Gays, population growth, the environment, clouds!

[complich8]

Now, to take off the admin-hat, and put on the giant-response-rant hat.

(a lot of anti-gay bile)

random arguments

On gays, pedos, and morality:

The best scientific evidence to date shows that homosexuality is neither a choice nor a learned behavior. Evidence of homosexuality in the animal kingdom is not just present, it's pervasive, and to ignore it or its implications is to shut out the realm of science entirely.

Making moral judgements about the actions of gay people is pretty fucked. It's like making moral judgements about women or black people or people with congenital defects: they don't really have any control over who they're attracted to. Forcing people into hetero relationships when they're not straight is just asking for social problems (loveless marriages, divorces, etc).

Gay people aren't pedophiles. Acceptance of homosexuality doesn't imply acceptance of pedophilia. They're independent phenomena. However, pedophilia, like homosexuality, spans all economic and social classes in a way that points towards some other factor influencing it.


On declining birth rates:

Yes, birth rates are hovering right around or slightly below the replacement rate in Europe and the US. So what's that mean for you? If you're hetero and you're concerned about the birth rate in your country, when you're married and having a family, make sure to have at least 3 kids. A lot of the low birth rates in Europe are the direct result of women's equality in the workplace but not in the home -- a direct clash of liberalization and traditional values. If it were feasible for a married couple to get by on a single income, or if fathers were more universally willing to take part in their children's upbringing, this problem would probably go away.

Further, gay couples have been known to adopt or to use artificial insemination to have children, and tend to make excellent parents. So there you go ... let gay couples marry, let married gay couples adopt, and straight unmarried/unmarried women will keep them supplied with kids ('cause you KNOW teenagers aren't going to stop having sex, and the preponderance of abstinence-only sex ed drives up teen pregnancy rates). With more stable adoptive families waiting, more people will feel better about putting their kids up for adoption and choose that over abortion. Another win-win: functional families happen, abortion declines, population grows.


On peak-everything:

Now let's talk about the world. There's a lot of theories floating around ... about how the planet, the angel, the ruby crag and Kujuta are all going to fall off of Bahamut's back and plunge all of existence into the oblivion of Adwad.

Peak-oil and its variants (peak-natural-gas, peak-food) are sexy. They scare people. They're also scientifically weak, based on models that mainstream science doesn't tend to find compelling. There's statistical and scientific models that show just about everything, but you have to question their validity. I'll leave that to climate scientists and earth scientists and whatnot though. What I _do_ know is that nuclear's still a valid solution, ITER is scheduled to come online in 2016 and hopefully demonstrate sustainable tokamak-model fusion energy (which is the holy grail of energy concerns), and if we can solve our energy concerns in clean ways we can solve most other problems that comes up using that energy.


On carrying capacity:

There is no non-coercive way to implement population controls. If you're comfortable with the ethics of coercion, then by all means, have a look at China. It's ... pretty fucked. Or, more to the point, China needs more gay men, since they're short of women by something like 115 men to 100 women. Coercive measures bring out horrible things in people and cultures, and non-coercive measures don't work. All you can really do is educate people and hope they make socially positive choices.

As for the carrying capacity of the world, that's SO wildly speculated on that it's barely worth thinking about. Science is nowhere near a consensus on that ... some people say 4 billion, some people say 50 billion. Global warming _might_ turn vast expanses of northern Asia (Russia) and North America (Canada) from non-arable tundra into arable land, which would in turn increase the food production capacity of the world. The biggest concern with more people is that more industrialization leads to more energy consumption, which leads to more CO2, more global warming, flooding of lowlands and rising sea levels, etc. And hey, flooding all of those popular coastal lowlands will probably kill a LOT of people, so there you go .


Optimism!

Anyway, I think we're just starting to be awake enough to avoid the apocalyptic terrors of peak-everything and global warming. And with a little bit more tolerance and a bit less irrational rejection of reality I think we'll be able to avoid the land mines of both population collapse and unchecked population growth. Maybe I'm just being optimistic though.