Domain: pop.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to pop.org.
Comments · 10
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They don't say burkas either.
They don't say "female skin is evil".
It's me making fun of their "logic and reasoning".
Do also note that said "negative imagery" of women showing skin is from "FAMILY FILMS" - not porn or even action movies where one might see some "sex sells" scenes.
They are complaining about beach scenes and short skirts and sleeves. Unless they are watching some other kind of "family films".Which is just half a step away from women covering their hair cause its smell clouds the minds of men - and cause a woman whose smell you can sense on the air is a harlot and a prostitute.
Thus, a hijab, niqab, chador and a burka. To protect men from raping women (belonging to other men) by accident, thinking them to be common whores.
Hey! It's the desert. It gets hot. People's minds go crazy. SOMETHING had to be done about it.Or if you don't like Islamic insanity, there's plenty of puritan Christian insanity as well.
Just look up St. Mary frescoes (not the modern ones, which show hair) - she's wearing a hijab.
Nuns are closer to a niqab but stop just short of covering the entire face.
Except this is all coming from "Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media" and not some religious sect.
And DO NOTE how that entire bit is an "additional" point.
Women are underrepresented in media - oh and by the way there's too much naked skin in family pictures.It's like that site about overpopulation being a myth (Which is true).
Oh... BTW, have you tried "natural family planing"? It's this totally the bestest thing ever.
Unlike the evils of "plan b", contraception that will give you AIDS and Obamacare. Think about it.
What a surprise from a group proudly describing themselves and their found as "pro-life".I'm not saying that it is necessarily "foot in the door" or "door in the face" push for puritan values.
It could be simply that they are overeager to push their message that they are tripping over themselves and coming off as puritan nuts.Just like the way they are bragging that "The Institute has amassed the largest body of research on gender prevalence in entertainment, which spans more than 20 years". Few paragraphs down, it's "over 25 years".
The institute was founded by Davis in 2006.Or how they brag about influencing SONY so they "added more females in the crowd scenes and gave the non-lead females a line or two" - in Hotel Transylvania.
Cause nothing says equality like more female monsters. There AND in Monster University. With a "line or two".
Not to mention the Geena Davis' Transylvanian connotations.
Or how they've helped "fix" the inequality in The Little Prince.
Cause nothing says equality like shoehorning female characters into a classic story - and making them into no-fun, gray-colored fun-haters who must be re-educated to learn how to have fun and to love.
By a man.They may be good-natured, but their approach sure is flawed.
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Re:Caregiver...
Whoa! Wait a minute who ever said anything about solving overpopulation. I'm just saying that from a career perspective caregiver can be rewarding. Also, to really be a caregiver you are going to probably have to be married with your partner working, unless you want to be one of the government dependents but then why are you asking about jobs.
However, I do have some issues with your points.
Food scarcity is normally not caused by society not being able to produce enough food. Well maybe we can't produce a enough meat for everyone to eat like a fat American, but we could meet the current worlds total caloric needs with some work. However, due to war, oppression, terrible government, stupidity, and callously choosing to say screw the poor I want double Steak we make that hard.
Energy scarcity: We have tons of Uranium and Thorium. If we could get off our asses and actually use it to build useful things like Modern power plants instead of bombs we might be able to have a sensible energy agenda.
Pollution Levels: The modern world needs steel and steel is dirty. Unless you want to go back to a pre-steel world we are going to have to put up with some pollution for the foreseeable future. But with good management we can limit the pollution.
Disease Susceptibility: People get sick. Always have always will. Poor people get sick more than rich people due to malnutrition or improper hygiene. Things are still better now than they were though. Maybe we should raise the standard of living in the rest of the world some.
Psychological Disorder: Always existed, society just killed people with this because they were "Possessed by the devil" before the enlightenment. I am not for a return to that idea even if it puts stress on society.
Political unrest: Come on wars are as central to human activity as breathing. As long as humans exist there will be war or at least arguments over something. If you think otherwise have fun in your utopia fantasy land. I welcome getting proven wrong.
Overpopulation in the Western World: Most of the western world is in demographic decline. (I'm assuming this is a predominantly western audience being English language and all.) The US and EU only skirt by with immigrants. So clearly we are not prolific reproducers anymore. Now for the rest of the world, they may have to tone down the reproducing, but unless we want to use that war thing to stop them I'm not sure how we could. And I'm not sure I can support a government that would go to war against the breeders it sounds to Nazi like to me.
Though in the end I agree with you. If we keep growing our population we will eventually run out of resources to support that population. In the end the only real answer is to get off this rock and colonize space. But that's not really an answer to the problem. It's just kicking it down the road for a really long time. (Universal Entropy and what not) Any other form of forced population control will require some form of world government. Otherwise the countries that don't comply will just swallow you up in a few generations.
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Re:Good lord
Claiming that ignorance can be fixed by continued ignorance from a different party is a fools prospect.
I'm not sure what ignorance you're talking about here. How are people going to be unaware that they've had a chip implanted under their skin that stops them from getting pregnant?
There are simply too many nefarious purposes for this type of technology.
But again, functionally, the birth control application isn't much different from a Depo-Provera shot or an IUD. The differences are A) it lasts somewhat longer, and B) you can turn it off without removing it.
If some dystopia decides that fertility is a reward, this technology allows that very easily.
We don't need to fantasize about what hypothetical dystopias might do -- we have an existing one to look at. In China, there are existing technologies that already do what you're talking about. They are backed up by fines and other punishments. Outside of China, trying to force surgery on an entire population is a risky move that could easily provoke a popular uprising. China spent decades under a Stalinist dictatorship before enacting the One Child Policy, and as such they are a pretty extreme case.
If another dystopia decides that soldiers should rape women but don't want pregnancy as a result, well, this allows that as well.
Do you know how hormonal contraception normally works? It doesn't take effect right away. You'd something high-dosage like a morning after pill or shot. Subcutaneous chips are designed to release low dosages over long periods of time.
Also, why would someone who's okay with institutionalized rape be worried about their victims getting pregnant?
I don't understand why you're more worried weird hypothetical dystopias than the kinds of evil that are already happening.
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Re:starving kids in africa and cambodia...
Interestingly, it turns out that the AC's comment is not a troll. As a matter of fact, some googling turned up pop.org (Population Research Institute). It has non-profit status and clearly a front for some Christian organization given their strong pro-life emphasis in the mission statement. To the point, they published an article called "The Pill's Deadly Affair with HIV/AIDS". http://www.pop.org/content/the-pills-deadly-affair-with-hivaids-1199
One paragraph that stood out:
"Likewise, Thailand, praised for a contraceptive prevalence of 79.2% in 2000 and upwards of 70% today, is a land where, “More than one-in-100 adults in this country of 65 million people is infected with HIV.”7 Among Thai women, “Oral contraception is the most popular method.”8, 9
On the other hand, Japan's HIV rate is, at 0.01%, one of the lowest in the world.10 In this context, it is important to note that the birth control pill was illegal in Japan until 1999, and even today only 1% of Japanese women use oral contraception. Similarly, the predominantly Catholic Philippines, with a longstanding popular resistance to contraception, boasts an HIV “prevalence rate of only 0.02%."
The paper is obviously extremely flawed as they don't separate their independent variables at all, thereby picking only the data points that bolsters their "research". For example, for Thai women oral contraceptives are the most common, without saying what the overall usage rate is. If the rate of contraceptive usage is very low overall, the rate of HIV infections will most likely be high whether oral contraceptives are preferred or not. And stating that the Phillipinos are resistant to contraception without stating what the rate of condom usage is. Same with the statement about Japan.
In any case, the point is that there are indeed "religious nuts convincing people that birth control causes AIDS" as the AC stated.
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Re:immortality
"Overpopulation is not a problem. That is a myth that has been perpetuated since the latter half of the 18th century. Do the math."
"Brought to you by.
http://www.overpopulationisamyth.com/""Copyright © 2010â"2011 Population Research Institute. All rights reserved. "
http://pop.org/about/who-we-are-800
"Our growing, global network of pro-life groups spans over 30 countries."
"pro-life"
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Re:Overpopulation is a myth
Wow, what a horrible site full of misinformation and straw man arguments.
This site was funded by the Bradley Foundation, who also funded hard-right "think tank" groups such as PNAC, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Federalist Society. The authors affirm they are a network of "pro-life" groups.
The site begins by linking belief in overpopulation to efforts to kill the poor and promote Chinese abortions, then proceeds with meaningless factoids (all the humans on earth could fit in Texas) to conclude that overpopulation is a myth.
The only legitimate argument on the site is that the Earth can produce enough food, although the argument relies on petrochemical fertilizers, and does not acknowledge constraints on the petrochemicals.
The site does not even acknowledge concerns about the high risk of global diseases, the massive amounts of waste products and pollution from industry and agriculture, or constraints on energy and water supplies. Oh, and nobody has even mentioned that there might not be enough jobs for everyone in the world.
In one section, the authors "prove" the Earth's population will peak around 8 B in 30 years and begin to decline by linking to the UN Population DB and telling you to use the "low variant" model. They don't tell you that the other three models (constant fertility, medium, high) all show the population continuing to rise for the duration of the model (present - 2050).
Talk about selective information. What a crock of shit.
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Re:The Big Picture
And I greatly admire this sentiment because it represents a 100% swing away from being controlled by anyone and anything.
OK, at the government level.
Recall, though, that this development occurs in a context of crushing overpopulation. Too, the country is potentially using coercive means to control that overpopulation.
The good news is that technology knows no master, and that savvy Chinese will create a work-around if (when) some little autocrat determines that stability of the country (personal power) at the expense of individual freedom is a worthy goal. -
Re:The reasons why - please read, Jon.
I'm at work (no access to my huge list O' links) but there is a story out there somewhere about Ford/Mazda plants paying for abortions to be done on company grounds as a prerequisite for employment
This little snip below should satisfy the fact that abuses of power in the realm of reproduction is rampent throughout some parts of the world.
The systematic and violent abuse of human rights in the name of "population control" is one of the world community's greatest scandals. Abuses cataloged in the People's Republic of China alone fill books numbering in the hundreds of pages,4 and thousands of refugees have fled abroad to avoid coerced abortion and sterilization.5 Similar abuses, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale, are happening in many other countries as well. The list of abuses is long: sex selective abortions, infanticide, forced IUD insertions, forced sterilizations, fertility "round-ups"at gunpoint, sterilizations of both husbands and wives to fill quotas, abortions of all children over a certain number, limiting of rights of parents who have more than two children, forced sterilization of parents who adopt abandoned babies, widespread abandonment and starvation of little girls, forced participation in contraceptive programs, government licensing requirements for pregnancy, imprisonment and fines for those who become pregnant without permission, abortion at all stages of pregnancy and under the most unsanitary of conditions and, as a result, maternal death.
above is from this link
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Re:Are you crazy!>Anyways, the planet is nowhere near it's carrying capacity. If people lived in one huge city with the same density as NYC, they would fit in the state of Texas.
Actually if they lived in the same desity as NYC they would fix in about 1/4 - 1/8 of texas. Look at http://www.pop.org/students/texas1.html .
To fix in texas you could have a very low desity actually.
There is plenty of room on earth, and there is plenty of food on earth. There is no reason to have a smaller population. Some people might have a reason to have less kids. Too bad for them.
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Ad Hominem Attacks...Before I comment on the story, a brief comment
on the comments themselves.
To put it simply, I'm seeing a lot of ad hominem attacks on Singer himself, such as that he is "dangerously mad" (Shouldn't he then be up a clock tower in Texas with a rifle?), whilst another decries the fact that an American professor is allowed to say this (fact: He is Australian as it said in the article, working at an American university). Such arguments embarass only their authors. Furthermore, I see him compared to the Nazis and their eugenics campaign, but I fail to see anyone pointing out that American and Swedish governments both had their own post-1945 eugenics programmes, which shows it isn't just racial supremecists who indulge in such things.
Anyway, on to my comment on the article: I would suggest we read the book. The man Singer is a philosopher (Indeed, I have a fine book by him on Ethics), and we can hardly expect to see all the caveats, ifs, ands and buts that are no doubt integral to his arguments in this less than single page article.
I will now no doubt be tarred as a baby eating madman.