is Life?".

I'm not sure. But whatever life is, it has certain inalienable rights. Those rights include the right to living, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

If you force a baby to be born when the world is not ready for it, then you are infringing on that baby's right to the pursuit of happiness, by removing choices that had it come at the right time, it would have been able to pursue. Even though we like to believe in the fantasy of the poor kid climbing the ladder to millions, the problem is with a population of a million millionares, no one has any money.

By their very nature, millionares are rare in the economic system we have set up. If you're lucky, you'll get born into a well off and stable family. If you're not, you'll be born into a broken family, or one that, through years of poor choices, by themselves and others and fortunes, for those near and far, have found themselves repeatedly unable to leave their negative circumstances behind them.

So taking away the ability of those responsible for their actions to choose whether or not to have a baby, is robbing a potentially unwanted child of it's future.

The graphic referenced in the thread linked at the bottom of the posts says that since 1820, there have been more people not living in absolute poverty every year. However, it also shows that over that same time period, the total amount of people that lived in total poverty remained unchanged, except recently with the ascension of China's citizenry out of poverty. Maybe if we started focusing on keeping the blue the same height and get the red down to zero, instead of just adding more things, then maybe the things we already have will get better.

Right now the world's got a lot of people in it, and it's set to only get more. We need to stop thinking about fighting the other guy and start thinking about what we're gonna do to get out of this situation. Because there's a lot of fighting, and a lot of pain in this world these days...and when we only think about ourselves, we lose sight of the bigger picture. We'll never get everyone to see it at once, but we can get enough people to make a change.

Anyway. Maybe if we started focusing on how to take care of the planet as part of a collective "human body", or something, some gift from nothingness, then we'll finally fix these problems and get on with the next stage of human change.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3fbqg5/1_billion_people_lived_in_extreme_poverty_two/

[Snarks]

I'll start off by saying I'm pro-choice as well but not necessarily for the same reasons you've posted.

Abortion is not the solution for an unsustainable population. It can be part of a solution, and there's certainly evidence that suggests abortion allows for population control.

Population control is not going to happen unless government or individual incentives  favors it. A government is not going to restrict its population growth if it feels that it needs more citizens. China actually favored higher birth rates in the 50s-70s. On some accounts, this may have been a wise move because it created a large labor force ideal for working in manufacturing. Allowing for abortion is not going to stop a family from having 5+ kids. For rural farming communities or disease ridden areas, you might actually want more kids for family labor, e.g. running a farm.

What I do know is that wealthy people seem to have less kids. This might be because they can expect their kids to live longer, have no need for family labor, are culturally different, or any other reasons. If you want to stop excessive population growth, then taking the route of making them wealthier might do a lot more than simply allowing for abortion.

I feel like you're really arguing against population growth and climate change, but you're using abortion as the reason for why these things are happening. An unsustainable population seems like a terrifying prospect, but I think it's one that you can combat. Find more green sources of energy, eat less meat, find meat substitutes, etc. People respond to incentives. If you want people to change, give them the incentives to do so. Abortion might be a step in the right direction, but it is not the only solution nor is banning it the primary or significant reason to why there are as many people on this earth as there is.

[OverDhill]

I am not going to debate Global Warming or now Climate change but before you believe the party line from the men who are making themselves rich off it read this


http://www.lowerwolfjaw.com/agw/quotes.htm


Yeah old enough to remember hearing many of those myself.

Now read this

http://dcwhispers.com/meet-the-climate-scientist-barack-obama-wants-silenced/#bPzzkGSHcOW8GQH7.01


As for life.... a fetus has its own DNA and often its own blood type. Not sure how anyone can not see it is a human life inside the womb is beyond me

End of my input

[The E]

No. You do NOT get to drive-by post like that. Have a warning.

[watsisname]

We already know how to solve the problem of climate change, without serious economic impacts or population control.  We just have to get serious about doing it.

http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/The_Way_forward.pdf
http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg3/

Added:  Just to emphasize, this post is meant mainly for UT.  Population growth and climate change are both issues that we, as a civilization, need to look at pretty carefully, but the two are not as directly related as a lot of people seem to think.  The thermodynamics of the atmosphere doesn't directly care about how many people or cows there are.  It cares about the concentration of greenhouse gases, or the emissions rate vs. sequestration rate.  Sure, the more people there are, the more energy we use, and with our energy production being largely from fossil fuels, that means a lot of emissions.  So you could imagine trying to solve this by controlling population growth.  Consider a strategy where we want to avoid more than 2°C of warming, but use the same energy production methods, and the same energy per capita.  Guess what -- you'll have to either find some awesome and practical way of reducing solar insolation, and/or sequestering CO2... or you'll have to reduce population by a few hundred million people per year.  Cutting emissions by controlling population just doesn't work, unless you're insane and throw out all ethics.   There are far better ways.

As for managing population growth for its own sake, I don't think abortion is the right way to look at it, either.  Not because of any ethical problem with abortion, but rather because it's a much more complex socioeconomic issue than that.  It's really difficult to say what our "carrying capacity" is anyway, since it depends a lot on our technology, food production, and management of the environment.

[Unknown Target]

I think you guys are focusing a lot on the part of my argument with population control, and less so on my preposition that abortion is important mainly because it provides a higher quality of life for those babies that are actually brought into this world as wanted beings. Read the bit about "what is life", inalienable rights, etc.

That being said, I never proposed that abortion would be the end-all, be all to population control. But it would help, because it would give people who didn't want or couldn't handle a child the option to not have it. The less unwanted people we have in this world, the better - for them and for the rest of us.

As for population control and climate change....well, I've always understood it to be a thermodynamic issue, wherein there's just not enough energy hitting the planet to support all of us living first world lifestyles. I could be wrong on that, though.

[The E]

If you want the end-all, be-al of population control, you only need to look at the history of women's suffrage, and the effects of pervasive education of and career opportunities other than mother and wife for women.

[WeatherOp]

That being said, I never proposed that abortion would be the end-all, be all to population control. But it would help, because it would give people who didn't want or couldn't handle a child the option to not have it. The less unwanted people we have in this world, the better - for them and for the rest of them.

Wouldn't a government run spay and neuter program be more efficient and less morally invasive if you want population control and improvement in quality of life?

Let's say $30 a neuter or spay if you don't want kids.

[Unknown Target]

Sure, but a lot of people would be scared of that, and I imagine many people wouldn't go for the surgery. But I think it's a good idea.


@The E: Yea, agreed.

[Bobboau]

ok, but how does one deal with population control and an aging population?

[Unknown Target]

I never said WeatherOp's idea was bad or shouldn't be implemented. I just wasn't saying it was a slot-in replacement for legal abortion.

[MP-Ryan]

Abortion should be legal, accessible, safe, and rare.  The best way to accomplish the latter is through sex education and improvement of living standards, as has been demonstrated both by studies and real-world data all over the planet.  Improve sex education, women's education, women's job prospects, and over-all access to birth control options for the population and the abortion rate does nothing but drop.  So does the overall birth rate, I might add, which renders the idea of abortion-as-supplementary-population-control both morally repugnant and completely unnecessary.

It's the great irony of consevrative America:  oh hell no, we can't possibly cover pregnancy-prevention in schools or health care, but if you get pregnant you'd better see that pregnancy to term.  Good grief.

[StarSlayer]

Come on MP, no sex education past abstinence is all that's required.  It's not like complete ignorance will lead them to try anal because they can "remain virgins and not get a STD"...

[Unknown Target]

Abortion should be legal, accessible, safe, and rare.  The best way to accomplish the latter is through sex education and improvement of living standards, as has been demonstrated both by studies and real-world data all over the planet.  Improve sex education, women's education, women's job prospects, and over-all access to birth control options for the population and the abortion rate does nothing but drop.  So does the overall birth rate, I might add, which renders the idea of abortion-as-supplementary-population-control both morally repugnant and completely unnecessary.

It's the great irony of consevrative America:  oh hell no, we can't possibly cover pregnancy-prevention in schools or health care, but if you get pregnant you'd better see that pregnancy to term.  Good grief.

Whenever I think of abortion as population control, I think of BSG, where Roslin outlawed it to keep the population rising.

I'm not saying it will solve our problems, but having it as legal means that we can focus more on the quality of the humans we produce, rather than the number.

[WeatherOp]

It's the great irony of consevrative America:  oh hell no, we can't possibly cover pregnancy-prevention in schools or health care, but if you get pregnant you'd better see that pregnancy to term.  Good grief.

I think the great irony is we are dumb enough to need to be taught about the basic facts if life yet they allow many of the same to control a two ton vehicle.

Wait who am I kidding some people ask me what you do with a forged wall hook.

[StarSlayer]

Um, the utilization of abortion squarely resides around the personal choice of the woman involved.  Its a very difficult personal decision and opening it up to some socio/cultural system to promote population control is morally repugnant.  Especially when, as multiple folks have pointed out, there are much better ways of promoting stable population than some dystopian bull****.

[Unknown Target]

*Shrug* Just saying, from a logical perspective it makes sense. Allow people to choose whether or not to bring someone into circumstances that will significantly limit their future expansion in life. That's really the thrust of what I was trying to say, a counter-argument to the "all lives matter" side of things that you get from the "Pro-Lifers". Is the life that you're creating going to be worth it? I say no, if you're not prepared to care for it.

[jr2]

I am not going to debate Global Warming or now Climate change but before you believe the party line from the men who are making themselves rich off it read this


http://www.lowerwolfjaw.com/agw/quotes.htm


Yeah old enough to remember hearing many of those myself.

Now read this

http://dcwhispers.com/meet-the-climate-scientist-barack-obama-wants-silenced/#bPzzkGSHcOW8GQH7.01


As for life.... a fetus has its own DNA and often its own blood type. Not sure how anyone can not see it is a human life inside the womb is beyond me

End of my input

No. You do NOT get to drive-by post like that. Have a warning.

You guys do realize you're not the most pleasant bunch to debate with?  Not the worst, but there's a reason I don't really dig in to debates here, just saying.  I don't blame someone for wanting to only have input lite into an echo chamber.

EDIT: By which I'm not saying that you all are in lockstep.  More like you all tend to ream out anyone whose ideas you all disagree with heartily, leading to a corrosive atmosphere in those debate threds.

EDIT2: I suppose I should also clarify that in the recently locked thread here, towards the end it looked (to me at least) as if people were actually starting to understand each other's viewpoints.


Then, of course, the thread gets locked for people supposedly trying to

"Interrogate the unbeliever about the extent of his heresy"

I don't recall anyone at the end of that thread making any sort of accusations about the opposing position, it actually seemed to be conveying a decent deal of information about both sides of the argument.

[The E]

If all you are interested in is voicing your opinion without discussion, get a blog and turn off comments. This is not what discussion forums are for though. If you do not wish to participate in a discussion, then do not participate. Do not enter a discussion, drop a bunch of opinions and tell people you're not going to be around to explain, defend or expand on your statements. That's a breach of etiquette at best, outright trolling at worst, and tolerating it is a bad idea.

[jr2]

I think it was meant as a "here's my thoughts on this" -- I'm sure he'd read any responses made to it, and probably might even respond to other points of view, but he's not in the mood / doesn't have the time to be cross-examined about it.  That's what I took it as anyways.  If it was meant as more of a 'this is what I think and I don't care what your opinions are', then yeah that's not nice.