redandblack wrote:Psyber, far from being semi-abusive, my post was fairly mild and perhaps a bit frivolous.
Your further explanations, far from reassuring me, are just plain scary.
Of course, you're entitled to state your opinion, just as I'm entitled to say that I find your opinion on this to be elitist, lacking any humanity and ideologically to the right of nearly any political party I know except extreme white supremacist parties.
Totally abhorrent, actually.
We share the planet, it's not yours to sterilise your 'inferior' people.
R & B, which part of this scared you, or offended you..
While I am still not advocating the adoption as a policy of the idea I considered at 13, I think we do have a serious problem about over-population.
We need to think about what to do about people who can't cope in our new type of society, and the problem of dwindling resources spread increasingly thinly over our growing population.
I would like to see us putting money into getting off planet to seek more resources, not contracting ourselves, but that is another un-PC position.
I have worked with people in the "low-normal" group who really can't cope in society and have long been neglected and excluded from support services.
Using IQ as a rough guide this group is the 70 to 85 range - for those who don't know 85 to 115 being "normal range", and below 70 being officially "intellectually disabled" and entitled to formal support.
I was surprised anyone thought at the outset that I was still supporting the obviously rather extreme idea I said I had come up with aged 13.
It had not occurred to me that anyone would assume a person would have stuck with their childhood ideas, and not continue growing and changing.
So, I assumed there were other motivations for the otherwise unexplainable responses.
I had since stated
twice that I am not advocating that as policy, yet R&B, you still responded as though I am doing so..
Do you really believe that having had such an idea as a child means one could not later think better of it?
I also expressed my current concern about the neglect of groups who do struggle in our society, pointing out they were not getting the support they need.
When I said,
"We need to think about what to do about people who can't cope in our new type of society..", I was not still pushing my idea of age 13, but looking for other solutions.
I was doing the same when I first posted
"But is there a better one?" I can see now that too could have been taken as saying my old idea was valid as you seem to have done.
I guess it shows how much expectation clouds reading comprehension, including mine - I had thought what I wrote was clear...
[I must remember it - we have run into it before here - I just find it hard to believe.]
What I have said I am
for is some form of population control before we are really in trouble due to the increasing overpopulation, since our governments are too short sighted to go for the getting off planet solution advocated by people like Jerry Pournelle, and Freeman Dyson, and too short sighted to see there are a substantial group of our population - about 18% - who need a lot more support than they are getting to cope in a more complex society that that man has lived in most of our existence. [18% score under the "average range" of 85 to 115 on IQ scales, using verbal or non-verbal tests.]
For any who don't know, Dyson ws a physicist who has already designed heavy lift nuclear powered launchers, and once published an article describing how it was possible with the technology of the time to dismantle Jupiter, spread it as a ring in Earth's orbit and live on it in our future trillions.
He did admit it would be expensive..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson
