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China to begin two-child policy

bbc.co.uk

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Re: China to begin two-child policy

#391

Post by TeMPOraL »

elboru wrote: post #184
iofj wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is much more what will happen to the world's numbers before the population numbers decline (IF indeed EVERY ethnic groups starts reducing numbers. God help us all if there is one that doesn't) Numbers of fanatically religious people will double, relatively speaking. Mostly Catholics and Muslims. This is under the assumption that the current rates of conversions remain roughly the same. Trouble is, p…

It's interesting, the generalized idea you have about "Catholics" and "Muslims" comes from a point of view where they're a minority. I'm from Mexico where almost 90% of the population is Catholic and something interesting happens here: Protestants are the minority and they're viewed as the "fanatically religious people", people would say they're always talking about their religion, they don't party a lot, they don't…

> Maybe there's a correlation between minorities and the attachment to their ideas (not only religious ideas) and that could be interpreted by the majority as "radical" or "fanatic" positions.

It probably doesn't need to be interpreted as "radical" or even "fanatic", it actually is radical and fanatic.

I grew up in a country of 90+% Catholics, but I was raised in a minority Christian religion. Yes, we always talked about the religion, didn't party (that) much, etc. - that was because we actually cared about following our beliefs, which can't be said about Catholics in my country.

Thinking more about it led me to the following conclusion: any religion that grows so big that it becomes mainstream has to relax a lot. Religious life becomes intertwined with day-to-day problems of employment, managing the economy, etc. Meanwhile you stop having small communities that can push all unconvenient issues to outside with "us vs. them" attitude. Professional specialization starts, people are delegating their religious issues to their priests (compare the way Catholicism looks in big cities vs. small villages). And then one day you wake up and can't ignore politics anymore, because suddenly your religion is the society, and thus is the politics.

TL;DR: Going from "more fanatic / more real" to "less fanatic / less real" seems to me to be a natural course of evolution of a religion as it grows.

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#392

Post by ZenoArrow »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #377
ZenoArrow wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Even the most generous estimates I've seen place the Earth's carrying capacity at 7.7 billion people." Can you show me these estimates? Do they take into account ways we could live with a smaller footprint (e.g. vegetarian/vegan diet) and/or advances in eco-friendly technology?

Denying people their meat or SUVs is an equivalent problem to limiting the number of children they have. People won't give their "freedoms" voluntarily - you have to force them either by law or by economy (and letting the free market take care of it will likely be too little too late). The whole argument sounds to me like "we don't have to force people to change their lifestyle to adjust for Earth's capacity - we can…

Are you suggesting most people have the same level of attachment to SUVs as they have to their fellow human beings?

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#393

Post by steve19 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #348
steve19 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.... Said every murderous dictator when he decided a certain segment of the population was polluting the gene pool and he no longer wanted to see or hear them. or in other words: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. "2+2 = 4" said every murderous dictator ever, and yet we don't ban arithmetics for being a tool that Stalin used.

Pulling out a Straw Man, is the last resort of the lazy debater. I never implied correlation or causation. I attacked a repulsive philosophy.

I implied the justification of "its for the good of society" in removing/restricting human rights (reproduction) and mutilating woman (forced abortions), is no different to the justification historical dictators used when they did the exact same things ... like for example the terrible things a totalitarian dictator did to Jews and homosexuals in your country during the 40s. In fact this same philosophy would have been used to ban your grandparents, and mine, from breeding had they been successful.

Adopting a policy of "anything goes because it is for my perceived good of society", without regard for society's wishes, allows for any manner of evils to be 'legally' imposed on that society by the ruling classes.

PS. To address the point you made: the US does in fact ban the export of arithmetics (cryptography, software) to a number of countries ruled by dictators (not that I think this is a good policy or that it has the intended effect).

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#394

Post by TeMPOraL »

UK-AL wrote: post #127
trymas wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But problem is resource consumption, no? It's a complete speculation, because I can't cite this, but isn't Earth not capable of sustaining 7+ billion people? Exponential population growth brings even greater exponential rise of greenhouse effect, oil consumption, deforestation, etc. IMHO it is the main problem of overpopulation.

Nobody knows what its capable of sustaining. There's stuff like using resources more efficiently, recycling etc. We aren't good at these things yet, consumption could go a lot higher with improvements to those.

> We aren't good at these things yet, consumption could go a lot higher with improvements to those.

That's an Malthusianism[0] right here. Why recycling and increased efficiency themselves aren't a solution? Because people will increase their consumption to offset all the gains.

C.f.:

"Why are even some affluent parts of the world running out of fresh water? Because if they weren’t, they’d keep watering their lawns until they were."

[0] - http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=418

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#395

Post by TeMPOraL »

netcan wrote: post #204

China's 1 child policy (now 2 child, I guess) is a difficult to fully form an opinion on. On one hand, "population crisis" is something a lot of people are concerned about^ and the policy was a direct and practical way of tackling it. On the other, it is unmistakably totalitarian. Going to 2 is a strange choice. It's just as totalitarian, but probably has a fairly negligible effect on average fertility rate. I guess…

I think the angle people are missing is that "totalitarian" doesn't always mean bad. Some problems are generally unsolvable by a democracy (coordination problems in general), you have to introduce some way of unilateral decision making to make progress, if you want to progress faster than by a random walk.

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#396

Post by TeMPOraL »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #392
TeMPOraL wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Denying people their meat or SUVs is an equivalent problem to limiting the number of children they have. People won't give their "freedoms" voluntarily - you have to force them either by law or by economy (and letting the free market take care of it will likely be too little too late). The whole argument sounds to me like "we don't have to force people to change their lifestyle to adjust for Earth's capacity - we can…

Are you suggesting most people have the same level of attachment to SUVs as they have to their fellow human beings?

I'm suggesting people have a smiliar level of attachment to being allowed to buy a SUV as they have to being allowed to have a child in the future.

Which is pretty visible in the West; every time the government tries to limit access to something, you get a stream of arguments that look exactly the same as those against one child policy that are posted here.

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#397

Post by TeMPOraL »

zhemao wrote: post #384
TeMPOraL wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Africa and India to play ball. The wealthy West limiting its procreation doesn't buy much for the Earth when somewhere else, poor families are pumping out children by the dozens.

Africa and India don't have widely available contraception, high levels of education, and low rates of infant mortality. Solve those problems and people will have fewer kids.

Exactly. I totally agree.

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#398

Post by TeMPOraL »

steve19 wrote: post #393
TeMPOraL wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. "2+2 = 4" said every murderous dictator ever, and yet we don't ban arithmetics for being a tool that Stalin used.

Pulling out a Straw Man, is the last resort of the lazy debater. I never implied correlation or causation. I attacked a repulsive philosophy. I implied the justification of "its for the good of society" in removing/restricting human rights (reproduction) and mutilating woman (forced abortions), is no different to the justification historical dictators used when they did the exact same things ... like for example the…

A straw man is what you're pulling out here right now :).

> I implied the justification of "its for the good of society" in removing/restricting human rights (reproduction) and mutilating woman (forced abortions), is no different to the justification historical dictators used when they did the exact same things ... like for example the terrible things a totalitarian dictator did to Jews and homosexuals in your country during the 40s

That's my point - the philosophy may or may not be sound, but the fact that evil dictatorships used such philosophy doesn't matter. It doesn't reflect on its soundness.

There are reasons that humans shouldn't generally be allowed to go for "ends justify the means" though. Like you correctly observe, historically it ended up with people abusing the power to promote one group over another. But the philosophy is not in itself repulsive.

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#399

Post by fineman »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #364
fineman wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, because if nobody killed the inmate they'd still be alive. Your "need" to kill them because they crossed some line is your need, and you're the killer. (For better or worse...)

You have to punish the defectors if you want to have a stable society. If you set up a law that says "X is punishable by death" and someone does X, then you have to deliver death to that person, or else the law loses all its coordinating power. If the law itself is not just, then you're responsible for unnecessary deaths, but a person committing X in full knowledge of the consequences is responsible for their own dea…

Sure, you just can't sugar-coat it. You're deciding to kill someone for that goal.

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#400

Post by TeMPOraL »

paradite wrote: post #216

Talk about bad things about China -> Get upvotes. Talk about good things about China -> Get downvotes and people rebutting you with clearly one-sided sources. Am I surprised? No. Am I pissed? No. I believe time will tell.

I don't know. Going through the comments, people here seem to be ahead of the curve in accepting that China may actually have had a point. But it's hard to agree with for many, because that would mean conceding that undemocratic solutions can be good and effective.
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