Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Read it. Read the whole pages shown.
Including his statements that the "legal, constitutional and desirable" way to limit population size is through
voluntary measures?
You mean this section:
Quote:
Compulsory control of family size is an unpalatable idea, but the alternatives may be much more horrifying. As those alternatives become clearer to an increasing number of people in the 1980s, they may begin demanding such control. A far better choice, in our view, is to expand the use of milder methods of influencing family size preferences while redoubling efforts to ensure that the means of birth control, including abortion and sterilization, are accessible to every human being on Earth within the shortest possible time. If effective action is taken promptly against population growth, perhaps the need for the more extreme involuntary or repressive measures can be averted in most countries.
I already stated that I accepted the suggestion that the horrible ideas in this book were presented largely to push for less horrible alternatives. Of course, he doesn't say "voluntary" here. He just says "milder methods of influencing family size preferences". We can assume similar meaning, but let's not replace words, shall we?
The problem with this section is that it's almost more of a CYA paragraph than anything else. Sure, we'd rather do things this other way, but all the other information in the book suggests that the problem is already upon us, so it doesn't really matter. If you were to read this book at face value, you'd see this as a footnote of what we could have done if we weren't already in a jam, with the bulk of the book telling us how much of a jam we are in, how necessary draconian measures are to dealing with said jam, and detailed descriptions of said draconian measures.
So yeah. Too little, too late...
Quote:
Yeah, I read it. Did you get bored before the end and stop?
No. I read it. It's just not sufficient to counter all the other statements made in the book. The more chilling aspects are not the suggestions themselves, or even what the authors consider the "best" way of dealing with the problem, but the frequency with which they dismiss legal and ethical concerns over various draconian acts. There are a whole lot of paragraphs that start: "Some would say that this is illegal, or unethical, or whatever, but....".
No amount of presenting a preference changes that the textbook is basically teaching that these other actions can and should be done if the conditions arise. Worse, the estimates and numbers he used to justify said draconian actions are already exceeded today. So, according to this textbook, we should already be implementing those compulsory population reducing methods.