[Chicon]

If I were an artist, I would make a concert Live Hate to 'cancel' Mugabe and his brotherhood of thugs !

[FOND]

I think that the only way to stop poverty in the world, is to encarage people to have less children. What is wrong of having just 2 kids per family. I have 1 kid and it is enough. All the money in the world will not be ever enough, if people having too many kids. They western world should start a new order, which encarage reducing the number of children born.
FOND.

[lighthouse]

Erm I think Indira Ghandis government tried something like that in India in the 70s and was very unpopular both there and abroad. (Horror stories about sterilisation gangs jumping women and going to work on them). China introduced legislation with an incentive for parents to have one child in an attempt to curb the population growth, but there were other problems with that caused by cultural tradition where the male child recieves a dowry from his betrotheds family upon their marriage. The result was that thousands of girl children were abandoned because the parents wouldn't be able to afford the dowry should she marry later in life. If you have one child and they happen to be female she could be consigned to a very uncertain, potentially bleak future, particularly when there's no male child receiving a dowry to make up for the financial burden already incurred.

Yeah - I'd agree that over-population does nothing to help the situation but you have to be able to at least offer them the chance or know-how of or about birth control etc, rather than have potentially disasterous and draconian legislation that could lead to gross human rights violations.

[XL Guru]

Originally Posted by FOND

I think that the only way to stop poverty in the world, is to encarage people to have less children. What is wrong of having just 2 kids per family.

Not much, IMO. I believe the "recommended figure" is 2.1 ; 2 for natural replacement, and 0.1 for "death not by natural causes" replacement. Of course you'd have to keep an eye on the overall picture.

Just saw lighthouse's post ; I think they had a thing in India where if you had the "snip" you got a free radio. I doubt I'd ever find a reference to it, but in trying I did find "In India, hundreds of men and women who lost children in the tsunami are seeking to reverse sterilisation so they can have more children. The State of Tamil Nadu has agreed to fund the operations reversing tubectomies and vasectomies of those grieving parents who want to have children again".

LINK

[lighthouse]

You might be right there XL, but I wasn't the enforced sterilisation programme run concurrent to the less draconian one?

The post-Tsunami trauma must be awful for any parent in that situation so the want for a re-population programme could well be very understandable.

RE:Chicons post: I agree Mugabe is a problem but the real and lasting answer has to be from within the country not imposed from elsewhere.

On the recent violence in Edinburgh: Can't see how battles with average earners (Police) is goiung to make the CEOs of megacorpland take notice of the plight of the poorer people of the world. Were those doing it 'Anarchists'? Not really - just hooligans!

[lighthouse]

What annoys me about the recent violence is that 'thugs incorporated' always seem to have the resources to get to events like the G8 demo whereas genuine people don't. I really wanted to go because I have such brilliant memories of 1999 and it would have been really good to have been there with the stuff we carried in our walk as a symbolic gesture from a good natured campaign 6 years ago. Instead you get the usual idiots who want to spoil it for everyone else. To call them 'Anarchists' is a misnomer as well because genuine Anarchism is a refutation of violence of all sorts - beit person on person, corporate or statutory.

[lighthouse]

I guess I now have common ground with genuine football fans who can't afford to see their team play live, but have to see, hear or read about the organised hooligans who have the season tickets and transport to go to any match they want.

It all seems wrong really!