Somehow we hijacked the Canadian election thread after the election was over. I pointed out that using fossil resources for fertilizer isn’t sustainable, and got this in response.
If you didn’t insist on growing human population every generation, you wouldn’t have these problems.
[Since now we’re way off-topic for a Canadian election thread, it continues here.]
But hey, bitching about environmentalists, that’s sure to somehow magically help. :rolleyes:
Let’s see, it was going something like this when the thread, having jumped off the highway, went deep into the woods:
It wasn’t really about high-yield ag, I just felt like sniping, since phosphate runoff is one of those things conservationists get bothered about all the time. We use a truly crazy (and unsustainable) amount of phosphate, and get a crazy amount of pollution. Hopefully someone will find a better way soon.
They will. Genetic engineering. Vertical indoor gardening. Artifical food. Lots of game changing technologies coming online within the next couple of decades.
I’m of the opinion that every breeding age individual should be injected with the equivalent of a Norplant device that only gets disabled when at least some minimal conditions are met e.g., a proven ability to provide for their spawn, the ability to calculate the change from a dollar transaction, professed unbelief in Santa, fairies, djinn, devils, angels, jewish zombies, pedophilic prophets, etc.
I’m also of the opinion that Canada was just great with 2/3 of the people it has now.
But until I’m elected (or my plans come to fruition) Evil Overlord, people are going to have babies and the option to let them starve to death isn’t one that should be on the table just because there might be an environmental impact. Want to save the environment? Stop people from having babies. And every environmentalist who has kids is a hypocrite.
People who promote ‘organic’ aren’t necessarily environmentalists because sometimes the ‘dirty’ option is more efficient than the ‘green’ one.
Well, it’s sustainable for the next 40, 000 years or so.
If your scale of sustainable exceeds 40, 000 years, then nothing is sustainable.
Either there’s nothing to worry about, or nothing worth worrying about.
“Poverty still exists” hides the fact that the proportion of people living in poverty has dropped like a stone in the industrial age, despite rapidly increasing population. It’s estimated the percentage of people living in poverty was around 10 times higher in 1815 than 2015 (cite).
That’s not to imply everything’s hunky-dory and poverty / income inequality are things of the past. But it’s very misleading to suggest increasing productivity has failed to improve lives.
Am I being whooshed? I think education / providing birth control is a more plausible and ethical means of lowering population growth.
I see good reasons to bitch about extreme left environmentalists and those who spread misinformation. It makes scares about phosphate running out (bizarre misunderstanding) and undermines a more effective agriculture drawing on the genetic engineering to allow for adaptation of higher yields to the more fragile and saline soils.
It’s not clear in your OP but…well, why? Phosphorus? Doesn’t seem likely. Seems to me the outlook for high-yield agriculture is pretty good. It better be, since if it’s not then a hell of a lot of people are going to starve.
From the linked cite:
Education in general, sex ed, and improved economic conditions are the most realistic solutions at this point.
In other words, you dislike freedom, especially for poor people.
Ooh! That’s the solution! Men made of straw!
Soooo, the rest of us should have to deal with expensive environmental protection measures and a destroyed environment because some person (any person, you brought up the people being ‘poor’) wants to breed. I ain’t against them practicing all they want, btw, if that’s your concern.
Actually it was you who brought up poor people, as anyone who reads your first post can plainly see. You said that people’s right to have children should be taken away except if people have “proven ability to provide for their spawn”, obviously meaning that you would deny the poor but not the rich such freedom.
Now it appears that after supporting eugenics in your first post, you’re running away from what you wrote.
‘proven ability’ doesn’t mean they are rich. And while people may have the freedom to breed all they want, they should also take responsibility to not breed when others have to support them in that activity. Where’s my freedom from supporting you from doing things that directly affect me? And I’m not talking about supporting schools so children can get an education, or if, unforeseen, you lose your job after having kids, but taking money out of my pocket because you know there is no way you can support your kid on your own in your current circumstances.
And I’m not denying anyone. I was answering the contention that I am in full support of people breeding willynilly as purported by foolsguinea. Yet, where is your condemnation of her? What I’ve written is my opinion and is very unlikely to ever be implemented. She wants to stop high-yield agriculture, and given the anti-gmo crowd out there, is far more likely to see her wish. That would cause uncounted numbers of people starving in the world. Any solution I can dream up would prevent those people from being around in the first place and at most prevent people from popping out kids to their hearts content. No one starves, the environment is saved, but some people end up butt hurt at not being able to be selfish by breeding us into oblivion.
That’s dodging the point. Obviously if you’re saying that you want to take away reproductive freedom from people who don’t have a “proven ability to provide” for them, any reasonable reader would conclude that your goal is to take away reproductive freedom from poor people. What else could it reasonably mean?
You tell me. Does the Bill of Rights give you freedom from supporting others from doing things that directly affect you? Does the Geneva convention do so? Or the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights? If none of those or any other documentation of basic human rights gives you any such freedom, then it would appear you don’t have any such freedom.
Who’s taking money out of your pocket, eh? I find it difficult to believe that any poor person is taking your money by force. If you object to the government taking money from you by force, then you should become a libertarian and advocate for less government, rather than for more government.
A classic dodge. You can’t defend what you wrote with facts or logic, so you instead point to some other poster and say “where is your condemnation of her”? Whether or not I criticize anything that foolsguinea said, it won’t do anything to make your statements more logical, moral, or defensible.
To state the bleedingly obvious, your first post was deliberately written to be nasty and bigoted, referring to human beings as “spawn”, “jewish zombies” which was an insult aimed at Christians, “pedophilic prophets” was intended to insult Muslims, etc… foolsguinea, however lacking her knowledge about the global phosphate fertilizer supply, instead writes mature and polite posts. People who behave in a mature and polite way tend to draw support, while those who are deliberately nasty and bigoted have the opposite effect, driving people away from their positions.
Where does the 40,000 year figure come from?
Farming is NOT the same as gardening. Gardening is NOT the same as farming.
Yes with a garden you can have earthworms and use compost as your fertilizer to grow your tomatoes.
However a farm is a commercial enterprise. Soil exists as a medium to hold the plants and all the soils nutrients probably have to be either supplied from artificial fertilizers or at least enhanced.
You eat from your garden but most likely if your garden fails its not the end of the world. If a farmers crop fails - thats his income source.
In farming we do the best we can to lower any methods of contamination from fertilizers and pesticides. The same cant be said for city dwellers and their lawns.
So please give farmers a break.
And by “farmers” he means Archer Daniels Midland. Which is pretty much the image everyone conjures up when they here the term “farmer”. Not that I’m jumping on the OP’s bandwagon here, but let’s not over-romanticize the idea of farming.
Of course not - it’s an industry like any other. And as such, it benefits from constantly advancing technology.
All of the agriculturalists I’ve known (including in my own period working on a farm) were very tech-savvy, constantly tinkering and innovating, and many of them had advanced college degrees in agriculture, engineering, botany and biology. There was nothing old-fashioned about what they did.
That rich people who can’t provide for their kids can’t have them? If the rich people are crack smoking alcoholics with a history of spousal abuse I’m all for them to be disallowed as well. Even if you take it to mean that poor people shouldn’t be allowed to have kids, so what? Why should people who can’t keep their kids from starving or care for them effectively be allowed to have them?
Because the freedoms that we should be able to enjoy are in total summed up in those documents? That those documents are written in stone and can’t be changed as societies change?
And I’m not stopping them from reproducing by expressing my opinion, am I? Maybe someone will listen and decide not to reproduce thus reducing all of our collective tax burden and help save the environment in the process.
What is the root cause of anthropogenic pollution? People. Logical.
How to stop pollution? Get rid of people. Logical.
My solution is to prevent them from breeding at such a level as to increase the population. Logical. The morality of doing so is debatable.
Foolsguinea’s is to actively cause them to starve to death. Illogical. The morality of doing so isn’t debatable.
Kids are spawn. A jewish zombie is the equivalent of santa and the tooth fairy. That someone takes offense at it is no concern of mine. I’m just exercising my freedom of expression. If they don’t like being called out on worshiping zombies, then they probably should stop doing so. Mohammed married a girl of 6 and had sex with her at 9. Logically, what do you call people who do that? The insult is to the rest of us having to cater to such beliefs.