You’ve been asked multiple times which criteria you use to judge cultures and which cultures you find below European, Japanese and American cultures and you have yet to answer. You are the one making the claim that some cultures, Muslim ones in particular, are not as valuable. You defend it.
You wanna drop these accusations. No one is distorting anything you are saying and most people aren’t taking pot shots.
How fast should the population lower to your ideal level of 2-3 billion?
Well, I read the OP and was going to weight in, but it turns out all the flaws I’d found in the premise had been addressed already and Aeschines’s primary response is a lame quip, accusations that respondents have not read or understood the premise, or some other evasion.
Regardless if the exact method is abortion or birth control, dropping birth rates correlate tidily with increased education and employment opportunities for women. If anything, I’d exepct a technologically advanced society facing a critical baby shortage to use:
[list=#][li]Increased immigration.[/li][li]Positive incentives (rewarding women for having babies)[/li][li]Improved health care (ensuring that all or most babies born will reach fertile adulthood)[/list][/li]
And if one were to give option #2, it’d be best to offer a singificantly higher incentive package to women who carry female children to term. Heck, I can imagine advances in human cloning being used to allow women to gestate copies of themselves. That’s be cool, in a science-fictiony kinda way.
This opinion of yours is not the common one held by most specialists, who consider the average of 5.4 children per mother to great a burden on all (not just the natural) resources of most African countries. The overall consensus seems to be that they would be better off if they didn’t have to fight each other over basic things like food, and were able to concentrate the little resources they have raising a smaller amount of children to a higher level of education and a higher standard of living. Your references to France are equally pointless - the colonial background of that nation ensured a deep connection with several mostly Islamic countries. Unsuccessful immigration policies are to blame, together with polarisation of the East-West relationships, in which the U.S. still plays a big part and to which it is still contributing. I am sometimes surprised, actually, how similar the U.S. and France are in many different ways - it must be part of the reason that they sometimes hate each other so much. It almost deserves a thread of its own.
Bringing in the Theo van Gogh reference is downright silly - the murder actually stems from a conflict that involves the U.S. a lot more than any part of the Dutch immigration policy. Furthermore, although the population of the U.S. is less than 20 times larger than that of the Netherlands, it lost 3000 more citizens in one strike attributed to the same organisation. Not to mention that I’m not exactly sure how many film-makers in the U.S. have actually taken it upon themselves to visually criticize Muslim mysogynism. Also of note is our previous (and probably first ever) political murder a few years before, the controversial politician Pim Fortuyn being killed by a man who dedicated his life to incessantly challenging companies and counties that undertook environmentally damaging activities, using only the available laws, and who probably saw Pim Fortuyn as a new Hitler that would undo his life work, would destroy the nation, and would generally make his country a place where he didn’t want his children to grow up. (I think he overestimated the guy, and I’ll never condone such a murder while the democracy is still functional, but it’s not incredibly hard to see why he was worried either - the man said some very unpleasant things at times, behaved like Mussolini, and he tended to soften them up if they were challenged in a debate).
Meanwhile, your whole point about abortion and under-population remains totally unconvincing and you can side-track the discussion all you like, but that’s not going to change. My previous post to you on that stands unchallenged.
There’s nothing to defend; it’s a matter of opinion. I stated the reasons anyway, though: political despotism, crap economies, and fundamentalism. Aren’t those pretty plain and reasonable reasons for not thinking a culture/country is A+OK?
Neverminding the far more pertenant question posted here by others, I have one of my own.In post 115, I mentioned the murder of filmaker, Theo VanGogh. You, Aeschines, then said something very odd in the next post.
If I am right, you were responding to me. It’s hard to tell. If you believe that diffrent standards of freedom from religon is what you call oppression, then the jews and christians of the article are being repressed, also. However, I do not see a ground swelling of christians killing educators and politicans. Also, you said “Here’s a better cite” Huh! What an odd statement. The word “better”, with no qualifier, is very odd. If your cite was the only one in the world, then I suppose it would be better, but as it is, something seems to be lacking towards the goal of proving whatever you are trying to prove.
After calling Blowero ignorant for suggesting Japan was overpopulated, you admit that it is, and again you’re suggesting that preventing shrinkage is a bad thing. Huh?
Should be “preventing shinkage is a good thing” I think my confusion is understandable.
I’m mildly curious if, assuming that people who have never been to Japan are too ignorant to discuss that nation’s problems, the OP has even been to a Middle Eastern country.
Arwein, from your post, it almost sound like you are addressing Aeschines about Vangogh issue. I think I agree with most of your post, but I do not believe my post was “silly”. Just to clarify, I agree with attacking Aeschines on every issue, but I feel that some elements of Muslim culture are harmful, just as are elements of other religious groups.
My post are a hijack, to this thread, however, since attacking Aeschines view of abortion is the main issue, and not harping on a minor part of his argument, as I am doing, so I should say here and now, I would not feel insulted in the least, if you, Arwein, ignored my hi-jack. It just that I feel our mutual enemy’s views need to be challenged.
P.S. Bryan Ekers, for what it’s worth, I’ve been to Israel, thought I am neither the OP, nor is that the kind of Middle Eastern country you are likely to be talking about.
I was under the impression that you admired the Shogun culture of Japan. That was certainly a fundamentalist despotism with a comparitively crappy economy. Color me confused.
Anyways two of the things on your list are attributes of the government and the country that the immigrants leave behind. In fact the people that leave are trying to escape the despotism and crappy economies. Certainly they aren’t bringing those values to the country that they emigrate to. As far as fundamentalism goes Muslims are no more fundamentalistic than any other religion.
Are those all of your criteria for a culture’s worth? Government, economy and fundamentalism?
Well if you think the ideal world population is 2-3 billion, how do you think we would get there? There are roughly 6 billion people now. Your ideal setting is a 50%-66% decrease. Meaning every country would have to reduce their population by that percentage. Why is a 1/3 reduction in Japan a bad idea? Seems like they are well on the way to creating your ideal global population. Unless you are saying people should die more often, the only way to lower population would be to lower the birth rate.
This site lists the following about Japan:
Population growth rate: 0.08% (2004 est.)
Birth rate: 9.56 births/1,000 population (2004 est.)
Death rate: 8.75 deaths/1,000 population (2004 est.)
Seems like they are growing for the time being. Plus, there is no guarantee that the current trends will continue.
Are you saying that other countries (besides the US, Japan, and EU countries) should have to reduce their populations?
Also, what does this have to do with abortion?
Bwaaaa, ha, ha, ha! What were you saying about flailing, again? 
Did you happen to notice all the PEOPLE there bumping into you all the time? As in an EXTREMELY DENSE POPULATION? tap-tap - Is my microphone on?
No personal insults in GD please.
Oh, I ABSOLUTELY have a problem with that. It sounds alarmingly close to some stuff a guy used to say whose name rhymes with Bitler.
Yes - feel free. Here’s your claim.
So far you have defended this with:
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one link to a garbled piece of rubbish on some far right wing site that contains about one statistic: “there are five million muslims in France” but nothing about their secondary citizenship that you have claimed muslims get in Europe.
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this, from a more impartial site:
that provides no evidence of their second class treatment.
In fact unlike the US, all migrants to most European countries (if not all, under EU charters) whether illegal migrants or legal migrants, get access to free health care and legal aid. Most US citizens don’t get that.
Dear Og, I was hoping you’d leave India out of it. But seeing as you’ve dragged it in, if you haven’t lived there at least eight years, by your own analogy you’d do well not to mention it at all.
And I’m reporting this post you made to **blowero ** to the mods:
[quote=Aeschines]
You’re ignorant–shut up while you’re ahead.
[/qquote]
This is GD, we expect a certain amount of civility around here. Neither am I afraid to tell you I’m reporting it.
Wow, that’s courage!
Well, I would extent violent extremism beyond the realm of religion, and just consider it dangerous in general. Since you mention Israel, what about the orthodox jew who murdered Rabin, for instance. Which is why I thought it was pertinent to mention the environmentalist, animal rights activist, and young dad that killed Pim Fortuyn. I’m very unconfortable with bringing in the term Muslim culture in that respect. It’s just not right, and as meaningless as referring to Christian culture, when we all know that there are such vast differences between followers.
None that I know of, but it’s interesting to consider whether low European birthrates are/will be a motive for keeping these restrictions on the books.
Yes, I think we should debate cultural relativism in another GD thread. It’s not the main issue here, so let’s not debate it here.
As long as we’re in a predict-the-future-mode here, and speaking from my vantage point on a sparsely populated lump of rock on the outskirts of Europe: No, I don’t see much risk of that (= abortion ban to increase population size) happening in Europe, for several reasons, such as:
[ul][li]As others have pointed out, it’s extremely doubtful that it’d have much long-term effect on population size[/li][li]It would be an extremely unpopular policy among women. If you’re worried about your pop size, you’d be wary of policies which might make women in fertile age say: “Fuck this country, I’m moving to Canada.”[/li][li]You’re right in that there is some uneasiness (both legitimate and not) towards the effects of immigration of people with different cultures. One of the legitimate worries (IMO, of course) is that people from some parts of the world (hell, most of the world) has a more restrictive view of women’s rights and freedoms than Europeans. Changing our culture for the worse in order to protect it seems counter-productive, to put it mildly[/ul][/li]Living in a small country, I see a lot of policies aimed towards protecting our culture - protecting our language, funding for various kinds of cultural activities, stuff like that. There’s also discussion about obligatory courses in our language and culture for immigrants. A thread with a more general view of the topic of changing cultures could be interesting. But the abortion point of view is, IMO, a red herring. It looks like one of those “if all you’ve got is a hammer, all the world looks like a nail”-situations. If you put abortion out of your mind for a minute, and make a list of all the things a society might do if it feels threatened by extinction - do you really think an abortion ban would make it in the top ten? Or top fifty?