What have you been reading lately?

[Tannin]

^ David, April 1st was yesterday.

Can you imagine the outcry? We are talking blood in the streets here, and not on a small scale. No government on Earth could keep the lid on something like that, not even North Korea. You'd be talking about the ex-government by Tuesday.

In any case, your plan is way too simplistic: we need children to survive - just not so many of them. The time for sterilisation is after you reach replacement level (roughly 2 per couple). You certainly can't do it before.

As for your silly claim that it "grinds my gears", where on Earth did you drag that dumb idea up from? I don't particularly object to the idea myself - I've never much wanted children and had a vasectomy in my twenties, which was (for me) a perfectly sensible thing to do - I just have at least some vague connection to the social and political and medical reality that this lunatic scheme of yours is so wildly impractical, inhumane, and counter-productive that I'd not really have expected it to be proposed even by our friendly resident clueless nutcases (no names, you figure out who they are), never mind an apparently intelligent man like you.

Fair dinkum, I'm gobsmacked.

You'd better check your calendar.

[HAL]

You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.

[Wokko]

If any government or leader attempted that, I'd be first in line to end them. By ballot or by bullet, that shit would never fly.

[David]

Perhaps I'm thinking of this in too abstract a manner�perhaps most people would be as viscerally outraged as you two and see such a practice as vile and inhumane. Not me. I don't see fertility as being a basic human right, and as someone who was circumcised at 8 days of age I don't see performing operations on newborn babies to be that horrible either. Perhaps the problem is that you're not taking the "lesser of two evils" approach�if we ever find ourselves facing extinction because of overpopulation, then you'll see real cruelty, suffering and degradation of human rights. If those were the two options, which would you choose?

Perhaps, as you say, there's a third: education, free birth control, abolition of theocratic authoritarianism. It really does sound great, but consider me unconvinced: that's the sane long-term scheme that should have been enacted a century ago. Nowadays, will it really be enough to stop us from overpopulating the planet? I hope so, but I can't help but get the feeling that when the real crises roll around, it'll be too little too late.

[think positive]

[think positive]

[David]

The thing is, I see one-child policies and the like to be not only much more difficult to enforce but also much more horrible to enforce (what do you do to people who break the rules? What about unplanned pregnancies?). Unfortunately, these aren't hypotheticals: China has already given us an example of how such a policy might operate.

My scheme, in case it's unclear, is really just sci-fi dystopian musing. Obviously I'm not advocating for it to happen now. The trouble is, if overpopulation does ever threaten the survival of the human race�as many people say it will�drastic policies may need to be enacted, and I really can't think of anything more humane than my proposal (I can certainly think of much less humane things).

[Wokko]

Israel's already done it. Not at all ironic that the people who were victims of the largest state run religious/ethnic discrimination of all time would do the same things to poor, black (Jewish) immigrants in their own little theocracy.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/eliseknutsen/2013/01/28/israel-foribly-injected-african-immigrant-women-with-birth-control/

[stui magpie]

Read a good little fiction novlette from Matthew Reilly over Easter. Bastard released it as an e book in 3 episodes so you'd read the first then have to wait for the second to be available. He's a very good writer, I like his stuff.

[Morrigu]

A Thousand Splendid Suns written by Khaled Hosseini - I loved Kite Runner and loved this one too!

[HAL]

Are you talking about an animal, vegetable or mineral?