i think i’ll ignore you now, so – although i’m sure you’ll need to (nay, MUST) have the last word (or in your case, long long paragraphs), we’re done. fell free to tell yourself you’ve won.

a) did I make fun of your name, assclown stupid sex toy real doll? Or did I, apparently mistakenly, treat your comments as those of a vaguely rational individual who actually sought to contribute anything useful to a discussion?

My mistake, I shan’t bother to assume so in the future… So, until you decide you want to be polite and demonstrate it repeatedly, don’t expect anything of the sort from me.

b) did you have any actual facts to dispute anything I said with, or did you just figure attacking the messenger by name calling and brainless handwaving was sufficient? If that’s what passes for discussion about issues around here, that’s a shame. I didn’t know I was visiting a training ground for Firedoglake, HuffPo, and Daily Kos commenters (there’s too few occurrences of the ‘F’ word for it to be proper training for DU).

In summary, “you’re a pompous, brain-dead jackass with vastly overrated delusions of intellect” and “it’s clear that you’re a cretinous moron studying hard to qualify for idiocy, and failing… *badly*“.

That working more for you on your highest level of discourse?

Let me know if you want me to taunt you a second time, n’kay…?

> “people should have a baby-making deficit such that the death rate way exceeds the birthrate to the point that are only 650 million people in the whole world”? Supposedly people did actually do this in the future and preferred to have few children such that population falls is this ‘ideological genocide’?

Gil, if people actually choose to do this, that’s fine. It’s foolish in the extreme, but that’s still a matter of free choice. I will happily have as many children as I can afford, as will every other sensible person, so that the gene pool doesn’t wind up absent some smart genes.

However, I don’t see how you’ve applied any aspect of your comment to actually bear on the issues at hand, which is the foolishness of the entire Malthusian argument. Did you have a point to make in there somewhere? Was there some weird reasoning by which you tried to connect not having children with killing children who’ve already been born and Malthusianism?

There are numerous instances of Greens claiming the world should have billions fewer people in it, and making it clear, in no uncertain terms, that they aren’t speaking about a gradual reduction. Or claiming that we should be living –NOW — under conditions more like those of the 1600s, and that what would necessarily happen to the population if such were “suddenly” made so doesn’t matter to them at all. These people demonstrate how little they care about human beings over and over. Their underlying misanthropy could not be more visible if it were formed into a halo around them as they sat in a dark room.

I dare say the ant has the cow just where he wants her, the poor dear.

E

hope that wasn’t too inane for you there, old sport.

In an industrial society, this might actually make sense — in a post-industrial society, though, the opportunities for children to actually be highly productive citizens (for their own benefit, if done correctly) at little to no risk or danger to themselves, while gaining valuable life experiences is unfortunate — consider the number of kids who are far more knowledgeable and understanding of computers than people 3 and 4 times their age. How many of them could do highly paid consulting work with proper adult supervision if the law allowed them to do so? How many could go to college knowing that it was all-expenses paid even without a scholarship because of money they socked away at 14, 15, 16 years of age, and came out of college with the experience of a 28 year old with five years employment under their belts?

This, of course, requires that people make have the capacity to make their own choices about what is good for their children’s future — and we know we can’t have anything like that.

The real fact is that it should be easy to get an exemption to child labor laws as long as the work is of a non-menial, non-dangerous nature, and the child maintains their grades in school above a certain level. As far as the money goes, they already have functional laws preventing “financial abuse” in place for dealing with that kind of situation in Cali, with regards to the child actors in Hollywood. One need only look those over for any flaws and adopt some variant of them.

And what in the HELL led you to these inane responses?

It’s rather obvious its both “Easy to say from 650 years in retrospect” and that “people thought (rightly) the world was coming to an end”
How does this — citing short term issues, and pooh-poohing the ability to actually perceive it and the results of it from a distance in a cold, clinical manner — affect, in any way, shape, or form, the analysis that there was a long-term benefit to it?

As far as the ludicrous assertion that there is anyone hoping for a repeat, WTF is wrong with your mental faculties that you would make such a totally unwarranted extension of anything I said? I defy you to find a rational connection between your assertion and anything I stated.

In the context of the times, it’s bleeding obvious that you could not expect, much less feel assured of, any positive benefit to the BP.

The only people in modern times who would cheer for a repeat/rhyme of such a catastrophe are extremist Greens, who, on multiple occasions, have expressed a desire for something to decimate the population — in the reversed sense of killing 90% and leaving only 10%.

BTW –
> People weren’t starving in the areas Borlaug improved because of population growth. Their numbers could be rigidly constrained and they’d still have been unable to consistently feed themselves and subject to devastating periodic famines. It is modern innovation that make our civilization robust and better able to handle disasters that would have been far more damaging in earlier eras.

The true fact is that there isn’t a single region on earth the size of Mexico which does not produce enough food in 10 years time to feed its people for that 10 years. The main problems which cause food shortages and famines are more closely tied to geopolitical reasons than anything else — stupid colonial-era national boundaries that separate peoples from food producing regions, failures to properly store and preserve grain across time, and various pestilence (rats, for example) which eat a major portion of what food does get stored. The tendency of local warlords to push people off farms and into cities, because it makes it easier to control them, and they can depend on food aid from the developed nations rather than arms to their victims, also exacerbates the problem.

The problems are usually ones of too much government doing too many of the wrong things, not too little government. Then you have self-appointed, self-serving demagogues like that fat cow Vandana Shiva obstructing the use of miracle foods with the open support of Green morons who don’t give a rat’s ass about human suffering.

Yes, OBloodyhell, poor farming people want heaps of babies because they are potential assets whereas middle class people find babies are pretty much financial liabilities. Then again Libertarians would blame anti-child labour laws and compulsory schooling that prevent children from earning their keep.

P.S. I love the “Seinfeld” gag where everyone but the parents is shocked by their ugly baby.

epo, not at all — the BP caused a massive shift in the capital base’s ownership, and in many cases, concentrated a lot of it (one surviving family member might inherit the assets formerly belonging to a half-dozen family members). It also broke the existing rigid structures’(including the church’s) control, allowing far more freedom of action for the individual than existed prior to that point. That time period before the BP is depicted as a time of anarchy, when what it was was a lot of localized, very rigid control and class systems — The old manner of becoming a knight by defeating a knight and taking his equipment (far from an easy task) had been replaced by a hereditary system that left no room for mobility, and encouraged inbreeding in the upper class as well — limiting the potential for good genes to express their ability as well as retaining and worsening bad ones.

Your error lies in assuming that “human capital” is equivalent to physical capital. It’s not, and has a lot of unique properties which differentiate it from physical capital. Yes, a lot of “human capital” was lost as a result of the BP, but since much of that was being pointlessly squandered by poorly constructed sociopolitical structures, it wasn’t a bad thing, since it broke those structures permanently. World War I served a similar function, though it also led, unfortunately, to the destructive entity we call “postmodern liberalism”, which has at its heart the goal of the destruction of the Greek legacy to the world.