Being Quiverful

That's pretty fucked up dude. I am not a fan of people having children all the time, but I'm not a psycho either.

 

Ehh, I suppose I just have a sick sense of humor, got my first neg rep here for it too:coffee:

But in all seriousness, I think it takes a psycho to doom all of our offspring, several generations from now, to death by some easter island-tacular suffocation of resources.

 

You're insane if you really think the population problem is that bad. There are enough resources on this planet to sustain a lot more people than we have now. The fact that a few countries are overpopulated doesn't mean there is a global problem.

The trend is actually moving in your favour though. How can you think the population is increasing when the size of families has probably been quartered over the past 50 years?

 

There's no such thing as a specific carrying ability for the Earth, it changes with technology and demands. There's about 6.6 billion people on Earth right now, now if we only had technology from the 16th century still, then yea probably about 6 billion of those people would be hungry right now.

 

We will just have to see who is right...

I hope I'm not right, but nothing you have said has at all swayed my opinion that overpopulation is going to lead to massive amounts disease and death.

If every other group of organisms on the planet have a carrying capacity, so do we and technology can't save us. In fact, it is just helping us to reach our own destruction quicker. Technology has given us things that help us deforest quicker, an agriculture system that is destroying the earth's soils, and someday it is all going to come crashing down on us.

I know, I know, I am using a computer... but as soon as I finish school I am going into the woods to be self-sustainable and technology can go fuck itself.

 

I guess all the deforestation, over-fishing and over-grazing to satisfy the needs of more and more people doesn't bother you, but it bothers me. If we all used way less and there were less of us the planet would be a lot happier. We can only rape the earth so long before it starts to fight back.

 

Arguments like that tend to personify the planet, which is something I've never seen much basis for. The Earth is not alive, and its 'happiness' doesn't really seem like an important priority. The Earth is valuable because of what lives on it -- it has no value in itself. I understand that you're making the point that if we destroy the Earth then we can't continue to live on it. I just don't understand why people couch that in such mystical terms.

 

Other species have a carrying limit in their environment because they must live off nothing but plants or each other, they have no technology and can't raise other animals for food, i.e. a lion's population is going to be directly effected in an area by the population of other animals it can eat which is effected by the amount of plant life and terrain for plant eating animals to live there.

Humans eat both plants and animals, have awesome technology, and are at the very top of every food chain, and can live anywhere on the planet almost, this doesn't apply to us.

You'll leave quickly, for the same reason subsistence farmers in third world countries try to make their way to the city, technology is pretty awesome.

 

You may be jumping the gun a bit in saying she won't make a good go at a simpler lifestyle: lots of people do it, and it can be quite successful and rewarding, if certainly more difficult.

The rest of your post is dead on, though.

 

Without the personification, the argument looks like this: There's only so many cookies in the jar.

I could go on and on about WHY when you finish the cookies, there are no more cookies... and list the different kinds of cookies we're going to run out of or poison and THEN run out of, but if you don't get the basic idea, i'm afraid it won't help....

We'll just have to wait, I suppose.

Oh, and just because it's the hip thing to do in developed countries for companies to put unenvironmental green dyes in shit and say "we're going green" without doing a damn green thing does NOT mean that the earth is better off in any way, or that our situation is improving.

And family size fell. Population didn't. If you didn't notice, the trend is moving away from families, but NOT away from getting knocked up.

 

Population growth rate has near stalled in most of the first world, it's the third world where most of it has taken place.

 

So you're saying having a population explosion of uncivilized people who where traumatized their whole life by violence, starvation, disease, and more, is better than having a growing population than sane people?

It's one of those thigns, like how broken families breed broken families... There are individual people who can cope with it, most can't, and will succumb to living how they've seen others contently live.

 

Like a lot of people arguing for what you are, you're being completely unreasonable and twisting people's words. First of all, I'm not sure why you felt the need to explain the argument to me. I said in my post that I understood the point, but not the reason for the delivery. And second, no one said it was better to have overpopulation in the third world. The point is that focusing your efforts here and telling people to have less children here isn't really addressing the issue.

 

I think one thing that matters is the motivation behind these couple's desires to have lots of children. They are being commanded by an ancient text to "be fruitful and multiply". This ancient text dates back to a time period when infant mortality was high. So, of course the author of these words would command that men and women have as many children as possible. It was inevitable that many would die before the age of one. These people are taking an out-dated verse and attempting to apply it to the present time.

Unless you own an empire or a gigantic farm, then there is no need for 10 or 15 children. Does this mean that people should be restricted on how many children they have? No, of course not. It's their right; just like it's my right to not have children. It would require the government being too intrusive and controlling. If these men and women are willing to do this, then okay. Besides, attempting to restrict family sizes is just cutting a branch off of the tree. The root of the problem lies in the motivation for this kind of life. Unnecessary strain is being placed on men to provide for a family of this size, and strain placed on women to care for such a large family.

Also, I honestly don't think a small movement like this could have that much of a global impact on population. However, I think it does have an impact on family dynamics and the well-being of the children. Remember Andrea Yates? Her and her husband were indirectly tied to the Quiverfull Movement. I don't think this means that mothers of lots of children are all homicidal, but I do think that having the wrong motivation for something can lead to very bad things.

 

So you're saying we should sterilize the whole third world? Because basically what you said sounds like eugenics. And sorry, just because a country is poor doesn't mean everyone is starving, dying and fighting in civil wars. You'd be surprised but up until the 1940's some parts of the American south-east looked like third world countries too until the tennessee valley authority came into existence. But you know what, they were happy.

In fact, in one of the first new ways to measure global happiness using other then monetary wealth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Planet_Index
A first world country doesn't make it onto the list until number 43

Obama was a broken home, collected food stamps, he seems pretty well adjusted.

You know people in the third world aren't popping out kids for shits and giggles, more kids means more labor in a poor country, whether it by farm or wage, and they don't exactly have the same access to condoms and birth control pills we do

Despite how it seems you're just as likely to find broken families in the suburbs as you are anywhere else, wealth does not equal good family.

 

I didn't say that people like obama can't rise out of a bad situation. It's just that people who would rise would rise in any situation. And I didn't say sterilize anyone, just that I can't see how the third world multiplying faster has anything to do with the fact that it's just WRONG to go have kids because you can. And I'm not equating wealth to a good situation, family wise or in any other way. Wealthy people are often complete assholes, because they can buy their way thru life without learning basic manners.

 

Well generally, most people do in fact have kids because they can, it's a great urge in many people. It would be argued biologically passing on your genes is the only reason for your existence and human evolution as we know it.

Why poor people generally have so many kids though goes back to the reasons above.

 

Well looking at human life that way (the way I do) there's no reason for ANYTHING... if you only exist to ensure the existance of things like you, which all exist for the same reason... You get my point. You have to MAKE a reason to exist, passing on a string of G's, A's, T's, and C's isn't a very fulfilling existance.

I do take your point of course, I'm just saying... While you're right, that's exactly the problem. And exactly why we don't need people with that mindset passing that mindset on to their young. Having kids is great. Having kids until your gonads are too shriveled to spawn anything further because you can is NOT great.

 

You guys are forgetting that there are two things that influence population growth:

Births and deaths.

The amount of births in a population doesn't mean shit unless you put the amount of deaths into the equation. The birth rate could be pretty high, but if one person is dying for each person that is born, then that population would stabilize.

 

^
That is true, but in countries where the death rate is high the birth rate tends to even multitudes higher. On the flip side the replacement rate of a country is 2.1 kids to maintain population, most countries in Europe for example are far below that, and with low levels of immigration most European countries are expected to lose quite a bit of their population by 2040 as the baby boomers begin to die

There in lies the problem though, most people don't want many kids, and don't have them, and those that do is often the problem of you can't reduce the human appetite for sex, and it creates a problem when there's no birth control availible.