Ohhh see THIS is why I love Wonkette...these headlines. If I ever wrote for media it could only be Wonkette because when I try to tell the truth, <sometimes> I end up getting banned. Precious social media calls it "bullying" when you point out someone is a know-nothing about a subject they're bleating about, when ...they actually know nothing about that subject.😤
OT: Hey remember during the super bowl when that group aired an ad that tried to put a nice spin on Christianity*? I saw that ad during the Olympics. It was ... weird. I wonder how much it cost?
*there are nice Christians, just not these people apparently.
I'd say Putin is taking talking points from the GOP but let's be honest, he's the one injecting oligarchy money into US politics. It sounds like he basically wrote the GOP plank (minus all their lies).
The right wants a white, Christofascist police state. They want Gilead. Finally the Harris campaign and the left is starting to SAY it and to punch back. Seeing young people in this county waking up and saying, “um, you wanna do WHAT? No fucking way” and getting on the Harris train is totally inspiring.
In 1939 Hitler instituted the "children, kitchens, church" doctrine for what German women should be focusing on. The indoctrination began at age 10. Married women were encouraged to have as many "ethnically pure" children as possible. Single women took positions in support of the war effort. Many of them becoming guards and even the heads of concentration camps. History is not just repeating, it is continuing.
See this is what I've been saying...he's trying to compete with Hitler & that is just not possible because the gov't doesn't have enough money...unless you go into other countries & steal their treasure like Hitler did in Europe. He is attempting to join up with other dictators to do just that. The U.S. needs to face it's ugly history. We need to discuss what the CIA did, & the Americans that helped fund Hitler's Nazi Germany in the 1930s including Ford, Bush, Lindberg, Dupont, et al.. We cannot afford to be precious with our history just to protect certain wealthy families. Our government needs full transparency ...not more ReTHUGlicon secrecy.
The countries that have women as chancellor, prime minister, vice president, president (soon), secretary of the army (U.S.), and minister of defense (many European countries) are kicking Russia's ass.
As usual ReTHUGs cry about abortion, then cut food stamps & won't give $6 a day for people to eat all so Billionaires get a $50,000 tax break. It makes no sense & congress itself should be ashamed of itself for ever bringing it up, let alone actually doing it. Those hypocrites need to keep the word "children, single mothers, minorities, & the poor" out of their mouths since they literally have contempt for them.
With Putin’s unbridled power and creepy enthusiasm for pregnant Russian women, it does make me wonder how many women he’s personally helping achieve that dream. I don’t want to wonder about that.
No wonder I occasionally have this uncontrollable urge to take over large parts of China. Reading about Khan, born Temüjin, I was startled by this: “Temüjin killed his older half-brother to secure his familial position. His charismatic personality helped to attract his first followers…” Young, murderous, charismatic. Like an early Ted Bundy.
Lenin had 7 siblings. Four died in infancy. Another died as a teenager. Of typhoid fever, of course. This was not a poor family. The Ulyanivs were a well-to-do family of landed gentry.
Jesus, I can't stand Russia's culture of nostalgia and them thinking this shit's romantic.
"Many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had seven or eight children, and maybe even more. We should preserve and revive these wonderful traditions."
He's trying to put a pretty face on the worst kind of poverty there. You might want to think that Russia was just populated with Ambersons and Babbits, comfortable families who wanted to fill their Midwestern three-floor Queen and style homes with babies. But you'd be wrong.
There are two traditions in Russia: starvation and fear of the czar.
Putin would like to celebrate both. The whole thing is bizarre, because there's no more desperate politics than fertility politics. China's one child policy is going to prove devastating, it's hard to believe that a nation with more than a billion people is in a population decline Doom spiral that will take a century to reverse. In addition to being one of the great crimes of History, the one child policy is also a kind of human ecological disaster.
State fertility drives are moral disasters too. We all know there's no more intimate no more personal thing, no more elemental expression of individual human freedom, then the agency the ability to shape ones household and family as one desires.
So Putin is against the basic human desire for basic human freedom, that's no surprise, but he's also against fighting the human part of mother nature, which will do as it will do regardless of whether the stern talking man on the TV tells his subjects what they should do when the lights go out.
In defense of the one-child policy (not its implementation, but the policy), they were up against a Malthusian limit, with the land area, technology and other resources they had. In hindsight, a 1.5 child policy might have been sufficient, but 'hindsight'.
Other places up against that limit (even after the green revolution, GMO technology, other technologies and changing attitudes associated with increasing wealth that almost universally press down fertility without any need for government intervention), Rwanda/Burundi/Kivu, Southern Nigeria, Pakistan, Egypt, a few more. We'll see what they do and how they do it and what people think of that. The response to a Malthusian limit is either fewer births or more deaths.
The one-child rule. Did you know that CIA Bush Sr. was nicknamed "rubbers" because he was always trying to stop excessive breeding. In fact, he was the protege' of Kissinger & they "worked" with China on that policy. Whatever it takes to protect the white race, I guess.
Can you prove that? Because CIA G.H.W.Bush went to China during the Watergate debacle, & he was a protege' (one of them) of Kissinger's. So...knee jerk quips will not do here. I'm going to need proof. You shouldn't just pop off, unless you know what you're talking about specifically.
Prove? You mean you want me to disprove a conspiracy theory? Oh please. You shouldn't do the conspiracy theory thing. It's bad for your brain and you'll wake up in ten years and realize how much precious time you've squandered. Actual information is readily available. You're on Wonkette, that's a good first step.
Here's the Wikipedia on the one-child policy. Good place to start. Links galore.
It isn't a conspiracy theory, so you can quit the arrogance. FYI...if wikipedia is your source, you're already way behind the 8-ball. Do you not read information other than what MSM gives to you? There is a large body of evidence by individuals that have actually RESEARCHED records, declassified records, etc.. & have found out the truth.
First of all, George H.W. Bush was in the CIA since the early 1950's. This is not "conspiracy theory". He was director in 1976 for 1 year. That doesn't disprove his involvement in the Bay of Pigs, the fact that he was in Dallas & lied about it in Nov 22, 1963. He was also head of the GOP. His father Prescott was in the CIA, as well. They were both in the Skull n' Bones secret club of Yale.
George H.W. Bush had a relationship with the President of China for decades...the longest relationship of any president. He along with a few others, was a protege' of Kissinger. It was Bush who pushed Taiwan out of the way for favored nation status & gave it to China.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP99-01448R000401570011-0.pdfThere is no link that wikipedia could ever provide to me or anyone else that would shed any light on this or a myriad of other topics, because wikipedia has been caught altering it's records to make some people look good, calling legitimate facts "conspiracy theories", & making other people look bad depending on politics. They've been caught in lies, alterations of facts, & misinformation.
**Wikipedia is not a reliable source for citations elsewhere on Wikipedia, or as a source for copying or translating content. As a user-generated source, it can be edited by anyone at any time, and any information it contains at a particular time could be vandalism, a work in progress, or simply incorrect.**
Malthus has been proven wrong so many times the conversation is not worth it. The very idea is simply human irrational fear masquerading as intellectualism.
For the audience, the so-called malthusian limit is not a measurement. You can't say which nations are facing a limit that is itself an abstract thought experiment. Anybody who says that they can see that a nation in the real world is pushing a so-called malthusian limit is misusing malthus's concept. So the use of the term malthusian limit is both pseudo intellectual and just a big lie.
Those who talk of Malthus this way, as my friend above has done, are really cleverly disguised eugenics fans. Some are even believers in ultimately murdering some part of human population to satisfy their irrational fear of overpopulation. These small-minded and weak-willed people are everywhere, and they often form the ground troops of political movements that seek things like genocide. They cloak their contempt for the "surplus population" in intellectual language to soften the blow. Or, as we've seen here they present themselves dishonestly as realists.
That would be news to Brad DeLong, author of recently published Slouching Towards Utopia, where the basic Malthusian insight figures prominently in the pre-modern period, and as something from which modern science, technology and industry have delivered us. You're welcome to take it up with him, but people challenging DeLong tend to end up as the intellectual equivalent of mincemeat.
In any case, while Malthusian thinking, which encompasses a lot more than whatever Malthus published in the late 18th c., has been criticised, interestingly enough from different ideological perspectives, claiming that 'Malthus has been proven wrong' is just silly. That's not how these things work. That's indulging in sloganeering, not thought or debate. It's not interesting, be better. Rejecting the idea that population growth can exceed available food resources is particularly silly. This happens all the time in the natural world. Historically it maybe did or didn't happen in human societies at various time and places, a question for historians. I don't find DeLong's historical model very convincing, but he's the professional academic. In the modern era, in the steadily more affluent areas, we are all beneficiaries of an almost universal reduction in the birthrate (a voluntary 2 or 3-child policy, if you will), as well as the parallel and continuing advance of technology and industry. We don't know what a continuation of 19th c. birthrates would look like now, with other variables held constant.
You should note that I only discussed a Malthusian limit', that is population exceeding the ability of a country to feed its population, not professed allegiance to any of the various creeds citing Malthusian ideas to support their evil or absurd programs. It could have been just 'a limit', the meaning would have been the same. All the other things you accused me of being were purely products of your imagination. Accusing me of those things is more than a little dickish, and a violation of Wonkette commenting rules. If you insist on being an asshole in your private life, that's none of my business, but being an asshole to other commenters is in fact against the rules.
A final word on China and the one-child policy formulated in the 70s (not 50s as I incorrectly assumed). For Chinese planners faced with the situation there and then, attempting to limit the population was an defensible strategy. Perhaps wrong with the benefit of hindsight, certainly wrong in many details of its implementation, but given the situation, a reasonable response. Note they had intensive and maximized use of arable land, no magical technological advances in sight, a commitment to food self-sufficiency and no wealth to import food in any case, recent famines (mostly caused by political excesses, but still), and still a very high birthrate. And they were trying to modernise and industrialize, arguably something easier to do with a much lower birthrate. So, defensible. And not a little racist of you to question the ability and right of Chinese decision makers to make that call back then.
Thank you. Please consult a rhetorician. "Malthus has been proven wrong" is a falsifiable declarative statement.
Thank you for providing the evidence that proves the statement true.
As you note, developments in "science, technology and industry" have shown that Malthus's conclusion that human population growth would always be restrained by death from want was false.
I prefer to consider animal needs for space. If there's too many too close together, disease is rife, and there is a lot of aggression over territory. Humans refuse to spread out evenly, given open ground. They cluster.
Humans are still animals. Its a shame people refuse to consider this.
I would ask you to consider that the City of New York has an average population density of 29,302.66 people per square mile (11,313.81 people per square kilometer)... Yet, incidence of water-borne disease in the State of New York is highest in the most rural counties and lowest in the most densely populated areas.
Consider this: Urban and suburban dwellers have access to monitored public water systems with protected sources. They also benefit from a robust public health system surveilling for infectious disease. Rural folks, conversely, depend most on ground water wells for drinking water and dispose of waste in septic pits. These systems fail more often than public drinking water infrastructure, and emit pathogens into surface waters.
One way of looking at it is that septic systems in rural areas are a threat to the health of city dwellers downstream.
My take on the long arc of human history is that while yes there are risks of high-density human settlement, the benefits (security, commerce, education, scientific research and development, artistic expression, etc.) greatly outweigh the risks *when* those risks have been mitigated by thoughtful human engineering.
It is hard to believe, but it is true. For thousands of years, humans lived in the Nile River valley, living on planting culture -- people literally survived by planting as many food plants as possible, by hand often using hoes or sticks to assist in planting. Each season there was enough food, but few surpluses. Human society was small and fragile. Then, somebody in northeast Africa developed the ard -- a stick, pulled across the soil to create a furrow. The furrow can be seeded and the seeds quickly covered. The first annual crop surpluses followed.
Within just a few hundred years of the appearance of the ard, you had cities -- and pharaohs, mathematics, engineering, religion and pyramids.
Technology created food surpluses which reduced the number of people needed for agriculture. Those people could then specialize in non food growing tasks. From that specialization came the storehouse of human knowledge. The cycle has repeated, with periods of backsliding, since civilization began in the Nile, and Indus river valleys millennia ago.
And, yes, one of those specializations was soldier. War, too, is an outgrowth of agricultural revolution. So too was medicine, moral philosophy, and the very internet that allows us to share these comments.
The Kaczynskiite desire to de-industrialize humanity to save it is a powerful fantasy. In moments, I have consider it as well. But, the story of humanity is a rather simple one -- even if humanity were banished to small, low-density groups, someone would invent a better way. And the whole human story of development (don't call it "progress," because bad comes with the good, and the line of development is not linear, there are regressions.) will repeat itself. Humans are animals that tinker. It's not shame for people to admit this.
Ohhh see THIS is why I love Wonkette...these headlines. If I ever wrote for media it could only be Wonkette because when I try to tell the truth, <sometimes> I end up getting banned. Precious social media calls it "bullying" when you point out someone is a know-nothing about a subject they're bleating about, when ...they actually know nothing about that subject.😤
OT: Hey remember during the super bowl when that group aired an ad that tried to put a nice spin on Christianity*? I saw that ad during the Olympics. It was ... weird. I wonder how much it cost?
*there are nice Christians, just not these people apparently.
I'd say Putin is taking talking points from the GOP but let's be honest, he's the one injecting oligarchy money into US politics. It sounds like he basically wrote the GOP plank (minus all their lies).
Putin gettin' on the "childless cat lady" train? Or driving it?
The right wants a white, Christofascist police state. They want Gilead. Finally the Harris campaign and the left is starting to SAY it and to punch back. Seeing young people in this county waking up and saying, “um, you wanna do WHAT? No fucking way” and getting on the Harris train is totally inspiring.
In 1939 Hitler instituted the "children, kitchens, church" doctrine for what German women should be focusing on. The indoctrination began at age 10. Married women were encouraged to have as many "ethnically pure" children as possible. Single women took positions in support of the war effort. Many of them becoming guards and even the heads of concentration camps. History is not just repeating, it is continuing.
See this is what I've been saying...he's trying to compete with Hitler & that is just not possible because the gov't doesn't have enough money...unless you go into other countries & steal their treasure like Hitler did in Europe. He is attempting to join up with other dictators to do just that. The U.S. needs to face it's ugly history. We need to discuss what the CIA did, & the Americans that helped fund Hitler's Nazi Germany in the 1930s including Ford, Bush, Lindberg, Dupont, et al.. We cannot afford to be precious with our history just to protect certain wealthy families. Our government needs full transparency ...not more ReTHUGlicon secrecy.
IANAL, but this sounds like grounds for asylum in any western country.
The countries that have women as chancellor, prime minister, vice president, president (soon), secretary of the army (U.S.), and minister of defense (many European countries) are kicking Russia's ass.
So, what does happen to the widows and orphans of the Ukraine war? Is the State going to take care of them? I'm not optimistic.
Widows assigned to inmarried war invalids, like they did in Iran. Male orphans => soldiers, female, see above.
Ta, Dok. FFS!!
From the Lebensborn to the Quiverfuls, fascists have an obsession with breeding.
🤮 It's so gross. Quiverfulls trying to hide in plain sight while really advocating for fascism
And yet, a total lack of interest in how people are supposed to care for all those kids.
As usual ReTHUGs cry about abortion, then cut food stamps & won't give $6 a day for people to eat all so Billionaires get a $50,000 tax break. It makes no sense & congress itself should be ashamed of itself for ever bringing it up, let alone actually doing it. Those hypocrites need to keep the word "children, single mothers, minorities, & the poor" out of their mouths since they literally have contempt for them.
"They don’t want to be in charge of something. This is our character"
The Russian women I know, and I know a fair few, would STRONGLY disagree with that, Aunt Lydia.
With Putin’s unbridled power and creepy enthusiasm for pregnant Russian women, it does make me wonder how many women he’s personally helping achieve that dream. I don’t want to wonder about that.
There's a good chance you have Genghis Khan DNA, so, no need to wonder.
No wonder I occasionally have this uncontrollable urge to take over large parts of China. Reading about Khan, born Temüjin, I was startled by this: “Temüjin killed his older half-brother to secure his familial position. His charismatic personality helped to attract his first followers…” Young, murderous, charismatic. Like an early Ted Bundy.
Something, something, matrushka doll.
Lenin had 7 siblings. Four died in infancy. Another died as a teenager. Of typhoid fever, of course. This was not a poor family. The Ulyanivs were a well-to-do family of landed gentry.
Jesus, I can't stand Russia's culture of nostalgia and them thinking this shit's romantic.
And one by fire squad?
No, hanged.
What a maroon.
"Many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had seven or eight children, and maybe even more. We should preserve and revive these wonderful traditions."
He's trying to put a pretty face on the worst kind of poverty there. You might want to think that Russia was just populated with Ambersons and Babbits, comfortable families who wanted to fill their Midwestern three-floor Queen and style homes with babies. But you'd be wrong.
There are two traditions in Russia: starvation and fear of the czar.
Putin would like to celebrate both. The whole thing is bizarre, because there's no more desperate politics than fertility politics. China's one child policy is going to prove devastating, it's hard to believe that a nation with more than a billion people is in a population decline Doom spiral that will take a century to reverse. In addition to being one of the great crimes of History, the one child policy is also a kind of human ecological disaster.
State fertility drives are moral disasters too. We all know there's no more intimate no more personal thing, no more elemental expression of individual human freedom, then the agency the ability to shape ones household and family as one desires.
So Putin is against the basic human desire for basic human freedom, that's no surprise, but he's also against fighting the human part of mother nature, which will do as it will do regardless of whether the stern talking man on the TV tells his subjects what they should do when the lights go out.
In defense of the one-child policy (not its implementation, but the policy), they were up against a Malthusian limit, with the land area, technology and other resources they had. In hindsight, a 1.5 child policy might have been sufficient, but 'hindsight'.
Other places up against that limit (even after the green revolution, GMO technology, other technologies and changing attitudes associated with increasing wealth that almost universally press down fertility without any need for government intervention), Rwanda/Burundi/Kivu, Southern Nigeria, Pakistan, Egypt, a few more. We'll see what they do and how they do it and what people think of that. The response to a Malthusian limit is either fewer births or more deaths.
The one-child rule. Did you know that CIA Bush Sr. was nicknamed "rubbers" because he was always trying to stop excessive breeding. In fact, he was the protege' of Kissinger & they "worked" with China on that policy. Whatever it takes to protect the white race, I guess.
Oh please. No Westerners were working with Chinese population planners in the 70s when the one-child policy was formulated.
Can you prove that? Because CIA G.H.W.Bush went to China during the Watergate debacle, & he was a protege' (one of them) of Kissinger's. So...knee jerk quips will not do here. I'm going to need proof. You shouldn't just pop off, unless you know what you're talking about specifically.
Prove? You mean you want me to disprove a conspiracy theory? Oh please. You shouldn't do the conspiracy theory thing. It's bad for your brain and you'll wake up in ten years and realize how much precious time you've squandered. Actual information is readily available. You're on Wonkette, that's a good first step.
Here's the Wikipedia on the one-child policy. Good place to start. Links galore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy?wprov=sfla1
Bush was appointed by Ford as de facto ambassador to China in 1974 and by Ford as CIA director 1976.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._W._Bush?wprov=sfla1
It isn't a conspiracy theory, so you can quit the arrogance. FYI...if wikipedia is your source, you're already way behind the 8-ball. Do you not read information other than what MSM gives to you? There is a large body of evidence by individuals that have actually RESEARCHED records, declassified records, etc.. & have found out the truth.
First of all, George H.W. Bush was in the CIA since the early 1950's. This is not "conspiracy theory". He was director in 1976 for 1 year. That doesn't disprove his involvement in the Bay of Pigs, the fact that he was in Dallas & lied about it in Nov 22, 1963. He was also head of the GOP. His father Prescott was in the CIA, as well. They were both in the Skull n' Bones secret club of Yale.
George H.W. Bush had a relationship with the President of China for decades...the longest relationship of any president. He along with a few others, was a protege' of Kissinger. It was Bush who pushed Taiwan out of the way for favored nation status & gave it to China.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp99-01448r000401570011-0
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP99-01448R000401570011-0.pdfThere is no link that wikipedia could ever provide to me or anyone else that would shed any light on this or a myriad of other topics, because wikipedia has been caught altering it's records to make some people look good, calling legitimate facts "conspiracy theories", & making other people look bad depending on politics. They've been caught in lies, alterations of facts, & misinformation.
**Wikipedia is not a reliable source for citations elsewhere on Wikipedia, or as a source for copying or translating content. As a user-generated source, it can be edited by anyone at any time, and any information it contains at a particular time could be vandalism, a work in progress, or simply incorrect.**
Malthus has been proven wrong so many times the conversation is not worth it. The very idea is simply human irrational fear masquerading as intellectualism.
For the audience, the so-called malthusian limit is not a measurement. You can't say which nations are facing a limit that is itself an abstract thought experiment. Anybody who says that they can see that a nation in the real world is pushing a so-called malthusian limit is misusing malthus's concept. So the use of the term malthusian limit is both pseudo intellectual and just a big lie.
Those who talk of Malthus this way, as my friend above has done, are really cleverly disguised eugenics fans. Some are even believers in ultimately murdering some part of human population to satisfy their irrational fear of overpopulation. These small-minded and weak-willed people are everywhere, and they often form the ground troops of political movements that seek things like genocide. They cloak their contempt for the "surplus population" in intellectual language to soften the blow. Or, as we've seen here they present themselves dishonestly as realists.
That would be news to Brad DeLong, author of recently published Slouching Towards Utopia, where the basic Malthusian insight figures prominently in the pre-modern period, and as something from which modern science, technology and industry have delivered us. You're welcome to take it up with him, but people challenging DeLong tend to end up as the intellectual equivalent of mincemeat.
In any case, while Malthusian thinking, which encompasses a lot more than whatever Malthus published in the late 18th c., has been criticised, interestingly enough from different ideological perspectives, claiming that 'Malthus has been proven wrong' is just silly. That's not how these things work. That's indulging in sloganeering, not thought or debate. It's not interesting, be better. Rejecting the idea that population growth can exceed available food resources is particularly silly. This happens all the time in the natural world. Historically it maybe did or didn't happen in human societies at various time and places, a question for historians. I don't find DeLong's historical model very convincing, but he's the professional academic. In the modern era, in the steadily more affluent areas, we are all beneficiaries of an almost universal reduction in the birthrate (a voluntary 2 or 3-child policy, if you will), as well as the parallel and continuing advance of technology and industry. We don't know what a continuation of 19th c. birthrates would look like now, with other variables held constant.
You should note that I only discussed a Malthusian limit', that is population exceeding the ability of a country to feed its population, not professed allegiance to any of the various creeds citing Malthusian ideas to support their evil or absurd programs. It could have been just 'a limit', the meaning would have been the same. All the other things you accused me of being were purely products of your imagination. Accusing me of those things is more than a little dickish, and a violation of Wonkette commenting rules. If you insist on being an asshole in your private life, that's none of my business, but being an asshole to other commenters is in fact against the rules.
A final word on China and the one-child policy formulated in the 70s (not 50s as I incorrectly assumed). For Chinese planners faced with the situation there and then, attempting to limit the population was an defensible strategy. Perhaps wrong with the benefit of hindsight, certainly wrong in many details of its implementation, but given the situation, a reasonable response. Note they had intensive and maximized use of arable land, no magical technological advances in sight, a commitment to food self-sufficiency and no wealth to import food in any case, recent famines (mostly caused by political excesses, but still), and still a very high birthrate. And they were trying to modernise and industrialize, arguably something easier to do with a much lower birthrate. So, defensible. And not a little racist of you to question the ability and right of Chinese decision makers to make that call back then.
Thank you. Please consult a rhetorician. "Malthus has been proven wrong" is a falsifiable declarative statement.
Thank you for providing the evidence that proves the statement true.
As you note, developments in "science, technology and industry" have shown that Malthus's conclusion that human population growth would always be restrained by death from want was false.
Again, my thanks.
I prefer to consider animal needs for space. If there's too many too close together, disease is rife, and there is a lot of aggression over territory. Humans refuse to spread out evenly, given open ground. They cluster.
Humans are still animals. Its a shame people refuse to consider this.
I would ask you to consider that the City of New York has an average population density of 29,302.66 people per square mile (11,313.81 people per square kilometer)... Yet, incidence of water-borne disease in the State of New York is highest in the most rural counties and lowest in the most densely populated areas.
Consider this: Urban and suburban dwellers have access to monitored public water systems with protected sources. They also benefit from a robust public health system surveilling for infectious disease. Rural folks, conversely, depend most on ground water wells for drinking water and dispose of waste in septic pits. These systems fail more often than public drinking water infrastructure, and emit pathogens into surface waters.
One way of looking at it is that septic systems in rural areas are a threat to the health of city dwellers downstream.
My take on the long arc of human history is that while yes there are risks of high-density human settlement, the benefits (security, commerce, education, scientific research and development, artistic expression, etc.) greatly outweigh the risks *when* those risks have been mitigated by thoughtful human engineering.
It is hard to believe, but it is true. For thousands of years, humans lived in the Nile River valley, living on planting culture -- people literally survived by planting as many food plants as possible, by hand often using hoes or sticks to assist in planting. Each season there was enough food, but few surpluses. Human society was small and fragile. Then, somebody in northeast Africa developed the ard -- a stick, pulled across the soil to create a furrow. The furrow can be seeded and the seeds quickly covered. The first annual crop surpluses followed.
Within just a few hundred years of the appearance of the ard, you had cities -- and pharaohs, mathematics, engineering, religion and pyramids.
Technology created food surpluses which reduced the number of people needed for agriculture. Those people could then specialize in non food growing tasks. From that specialization came the storehouse of human knowledge. The cycle has repeated, with periods of backsliding, since civilization began in the Nile, and Indus river valleys millennia ago.
And, yes, one of those specializations was soldier. War, too, is an outgrowth of agricultural revolution. So too was medicine, moral philosophy, and the very internet that allows us to share these comments.
The Kaczynskiite desire to de-industrialize humanity to save it is a powerful fantasy. In moments, I have consider it as well. But, the story of humanity is a rather simple one -- even if humanity were banished to small, low-density groups, someone would invent a better way. And the whole human story of development (don't call it "progress," because bad comes with the good, and the line of development is not linear, there are regressions.) will repeat itself. Humans are animals that tinker. It's not shame for people to admit this.
Indeed...a rose by any other name is still...a rose.
I'm so confused, I thought Putin wanted to call the "motherland" the "fatherland" just a few months ago.