China to begin two-child policy • Hacker News Board

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#271

Post by gnaritas » Thu, Oct 29, 2015, 5:46 PM UTC

c0achmcguirk wrote: post #206

gnaritas wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> America has been slowly transitioning from a Bible believing nation to a humanist world view. America has been slowly transitioning from a superstitious nation to a more rational one. Fixed that for you. > The humanist world view on the other hand has no moral absolutes and must enforce the popular or elected rules onto the majority by force. No one has moral absolutes, they do not exist except in the minds of thos…

> America has been slowly transitioning from a superstitious nation to a more rational one. lulz Rationality requires laws of logic--which do not exist in a humanistic, materialistic world. Tell me, can you stub your toe on the law of non-contradiction? No? How does it exist then?

> Rationality requires laws of logic--which do not exist in a humanistic, materialistic world.

And how do you suppose that? Materialism doesn't deny the existence of logic; you seem to not really know what materialism is.

> Tell me, can you stub your toe on the law of non-contradiction? No? How does it exist then?

Yea, you don't know what materialism is. I can't stub my toe on hacker news either, nor any website, but they clearly exist and they exist in way perfectly compatible with materialism as does your mind and the thing we call logic. They still all reduce down to patterns of matter in your brain or patterns of electrons in computer chips, it is all physical at the base level. To a materialist, mind is simply what the brain does, it's your operating system just as Windows is what your computer is probably doing. Perfectly compatible with materialism.

Science and logic go hand in hand and scientists are virtually all materialists because so far as anyone can demonstrate with evidence, materialism is the nature of reality.

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#272

Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Oct 29, 2015, 5:51 PM UTC

ZenoArrow wrote: post #250

Dylan16807 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So someone who is poor is of less "merit"? With the word in quotes like that? Absolutely yes.

Can you explain what you mean by that?

Poor people are, in general, treated as if they have less merit.

So they have merit in an absolute sense, but not in a societal opinion sense.

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#273

Post by fineman » Thu, Oct 29, 2015, 5:53 PM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #120

bigfudge wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter the history, using communist as a synonym for totalitarian is lazy.

No matter the history, using terms as they are applied in real life is generally accepted. The definition of communism means one thing, the real world applications of it are something else. How many communist governments have there been that weren't totalitarian?

Well there aren't any actual communist governments, so there haven't been any totalitarian ones. :P

I agree, somewhat, about using vernacular, but that misses the point.

The USSR was no-more a communism because they said so than they'd have been a capitalism by saying so... You are as you do, not as you wish to be seen doing.

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#274

Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Oct 29, 2015, 5:56 PM UTC

MacsHeadroom wrote: post #245

Dylan16807 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most people would say that if the punishment is justified then the responsibility is transitive.

The punishment being justified depends entirely on whether or not the law itself is just (e.g. capital punishment is largely considered to be a legal injustice). Whether or not responsibility is transitive a separate, but important, matter. As it turns out, responsibility for statutory laws is only transitive when applied to a party to the statute (e.g. a lawmaker or the enforcer). A thief is responsible for restitut…

And if the contract is "you can live and work here if you don't have a baby"? Let's say a hypothetical government doesn't touch the woman, but they insist the woman do something to avoid raising too many children.

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#275

Post by gnaritas » Thu, Oct 29, 2015, 6:00 PM UTC

ctlby wrote: post #234

gnaritas wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> America has been slowly transitioning from a Bible believing nation to a humanist world view. America has been slowly transitioning from a superstitious nation to a more rational one. Fixed that for you. > The humanist world view on the other hand has no moral absolutes and must enforce the popular or elected rules onto the majority by force. No one has moral absolutes, they do not exist except in the minds of thos…

> Laws aren't about morals, they're about reason. Most contentious issues--marriage laws, universal healthcare, minimum wage, etc--are explicitly framed and argued (by both sides) with the language of justice. Moral preferences guide law; reason is just post-hoc rationalization. You might object that "law" is not the same as "contentious issues," but that changes nothing. The emotionally charged political process tha…

Justice is not necessarily a moral concept, it's quite a reasonable concept as well. Laws are about reason in the sense that they're things we can convince majorities to abide by; sometimes those justifications are moral, but being immoral is not a justification to be illegal as morals themselves are fluid and what is moral for one isn't for another. As there are no absolute morals, laws are thus based on reasoning between moral beings as to what they can agree to.

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#276

Post by akshat_h » Thu, Oct 29, 2015, 6:02 PM UTC

baldfat wrote: post #16

Natanael_L wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> allowing couples to have two children if one of them is an only child > To ensure coordinated economic and social development, the population size for China should be kept at about 1.5 billion, said Guo, citing the results of a study sponsored by the State Council, China's cabinet. > China should keep its total fertility rate at around 1.8, and the current rate is between 1.5 to 1.6, allowing the country to maneuve…

Gender bias for one child must be one big influence. > there will be 30 million more men than women in 2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#Sex-based_bir... It was against the law to find the gender of your child in China because if given the option many people wanted boys and would abort.

It might have been a big influence, but I am not entirely sure this will help. Similar issues exist in India without any limit, just because of the cost of raising children.

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#277

Post by gjm11 » Thu, Oct 29, 2015, 6:06 PM UTC

triangleman wrote: post #252

gjm11 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this account of things were correct, then we would expect to find that less-religious (or specifically less-Christian) nations have less freedom. It doesn't look to me as if this is true; for instance, the nations of Scandinavia are distinctly less Christian than the US (they often have established churches, but the rate of actual religious belief and commitment in the population is low) and they seem no less free…

But the OP was not talking about "religion" per se, he was saying that freedom is a natural result of following Christ, specifically following the words of Christ as found in the Bible. Your example of the Middle Ages is a case in point: During this time, scripture was taken away from the people and mainly transmitted between clergy in a dead language (Latin). How could society develop an attitude towards freedom in…

> not talking about "religion" per se [...] following the words of Christ as found in the Bible

We're in some danger of getting no-true-Scotsmanned here, since it's by no means straightforward to determine who is and isn't actually "following the words of Christ as found in the Bible".

Still, let's consider Uganda, where being (actively) homosexual is now punishable by life imprisonment thanks largely to the activism of Christians following the words they find in the Bible. (Not specifically "the words of Christ", but actually that's a bit you just made up; what code4life said was "the new testament Biblical principles".) Now, for all I know you may think this is a good law, and I'm not going to try to change your mind if so -- but what it obviously isn't is an improvement in freedom.

Or consider the long and sad history of how Christians, following the principles they found in the Bible, have tried to prevent schoolteachers telling their pupils accurately about certain areas of science. Again, you might agree with the people who made the laws in question that, e.g., evolution is a damnable atheistic error, but these laws very plainly reduced people's freedom. (In more recent years, as a result of having one such measure after another struck down in the courts, antievolutionists have shifted tactics, and since roughly the 1990s their preferred legal measures haven't been particularly anti-freedom. But that's only because their attempts to get their way by impeding teachers' freedom stopped working.)

> During this time, scripture was taken away from the people and mainly transmitted between clergy in a dead language

I think that's a rather tendentious way of putting it. What happened, rather, was that Latin-as-vernacular largely died out but the prevailing Bible translations remained in Latin. Not a matter of scripture being taken away from the people, but of the people moving away from the language used for the scriptures. (And from written language in general; literacy was very low in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Providing vernacular bibles might not have done anyone much good.)

So, anyway, it's true that mediaeval people generally didn't have Bibles. But they did go to church, where those clergy were supposed to expound on doctrines derived from the Bible, and they did have a culture saturated with Christian ideas. And, actually, it's not even so clear that they didn't have vernacular Bible translations. Take a look here (apologies for the outrageously long Google Books link):

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2pSGAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA178&lp...

"To be sure, the Protestant Reformation did achieve a change in the way the Bible was read and the way it functioned within Christian spirituality, but this change was largely due to a long medieval tradition of lay access to biblical texts."

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#278

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 29, 2015, 6:06 PM UTC

zero_iq wrote: post #96

vincentkriek wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brutal and cruel? I agree it's a severe limit on the personal freedom but China doesn't value personal freedom as highly as the west does. Brutal and cruel is not the right terms for this in my opinion, you can have a beautiful, rich and fullfilling life with 2 children or less. You can plan to have just two children (up to some point). Also, I think it could benefit the earth if more countries would limit children.

The policy itself isn't cruel or brutal, but the enforcement can be terrible. Brutal and cruel acts include: * Killing of child immediately after birth * Killing of child whilst being born, e.g. in birth canal during birth * Termination of pregnancy as late as 8.5 months * Forced abortions (incorporating kidnapping and assault) All of these things have happened routinely as part of enforcement of the "one child" poli…

[deleted]

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#279

Post by akshat_h » Thu, Oct 29, 2015, 6:11 PM UTC

tormeh wrote: post #221

bilbo0s wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rape was the major contributor to population growth in Eastern Kivu back when Nkunda was running rampant. And, to keep everything honest, it still is. (Particularly in Goma). It's not like rape and massacres went away because the Rwandans decided to replace their warlords. The Rwandans still do what Rwandans do I'm sure. I'm only saying that you ascribe certain properties to the populations you are dealing with. And…

You can have sex with an infertile man. Vasectomy does not make the man lack lust, it just makes the man infertile.

One possible problem I see is that females becoming comparatively "irresponsible" about birth control due to perception of males having vasectomy, which may increase accidental pregnancies. I am not taking birth control methods used for STD protection into account here, but the the award of 10k may need to be carefully set so as to have an optimal ratio of infertile vs fertile males. Seems like an interesting proposal though.

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#280

Post by CapitalistCartr » Thu, Oct 29, 2015, 6:15 PM UTC

erispoe wrote: post #248

vinceyuan wrote: post #244

One-child policy began in 1979. In 1980, My mother hid in her relatives' houses and finally delivered her second child - me. I was very lucky because if my mother was caught, I can't sit here to type these sentences. I do understand the one-child policy because there are too many people in China, especially in cities. The population should be under control. (However, as far as I know, one-child policy never really wo…

Why is there too many people in China? What is the standard to determine the right population?

Here is an incrementing population tally; note how fast its growing: http://m.worldometers.info/world-population/

Its not current population so much as the growth rate. China is 2/11 of the World. That's between 1/5 and 1/6, so small changes they make have dramatic effects decades down the road. Our current population is almost certainly not sustainable doing things the way we are now, but we are changing that. Population growth is only sustainable with dramatic changes in the way we live, yet we are adding people by the billion.