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Author Topic: Aborpopulation  (Read 37509 times)

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Pacobird

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #140 on: October 31, 2011, 10:30:16 AM »

fuck a malthus
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Brentai

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #141 on: October 31, 2011, 11:56:16 AM »

Ok, that's fair.  I admit that it's difficult to acquire full context at work on a phone, but if I let that stop me from posting I wouldn't be able to maintain my postcount participate in discourse at all.
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Kashan

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #142 on: October 31, 2011, 01:54:21 PM »

I think it's also notable that the cost of developing a nuke is so high that generally only first world countries have been able to develop them, and our present international economic system is such that there's an extremely strong disincentive against any first world nation attacking another. Even with North Korea, they might be able to create a handful of nukes at extreme cost to themselves, but they can't really use them. If they did the international military action that would be united against them would probably be like nothing we've ever seen.
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Thad

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #143 on: October 31, 2011, 02:17:22 PM »

Yep.

MAD is the major reason the Cold War stayed cold.  And nuclear war's a damn sight less likely now than it was then.
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Mongrel

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #144 on: October 31, 2011, 03:32:31 PM »

I do agree with you guys, for the most part. MAD is relevant, as is the potential collective rage of the global community if a rogue state lobbed a nuke at someone. Disarmament is accelerating in part because nukes are damned expensive to maintain and cannot be used in any practical military sense, except for the ultimate extreme. Hell, it's been commented on at length that the very nature of war has changed recently, to a situation where maximum application of force is usually the worst move (which runs counter to the last several millenia).

The only thing I'm just not comfortable with is any claim that the world's advanced nations will never ever again enter into a truly knock-down, drag-out, tooth-and-nail fight. Maybe MAD staved things off last time, or maybe it was just fatigue/reflective wisdom from WWII. I suppose we'll find out eventually.

Of course that's an easy statement for me to make, because I'm talking about stuff that (probably, hopefully) won't take place until well after we're all dead.
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Kashan

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #145 on: October 31, 2011, 06:17:20 PM »

The only thing I'm just not comfortable with is any claim that the world's advanced nations will never ever again enter into a truly knock-down, drag-out, tooth-and-nail fight. Maybe MAD staved things off last time, or maybe it was just fatigue/reflective wisdom from WWII. I suppose we'll find out eventually.
If we have 2 advanced countries go to war again I think it'll be because we've had a colossal world wide economic collapse and that the countries involved would be fighting over things like water and food, in which case the 2 countries wouldn't really be advanced anymore. There's a lot of really shitty things about globalization, but one really good thing is it makes war against insider members really really undesirable.
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Mongrel

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #146 on: October 31, 2011, 07:12:14 PM »

Crises over food and water would be bad, but a war fought over such crises would be an order of magnitude worse. I think if things were on the way to totally collapsing, you would see the war well before things actually hit bottom. I mean, by definition any such Giant Space War would have to be fought before the collapse was complete.

Climate, food supply, demographic issues are mostly growing worse, though the problem is very very manageable for now and the decline is incredibly incremental (it may even be reversible, if we get our shit together).

There's also a possibility that internal unrest in large powers will precipitate nasty things (I could also go about a possible friction-inducing social shift akin to the original introduction of Communism/Fascism, or the Reformation/Counter-Reformation, but I think it's kind of bullshit for me to argue about imaginary potential social shifts with no evidence for it at all).

Never underestimate people's ability to forget war's real impact after a long peace - or the capacity for stupid little bullshit things to spiral way out of everyone's control until events overtake everyone.

Anyway, I'm not disputing the points about globalization etc. The above stuff is just me throwing points out (those paragraphs don't even flow into each other very well). I agree that general wars area lot less attractive for a major power than they've ever been; "Greed will save the world" and all that. I'm just saying that a) it's not impossible and b) "not impossible" does not mean "a 0.0000000000000000000000000000001% chance".

The species has had a globe-spanning war about once every 75-125 years for as long as such conflicts have been possible (about 350 years, though some would argue for 450), and we've been beating each over the head with rocks for millennia before that. Wouldn't be the first bad habit we'd found was hard to break.

Maybe we really have turned a corner. Maybe our own mortality has sobered us up (a little). But I don't think we can say that for sure until quite a bit more time has passed.
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Büge

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #147 on: October 31, 2011, 07:19:08 PM »

The species has had a globe-spanning war about once every 75-125 years for as long as such conflicts have been possible

That sounds about right. It only takes a generation or two to forget just how awful war can be.
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Joxam

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #148 on: October 31, 2011, 07:33:01 PM »

How did you take a topic about woman's rights and change it into waterworld in like two pages?
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Kashan

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #149 on: October 31, 2011, 08:30:39 PM »

75-125 years over a 350-450 year period is enough variability that I'm not sure I actually buy the argument. I don't think remembering how terrible war was has anything to do with preventing the next war. If it did then WWII wouldn't have happened, or really any of the wars since WWII. If anything I think war begets war, as once you decide that war is a legitimate tool to solve one international problem it's put on the table for any problem. The only way war stops in when the population/infrastructure finally drop to a point where war isn't feasible at all.
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Mongrel

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #150 on: October 31, 2011, 08:43:27 PM »

Arguably, you can go back about another 300 years or so if you replace "globe-spanning war" with "all out war between the most powerful nations on the globe". Beyond that conflicts were generally smaller, but endemic and constant (of course they were endemic anyway, until recently).

Also, WWI and WWII being treated as separate wars is a product of recent memory and historical convenience. Maybe they're not the exact same war, but they're two episodes in the same series.
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patito

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #151 on: October 31, 2011, 10:21:00 PM »

Which is why they are both called World War #
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Pacobird

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #152 on: November 01, 2011, 05:50:25 AM »

Population Density

oh, populations have exploded in the past two-hundred years or so?  couldn't be because industrialized agricultural production means we can feed that many people now

seriously you guys fuck a malthus
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Mongrel

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #153 on: November 01, 2011, 06:58:52 AM »

Yes, war is one of the "natural checks' that Malthus said would reduce population, but that's not the source of my war arguments. I don't think anybody here is arguing for a Malthusian view. 

Personally, I do believe that there's an upper limit to the number of people you can cram on a given land area, but I don't think the most relevant limitation is food anymore. It probably isn't even water, either. The real limits are social and mental. And population density is a very minor part of my views on why humans go to war.
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Pacobird

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #154 on: November 01, 2011, 08:22:05 AM »

I'm personally a fan of youth bulge myself
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Joxam

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #155 on: November 01, 2011, 08:28:10 AM »

Pervert
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Mongrel

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #156 on: November 01, 2011, 08:33:17 AM »

I'm personally a fan of youth bulge myself

Yeah, I agree there. The male/female selection bias in some places exacerbates this too. 
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Beat Bandit

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #157 on: November 01, 2011, 12:43:27 PM »

I'm personally a fan of youth bulge myself

Yeah, I agree there. The male/female selection bias in some places exacerbates this too. 
:suave:
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Pacobird

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #158 on: November 01, 2011, 12:49:01 PM »

For those keeping score, "youth bulge" refers to the tendency of societies blessed with more men ages 15-29 than they can gainfully and peaceably marry off/employ to end badly if unable to inflict those 15-29ers on somebody else.

See: the Crusades, the modern Middle East, China in about 15 years
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Ziiro

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #159 on: November 01, 2011, 01:10:56 PM »

India fits in there somewhere as well if I'm understanding this correctly.
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