Anti Chinese media propaganda

[richardw]

Back in 2012 i was invited out for a meal by a business partner who at the time was a professor at Lincoln University, at the table were five other professors from the Beijing University. One of the professors was head of population control in China, he spoke of the how they were planing to relax the one child policy in 2016 as that would be the year that there would be a need to allow enough young people to sustain a population balance. Early this year there were media reports that the Chinese had relaxed there one child policy because they had to admit that there policy was a failure. This was not true at all as the Chinese had planed well before 2012 that 2016 to be the year. We are feed so much propaganda by western media which is designed to maintain tense international relations thus supporting the military hardware industry of which the bankers make so much money from.

[copse]

Aug 9, 2016 16:03:03 GMT -5 richardw said:

Back in 2012 i was invited out for a meal by a business partner who at the time was a professor at Lincoln University, at the table were five other professors from the Beijing University. One of the professors was head of population control in China, he spoke of the how they were planing to relax the one child policy in 2016 as that would be the year that there would be a need to allow enough young people to sustain a population balance. Early this year there were media reports that the Chinese had relaxed there one child policy because they had to admit that there policy was a failure. This was not true at all as the Chinese had planed well before 2012 that 2016 to be the year. We are feed so much propaganda by western media which is designed to maintain tense international relations thus supporting the military hardware industry of which the bankers make so much money from.

Anti-Chinese? Or low quality journalism leaning towards sensationalism due to inability to make money, and pay decent journalists, in the internet age?  If we find the local journalists in the national newspapers here are often not fact-checking or filtering unsubstantiated claims (as I seem to see every other week), then how can we expect them to fact-check international stories/claims?  Our second-runner political party for instance pushing a story to journalists (with some initial success) about Chinese sounding names and house buying, is a poorly selected but applicable example of this.

[MikeH]

Or it may just be the subject. Even Bill Mollison's third permaculture ethic (Permaculture One, 1978) has been abandoned. "Setting limits to population and consumption" was altered by David Holmgren in 2002 (Permaculture: Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability) to read "Fair Share: Set Limits and Redistribute Surplus" which has since become Fair Share or Return of Surplus. The changes are vague and have been adopted to fit agendas.

It seems to me that Mollison nailed it in 1978. The second of the two is not all that difficult to come to grips with but the first is truly a hard nut to crack. Even starting the conversation is a non-starter. At best, we talk about declining birth rates and a peak population (what number would you like?).  There is a saying that a tree cannot grow to the sky.  Even with the wonders of technology, you cannot have infinite growth based on finite resources unless you see a matrix-type world where "consciousness" exists on microchips (and there are probably limits there as well). In Nature (and we are part of Nature), there is a pattern: when the wild herd gets too big for its grazing area, disease or starvation reduces the size of the herd to a size below or equal what its grazing area can support: Nature self-regulates.  Since we never do anything before we have to and generally muddle our way through, I'd put my money on Nature taking care of things.  

World GDP has grown for 54 out of the past 55 years to 2015 averaging 3.8%, and 2.2% in per capita terms. To put that growth rate into perspective, you need a really big calculator. Plug in 2^50 and then plug in 3^50, then plug in 4^50 to see the impact of growth building upon growth, ie, compound growth.

There is a mental math calculator called the Rule of 72. China's GDP growth rate averaged 9.82 percent from 1989 until 2016. That means that China's economy doubled every 7-8 years for 27 years. Plugging 9^27 into the big number calculator.  Thanks to the 2008 financial mess trillion entered the global lexicon but this number is more than a septillion.  If China becomes a consumer society along Western consumer lines, ....................!

OK, take the soapbox away, please.

[steev]

I suppose I'm known for railing against over-population. I remember us driving past cardboard camps near the highway or railways and also seeing people living in dirt-floored converted chicken shacks; that was when I was less than ten. These days we have plastic-tarp camps; it really IS a brave new world!

When the domesticated herd gets too big for the feed-lot, it's off to the abbatoir.

[MikeH]

Having painted a might-as-well-end-it-now picture, I should balance things a bit by point out that I think that there is hope. The slow growth to no growth that we've seen since 2008 is now being posited as the new normal since the growth model seems to be busted and no one knows why and no one knows how to fix it. Aside from the fact that we need growth today to pay for yesterday's borrowing, a scenario of no growth aka zero growth aka steady state might not be such a bad thing. We will need new measures of economic health. Bhutan's Gross National Happiness Index might not be a bad place to start.  Transition could be bumpy but the outcome of living within our means seems at attractive one.

[blueadzuki]

Aug 10, 2016 5:54:22 GMT -5 MikeH said:

It seems to me that Mollison nailed it in 1978. The second of the two is not all that difficult to come to grips with but the first is truly a hard nut to crack. Even starting the conversation is a non-starter. At best, we talk about declining birth rates and a peak population (what number would you like?).  There is a saying that a tree cannot grow to the sky.  Even with the wonders of technology, you cannot have infinite growth based on finite resources unless you see a matrix-type world where "consciousness" exists on microchips (and there are probably limits there as well). In Nature (and we are part of Nature), there is a pattern: when the wild herd gets too big for its grazing area, disease or starvation reduces the size of the herd to a size below or equal what its grazing area can support: Nature self-regulates.  Since we never do anything before we have to and generally muddle our way through, I'd put my money on Nature taking care of things.  

Well, it's always going to to be a thorny subject, and the worse the problem gets, the thornier it gets. As I have said before, at some point the problem gets so bad that the cost of correcting it goes from sacrificing a few thing to sacrificing EVERYTHING, up to and including our innate right to try and survive. Given how much people kick and fume when the idea of everyone having no more than two children and even more if you suggest only one, imagine what happens when someone finally comes out and says that the world population needs to shrink so dramatically fast (a lot of people think that even halving the population each generation will still result in the earth running out of resources before we reach ecological stability) that most people should have NO children, and working out who does get the chance (some sort of lottery system might be suggested at first, but it would probably not be too longer before eugenics reared its head and we go right back to liebensborn.

[steev]

Thorns, shmorns; I'll jump into that brier-patch.

It is well-documented that the better-educated tend to want/have fewer children; this may be because they are better-off financially and so need fewer children as old-age insurance; they may get more satisfaction in their work or have greater leisure options, and thus feel freer to limit their parental role to fewer numbers; they may have gained a broader world-view; this correlation of education and fewer children is especially striking among women, who, through education, gain value beyond breeding and domestic labor.

It is also well-documented that larger broods are most common among the poorest and/or most religiously fundamentalist groups (nationalist, racial, and ethnic matters are often couched in quasi-religious terms).

It is often charged that uneducated immigrants breed like flies, but in my experience, it doesn't take long, once they discover that birth control is readily available and not rigidly disapproved, that they decide they'd rather not have as large a family as that from which they may have come, the better to provide for themselves and their child(ren).

As to the issue of eugenics: it tending to appear in the interests of the "ruling"/1% class to keep the "loser"/99% class ignorant, impoverished, and impressionable, I'm sure they are filling a lot of adult diapers over the threat of free access to information on the internet; they haven't come to grips with the fact that it's not the stupid and ignorant they must fear, but those smart enough to know how badly they're being screwed by their "rulers" and ruthless enough to use the malleable as weapons, just as the "rulers" have always done, but less formally and openly (no uniforms and marching regiments). One wonders whether global financial/corporate/military control can be instituted faster than the 99% can say "HELL, NO!" and make it stick. I could be wrong, (I often am, though never [well, rarely] in doubt) but I just don't think that old "those people don't deserve to breed/live because they are: stupid; the wrong color; the wrong religion; the wrong sexual orientation; the wrong nationality; or of the wrong economic philosophy", is going to hold water much longer than a bargain-brand adult diaper.

Words to live by: It's better to be pissed off, than to be pissed on!

Um, some may disagree with that, due to personal preference, not that there's anything wrong with that.

[MikeH]

Aug 10, 2016 15:39:11 GMT -5 blueadzuki said:

Well, it's always going to to be a thorny subject, and the worse the problem gets, the thornier it gets. As I have said before, at some point the problem gets so bad that the cost of correcting it goes from sacrificing a few thing to sacrificing EVERYTHING, up to and including our innate right to try and survive. Given how much people kick and fume when the idea of everyone having no more than two children and even more if you suggest only one, imagine what happens when someone finally comes out and says that the world population needs to shrink so dramatically fast (a lot of people think that even halving the population each generation will still result in the earth running out of resources before we reach ecological stability) that most people should have NO children, and working out who does get the chance (some sort of lottery system might be suggested at first, but it would probably not be too longer before eugenics reared its head and we go right back to liebensborn.

Yep, not an easy task.  After WWII, there was a baby bonus in Canada where you got money from the government based on the number of children you had.  I don't know if it actually made a difference but I suppose it might have at some point if the money was significant enough.  Maybe we incent not to have babies.  At some level of wealth, the incentives have no meaning so some kind of a sliding scale would be needed.  And for those who can't/won't eat the carrot, a stick.  Or perhaps, a Utopian solution.

Nahhh.  We'll muddle and Nature will unfold naturally.

[blueadzuki]

(responding to Steev)


And I don't think it will, at least with those criterion. The way I think it might be would be along the lines of this "Okay, we have decided that for the sake of population control, only 10% of the couples out there should have a child in their lifetimes. Those children need to be the best of our race they can be. We can do our best with their raising (the fewer children the more resources they are to use on each one, up to a point) but that's not going to help much if they come into this world with a genetic problem that compromises their development.

I don't think the rejection criteria are going to be being things like Jewish or gay (in fact under that kind of situation, having more homosexual people is actually and advantage, they can provide homes just as loving to children as a hetero one, and are not a worry with regards to "accidental" births). I think it will be things like having the gene for Tay-Sachs, or Sickle Cell Anemia, or a predisposition to a cancer, or things like that. And as the pool gets smaller the criteria will probably get more stringent (like say, limiting breeders to those who have a natural tendency towards muscular growth and an efficient metabolism, or (the only one on your list I think might come into play) a genius level IQ.) At a real extreme level, I wonder if someone would go polling around for those people who through genetic quirks have something that IS sort of like superpowers (like Winn Hoff and his Iceman abilities, The woman in Britan who has an extra kind of receptor in her eyes that lets her see several thousand extra colors, or that family that has a bone density like concrete) and try to combine their various talents in an attempt to try and make and actual Homo Superior

[steev]

The trouble with selecting people with genius IQ for parenthood is that those on the upper end of the bell-curve tend to whelp back toward the middle.

[prairiegarden]

www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth?language=en I don't know if it links directly to the talk or a page with a bunch of them, if the latter,  it's the Global Population Growth Box by Box talk. He's an interesting guy who's done a number of TED talks.

Since a number of countries now have NEGATIVE birth rates it seems as though he's got it right. If so, anyone who worries about immigrants has best think again. Who is going to pay politician's obscenely inflated pensions when the workforce shrinks, especially considering that the next generations are not predicted to live as long as their parents? And who is going to fix their plumbing and their leaky roof and produce their GMO strawberries and growth hormone laced cream?

Something that nobody is considering is the chance that one or more of the kids growing up in the refugee camps - some of them third generation now - with no present and no foreseeable future worth living may get hold of some biological or atomic weapon. Or figure out how to take down a few crucial satellites. There are obviously a number of them who have learned to place no value on their own life beyond how many people they take with them when they die. If that happens then birth control would likely be even more of a non starter in a conversation than it is now.

[prairiegarden]

As far as China is concerned, there is a group presently touring Canada to promote awareness of how prisoners are treated in China. Including involuntary donation of organs. This is not new news, it's been known for at least 10 years, but apparently it's a well entrenched practice now. After all the prisoners owe a debt to society and organs are worth big bucks... So maybe they can afford to let go of the limit on kids, after all it's a potential source of income to have people they can harvest from.

[steev]

Many people wrongly think themselves threatened by the stupid and uneducated; it's the intelligent and educated who are capable of seeing how badly they're being treated that are the real threat; these are the people capable of using the stupid and ignorant for their ends (forty years of living in Oakland has certainly made that clear to me), capable of planning low-tech attacks and convincing others to commit them, capable of going on-line and learning how grossly unfair the world is to them for no better reason than power and profit; there are parents teaching their children that the greatest they can aspire to is to kill others in an act of suicide; note that the parents don't do it.

As for forced organ donation: longer than this has been news was that China's government would bill the family of an executed criminal for the cost of the bullet; is that true? I don't know. I know that my supervisor, years ago, was a John Bircher who got very worked up about a photo published in his copy of "Tocsin" that showed a factory owner seized and skinned alive by a Communist mob; when I showed him proof that it was a still from the movie "The Sand Pebbles", his response was "Well, these things DO happen". Note that he was not offended at having been presented past fiction as current fact. Perhaps his mindset was not influenced by his being a German immigrant who had spent some impressionable time in the "Hitler Youth".

I think China is fascinating, partly why I took a year of Mandarin; while I'm sure some think I air too many of my opinions in this forum, I assure you that I have far more opinions that I've kept to myself, those critical of China being well-represented, though less so than my opinions of the USA and some of its "Allies".

[MikeH]

Aug 22, 2016 22:23:45 GMT -5 prairiegarden said:

www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth?language=en I don't know if it links directly to the talk or a page with a bunch of them, if the latter,  it's the Global Population Growth Box by Box talk. He's an interesting guy who's done a number of TED talks.

Since a number of countries now have NEGATIVE birth rates it seems as though he's got it right.

I parsed the transcript and not once does he use the word consume or any form of it. Population and consumption are related problems. You cannot talk about only one. In his world, raising the standard of living will end population growth. But what will it do to consumption? It's not enough to have negative birth rates without zero if not negative consumption. How do species populations recover if we don't stop consuming? Granted, a low enough population will take the pressure off. But it will do nothing for finite resources. The wild salmon may recover but not rare elements. Once gone, the technology that depends on them will have to change or it too will be gone.  A smaller population will take the pressure off the availability of these rare elements but only reduced consumption will have a significant impact.  Recycling Apple iPhones and iPods will have a positive impact but not if the total number continues to go up.  

[MikeH]

Aug 23, 2016 2:48:15 GMT -5 steev said:

Many people wrongly think themselves threatened by the stupid and uneducated; it's the intelligent and educated who are capable of seeing how badly they're being treated that are the real threat;

Well of course, they're the threat. Carlin nailed the education threat.