CaptainPanic

I think up until the toast, the post was on topic and mostly factual. Ophiolite starts with a historical precedent to base his opinion on. And although it might be confronting, it's all true. The English did not treat the Irish as equals in those days (although I have no idea who is this "Dekan"). The peoples in the Horn of Africa are indeed often uneducated, poverty stricken, debt ridden, resource deprived. And this thread definitely asked where we should put the responsibility (the "blame", if you want) for their situation. The toast at the end might be tasteless... but the post definitely contains merit for this thread.

Yeah, Guantanamo Bay would probably have to close. But from a practical point of view, that's hardly a problem. It's only a problem from a US-political point of view. And if the USA would join the EU, politics would most certainly have to change anyway.

That's something I wonder about... There are many posts that suggest that the actions of these African people are rather instinctive, and that reasoning is not something that they are capable of (or at least, they do not do it). And I don't believe that. Does the average African in that region not plan their families? I bet they get married first, and only then make a family. Shows it's definitely planned. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a form of pressure from the community to get more kids, which would suggest it's deliberate. And I really wonder if they are not aware that they live in a conflict area? Maybe all the people walking around with AK47's does give a hint? Many Africans have mobile phones now (albeit often only one per village). They do have contact outside their local area. I think that they know damn well that the situation is not ideal for a family. I think that despite all that, they still make a family. p.s. You should realize that those documentaries that you see on TV about the tribes in Africa who don't know what white people look like and who have never seen any plastic object are always about the most remote tribes. From an anthropoligical point of view, that's just the most interesting. But that's not the average African anymore.

I think that the guys in the paint shop will understand if you ask for glossy, especially if they give the consumer a choice. Anyway, the paint you should use also depends on the surface you put it on. So, a very glossy paint like car paint might not be suitable for you. Btw, cars are also painted at least twice: once for color, once for a shiny finish. And often they get a base color first. I think that the glossiness (is that a word?) comes from the surface. If the surface is (on a small scale, but not molecular) very smooth, the light reflects like in a mirror. If the surface is more rough, the reflection is diffuse. The mirror-like reflection is glossy.

Yes, there are (click for summary of EU law). And yes, Brussels demands that the individual member states change their own laws to comply with the EU law.

I agree with the description of the problem... I am not sure I agree with where you place the responsibility. And I do not yet see a workable solution. So, let's follow the reasoning some more. Let's then assume that we (western countries) are responsible for the population growth of the entire planet, because we control the global economy... What then gives us the right to control the population of developing countries? We are responsible for their problem. We cannot let them suffer because we failed, can we? And yes, I really think that any " fertility or population reduction" will result in some form of unhappiness. People have a natural desire to have kids. Personally, I believe that all humans are equal. And that means they also carry equal responsibilities. I do not see developing countries as places where we (western countries) can impose our will. We can only ask them to take responsibility for their own problems. And we can offer (not force) aid.

Maybe it should be moved to ethics or politics? The OP already suggests that (I quote) "climate change is just one of the many symptoms of human over population". The OP started a political discussion - especially the final question in the OP is of a political nature. The thread aims to find solutions, which is subjective. (Sorry to respond to a mod note.) Let's go with your reasoning for a moment (although I might exaggerate it for the sake of the discussion): If we take for a fact that: (1) without education people cannot reproduce sustainably and responsibly (2) western countries are responsible for giving the developing world the means to reproduce at a very high rate (medicine and food), (3) western countries did not give the developing countries birth control So, the western world logically is the only responsible actor in this problem. If I'm allowed to exaggerate, you say that poor uneducated people are as responsible for their own reproduction and well-being as cattle on a farm. The next question is: does it make the western world also fully responsible for all problems in the developing world, or are there parts of the problem where there is no responsible at all? If we are the responsible, we must solve our problem. But currently the western world only takes some actions, and seems to suggest a responsibility, but effectively does nothing to solve the problems. We make some donations out of empathy (or guilt?), and that's it. There is a set of problems in the world for which nobody takes responsibility - and logically they are not solved. This is not an impasse where no agreement is reached (like other climate change problems). Instead, this problem is just mostly ignored. Or, perhaps it's more accurate to say that we knowingly turn a blind eye to it. The best solution would be to properly help those people. The next best would be to do nothing at all... and the worst (I think) is to carry on the way we do now.

In this thread on the ethics subforum, we're trying to discuss the population growth from a perspective of the current (or near-future) famine in the Horn of Africa. It seems this discussion is held in 2 threads at the same time. In the last post I wrote in that thread (#4), I suggested that we (=western countries) are resonsible for the population growth because we gave them (=developing countries) medicines and other means to keep their children alive. I wrote that as a question in that post, because I am not sure we actually are responsible. If they were rabbits, which breed out of instinct, and we gave them the means to multiply, then it would be our responsibility. If our actions lead to problems for the rabbits, that's our responsibility. But they are people, and they can think for themselves. They live in independent countries (which admittedly are economically still dependent on the western economies)... but I cannot see how we can take responsibility for their population growth without treating them as inferior humans. If they are to be treated as equals - and all human rights suggest they should - then they must take their own responsibility for population control. It's none of our (=western countries) business.

You are right, but those were problems of the past. In the here and now, we have a famine on our hands. Emergency aid is the only thing that will keep these people alive. Question is: should we give it? (If I ask it like this, it's even more harsh than in my previous post - I dislike myself when talking about this). I hope I don't put words into your mouth, but I read that we (the countries that provide aid) are responsible to keeping the children alive, because we provide medicine and aid, so we are responsible for the population growth? Maybe there should be a box of condoms and some birth control pills with every bag of grain/corn or with every box of medicines that is shipped to those countries? At least the birth control measures might cancel out the population growth that we cause.

Those two countries also happen to be democracies... Even though the Iranian one doesn't seem to get along very well with most other democracies in the world.

I'd like to see Obama explain to the American public that taxes have to go up a bit because they have to fund subsidies for French farmers and new infrastructure in Eastern Europe. I'd also love to see Obama explain that they should open up the borders to all Europeans, who then can suddenly stay and work in the US for 3 months without any permits (or, have a 100% guarantee to get a work permit). I'd enjoy very much to see the US join our 20-20-20 agreements. How would the US public react to the EU elections, where they would have the chance to vote for the succeeders of actual communists?

If you are able to define "we" in your post, we might have taken the first step towards a solution. Btw, here's a picture that shows where the population is growing fastest.

I never said or even suggested we should condone (accept and allow) terrorism. Instead, I say is that there are also other problems in this world which deserve attention. Some people act like terrorism is by far the most important problem in the world. That does not make any sense, as I showed with some numbers in my previous post. The result of everyone over-prioritizing terrorism is that the costs of the war on terror to the US is about to surpass the US budget of WWII (compensated into today's prices)... And I think that's just not worth the money. Sure, we must fight terrorism... but by giving these terrorists so much attention, and by dedicating an astronomical amount of money to fighting them instead of some other problems, you allow them to win. That's just below the belt, and it does not help you to make a point. You cannot back up that argument by any other point other than that we disagree on something. If you consider "uncivilized behavior" the same as "disagreeing with you", then you should not be in the politics forum. From the victim's point of view, I don't see the difference between getting blown up by some crazy terrorist who has a messed up world view, and getting hit by a truck with a driver who did not get enough sleep, or in fact any other accident. Terrorism is so easy that it cannot be 100% prevented. So, the real question is just how much we should dedicate to fighting terrorism, and how much we dedicate to other problems. I seem to disagree with you that we crossed the line a long time ago. When you knowingly ignore massive problems in this world, and make fighting terrorism your primary priority (as the US federal budget spending suggests), you have got your priorities wrong.

Thanks that you added it. This entire thread is a very selective presentation of facts, so I am not surprised that this has been ignored so far... Why use facts when you have already made up your mind that Islam is a bad religion? Facts can only undermine this bias. Something else which was ignored so far is that many Islamic states were colonized by Western powers at some point, and many only became politcally independent after WWII - and many countries are economically still dependent on the more powerful economies. The main purpose of colonization was to increase wealth of the Western countries (it was not philantropy), so goods and resources were shipped back to the colonizers. This, obviously, was not very helpful for the local economies. None of that has anything to do with Islam. The Western countries did not selectively pick out Islamic countries to colonize.

In India, out of every 1000 babies born, 65 die before the age of 5. UNICEF says that 2.1 million children die every year, because of diseases and malnutrition. Why do you care about 17 dead people from terrorism in India, when many many many many more innocent children die from a lack of food and diseases? Get your priorities straight, man.

I think it's the first. Cats also like to extend and retract their claws when they're comfortable ( , it seems to be called in English). That's definitely a 'throwback' to the time when they were kittens. Well, we have lots of automatic behavior... both quite simple automated responses (hit your knee on the right place when you sit, and your foot comes up) and more complicated physical responses to emotions (crying as a result of sadness or fear). And one of the most calming positions to be in, is to lie your head against the chest of someone else you're comfortable with (preferably your partner or perhaps family member). Pretty 'infantile' if you want. Mothers hold their babies pretty much the same way. And the heartbeat of someone else is also calming, because you already listened to that for 9 months in your mom's belly. And when someone grabs you in the neck, you will probably automatically move your head back and lift your shoulders, and possibly you might even bend your knees a little. Seems insignificant compared to an almost paralysed cat, but then we aren't carried around by our necks when we're babies.

Yes, some money is 'given' to China, but as timo points out it's perhaps 3-4 billion per year in total. And for that money, those other countries 'buy' influence or at least a good relation with the Chinese. And the OP makes it sound like the Chinese are a form of competition which we should hold back. In order to win a race, you can either slow down your opponents, or make sure you're the fastest yourself.

Within an ordinary gust of wind there can can be a certain wind speed. But the gust of wind itself (as a whole) moves forward at much lower speeds. How does that work? What puzzles me the most is that you have fast moving wind that moves into slower moving air in front of it. Where does it go? The air pressure isn't so different inside a wind gust that you can explain this by compression phenomena (I guess?). The only thing I can come up with is that it works like a traffic jam ( to illustrate)? But in that video, you can see a compression, which we don't observe in a wind gust (or do we?)? My back-of-the-envelope calculations (mass balances) seem to fail. Any thoughts?

Ok, I found the one graph that I think is the answer, namely this one: The white circles are the current GDP per capita in 2010, averaged for entire regions of this earth. Note that MENA (click for wikipedia picture) is "Middle East and Northern Africa"... It excludes the extremely poor Afghanistan, but also the relatively wealthy Turkey. I hope that we can agree that it's still a reasonable representation of the "Muslim countries"? Then please note that the white circle representing the current GDP per capita is larger for the MENA than for the following regions: - Sub-Saharan Africa - 800 million people - China - 1.3 billion people - India - 1.2 billion people - CIS (Russia and other former Soviet republics) - 300 million people - Asia excluding China/India/Japan - (couldn't find how many people) ----------------------------------------- + - A total of 3.6 billion people So, MENA has a higher GDP per capita than more than half of the world's population. And I therefore conclude that we cannot make a point that links Islam to poverty... because the region is not poor. We (I guess most people on this forum) just belong to the top 10%, and we are just incredibly rich.

I am ashamed to say that I think our politics forum reflect the real politics pretty well. Real politics has also gone to hell... and the political news is in general a waste of bandwidth. I will illustrate this by real examples from Dutch politics. Women's rights? We still have a political party, the SGP, (with seats in parliament) that "opposes feminism, and concludes, on Biblical grounds, that men and women are of equal value (gelijkwaardig) but not equal (gelijk). Men and women, so the party claims, have different places in society". Whether they link women's rights to the commies, I don't know. We do have a right wing (I would say 'racist') politician who would no-doubt jump the opportunity to link poverty to Islam directly. He is famous for twisting the truth to make Islam sound like a threat. For a short while we have had a pedophiles party (really!), although luckily they never collected enough signatures to be allowed to participate in elections. I can only conclude that the real politics is just as sick as our forum... and since the forum is supposed to reflect the real politics, I would suggest we keep it as it is - even though it sometimes really makes me angry to read the stuff that some people write. One suggestion: apart from a minimum post count (30?), would it also be a good idea that nobody is allowed to have more than a certain percentage of their posts in the politics forum? Like, overall 2 out of 3 posts must be in a scientific forum, and only 1 out of 3 a non-scientific forum (possibly with the exception of the Lounge)?

Facts In 1984-1985, there was a widespread famine mostly in Ethiopia, but also some in countries around it. A (contested) number of 1 million people died. Drought was the reason that food did not grow, but a war caused the available food to be extremely poorly distributed. Since then, the population in Somalia went from 6.4 million to 9.1 million. The population in Ethiopia went from 41 million to 82 million (it doubled!). The population of Eritrea went from 2.8 to 5.0 million. And the population of Kenya grew from 19.6 to 39.8 million people (also doubled). In short: in 26 years the region went from 70 million people to 136 million people. Right now, again, millions are on the move. Drought has caused harvests to fail. Food reserves are depleting. And some media are starting to use the word 'famine'. The ethical issue Let me start with an apology. The things I wrote below are harsh and cold, and completely without emotion. But I find myself wondering these things, and this seems a place to discuss it. If you know that you live in an area where extreme droughts are possible, and you know that the region is still extremely unstable and conflicts still rage in multiple countries (Ethiopia in the past, now in Sudan and Somalia)... and you double the population in merely 26 years, should we (you and I) feel responsible for these people? Aren't they just behaving irresponsible themselves? I find myself wondering what problem we are solving by helping these people with emergency aid. If we feed these people, won't they just double their population in the next 25 years again? Obviously, a decent long term plan would help. But how can you provide long term support to a population that doubles every generation? What long term plan can you make for a population that is unsustainable in itself? If we help 136 million people now, wouldn't that just create another 136 million people that need our help in 25 years from now? Should we set up continuous (never ending) emergency aid programs? Where's the line? And how many other unsustainable populations are there? India? Bangladesh? Nigeria? I'm not sure I will send money to the aid programs this time. I'm really struggling with the fact that the population in that region doubled to fast while there are so many problems. What do you all think? I guess I'm a complete bastard, earning a decent living and not even wanting to give a little of it to save some lives.

Fruits are such an energy "boost" because part of the sugars (e.g. glucose) in fruits are in a form that you can take up directly. Your stomach or bowels don't have to do much. The glucose just has to go into your blood, and it's immediately available. I hope our biology experts correct me if I'm wrong... I'm not the resident biology expert, but I think I have the answer, so I posted it.

If you start communism as a nation, you always maintain inequality across the borders. Closing the borders is then a logical result. And that means your people aren't free. And being not free is never really popular. Add to that a complete mismanagement of the economy in the communist states - I have the impression you got higher up the commie ladder if you kissed some *ss or if you were a military hero, rather than being a capable leader - and you have a disaster. Don't get me wrong: I think that our current banking system as a way to fund investments is a very sick system that's on the verge of collapse, so this is no rose garden either... but the communist system like the Soviets had, no thanks. I think it would be a good thing to distribute wealth more evenly... but not if that requires closed borders, a police state and a dictatorship.

Ok, so you say that the GDP per capita is not the perfect tool to evaluate wealth of the population. The OP mentioned that "Muslim countries are poor and do not compete well in the global economy". In such economic terms, GDP per capita is an accepted tool to evaluate the economy of a country. But if you do not accept it, please provide us with another tool to evaluate the average wealth of the populations of Muslim countries in relation to non-Muslim countries? Because it is essential that we evaluate this before we can discuss the alleged link between Islam and poverty. That graph is a rather selective presentation of facts. I have the following problems with it: - From the top-10 most populated countries, China and Nigeria (both non-Muslim) are missing in that chart. - Relatively rich Muslim countries like Malaysia or Iran are missing too. - Wealth is - as far as I'm concerned - something which should be plotted on a log-scale, not a linear one. In a linear scale, the large majority of all countries fit in the lowest category. - I count only about 80 dots on that chart, there should be >200. - The black dots are pasted over the yellow/red ones in the top-left corner, emphasizing the black ones. - In the top left corner, only the black ones are named, while other colored dots do not have a name. Also, I would claim that this graph does not link poverty to Islam. It does however suggest that Muslim countries have a very high percentage of Muslim population (namely about 100%). In that respect they distinguish themselves from other countries, where the percentage of "people who say that religion plays an important role in their lives" is lower than 100%... This graph shows the map of the world, and how religious people are (without leaving half the world out). But that's not the point we're trying to prove, is it? We're trying to (dis)prove a significant correlation between poverty and Islam. So, India (poor and mostly non-Islamic) disproves the correlation. All sub-Saharan Africa disproves the correlation. Rich Muslim countries disprove the correlation. In fact, if you would run the numbers, I bet there is no statistical significant correlation at all. I think that the correlation between the Hindu religion and poverty is a lot stronger, because of the economic state of India. Poor countries do have things in common, but the type of religion it is not. So, before we re-enter the discussion trying to find out why Islam and poverty would be linked, I think we should either broaden is (and make this non-religious, and include sub-Saharan Africa and India at least) or really prove that the correlation is there. So far I am not satisfied at all.

They are usually asked to back up the claims and/or explain the assumptions that were made, but hardly ever succeed. Most threads that are moved to speculations cannot be backed up because they are based on assumptions which aren't true. And that's why I think this thread belongs in speculations. Threads in the speculations section suggest a certain (lack of) scientific rigor and I think this thread should be placed there as well, because the main assumption on which the entire discussion so far is based is not true, or at least not proven: Muslim countries aren't significantly poorer or richer than other countries.