dk

Forgive my two cent here...
Originally posted by long winded fool: Contraception and foreign aid only temporarily lessen the damage of the behavior. (And as such is, of course, as valuable a thing as aspirin is for the cancer patient.) The goal ought to be to someday no longer need the aspirin/contraception/foreign aid. We wouldn't need a padded cell if we'd just stop banging our head against the wall.
posted by VivaHedone:
Again...
What do you base this on?
dk: From 1950 modern liberalism broadly underwrote illiteracy, poverty, racism, crime, divorce, famine, pestilence, war and human deprivation to “overpopulation”. From Margaret Sanger’ (Planned Parenthood), to Paul Ehrlich’s (Population Bomb) and Margaret Mead(anthropological and child development musings), the overpopulation myth became a defacto tautology used to rationalize social deviance in normative terms (under the circumstances). This has nothing to do with science, but folk science popularized and socialized under the edicts of the Great Society by a democratized academic consensus, that in fact is/was nonsense. .The Great Society in fact didn’t turn out so great. On the record Bill Clinton was more conservative than Richard Nixon, so the pendulum swings ahead of the conventional wisdom. Yet we are still persuaded by such popular ad hum intellectual arguments as
It’s time we question the defacto standard. Sanger promised “Every child a wanted child”, but Sanger’s vision turns out to be tragically flawed given the number of children the government guards from their parents. Ehrlich wrote off India, China and Indonesia off as a lost cause, doomed by the population bomb. Mead’s body of work has been so thoroughly discredited her academic credentials have been virtually revoked, yet the constructs she formulated have somehow become the basis of mainstream psychology, social studies and sociology.

posted by VivaHedone:
In countries where education and contraception are freely available, population is stable. In countries where education and contraception are not available, population is increasing. Therefore your cherished 'reason' would suggest that the solution is to make education and contraception freely available in all countries. If you educate people about the negative consequences of sex, and give them means to avoid these negative consequences, they will use them - why wouldn't they? This stands a far greater chance of success than atempting to teach universal abstinence.
dk: The birth control pill has left Europe so anemic it can’t raise enough babies to keep its infrastructure repaired or run its industrial complex, much less field an army to protect its borders. Old Europe, except Britain, virtually lays prostrate before the United States crowned the Super Power Protector. Even worse, birth control has destroyed the democraphic balance, to squeeze the middle class out, like tube of tooth paste. This ominously presents even the mighty USA with an unsustainable demographic certainty, by 2030 50% of the population(the young) will work to support the other 50% in retirement. What has been mistaken for a solution to overpopulation has become a prescription for economic, social and national catastrophe. I don’t criticize the birth control for its unacceptable failure rate, plethora of side affects, impact upon child development, and the pandemic of STDs & MDR microbes. I criticize the birth control pill because its success has seeded the future with doom and gloom where innocent children once played with hope, .