Controlling Birth

A few people currently have posts up about breeding, children, and families. From musing on this, I am inclined to think that maybe we need to move towards something that will be very close to things that will make people very scared.

That mockery of a sentence is basically me saying: controls on reproduction may not be all that bad. It may be that the best situation for society is, speaking very broadly, one in which people do not operate with an expectation that they automatically have the right to have children. The principal reason is that more people require more land, more energy, consume more plastics, more minerals. The number of humans is way beyond the planet’s capacity to support at our current level of consumption. I think this is one good reason for people to make a personal choice not to reproduce. But personal choices may not be enough.

EDIT:  This post sparked a lot of controversy, which I have partly responded to here.

Most Wanted Nine for 2009

I’ve been tagged in a meme: what 9 things do the bones most want to see happening in 2009?

The bones, of course, are like those used in cleromancy to predict the future from reading their direction. But these ones typically do not have a clear sense of direction – that’s the problem. But they do sometimes seem to point somewhere. So let’s cast them and see.

Developments in Guinea

The couper-troupers are starting to grow on me. Having taken power after the last strongman died (previous posts here and here) they have apparently held a meeting asking the country’s unions and opposition groups to suggest a new prime minister.

When Planned Economies Go Bad!

This is a follow-up to my post earlier about reification and the idea of a planned economy as an overcoming of reification, the process by which human beings and their actions are perceived as non-human things blindly operating according to mechanical laws.

The obvious comment that might occur is ‘but what about the bad planned economies? the USSR, Maoist China, North Korea? How can such oppressive societies represent a ‘humanising’ of the economy?’