Is this a good thing? Should this be happening? Look beyond your initial emotional response of high-fiving yourself and whooping 'YAY! NO MORE AIDSY BABIES!' and think...do we REALLY want 3m more people in the world per year?
Will this benefit Africa in the long run?
Discuss.
Javelin.
Whatever.
__________________ America: So soaked in Religion its seething with Sin.
"In Heaven all the interesting people are missing" - Friedrich Nietzsche
"America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success." - Sigmund Freud
HIV/AIDS is a shitty and expensive form of population control. If you want 3million fewer people on the planet, find a more efficient way to do it.
Alternatively, improve education and living conditions in the 3rd world, decrease childhood mortality, and then see how quickly the population drops. That might be counter-intuitive, but there's plenty of research that shows that decreased childhood mortality leads to a reduction in the birth rate.
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Spending as long as I do here, it's easy to forget that Oddworld has actual fans.
It's absolutely fucking fantastic, this is only the second cure for HIV though and doctors aren't yet sure if the kid will survive.
Fuck anyone who has such little ethical compassion that they see HIV as viable population control, if you think that's the way to solve the problem then please find yourself the nearest cliff and then keep on walking off it.
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Oh yeah, fair point. Maybe he was just tortured until he lost consciousness.
Is this a good thing? Should this be happening? Look beyond your initial emotional response of high-fiving yourself and whooping 'YAY! NO MORE AIDSY BABIES!' and think...do we REALLY want 3m more people in the world per year?
Will this benefit Africa in the long run?
Discuss.
Javelin.
Whatever.
I think that is the dumbest thing I have ever read in this forums.
your stupidity is mesmerizing. no, it's contagious.
AIDS doesn't work as population control at all. The child who was cured was born with it, because her mother had been somehow infected. It didn't impact her reproductive ability in the slightest.
It kills people slowly and nastily, filling them with despair as it does so and greatly reduces their health in the meantime. And when that is going on in a sizeable portion of the population it really helps to stagnate social development and keep conditions the way they are. Those conditions being easy HIV transmission, high infant mortality poverty, violence...
Nate's right. When quality of life and health is improved, birthrate drops. Indeed, when birthrate drops people's quality of life also improves. People are inclined to have less children when they aren't used to so many of them dying or don't need every hand possible working the fields or family business just to keep living hand to mouth. When these issues are resolved there will be less people being born to die and becoming part of that 3 million figure.
"Do we really want three million more people in the world each year?" In that question I heard, "wouldn't you rather three million innocent people die horribly each year?" I have to ask why anyone would be happy with that. I know the answer is going to come down to population growth and resource distribution. Which ultimately means: "I don't want those people to survive, because if they live that's going to negatively impact my lifestyle!"
It kills people slowly and nastily, filling them with despair as it does so and greatly reduces their health in the meantime. And when that is going on in a sizeable portion of the population it really helps to stagnate social development and keep conditions the way they are. Those conditions being easy HIV transmission, high infant mortality poverty, violence...
BM's right, guys. The only ethical solution is to form culling squads and take them out ourselves, quickly and painlessly.
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HAPPY HOL-ODD-DAYS!
I bought some powdered water, but didn't know what to add.
I think I heard the doctor's don't know exactly what drugs they gave him to cure him of the disease? Which sucks cause this might be just a one-off.
I really hope it isn't.
The article I read suggested that the take-home message should be that testing of at-risk pregnant mothers and newly born babies must be done early and regularly, so that treatment can start early. It may not cure every child, but if even just one child is cured it's worth it.
Having said that, it annoys me when people share this with a message of 'FUCK YEAH SCIENCE!'. In this case, the doctors hadn't hypothesised that the child might be cured and hadn't planned as such. The only reason they even found that the child was cured was because s/he'd been taken off the meds for several months and the doctors wanted to check how badly the virus had advanced. It's cool, but SCIENCE can't take much credit here.
Having said all that, people like Jacob who are talking about world overpopulation are simply ignorant. Current statistical analysis is suggesting that the world population will continue to grow to 10 billion, then it will more or less stop. I would recommend watching the following video by the brilliant Hans Rosling to explain the point.
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Spending as long as I do here, it's easy to forget that Oddworld has actual fans.
There's obviously established natural limits for human population. I think the real issue is whether we can hit the 10 billion mark without the world descending into chaos.
"Alternatively, improve education and living conditions in the 3rd world"
One could argue that in the 3rd world religion is rampant. Who needs education when you have a God on your side telling you contraception is wrong?
"And here I was assuming that Jacob got less edgy as he got older like the rest of us. Here I was being wrong."
A-haaaa. I've actually evened out a bit. I just like to THROW ideas out there and get the general consensus of everybody else. ...before I go against it.
"Fuck anyone who has such little ethical compassion that they see HIV as viable population control, if you think that's the way to solve the problem then please find yourself the nearest cliff and then keep on walking off it."
You would rather see Government enforcing a 'one child' rule, were people then PANIC and decide they don't want a child of a certain sex, so they then, upon giving birth to a child of a sex they do not want, abandon it in a gutter somewhere? You would rather KILL perfectly healthy babies?
Like some kind of sick baby killer? Is that what you get off on, eh? You sick freak! KILLING LITTLE HYPOTHETICAL BABIES?!
Jeez.
...at least i'm only advocating killing black babies.
"I think that is the dumbest thing I have ever read in this forums.
your stupidity is mesmerizing"
I thank you. You can now return to the darkened hovel you've emerged from and rant at some n00b who's camping in CoD. Away.
""Do we really want three million more people in the world each year?" In that question I heard, "wouldn't you rather three million innocent people die horribly each year?" I have to ask why anyone would be happy with that. I know the answer is going to come down to population growth and resource distribution. Which ultimately means: "I don't want those people to survive, because if they live that's going to negatively impact my lifestyle!""
...thinking emotionally there, sport. Bad dog.
"Having said all that, people like Jacob who are talking about world overpopulation are simply ignorant."
I'm aware of the 10b and then STAHP theory, but what if it...doesn't?
I'm generally against all major disease curifications. With more people there'll be more wars. I'd much rather people die from nature kicking ass and taking names, than some douche at the right end of a missile.
__________________ America: So soaked in Religion its seething with Sin.
"In Heaven all the interesting people are missing" - Friedrich Nietzsche
"America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success." - Sigmund Freud
Haven't you been listening? A high death rate does nothing to slow population growth, as evidenced by the countries that have the highest death rates also having the fastest growth. They take that into account and compensate. The only way to change that is to change the sociological conditions that create that environment, and improved healthcare is on of them. Easy access to birth control is another.
Leaving them to be ravaged by disease makes it worse. And awful. And will also result is great population growth but no increase in wealth. And then you get war AND disease! Hooray!
I still think Jacob should do the noble thing and off himself to help bring the population down. At the end of the day, a human life is a human life and someone with AIDS has as much of a right to live as you. If you don't like it, take your own life to solve the problem because if you have a sick mind where you think someone else has more of a right to die than you, the world doesn't need you any way...
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Oh yeah, fair point. Maybe he was just tortured until he lost consciousness.
I'm not sure what's worse, that people think disease is a better population control than education, or that people are wishing death on those that think that.
Telling someone to kill themselves is never cool guys. Never cool.
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Munch's Exoddus: the quest for a can opener. Which will be just as squeaky as the wheelchair.
And yeah HIV/AIDS wouldn't work as a population control. AIDS can be managed and people with it can live relatively normal lives. Countries on early stages of the DTM, like many African countries, have high birth and death rates. Disease is a small small small small factor in both of those things.
my B in gcse geography finally pays off.