Wednesday, April 1, 2009

There aren't too many of me, although there might be too many of you

The world has too many "experts":
Nina Fedoroff told the BBC One Planet programme that humans had exceeded the Earth's "limits of sustainability."
Dr Fedoroff has been the science and technology advisor to the US secretary of state since 2007, initially working with Condoleezza Rice. . . .
Pressed on whether she thought the world population was simply too high, Dr Fedoroff replied: "There are probably already too many people on the planet."
So why don't you go jump in a lake, Dr. Fedoroff? Obviously, a "science and technology advisor" consumes far more resources annually than me, my wife and six kids combined. So please die, Dr. Fedoroff. Do it for the children!

Of course, the Jonestown/Heaven's Gate mass die-off of Ph.D. intellectuals isn't going to happen. Instead, we'll be taxed to pay to send more condoms to the Third World. Never mind water-purification technology or antibiotics or DDT to fight malaria. No, say the experts, what those breeding brown masses need is more latex.

John Hawkins at Right Wing News notes the perverse irony that these experts are always preaching their Malthusian gloom-and-doom message to affluent Western audiences, rather than learning to speak Arabic, Swahili, Hindi or some other language spoken in countries where fertility rates are actually above replacement levels.

The result of this "scientific" anti-natalist message is thus to persuade well-educated Westerners not to have babies, which benefits no one, least of all the poor people in the Third World. It takes a very weird fixed-pie zero-sum mentality to suppose that poor villagers in Pakistan benefit by there being fewer engineers in Amsterdam or bankers in Bonn. And yet wealthy people in the West have convinced themselves that limiting their number of children is somehow "good for the planet."

For more than a decade, Jim Sedlak of Stop Planned Parenthood has been warning of the demographic disaster looming as a result of the Contraceptive Culture. In 1999, Sedlak said:
"The 'success' of the population controllers in Europe is now taking its toll," said Sedlak. "The average number of babies per woman has fallen from 1.95 to 1.65, and there is no end in sight."
"In order to turn things around, four things are necessary," Sedlak said. "First, the world has to understand that there is not an overpopulation problem, but a problem of too few children. Second, everyone in our society must accept large families and stop using peer pressure to convince people not to have more children. Third, governments and rich philanthropists must stop giving money to population control programs. Finally, young people getting married have to be thinking of having four or more children."
But the "experts" still aren't listening.

3 comments:

  1. "So why don't you go jump in a lake, Dr. Fedoroff? Obviously, a 'science and technology advisor' consumes far more resources annually than me, my wife and six kids combined. So please die, Dr. Fedoroff. Do it for the children!"

    Harsh but warranted. I was thinking the same thing. Our enemies may have much cruder tactics of combat, but their civilization has the will to sustain itself and ours currently does not.

    Teddy Roosevelt once said "When men fear work or fear righteous war, when women fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of doom; and well it is that they should vanish from the earth, where they are fit subjects for the scorn of all men and women who are themselves strong and brave and high-minded." In this century we face a choice between life and the sort of death which the laws of nature say is much-deserved.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Of course, the Jonestown/Heaven's Gate mass die-off of Ph.D. intellectuals isn't going to happen

    It could. They could be in the wrong place at the wrong time...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Maybe there are too many people in the UK -- which we've all just learned is slightly smaller than Oregon.

    Then again, there's plenty of room in Oregon!

    http://thepurplecenter.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete