I don't know exactly how bad it would be. No one really does. But no one doubts that a major nuclear exchange would cause large scale human suffering, the likes of which humanity probably has never seen before. I don't know if it would be bad enough to doom the human species. I suppose that depends on the severity of the nuclear war. Lots of ifs involved. >> ^raverman:

Absolutely - No doubt it would be bad...
But objectively how bad? Total Extinction? A 'fallout' world? 90 years uninhabitable with the only survivors living under ground? Or maybe that's the media making the story extra scary. Possibly the Western US has lived with intermittent fallout from tests for years depending on wind direction.
Remembering most of the world population lives in India and China... e.g. A nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan may actually kill more people than an exchange between the US and say Russia.

>> ^kronosposeidon:
No one knows exactly how bad it would be if a nuclear war took place, but there is no dispute that it would definitely be bad for both the Earth and mankind as a whole if a major exchange of nuclear weapons took place.

Absolutely - No doubt it would be bad...

But objectively how bad? Total Extinction? A 'fallout' world? 90 years uninhabitable with the only survivors living under ground? Or maybe that's the media making the story extra scary. Possibly the Western US has lived with intermittent fallout from tests for years depending on wind direction.

Remembering most of the world population lives in India and China... e.g. A nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan may actually kill more people than an exchange between the US and say Russia.


>> ^kronosposeidon:

No one knows exactly how bad it would be if a nuclear war took place, but there is no dispute that it would definitely be bad for both the Earth and mankind as a whole if a major exchange of nuclear weapons took place.

blankfist, ever thoughtful blankfist. We often butt heads, but you always mount an intelligent argument. I appreciate this. This is why I will allow you to bear my sift butt babies when you come of age.

I think most consumers understand that their money goes towards evil. I myself, socially conscious politico that I am, buy clothes made of Indonesian children, play Super Mario Galaxy (don't have the sequel yet, champ) on Chinese suicide victims and put dead Iraqis in my gas tank. I do my small meaningless part for wallet democracy by boycotting Exxon/Mobil, Wal*Mart and McDonalds, but those corporations thrive despite of my best efforts. Aside from that, I am completely complicit in oppression, as are we all. It's easy to ignore the suffering when it's so far away and there are so many everyday low prices. Any change in this arena certainly won't come from consumers, because we all play a part in this circle of misery. The system needs to be busted in two.

(note for campiondelculo: Yes, of course we could all move to a forest, use Ubunto and live off the grid, but get serious dude, that is an absurd and semi-retarted expectation for a world population of billions.)

Foxcomm had little or no regulation and started out as a small business. This empirical evidence would seem to completely contradict your hypothesis. How might a true free market have affected Foxcomm or prevented its ills?

I do think the majority of people want to do the right thing, that's why I support democracy. Without democracy, there is no civic means of expressing the public will, which means the guy with the most money calls the shots. Not really all that different than what we have already, just with less voting and more slavery.

Not sure how the jail thing fits into the larger context, but solidarity with you on that brother. Set the prostitutes and weed users free.

You sound a little red when you talk about majorities, communalism, tibal desires and coexisting. Are you becoming a Marxist? Either way, I've got wood. Baby making time?

He's not talking about the Haber process only, he's also talking about herbicide usage of products like Monsanto's RoundUp and others. This also ties into soil fertility and top soil depletion, it's not just a case of some arbitrary soil input method, there are many many many other contributing factors.

The Haber process may feed one third of the worlds population today, but it's not a sustainable practice, not the way agribusiness has wastefully adopted it and 'augmented' it with imazapyr and glyphosphate based herbicide products. It's not a common sense choice at all.

You have to look at how fossil fuel dependent modern industrial agricultural production is overall. 7-10 calories of energy input for 1 calorie of output? Retarded.

Small, inefficient 3rd world style farming? I was thinking something more along the lines of small to medium scale, efficient and sustainable farming practices where your energy input is smaller than your energy output.

Also, it's ironic to imply that 'third world' farming techniques are inefficient when many competent farmers throughout India and Africa, and I'm sure elsewhere, have taken huge yield hits after adopting 'modern, first world, farming techniques'.

If I had the power, I turn the worlds population into cynical assholes just so they could enjoy this on its various level.s

Diagnosing Benny Morris
The Mind of a European Settler
by Gabriel Ash


Israeli historian Benny Morris crossed a new line of shame when he put his academic credentials and respectability in the service of outlining the "moral" justification for a future genocide against Palestinians.

Benny Morris is the Israeli historian most responsible for the vindication of the Palestinian narrative of 1948. The lives of about 700,000 people were shattered as they were driven from their homes by the Jewish militia (and, later, the Israeli army) between December 1947 and early 1950. Morris went through Israeli archives and wrote the day by day account of this expulsion, documenting every "ethnically cleansed" village and every recorded act of violence, and placing each in the context of the military goals and perceptions of the cleansers.

Israel's apologists tried in vain to attack Morris' professional credibility. From the opposite direction, since he maintained that the expulsion was not "by design," he was also accused of drawing excessively narrow conclusions from the documents and of being too naive a reader of dissimulating statements. Despite these limitations, Morris' The Birth of the Palestinian Refugees Problem, 1947-1949 is an authoritative record of the expulsion.

In anticipation of the publication of the revised edition, Morris was interviewed in Ha'aretz. The major new findings in the revised book, based on fresh documents, further darken the picture.

The new archival material, Morris reveals, records routine execution of civilians, twenty-four massacres, including one in Jaffa, and at least twelve cases of rape by military units, which Morris acknowledges are probably "the tip of the iceberg." Morris also says he found documents confirming the broader conclusions favored by his critics: the expulsion was pre-meditated; concrete expulsion orders were given in writing, some traceable directly to Ben Gurion.

Morris also found documentations for Arab High Command calls for evacuating women and children from certain villages, evidence he oddly claims strengthen the Zionist propaganda claim that Palestinians left because they were told to leave by the invading Arab states. Morris had already documented two dozen such cases in the first edition. It is hard to see how attempts by Arab commanders to protect civilians from anticipated rape and murder strengthen the Zionist fairy tale. But that failed attempt at evenhandedness is the least of Morris' problems. As the interview progresses, it emerges with growing clarity that, while Morris the historian is a professional and cautious presenter of facts, Morris the intellectual is a very sick person.

His sickness is of the mental-political kind. He lives in a world populated not by fellow human beings, but by racist abstractions and stereotypes. There is an over-abundance of quasi-poetic images in the interview, as if the mind is haunted by the task of grasping what ails it: "The Palestinian citizens of Israel are a time bomb," not fellow citizens. Islam is "a world in which human lives don't have the same value as in the West." Arabs are "barbarians" at the gate of the Roman Empire. Palestinian society is "a serial killer" that ought to be executed, and "a wild animal" that must be caged.

Morris' disease was diagnosed over forty years ago, by Frantz Fanon. Based on his experience in subjugated Africa, Fanon observed that "the colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say, with the help of the army and the police, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation, the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil � The native is declared insensitive to ethics � the enemy of values. � He is a corrosive element, destroying all that comes near it � the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces" (from The Wretched of the Earth). And further down, "the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms" (let's not forget to place Morris' metaphors in the context of so many other Israeli appellations for Palestinians: Begin's "two-legged beasts", Eitan's "drugged cockroaches" and Barak's ultra-delicate "salmon"). Morris is a case history in the psychopathology of colonialism.

Bad Genocide, Good Genocide

When the settler encounters natives who refuse to cast down their eyes, his disease advances to the next stage -- murderous sociopathy.

Morris, who knows the exact scale of the terror unleashed against Palestinians in 1948, considers it justified. First he suggests that the terror was justified because the alternative would have been a genocide of Jews by Palestinians. Raising the idea of genocide in this context is pure, and cheap, hysteria. Indeed, Morris moves immediately to a more plausible explanation: the expulsion was a precondition for creating a Jewish state, i.e. the establishment of a specific political preference, not self-defense.

This political explanation, namely that the expulsion was necessary to create the demographic conditions, a large Jewish majority, favored by the Zionist leadership, is the consensus of historians. But as affirmative defense, it is unsatisfactory. So the idea that Jews were in danger of genocide is repeated later, in a more honest way, as merely another racist, baseless generalization: "if it can, [Islamic society] will commit genocide."

But Morris sees no evil. Accusing Ben Gurion of failing to achieve an Arabian Palestine, he recommends further ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, including those who are Israeli citizens. Not now, but soon, "within five or ten years," under "apocalyptic conditions" such as a regional war with unconventional weapons, a potentially nuclear war, which "is likely to happen within twenty years." For Morris, and it is difficult to overstate his madness at this point, the likelihood of a nuclear war within the foreseeable future is not the sorry end of a road better not taken, but merely a milestone, whose aftermath is still imaginable, and imaginable within the banal continuity of Zionist centennial policies: he foresees the exchange of unconventional missiles between Israel and unidentified regional states as a legitimate excuse for "finishing the job" of 1948.

Morris speaks explicitly of another expulsion, but, in groping for a moral apology for the past and the future expulsion of Palestinians, he presents a more general argument, one that justifies not only expulsion but also genocide. That statement ought to be repeated, for here is a crossing of a terrible and shameful line.

Morris, a respectable, Jewish, Israeli academic, is out in print in the respectable daily, Haaretz, justifying genocide as a legitimate tool of statecraft. It should be shocking. Yet anybody who interacts with American and Israeli Zionists knows that Morris is merely saying for the record what many think and even say unofficially. Morris, like most of Israel, lives in a temporality apart, an intellectual Galapagos Islands, a political Jurassic Park, where bizarre cousins of ideas elsewhere shamed into extinction still roam the mindscape proudly.

Nor should one think the slippage between expulsion, "transfer," and genocide without practical consequences. It is not difficult to imagine a planned expulsion turn into genocide under the stress of circumstances: The genocides of both European Jews and Armenians began as an expulsion. The expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 was the product of decades of thinking and imagining "transfer." We ought to pay attention: with Morris's statement, Zionist thinking crossed another threshold; what is now discussed has the potential to be actualized, if "apocalyptic conditions" materialize.

The march of civilization and the corpses of the uncivilized

It is instructive to look closer at the manner in which Morris uses racist thinking to justify genocide. Morris' interview, precisely because of its shamelessness, is a particularly good introductory text to Zionist thought.

Morris' racism isn't limited to Arabs. Genocide, according to Morris, is justified as long as it is done for "the final good." But what kind of good is worth the "forced extinction" of a whole people? Certainly, not the good of the latter. (Morris uses the word "Haqkhada," a Hebrew word usually associated with the extinction of animal species. Someone ought to inform Morris about the fact that Native Americans aren't extinct.)

According to Morris, the establishment of a more advanced society justifies genocide: "Yes, even the great American democracy couldn't come to be without the forced extinction of Native Americans. There are times the overall, final good justifies terrible, cruel deeds." Such hopeful comparisons between the future awaiting Palestinians and the fate of Native Americans are common to Israeli apologists. One delegation of American students was shocked and disgusted when it heard this analogy made by a spokesperson at the Israeli embassy in Washington.

Morris's supremacist view of "Western Civilization," that civilization values human life more than Islam, has its basis in the moral acceptance of genocide for the sake of "progress." Morris establishes the superiority of the West on both the universal respect for human life and the readiness to exterminate inferior races. The illogicalness of the cohabitation of a right to commit genocide together with a higher level of respect for human lives escapes him, and baffles us, at least until we grasp that the full weight of the concept of "human" is restricted, in the classic manner of Eurocentric racism, to dwellers of civilized (i.e. Western) nations.

This is the same logic that allowed early Zionists to describe Palestine as an empty land, despite the presence of a million inhabitants. In the end, it comes down to this: killing Arabs -- one dozen Arabs or one million Arabs, the difference is merely technical -- is acceptable if it is necessary in order to defend the political preferences of Jews because Jews belong to the superior West and Arabs are inferior. We must be thankful to Professor Morris for clarifying the core logic of Zionism so well.

The color of Jews

Morris assures us that his values are those of the civilized West, the values of universal morality, progress, etc. But then he also claims to hold the primacy of particular loyalties, a position for which he draws on Albert Camus. But to reconcile Morris' double loyalty to both Western universalism and to Jewish particularism, one must forget that these two identities were not always on the best of terms.

How can one explain Morris' knowledge that the ethnic Darwinism that was used to justify the murder of millions of non-whites, including Black African slaves, Native Americans, Arabs, and others, was also used to justify the attempt to exterminate Jews? How can Morris endorse the "civilizational" justification of genocide, which includes the genocide of Jews, even as he claims the holocaust as another justification for Zionism? Perhaps Morris' disjointed mind doesn't see the connection. Perhaps he thinks that there are "right" assertions of racist supremacy and "wrong" assertions of racist supremacy. Or perhaps Morris displays another facet of the psychopathologies of oppression, the victim's identification with the oppressor.

Perhaps in Morris' mind, one half tribalist and one half universalist, the Jews were murdered to make way for a superior, more purely Aryan, European civilization, and the Jews who are today serving in the Israeli army, both belong and do not belong to the same group. They belong when Morris invokes the totems of the tribe to justify loyalty. But when his attention turns to the universal principle of "superior civilization," these Jews are effaced, like poor relations one is ashamed to be associated with, sent back to the limbo they share with the great non-white mass of the dehumanized. In contrast, the Jews of Israel, self-identified as European, have turned white, dry-cleaned and bleached by Zionism, and with their whiteness they claim the privilege that Whites always had, the privilege to massacre members of "less advanced" races.

False testimony

It would be marvelous if Morris the historian could preserve his objective detachment while Morris the Zionist dances with the demons of Eurocentric racism. But the wall of professionalism -- and it is a very thick and impressive wall in Morris' case -- cannot hold against the torrent of hate.

For example, Morris lies about his understanding of the 2000 Camp David summit. In Ha'aretz, Morris says that, "when the Palestinians rejected Barak's proposal of July 2000 and Clinton's proposal of December 2000, I understood that they were not ready to accept a two state solution. They wanted everything. Lydda, and Akka and Jaffa."

But in his book Righteous Victims, Morris explains the failure of the negotiations thus: "the PLO leadership had gradually accepted, or seemed to�Israel...keeping 78 percent of historical Palestine. But the PLO wanted the remaining 22 percent. � At Camp David, Barak had endorsed the establishment of a Palestinian state�[on only] 84-90 percent of that 22 percent. � Israel was also to control the territory between a greatly enlarged Jerusalem and Jericho, effectively cutting the core of the future Palestinian state into two�" Morris' chapter of "Righteous Victims" that deals with the '90s leaves a lot to be desired, but it still strives for some detached analysis. In contrast, in Ha'aretz Morris offers baseless claims he knows to be false.

If Morris lies about recent history, and even grossly misrepresents the danger Jews faced in Palestine in 1948, a period he is an expert on, his treatment of more general historical matters is all but ridiculous, an astounding mix of insinuations and clich�s. For example, Morris reminds us that "the Arab nation won a big chunk of the Earth, not because of its intrinsic virtues and skills, but by conquering and murdering and forcing the conquered to convert." (What is Morris' point? Is the cleansing of Palestine attributable to Jewish virtues and skills, rather than to conquering and murdering?)

This is racist slander, not history. As an example, take Spain, which was conquered in essentially one battle in 711 A.D. by a small band of North African Berbers who had just converted to Islam. Spain was completely Islamized and Arabized within two centuries with very little religious coercion, and certainly no ethnic cleansing. But after the last Islamic rulers were kicked out of Spain by the Christian army of Ferdinand and Isabel in 1492, a large section of the very same Spanish population that willingly adopted Islam centuries earlier refused to accept Christianity despite a century of persecution by the Spanish Inquisition. 600,000 Spanish Muslims were eventually expelled in 1608.

Obviously, Islamic civilization had its share of war and violence. But, as the above example hints, compared to the West, compared to the religious killing frenzy of sixteenth century Europe, compared to the serial genocides in Africa and America, and finally to the flesh-churning wars of the twentieth century, Islamic civilization looks positively benign. So why all this hatred? Where is all this fire and brimstone Islamophobia coming from?

Being elsewhere

From Europe, of course, but with a twist. Europe has always looked upon the East with condescension. In periods of tension, that condescension would escalate to fear and hate. But it was also mixed and tempered with a large dose of fascination and curiosity. The settler, however, does not have the luxury to be curious. The settler leaves the metropolis hoping to overcome his own marginal, often oppressed, status in metropolitan society. He goes to the colony motivated by the desire to recreate the metropolis with himself at the top.

For the settler, going to the colony is not a rejection of the metropolis, but a way to claim his due as a member. Therefore, the settler is always trying to be more metropolitan than the metropolis. When the people of the metropolis baulk at the bloodbath the settler wants to usher in the name of their values, the settler accuses them of "growing soft," and declares himself "the true metropolis." That is also why there is one crime of which the settler can never forgive the land he colonized -- its alien climate and geography, its recalcitrant otherness, the oddness of its inhabitants, in sum, the harsh truth of its being elsewhere. In the consciousness of the settler, condescension thus turns into loathing.

Israeli settler society, especially its European, Ashkenazi part, especially that Israel which calls itself "the peace camp," "the Zionist Left," etc., is predicated on the loathing of all things Eastern and Arab. (Now, of course, we have in addition the religious, post-1967 settlers who relate to the Zionist Left the way the Zionist Left stands in relation to Europe, i.e. as settlers.) "Arab" is a term of abuse, one that can be applied to everything and everyone, including Jews. This loathing is a unifying theme. It connects Morris' latest interview in Ha'aretz with Ben Gurion's first impression of Jaffa in 1905; he found it filthy and depressing.

In another article, published in Tikkun Magazine, Morris blames the "ultra-nationalism, provincialism, fundamentalism and obscurantism" of Arab Jews in Israel for the sorry state of the country (although Begin, Shamir, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak, Sharon, and most of Israel's generals, leaders, and opinion makers of the last two decades are European Jews). For Morris, everything Eastern is corrupt and every corruption has an Eastern origin.

One shouldn't, therefore, doubt Morris when he proclaims himself a traditional Left Zionist. There is hardly anything he says that hasn't been said already by David Ben Gurion or Moshe Dayan. Loathing of the East and the decision to subdue it by unlimited force is the essence of Zionism.

Understanding the psycho-political sources of this loathing leads to some interesting observations about truisms that recur in Morris' (and much of Israel's) discourse. Morris blames Arafat for thinking that Israel is a "crusader state," a foreign element that will eventually be sent back to its port of departure. This is a common refrain of Israeli propaganda. It is also probably true. But it isn't Arafat's fault that Morris is a foreigner in the Middle East. Why shouldn't Arafat believe Israel is a crusader state when Morris himself says so? "We are the vulnerable extension of Europe in this place, exactly as the crusaders."

It is Morris -- like the greater part of Israel's elite -- who insists on being a foreigner, on loathing the Middle East and dreaming about mist-covered Europe, purified and deified by distance. If Israel is a crusader state, and therefore a state with shallow roots, likely to pack up and disappear, it is not the fault of those who make that observation. It is the fault of those Israelis, like Morris, who want to have nothing to do with the Middle East.

Morris is deeply pessimistic about Israel's future; this feeling is very attractive in Israel. The end of Israel is always felt to be one step away, hiding beneath every development, from the birthrate of Bedouins to the establishment of the International Court of Justice.

Naturally, every Palestinian demand is such a doomsday threat. This sense of existential precariousness can be traced back to 1948; it was encouraged by Israel's successive governments because it justified the continuous violence of the state and the hegemony of the military complex. It may eventually become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

But this existential fear goes deeper. It is rooted in the repressed understanding (which Morris both articulates and tries to displace) of the inherent illegitimacy of the Israeli political system and identity. "Israel" is brute force. In Morris' words: "The bottom line is that force is the only thing that will make them accept us." But brute force is precarious. Time gnaws at it. Fatigue corrodes it. And the more it is used, the more it destroys the very acceptance and legitimacy it seeks.

For Israel, the fundamental question of the future is, therefore, whether Israelis can transcend colonialism. The prognosis is far from positive. In a related article in The Guardian, Morris explains that accepting the right of return of the Palestinian refugees would mean forcing Israeli Jews into exile. But why would Jews have to leave Israel if Israel becomes a bi-national, democratic state? One cannot understand this without attention to the colonial loathing of the Middle East which Morris so eloquently expresses.

But taking that into account, I'm afraid Morris is right. Many Israeli Jews, especially European Jews who tend to possess alternative passports, would rather emigrate than live on equal terms with Palestine's natives in a bi-national state. It is to Frantz Fanon again that we turn for observing this first. "The settler, from the moment the colonial context disappears, has no longer an interest in remaining or in co-existing."

Related Articles:

* The Education of Benny the Barbarian by Ahmed Amr
* Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion by Adi Ophir

Gabriel Ash was born in Romania and grew up in Israel. He is a regular contributor to Yellow Times.org, where this article first appeared (www.yellowtimes.org). Gabriel encourages your comments: gash@YellowTimes.org

>> ^Ryjkyj:
But I can't help but thinking that scientific and social advancements are great and all but why not just start promoting the idea that people need to have less babies?

I think you missed the point in the documentary where they mention that it doesn't work well to try to limit peoples population growth by promoting less babies. People get less babies when their countries develop and they have good access to contraception. Many developed countries are already experiencing near zero or even negative growth.

I think with improved technology the Earth can easily support many more billions. The UN predicts that the population will level out around 9 billion in the medium scenario.

http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300final.pdf
Under the assumptions made in the medium scenario projection, world population will not
vary greatly after reaching 8.92 billion in 2050 (figure 6). In another 25 years, by 2075, it is projected
to peak at 9.22 billion, only 3.4 per cent above the 2050 estimate. It will then dip slightly
to 8.43 billion by 2175 and rise gradually to 8.97 billion, very close to the initial 2050 figure, by
2300.

However the people could be richer and the planet in better state if the population growth doesn't continue too much. So the best way to accomplish that is to help developing countries develop as quickly as possible and give free access to contraception if people can't afford it.

Digression, but lets be fair; approximately 80% of the worlds population lives on less than $5.15 a day = $1875 a year. Minimum wage in the US is $7.25 per hour = $15,080 a year. If you can't live off 15k a year you are either a dumb ass, or a jack ass.

>> ^Ryjkyj
Minimum wage is absolutely not a living wage.

>> ^jwray:
Earth has enough people on it; population growth must stop.

I agree to some point and I see it happening. In all developed countries birth rate goes down and approaches or even goes below replacement values (e.g. negative growth in Italy, Japan for example). So once a country reaches a sufficient level of development, population growth stops and further growth is not necessary for improved prosperity, advances in automation and efficiency will make these countries richer.

Now if me manage to help the developing countries develop, they will also level off. Because developed countries just don't need a lot of children to support themselves later in life. This will happen over a period where their population still grows rapidly, though increasingly slower. UN projection estimate that the world population growth will flat-line around 9-12 billion people. So if the Earth can support this population, were fine for the future, a very bright future indeed. I'm convinced the Earth can support this number with increases in intensive farming and technology, so more food production per acre, and by changing our energy demand and energy sources. That is develop large scale fission or fusion processes to power our more efficient society.

>> ^rychan:
>> ^jwray:
Actually access to cheap contraception and abortion is one of the most effective ways to reduce poverty everywhere on earth.
Same resources divided among more people = poverty.

Mostly false. More people = better economies of scale = better standards of living for everyone.
Do you think a company like Intel could exist without a first world economy with billions of people? How can they afford to invest 10's of billions of dollars and millions of man hours into infrastructure and research to create a next generation CPU? Because the world economy is big enough for them to make up their investments.
Do you think the NIH could distribute 10's of billions of dollars for medical research to extend and improve your life if we didn't have hundreds of millions of taxpayers?
The larger the world economy, the more specialists such as scientists and researchers you can support to benefit the entire world. The more amazing engineering projects you can undertake because the return on investment is higher. GPS, the Internet, etc etc... You could not enjoy the quality of life that you have now if the world population were 1 million people, regardless of how educated they might be and how trivial food and energy production might be (hint: neither would be trivial, because both enjoy economies of scale and both benefit from modern science).


So by your logic the countries with the highest birth rates should have the best standards of living in the world right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_birth_rate

Also, I dont argue that more people = better quality of life for some of the population, but that's looking at it from a macro scale, when you look more closely you'll see that the people benefitting from the additional population are not the poor, they are just providing cheap labour for the companies, and the people who use the resources are the ones getting the most benefit - hence why choice for them makes sense.

>> ^jwray:
Actually access to cheap contraception and abortion is one of the most effective ways to reduce poverty everywhere on earth.
Same resources divided among more people = poverty.


Mostly false. More people = better economies of scale = better standards of living for everyone.

Do you think a company like Intel could exist without a first world economy with billions of people? How can they afford to invest 10's of billions of dollars and millions of man hours into infrastructure and research to create a next generation CPU? Because the world economy is big enough for them to make up their investments.

Do you think the NIH could distribute 10's of billions of dollars for medical research to extend and improve your life if we didn't have hundreds of millions of taxpayers?

The larger the world economy, the more specialists such as scientists and researchers you can support to benefit the entire world. The more amazing engineering projects you can undertake because the return on investment is higher. GPS, the Internet, etc etc... You could not enjoy the quality of life that you have now if the world population were 1 million people, regardless of how educated they might be and how trivial food and energy production might be (hint: neither would be trivial, because both enjoy economies of scale and both benefit from modern science).

^ Who is asking you to confrom? Ive lived my whole life and never had anyone ask me to conform to anything except maybe my grandparents but I shrug that off to them being old school.

I really don't think my point is getting across to well in above statements. Maybe I can sum up my whole issue in just a few lines. I had no problem with this video until the last line when he insulted at least half of the worlds population. I know people who are the exact representation of what he is describing and they are not a disgrace period. If he were sitting in front of me and a few of these people and said that I would be very confrontational just on how insulting that whole comment is whether I believe hes right or not. Otherwise he had not said anything that I did not already know. : )

NOT EVERYONE SHARES YOUR NARROW MINDED BELIEFS!! IT IS JUST A GAME! YOU DON'T LIKE IT DON'T BUY IT! IS THAT TOO HARD OF A CONCEPT FOR A MORON LIKE YOU??? LOOK YOU WANT TO KNOW A FACT?? CHRISTIANS ARE ONLY 1/3 OF THE WORLDS POPULATION! YOU WILL NEVER WIN AN ARGUMENT ABOUT THINGS LIKE THIS!! I AM REMINDED OF A COMMENT I HEARD A WHILE BACK "Have you ever noticed that people who believe in creationism, look so unevolved?" I THINK THAT ALSO GOES FOR THEIR BRAINS TOO! STOP BEING A FLIPPING MORON AND GROW THE HELL UP! YOU DON'T CONTROL THE WORLD AND YOU SURE AS HELL WONT GET CENSORSHIP. SO GROW UP DONT BUY PRODUCTS YOU DON'T AGREE WITH FOR RELIGIOUS REASONS, AND STOP TRYING TO TAKE AWAY OTHER, MORE INTELLIGENT PEOPLE'S, RIGHTS TO FREEDOM!!!!!

>> ^Skeeve:
"They're not terrorists, they're wearing sandals." Just one of many reasons not to listen to this guy. He says he was "ordered to kill innocent people" and I can understand that the urge to follow orders can be strong, but it is a soldier's duty to refuse and report an unlawful order, and that is definitely an unlawful order.
He deserted the army and has helped others go AWOL and calls for more soldiers to resist. As a soldier myself I find this attitude disgusting. America has an all-volunteer army. No one forced him to join. You can't become a pacifist or a conscientious objector after actively seeking a job in which you might have to kill people.
This guy is just another undereducated soldier speaking about things beyond his understanding.
As for his obsession with Iraq and 9/11... no one really believes they have anything to do with each other anymore do they? Iraq was an idiotic move by Bush and his cronies to finish what Bush Sr. started.


Mate. Killing innocents isn't something your personal generalizations/sentiments are able to justify/downgrade/trvialize to a large portion of the worlds population. Sounds like you are a good soldier, I can't fault you for that. Sounds like the above guy is a good human being, I definitely can't fault him for that...

Ok WP , you still cant provide good links to peer reviewed data huh ?
This is a report ( sorry pdf ) that details paleoclimate carbon ppm measurements ,
and surprise , theorizes those high levels are the case of the high temperatures .
http://earth.geology.yale.edu/~ajs/1991/04.1991.03Cerling.pdf

also
The only thing that is political in this movement is that studied observation MAY lead the way to better governance
The word is MAY , as in might , or possibly .

Have you ever heard the ultimate conspiracy theory?
It goes like this .
I don't believe in any conspiracies , because if i believed in a conspiracy , it would mean i knew something about said conspiracy , and therefore would be a danger to it , and therefore it would be a danger to me , therefore i don't believe in any conspiracies .
Circular logic is what it's called .
So what your saying is ALL the governments in the whole world except the U.S. , as they did not sign the Kyoto Accord , are working together to rip you off .
Paranoia is the easiest form of narcissism.

So lets say they win , and it's false, what do they do with all the tax money ?
How do they keep from getting whacked by a disgruntled polity?

Ok lets say they lose , and it's real .
We lose 1/3 of the worlds population , weighted more heavily among the poor , and populations near any coastline . Wasn't it well over 50% of the world population that lives within 50 miles of the coast ? We gain 40 feet , 12.19 meters , of sea level . Hence the title of this video .

Option 3 is obviously , They win and it's real .
Well they may be able to slow it down before it goes into a self-sustaining loop .
All that methane hydrate stored at the bottom of glaciers doesn't come bubbling lose . All that carbon sequestered in the permafrost stays put. Which it isn't .
http://www.321energy.com/editorials/lamontagne/lamontagne080109.html
Maybe governments have a few extra resources to deal with all the problems that will be caused by it . They still wont have enough because even their reports have been watered down .

Option 4 , They lose , and it's false .
I have a hard time addressing this one , as the odds of the latter are so low, though the odds of the former are well , a real possibility .