Embracing The Future

The following rant was provoked by someone somewhere blaming the fashion industry for the 'end of fat-as-beautiful', which gets the causality arrow all tangled up. (But that's another post for another time.)

I know it's oh-so-fashionable to be doom-and-gloom about modernity and industrialization and all that, but frankly it's boring, totally old-skool (in a not good way), and it makes people sound like their parents, grandparents (again, not in a good way), or religious whackos.

I'm all for preserving traditions that work in modern contexts, but knee-jerk allegiance to nostalgia can leave the knee-jerker looking out of touch and, honestly? -- hostile, desperate, and somewhat pathetic.

I usually keep this opinion to myself, but I'm getting so tired of hearing people's inner fears about the future projected out as 'objective factual info'.

I like modernity; I like progress; I like electricity and computers and space travel and technology and modern notions of human rights (and clothing) and most especially I like public sanitation and modern plumbing.

I know too much history to ever want to go back.

And don't even get me started on how lacking it is in personal responsibility to blame things on the fashion industry. (Or the media, or government, or whatever . . . . . . Enough with the blame games.)

Let's Talk About Abortion, Contraception, & Population Control

First let me share with you this bit of happy news, with which you may not be familiar: industrialization, & especially the resultant urbanization, is the best population control humans have come up with yet. Fully industrialized & heavily urbanized countries are not replacing themselves, despite most having laws & customs that are generally pro-natalist. (Pronatalism is the promotion of child-bearing.)

There's a myth out there that humans will breed like rabbits, or bacteria, under most any circumstances, & that they must be stopped from this by specific actions to enable zero population growth, or even depopulation. This myth ignores the underlying realities of economics & demographics: agriculture-based societies reward high rates of childbearing, & industrial societies penalize high rates of childbearing. The whole of the planet is in demographic transition from being primarily agricultural to being primarily industrial, with the result being that we will face an issue of depopulation. (Most likely sometime around 2050.)

Another myth relating to this 'breeding like bacteria' trope is that humans have not controlled their population except for inefficiently thru primitive contraception & abortion, ignoring the reality that evidence shows humans have controlled population thru infanticide back into the far reaches of pre-history. Unsavory, but there it is. Given that, abortion is a vast improvement over the infanticide it replaces.

I'm looking forward to the future when we finally realize we must realistically control population & accelerate the depopulation curve, primarily thru beginning comprehensive sex education in grade school (a la Sweden), & making contraception an ubiquitous part of ordinary lives. This will eventually include 'handing out contraception on street corners', & pornographers eroticizing the use of contraceptives, particularly condoms & other barrier devices.

& this will be a good thing. If we want everyone on the planet to live lifestyles even approximately as luxurious as early 21st century American ones, there will have to be a lot fewer people, & the only morally acceptable way to get there is thru contraceptive-enabled attrition . . . . . .. .