When a team of eleven men brandishing national colours suddenly gain the questionable ability to make grown men in ridiculous costumes cry by managing not to kick a pigskin truncated icosahedron into a designated area measuring 7.32 by 2.44 metres. Good times.
Christians are retarded. I say this because in a country where you are as of next month no longer allowed to smoke in public areas because all those poor non-smoking people might somehow die from second-hand smoking, it is the Christians—in the form of the Dutch political party Christen Unie (Christian Union), or CU—who have made it their personal task to ensure that screening embryos for breast cancer will NOT be included in our pre-implantation guidelines. They are doing this, of course, because all but one of those poor little embryos in a pre-implantation test get tossed out the window, which in their eyes prohibits perfectly good ‘potential life’ from being lived.
What a bunch of bullshit. I mean, I’m willing to argue about abortion and the point at which it becomes unacceptable to abort, but we’re talking about little clusters of cells here! To illustrate this mind-boggling, deranged statement, I have mapped my understanding of how this works exactly below:
~0 = not life = 0
( ) = not life = 0
~(0) = life worth protecting = 1
What gives, Christians? You can’t add two zero’s and get one, any pre-schooler will tell you that, unless you want to tell me that ‘the soul’ is implemented at the exact moment the little sperm enters the little egg or something. Get real. In this schematic, the difference between being dead and alive isn’t the soul at all, but about 1 second. An embryo is alive in the same way plants are, sure, but it’s not a life. Hell, at this point, ‘killing’ an embryo would probably offset your karmic balance in about the same way as not watering your plants would.
To complicate things, the CU has also stated that, while they don’t want to have breast cancer added to the list under any circumstances, they ‘respect’ the current practice, which is mostly concerned with genetic diseases that will manifest themselves at some point during life, 100% guaranteed, like Huntington’s. So I guess we shouldn’t really pity people with cancer, because God himself says Huntington’s is like, way worse. This would be a really funny thing to say, if it weren’t for the fact that some so called ethicist from the ranks of the CU actually went on record saying that cancer is getting more treatable all the time, so it’s not needed to include it in the guidelines, which is actually a nice way of saying ‘do whatever the fuck you want, as long as it doesn’t involve anything I think my god may or may not have wanted’. The woman sitting next to him, who had herself had breast cancer, was shocked to say the least. But I guess when you’re all busy saving as of yet non-existent people’s possible lives you can’t very well be bothered to consider their actual well-being for too long. Given this particular attitude, they probably ‘respect’ people selecting embryos for Huntington’s in the same way I respect people trying to sell me ringtones thirty fucking times each commercial block: they just haven’t found a way to credibly convict them for witchcraft and burn them at the stake… yet.
I would think that the possibility of erasing a very nasty disease from the human genome some time in the future (which is effectively what this would lead to if everyone with the gene would pre-test) would be a good thing in and of itself, but I guess the net potential of a little gooey lump of cells is worth more than an actual person’s well-being. So thank you, Christians, for once again putting a screeching halt to scientific progress and preventing people from utilizing a technology that would actually benefit their children.
Maybe in a few months, when the dust has settled, they could propose a law that forces people to sleep with their hands above the covers. Everyone knows that would save loads of little kitties.
P.S. If you’re wondering why it took slightly longer for me to put something up here, all I can say is: Metal Gear Solid 4 is friggin’ AWESOME.
The internet is a funny thing. The BRAT LIMITATION Act I came up with in a self-professed moment of brilliance isn’t even a week old, and already someone has taken it upon himself to point out some flaws he thinks are obvious (see the comment on ‘If I’m ever crowned King of the World..’). If he had read the rest of this blog, I doubt he would have even taken the time, but hey, to each his own. Since I’m not one to take such a verbal beating and go and sit in a corner crying about it, I will honour dear Nathaniel with a proper rebuttal. Be advised that in order to give adequate response to Nathaniels ill-sourced claims, I will have to resort to the one thing I had hoped to keep out of this blog for a little while longer: science. Hang on to yer hats, folks, it’s gonna be a long one…
[DEAR ANGRYPOODLE,] Looking over your proposed dictatorship I find several flaws in your thinking. Not that you really expect to be a dictator any time soon but you attempt to solve what you think are real problems (some of which are) and would likely fail massively.
*trying to hold back the tears*
I’ll focus on the last thing you said.
Besides solving overpopulation in the most awesome of manners, once implemented this plan will solve numerous other problems closely related to overpopulation.
This is inaccurate, you assume there is overpopulation. Some estimates place the amount of people the world can feed at 30-40 billion. Right now we have a bit over 6, talking about overpopulation as if it real right now jumping the gun (in a really really big way).
Wow, 30-40 billion?! I mean, that’s a LOT! Though I’m kind of dissapointed that this bold claim came without any reference (an average four-your-old might ‘estimate’ even the current world population at ‘one hundred billion billion’, but I’m sure as hell not taking that for granted), I’m thinking this is probably based on the claim of Roger Revelle that ‘the approximately 2.43 billion [hectares] of net potential arable land and the 4.06 billion hectares of gross cropped land are estimated with currently available technology to feed 38-48 billion people’ (source). Well sure, we can feed ‘em theoretically, but simply comparing 40 billion to 6 billion and saying I’m wrong could also be considered by some to be ‘jumping the gun (in a really really big way)’. Let’s do some basic math, shall we?
‘The total area of the Earth is approximately 510 million square kilometers and the oceans cover about 71 percent of the Earth’s surface’ (source). I don’t know about you, but I’m inclined to take these numbers at face value, in part because I believe these guys have no reason to lie about the earth’s surface, and in part because I’m just really really lazy. So, working with these numbers, we have a total populable surface of (510 million x 0.29 =) 147 million km². Of course, we lose Revelle’s precious arable land as well, which means that we end up with about (147 million - ((2.43 billion + 4.06 billion) x 0.01) =) 82.1 million km². When this land is populated with 40 billion people, the population density will amount to (40 billion / 82.1 million =) 3192984.166 people/km². This is about 195 times denser than earth’s current most dense country, Monaco (16.335,5/km²), and roughly 1 million times denser than the USA currently is (31/km²) (from Wikipedia). Note that these numbers apply for THE WHOLE FRIGGIN’ WORLD, and leave little room for recreational space, parks, or any of the other places we like to visit when we’re not living on a planet closely resembling the city-planet of Coruscant. This is all starting to sound vaguely like OVERPOPULATION to me…
Sadly, there are no nude beaches on Coruscant either
Pollution? Gone: less people to pollute means less pollution.
BS. Pollution has little to do with population levels. Pollution has to do with lifestyles, things companies do, and so on. Not everyone pollutes at the same level and some places a few people pollute alot (you may live in one). Less people in no way guarantees less pollution.
True. However, developing countries are slowly developing towards western standards of living, hence the word. Wouldn’t it be nice if we all did so with about 6 billion or less, as opposed to, say, 40 billion? Because then we’d have some serious pollution, wouldn’t we?
Poverty? Gone: with less people to occupy existing jobs, there will be more room for everyone to compete in an honest open market system.
Poverty rates have been falling worldwide as the number of people has grown, not rising. Poverty deals wealth distribution, not population-population control is the wrong tool for the problem.
Thank god this was just a side-effect and not a direct solution then. I was afraid I was going to look really silly there for a moment. Your being right however also means that you’re wrong. Take a look at this table:
|
Region |
1990 |
2002 |
2004 |
| East Asia and Pacific | 15.40% | 12.33% | 9.07% |
| Europe and Central Asia | 3.60% | 1.28% | 0.95% |
| Latin America and the Caribbean | 9.62% | 9.08% | 8.64% |
| Middle East and North Africa | 2.08% | 1.69% | 1.47% |
| South Asia | 35.04% | 33.44% | 30.84% |
| Sub-Saharan Africa | 46.07% | 42.63% | 41.09% |
(percentage of households living below poverty threshold)
Wow, declining rates all over, although the rates aren’t dropping quite as fast (relatively) in 1) Latin America and the Caribbean, 2) South Asia and 3) Sub-Saharan Africa. Perhaps this is because these area’s are inhabited by a lot of people struggling to get some of the Western riches, but fail to do so, resulting in poverty, wich is made tangible in the large slums accumulating around the big cities (handy little diagram)? Maybe, just maybe, if there were less people fighting over the same shitty jobs, they would manage some actual progress, instead of collectively dying from AIDS and Cholera and other nasty diseases, who knows?
Starvation? Gone: with everyone making more money through said open market system, and more food being available to less people, starvation will be a thing of the past. We might even be able to ’solve’ our problems with the bio-industry in a more animal friendly manner.
Another failure. Enough food is grown in the real world to feed everyone in the real world (it has been that way for the past several years and is that way right now). Starvation isn’t due to populations levels back a lack of distribution (sharing). Real world riots over food in Haiti were over a rise in food prices-the food is exists the people selling it just decided to charge more for it (perhaps beyond what the people in Haiti can pay).
Enough food, yes, so you said. I suppose I could have been clearer when I said starvation will be gone. You yourself noted that I didn’t ‘really expect to become a dictator any time soon’. I don’t, and I don’t assume that research and development concerning the distribution of wealth will stand still until I do, nor have I claimed that limiting of the number of children will be the sole solution for starvation, although I can see why you thought that. It would help though if, by the time developing countries get acces to this food (we’re hogging, I know, but I can’t really do anything about that just yet, can I?), they would do so with a manageable amount of people, if just to keep the pressure on food sources low.
So how would your dictatorship do? Pollution rates, probably high-I saw no EPA (which, when it isn’t stopped by paid off/bribed bosses, tries to deal with pollution). Poverty, probably still there as there is no promise that the jobs that will be there will pay what needed for people to be out of poverty. Starvation, no attempt to deal with the real distribution related reasons for hunger means that it continues.
All in all your dictatorship looks likely to fail in the best goals you set out for it.
Who said these were the best goals? I sure didn’t. If I remember correctly, my first goal and arguably one of the best goals anyone could hope to achieve is the extermination of those hideous ringtone commercials some companies insist on bombarding my senses with. More importantly, the second plan is aimed primarily at maintaining a more or less stabilized population, which is why the limit is 2. This plan is to prevent excessive overpopulation so the current (or near future, or whatever) population can work on the problems you said it wasn’t going to solve. So no, it doesn’t directly solve any of the things you stated, but then it was never meant to do that. That is why, to the savvy reader, they are clearly stated under ’side effects’. The only thing it is meant to do is to keep the world population at a stable point, seeing as how 6,6 billion can not be said to be overpopulation per se, but I don’t like the sound of 40 billion either.
Rest assured though that all the problems you pointed out my plan won’t solve will receive adequate solutions of their own. If and when I feel like it.
At least in the real world you know enough not to become a scientologist.
Well, that much is true, although at this point it sounds more like an insult than anything else. I would reply along the lines of ‘at least you have retained your childlike ability to misinterpret everything you read’, but that would just be mean, and this whole discussion has left me weirdly satisfied, which means I actually owe you thanks for this whole debacle. Maybe next time you can point out, in response to another post on this blog, that despite the fact that killing someone doesn’t inflict them direct harm, it is still not nice and ‘doesn’t solve anything’, although your ability for stating the obvious might have some limits I’m currently not aware of.
On a related note, it has been brought to my attention that some of the more practical aspects of the BRAT LIMITATION Act might be considered by some to be just a tad, erm, harsh. Since I aspire to be for the most part a benign ruler, I could not just sit idly by and ignore this fact. So, if you read the act and you felt the same way, you will be glad to hear that the Act has been revised! In my infinite wisdom and goodwill, I have decided that every citizen who will be sterilized will receive a complimentary lollipop. Pretty sweet, eh?
Sincerely,
Your would-be benevolent-ish dictator
