patrick.net

thunderlips11 says

Big difference between not killing people and encouraging people not to have children, and killing people and encouraging other people to fill up the killed people's lands with other people.

Like with the Nazis, who also looked at sterilization, etc., there's no guarantee that your method won't result in the killing of people, particularly when your efforts to "encourage" them involuntarily don't work out as you design when they don't willfully cooperate, and you need to resort to more dramatic means, which you can justify for the greater good of whatever group of people you think you can determine has the right to continue to exist and propagate (b/c you're going to have to find some method of selection, no?).

thunderlips11 says

I practically feel the steam of anger arising from the Iron Age religious believers as I type this.

Just like you, the Nazis hated them as well.

But the more pressing matter at hand is... Once you implement your utopian project, what will you do once the "Iron Age religious believers" (which across the world way outnumber you) and even those who are simply against your greedy lust for god-like power (or who simply don't want your 1930s German-like imperialist pressure on their countries), start actively resisting? What then will you do? How will you continue to "encourage" what you want in a peaceful, yet involuntary manner?

thunderlips11 says

I think this is probably the first time I have made (and admitted without prompting) a call to an authoritarian method of solving a problem in this forum.

No one should miss the fact that when you say "encourage" you truly, unambiguously mean "force."

Paralithodes says

Like with the Nazis, who also looked at sterilization, etc., there's no guarantee that your method won't result in the killing of people, particularly when your efforts to "encourage" them involuntarily don't work out as you design when they don't willfully cooperate, and you need to resort to more dramatic means, which you can justify for the greater good of whatever group of people you think you can determine has the right to continue to exist and propagate (b/c you're going to have to find some method of selection, no?).

The government, through a package of incentives, like mortgage interest rate deductions, first time homeowner programs and credits, homeownership. After several decades, nobody has yet forced a potential homeowner to buy a house when they didn't want to, killing or imprisoning them if they insisted on renting.

I don't believe the Nazis used subsidies and tax penalties to incentivize "undesirables" to sterilize themselves.

Paralithodes says

Just like you, the Nazis hated them as well.

As I've stated many times, one of the very first treaties Hitler signed when coming into power was a Concordat with the Vatican. It gave immunity to the draft to clergy, confirmed the free hand of the Church in running it's affairs in German Controlled Territory, upheld past privileges, etc. - in return for the Church not interfering in the Hitler Regime.

The Signatory for the Vatican was no less than the future Pope Pius XII.

Paralithodes says

But the more pressing matter at hand is... Once you implement your utopian project, what will you do once the "Iron Age religious believers" (which across the world way outnumber you)

There is no utopian project -- it's a matter of survival for the human race.

As for numerical superiority, wasn't Baywatch the most widely distributed TV show in the world, and Shades of Grey the most popular book of 2012 in the USA? Don't more Americans believe in Ghosts than those who claim to have no religious preference?
Paralithodes says

What then will you do? How will you continue to "encourage" what you want in a peaceful, yet involuntary manner?

Paralithodes says

No one should miss the fact that when you say "encourage" you truly, unambiguously mean "force."

Where and When in this thread did I use the word "Encourage"?

Twice. Once when asking people to view a video posted by Heraclitusstudent. A second time describing not a program of mine, but rather Himmler's Breeding Program.

So I don't see any evidence for this assertion of yours.

thunderlips11 says

As for numerical superiority, wasn't Baywatch the most widely distributed TV show in the world, and Shades of Grey the most popular book of 2012 in the USA? Don't more Americans believe in Ghosts than those who claim to have no religious preference?

So now in 2014 they watch Duck Dynasty...ending with the lords prayer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C63UgwzB-xY

What melted the ice after all of the previous ice ages?

thunderlips11 says

As I've stated many times, one of the very first treaties Hitler signed when coming into power was a Concordat with the Vatican. It gave immunity to the draft to clergy, confirmed the free hand of the Church in running it's affairs in German Controlled Territory, upheld past privileges, etc. - in return for the Church not interfering in the Hitler Regime.

The Signatory for the Vatican was no less than the future Pope Pius XII.

Google "mit brennender sorge" and get back to us....

thunderlips11 says

There is no utopian project -- it's a matter of survival for the human race.

Yes, of course. Just like most other extreme regimes, including the one we are discussing - it is a matter of survival! It is THAT urgent!

This is of course why your claim here:

thunderlips11 says

The government, through a package of incentives, like mortgage interest rate deductions, first time homeowner programs and credits, homeownership. After several decades, nobody has yet forced a potential homeowner to buy a house when they didn't want to, killing or imprisoning them if they insisted on renting.

I don't believe the Nazis used subsidies and tax penalties to incentivize "undesirables" to sterilize themselves.

Doesn't square with:
thunderlips11 says

I think this is probably the first time I have made (and admitted without prompting) a call to an authoritarian method of solving a problem in this forum.

thunderlips11 says

Sometimes you have to be authoritarian. The US Army in WW2 was authoritarian. Washington hung deserters from the Continental Army and Militia.

I dislike authoritarianism, I'd do anything to prevent an authoritarian solution if there was any other solution, even a half-assed one, but there isn't.

The only, only alternative to this is to aggressively redistribute the wealth so that people don't want to have too many kids themselves - but that involves even more death and destruction. If it's even feasible because it would involve more environmental destruction to rush to bring wealth to fourth and third world areas with power, roads, etc.

It makes me sick to my stomach, but damn, it has to be done somehow.

We can restrain ourselves or we can die along with everything decent we and our ancestors have created in spectacular fashion after suffering Soylent Green/ApocalypseFUCK style hell.

thunderlips11 says

Where and When in this thread did I use the word "Encourage"?

Twice. Once when asking people to view a video posted by Heraclitusstudent. A second time describing not a program of mine, but rather Himmler's Breeding Program.

thunderlips11 says

Big difference between not killing people and encouraging people not to have children

"Encouraging people not to have children" is what you claim to support. Yet above you admit that it must be through authoritarian means that will result in death and destruction.

Yes, it is you who equates your authoritarian positions with the word "encourage."

Paralithodes says

Google "mit brennender sorge" and get back to us....

I found this right away:

Issued to Nazi soldiers throughout WW2. Odd that a regime that is allegedly pushing a strong atheist agenda would issue this to their own Army.

But I see your one weak and veiled criticism by the Pope, and raise you"Bishop Alois Hudal".

(BTW, Popes throughout the 19th and 20th Century - and today - have also criticized laissez-faire capitalism in particular.)

Now you say that when I say this:
Paralithodes says

thunderlips11 says

I think this is probably the first time I have made (and admitted without prompting) a call to an authoritarian method of solving a problem in this forum.

Doesn't square with this:
thunderlips11 says

I dislike authoritarianism, I'd do anything to prevent an authoritarian solution if there was any other solution, even a half-assed one, but there isn't.

And you'd be right, except in the paragraph immediately following the second comment - which you yourself quoted - I made this observation:
thunderlips11 says

The only, only alternative to this is to aggressively redistribute the wealth so that people don't want to have too many kids themselves - but that involves even more death and destruction. If it's even feasible because it would involve more environmental destruction to rush to bring wealth to fourth and third world areas with power, roads, etc.

Not to mention a further follow up post about incentives. To clarify, the death and destruction I'm referring to is the likely violent resistance of the top 1% to having income redistributed AND religious nuts preventing the implementation of wealth distribution and population control financial incentives.

Paralithodes says

"Encouraging people not to have children" is what you claim to support. Yet above you admit that it must be through authoritarian means that will result in death and destruction.

I see what you're doing here. You're trying to attach my "Encouragement" to the one thought I had that involuntary two-child policy might be the only way to prevent it, and not any of the follow on commentary where I provided alternatives. My alternatives were posted before your
Paralithodes says

No one should miss the fact that when you say "encourage" you truly, unambiguously mean "force."

comment. So they were there to read before you responded.

thunderlips11 says

Odd that a regime that is allegedly pushing a strong atheist agenda would issue this to their own Army.

SS did not have this on their uniforms, only Wehrmacht

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gott_mit_uns

Bellingham Bill says

thunderlips11 says

Odd that a regime that is allegedly pushing a strong atheist agenda would issue this to their own Army.

SS did not have this on their uniforms, only Wehrmacht

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gott_mit_uns

Duly Noted. However, the divisions of the Wehrmacht greatly outnumbered the SS formations, and it was the principal tool of Nazi expansion - and also committed plenty of atrocities, as the recordings in bugged rooms of US/UK POW camps prove. It was served by Chaplains, both Catholic and Protestant - but not Odinist. Atheists were prohibited from joining the SS - only Protestants, Catholics, and "God Believers" were admitted - and all Wehrmacht soldiers took an oath, swearing by God, to serve Adolph Hitler.

thunderlips11 says

However, the divisions of the Wehrmacht greatly outnumbered the SS formations, and it was the principal tool of Nazi expansion - and also committed plenty of atrocities, as the recordings in bugged rooms of US/UK POW camps prove

Sure. Even the anti-Hitler clique in the Wehrmacht -- e.g. von Stauffenberg -- was approving of the Germanic reconquest of Poland, to recapture what they had lost in 1918. Wehrmacht was generally OK with taking out France, again, too, since France was the one who had declared war on them, and they still had unfinished business with the Allies in 1939.

As generally conservative, German militarists didn't have much truck with godless revolutionary "Bolshevik" Russia for that matter -- Hitler came to power as the right's bulwark against domestic leftist revolution -- and welcomed the opportunity in 1941 to defend the new Germanic hegemony from its only future rival, Stalin's Russia.

Warriors gonna war. Germans in the 1930s lived in a time closer to the Kaiser's Germany than the postwar pan-Europeanism. More parochial, chauvinistic, and bigoted against non-Germans.

Not that the Germans aren't still generally like that, for all I know, having never lived there.

The point about Nazism not being atheist is an important one -- Nazis didn't want independent free-thinkers, they wanted groupthink and homogeneity, with Nazi ideology foremost in people's minds.

So they were more anti-Church than atheistic per se. Maybe similar to Soviet Russia and Communist China.

What is with the Internet? A thread that starts off as a rational NPR discussion of rising sea-levels and ends up with posts about the Nazis? Does every discussion thread on every forum ultimately end up about Nazis regardless of the subject matter if the thread lives too long?

Dan8267 says

Does every discussion thread on every forum ultimately end up about Nazis regardless of the subject matter if the thread lives too long?

You know where else it was that conversation tended to turn toward Hitler?

In NAZI Germany, that's where!

Bellingham Bill says

Not that the Germans aren't still generally like that, for all I know, having never lived there.

The point about Nazism not being atheist is an important one -- Nazis didn't want independent free-thinkers, they wanted groupthink and homogeneity, with Nazi ideology foremost in people's minds.

So they were more anti-Church than atheistic per se. Maybe similar to Soviet Russia and Communist China.

Hi BB, good points all. I think "Anti-Clerical" is a good description of the attitude of the Nazi party - and an attitude long shared. The Kulturkampf under Bismarck, the I-am-Barbarossa-come-again attitude (Lay Investiture), the Ghibellines/Guelph struggle, Luther's reason for gaining steam very quickly and his support among nobles: Basically, the concept of more German control, less Italian control over German Churches is a long standing trend in Germany. The NSDAP did try to push a Duetsche Christian church based on a muscular Aryan Jesus beset upon by vile Semites and decadent Romans; and support of that Church was in the NSDAP platform. The few neopagans - who were a significant minority before in the party - were placed in camps soon after the Nazis took power, probably to shut them up.

The Germans of course, are not this way anymore, and are generally thoroughly embarrassed by WW2 atrocities. I count myself a Germanophile.

Before the 1800s, if you asked other Europeans to describe the Germans, they'd probably say "They're poets, musicians and artists who like to sing and make pretty things." -- very different than how the Germans are perceived in the early 20th!

Dan8267 says

What is with the Internet? A thread that starts off as a rational NPR discussion of rising sea-levels and ends up with posts about the Nazis? Does every discussion thread on every forum ultimately end up about Nazis regardless of the subject matter if the thread lives too long?

Another confirmation of Goddard's Law, right here.

@Dan8267, Sorry, I tried to stay on target by offering Population Reduction as a means of arresting Environmental Catastrophe, but I just couldn't let Nazi baloney stand unchallenged.

I have to read the IPCC reports to verify this for myself, but the IPCC apparently says that even though western Antarctica is losing ice (which is what predicates this catastrophic sea level rise prediction), eastern Antarctica is gaining ice cover at a faster rate, due to the increased snowfall due to warmer temperatures. On net, Antarctica is making the sea level fall, because western loss is smaller than eastern gain.

This link is from a site which denies the AGW thesis, but the references it cites are IPCC publications, so they're not making the stuff up.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/28/ipcc-findings-dispute-abc-cbs-nbc-and-bbc-alarmist-and-flawed-antarctica-sea-level-rise-claims/