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Australia's population to hit twenty-five million, newest resident likely to be young, female, and Chinese
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- Title
- Australia's population hit 25 million. Who was likely to be the newest resident?
- Published
- Aug 6 2018
- Word count
- 1026 words
You want to fix overpopulation? Educate women. Women with the knowledge, money, and power to have lives of their own -- independent of men -- are women who don't have 3 or more children.
I think the focus on women here is rather unnecessary and limited. We are two sides of the same coin after all, if you focus only on women you're leaving out 50% (likely slightly higher than 50, even) of the population. It takes a man and a woman to have a chid.
Why educate only one?
Plus, the cynic in me can't stop but think of all the women that don't really want to have kids so young but are completely helpless against their rape by men and following shaming of society into marrying and having the kid.
So, please, let's educate both men and women, for we live in this world together and are one and the same. (species, I mean)
I'm all for teaching men to not rape, and that they should fuck their fists (or each other) if they don't have a willing female partner and access to fertility control, but the page I linked suggests that the biggest gains in terms of population control and poverty reduction in the developing world come from helping girls.
If you don't like it, take it up with UNESCO.
No, it's not. There is a direct and strong correlation between educating women and a lower birth-rate. Many studies have demonstrated this link. There is also a direct and strong correlation between reducing poverty and a lower birth-rate, and this reduction in poverty can also be achieved by educating women.
An educated woman is empowered to make choices that an uneducated woman is not. She knows about birth control, and how to use it. She can follow a career and decide not to be a baby-factory.
You're right that, in a perfect world, we should educate both men and women. However, in this world (and it is the whole world we're talking about, not just one particular country or one particular culture), women are much more likely to be uneducated and unempowered than men, and therefore more likely to not have control over their own fertility. Educating women provides a more noticeable change in birth-rates than educating men because, generally speaking, more men are educated in this world than women. Focussing on women's education in the here and now is merely reducing this imbalance and moving towards parity.
Actually reminds me of this YouTube documentary about bride kidnapping in Kazakhstan, where this smart young woman was studying and doing well at school, with plans for going to university and getting a degree (in economics, I think); but then her boyfriend decided to kidnap her and have a flash wedding; after which she'd go on to have kids and because the lady of the house and having to abandon her studies.
I mean, this girl didn't need education. The guy did.
What the guy needed was his father to hold him down while his mother put her boot up his ass. But education might have made that unnecessary.
You replied to my post instead of @lukeify's comment.
Oh, sodomy. I keep doing that. Sorry.
You say that like it's a bad thing! ;)
It is if you do it wrong.
Through the magical power of username mentions, I did end up getting notified by this thanks to @Algernon_Asimov above, so yay.
And yes, very much agreed. The number one solution I can think of to tackle overpopulation is to completely spam education and contraception to as many places as possible, and it might not hurt to remove tax breaks for parents either.
Might as well remove tax breaks for religious orgs, too. The church has a few centuries of rendering unto Caesar to catch up on.
This isn't as much a comment on immigration (what this article is tagged against), but I really wish there was greater understanding of just how insanely overpopulated we are as a species. Yes, Australia has one of the lowest densities of habitation in the western world—owing to its vast deserts and uninhabitable land—but when you consider there's 7600 million of us (for a sense of scale, if you enumerated over 1 million humans, once per second, you'd be done in 11 days, if you enumerated over a billion at the same rate, it'd take you 31 years), and a large fraction of us either have, or will have, huge carbon footprints, then something is clearly wrong.
Overpopulation in my mind isn't a future issue, it's an issue we were suffering from half a century ago. We're already well past the point of sustainability, and we're already impacting Earth's climate in untold ways; and then you have people like Kurzgesagt issuing incredibly damaging videos stating it's not an issue at all. Why do we need to have 7 billion people? Isn't one billion enough? Is the desire for growth intrinsic in the human psyche?
So yes, you can say that western nations are topping out as birth rates fall, and eastern nations will drastically reduce their birth rates as they become more highly educated; but in my view that's also like saying "it's okay! We're slowing down!" as we continue to roll towards the cliff.
I don't think we can be a sustainable human species through the use of technology, genetic engineering, crop modification, and carbon emissions reduction alone. Technology doesn't stop humans being assholes, it doesn't stop us littering, it doesn't stop us lighting forest fires, or owning dogs and cats which kill endemic fauna. My genuine belief is the best thing we can do as a species is significantly drop how many of us exist, in a pacifist, non-genocidal manner.
If I was feeling cheeky, I could point out that, from a utilitarian point of view, 7 billion happy people is quantifiably more human happiness than 1 billion happy people. Therefore, making more happy people is a moral good. Of course, the reality is that not all those 7 billion people are happy all the time. But, even if they're only happy half the time, that's still more human happiness than 1 billion people who are happy half the time. :P
Then there's the idea that the next baby might be a genius who invents a cure for cancer, or discovers how to make cold fusion work, or produces the next artistic masterpiece, or works out the elusive Theory of Everything.
No, it's biological. We come from a very long line of organisms that succeeded by breeding more offspring than nature was able to kill off. Breeding is a very deeply ingrained biological imperative for just about all living things on this planet.
Don't get me wrong - I totally agree with you that we need fewer humans on the planet. I'm just pointing out that it's not quite as simple as saying "we need fewer humans on the planet".
I'd probably say that if we could spawn another 93 billion people onto this planet right now, no one would be very happy whatsoever :)
This is kind of my, worldview, I guess, but I don't believe that we should introduce more humans simply because we want to bring more joy to the planet, as a vacuum. It has to be weighed, strongly, against our destructive actions as a species too. And if you look at the sum of humanity on this planet right now, there's a lot of deeply unhappy people—whether that's because they're limited by their countries' upward mobility, because there's a housing shortage, or more fundamental ones like not having access to clean water and a steady supply of food.
I think a fewer number of more enriched, fulfilled people is a fundamentally better thing than a larger number of people who may not share all those luxuries.
And right now, the planet is very very sad. 🌎
I think it's fair to say that for many people, if not most of them, procreation is the last thing on their minds when they're fucking. We don't have an urge to breed. We have an urge to fuck. Most of us are more-or-less content with ISO standard penis-in-vagina action -- if only because we never learned about any other way to get it on -- but let's face it: that usually isn't the most pleasurable way to fuck, especially for women.
The challenge, therefore, isn't to overcome the urge to breed, but to decouple fucking from breeding so that fucking need never result in pregnancy. Giving all women free IUDs unless they've signed and some kind of official document waiving fertility control because they want to have children in the near future might do the job -- but good luck overcoming religious objections.
Given that, in the wild, fucking leads quite often to breeding, this is simply biology's way of encouraging us to breed. Organisms which enjoy fucking are more likely to breed, so the gene(s) for making fucking enjoyable became widespread.
I don't disagree.
I think you're only seeing one small part of the issue. Lots of people want to have kids and a family. Sure, they're not thinking about it most of the time they have sex, because out of all the times they do, they'll only be doing it to have kids a small percentage of those times. But, outside of sex itself, wanting to procreate is very much present and common.
Our perception on the amount of people that do not want kids is probably skewed by Reddit's (and social media in general –Facebook being the exception–) vocality regarding a childfree life. But plenty of people do want kids and a family even if they're not thinking about it most of the time they have sex.
PS. I don't see what your point is by using (unnecessarily) vulgar slang so repeatedly and in italics.
People fuck. It's how we make more people.
It's not like demifiend was insulting or attacking anyone. He wasn't being vulgar or using slang. He was describing a very natural and common activity using a long-standing English word with a simple and clear meaning.
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/fuck
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/fuck
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/fuck
It is vulgar slang. Unless you don't agree with most dictionaries.
Technically, yes. But it is the same as having sex, copulating, making love, screwing, banging... etc.
We can talk about the same phenomenon using many different words. And these different words each add some slight connotation. Specifically using the most vulgar of them, repeatedly and in italics seems too deliberated to lack a certain implication (which implication? I don't know).
It's not, really. It's a very versatile word used in many different contexts. So, if we're having a serious discussion, it looks very out of context. You wouldn't include that in a scientific paper.
Actually, one can have sex without indulging in vaginal or anal intercourse. Just sayin'. And, just like you think "fuck" is too informal for this discussion, I think "copulate" is too formal; it looks very out of context. "Making love" is wrong because not all sex involves love. "Screwing" and "banging" aren't really much better than "fucking".
You're right that I wouldn't use it in a scientific paper but, last time I checked, this wasn't a scientific journal.
Well, I wasn't suggesting replacing the original word with these. I was just listing different ways of referring to the same act to show that each different way of calling it adds a different nuance to it. And the nuance that “fuck” adds isn't quite the most appropriate for this occasion, in my opinion.
That's all true, but if the statistics are showing us anything, it's that once educated about contraception, most people who want kids only want one or two, which from the perspective of someone wanting to shrink our population, is perfectly fine.
We are animals, and animals do not "have sex" unless you can get them to do it in a laboratory. "Having sex" is too dry and clinical for my liking, so I use my preferred vernacular. I'd apologize for offending your sensibilities, but I only lie to my enemies.
Moreover, I don't see what you hope to accomplish by displaying your class bias and inveighing against my usage of an old Anglo-Saxon word that was perfectly respectable until William the Bastard and his cronies invaded Britain in 1066.
They do, though. You might choose to express it in a different way. But they do have sex.
I did no such thing. I just found your specific use of that word in italics very out of context and unnecessary. So I made a remark about it.
Overpopulation is an issue that we suffer from today, and I do think we should ultimately limit Earth's population once we have alternative homes, but even if we committed to reducing our numbers tomorrow it wouldn't solve anything. Even if we stopped growing our population today, climate change is already in full swing, and unless we started killing a lot of people, we'd still have to find a way to sustainably support seven billion humans for at least 60 or 70 more years, which ultimately isn't going to be that much harder technologically than supporting the nine or ten billion humans we'll end up with otherwise.