Bombing in Syria not the way to peace in Syria - Julie Bishop reckless

David Z Hughes has just expressed what many people think, but most do not express. I know David. He is a brilliant engineer and he thinks through social conundrums with an engineering approach. He is a very warm person, who once sent me a card from his factory cat, and with a left-field sense of humour based on pure logic that can take your breath away, but when he is analysing a people problem in the abstract, he comes out with stuff that ignores human social constraints and therefore shocks them. I grew up with an engineer and engineers run our terrible overpopulation and planning program in Australia on the same sort of logic. They sort of accept the way people are presented as economic units and behave as if we people also accept that. So they foist smart cities on us and think we will like it because they have some hypothesis that it will make us more valuable or less costly economic units, which they confuse with virtue. [Edit: Sorry, did not mean to imply that David is a growthist, more that he has an engineering way of ignoring social constraints.]] I made those comments above just to let you know a bit the way I think David thinks and to introduce my response to the statement he has made about increasing the global death rate. I wish I had all day to write this, but actually it is part of my third book on the subject. Humans, like all other animals and plants, once tended to live in viscous populations. (Biological term, look it up). Many still do. These populations or societies have a default of (a) marrying within themselves within the constraints of incest avoidance and marriage rules (b) observing incest avoidance rules and marriage rules (kinship rules) that vary according to the carrying capacity of their local traditional territory, (c) discouraging marriage and therefore children between members of the population who lack land and assets sufficient to raise children without impoverishing the community or themselves. The smaller the population, the smaller the marriage and fertility opportunities. It is quite normal for people to live and die without a partner, whilst enjoying roles as aunties and uncles. In other animals there is often a delay or non-event of sexual maturation where fertility opportunities are not present. Or sexual behaviour may simply not arise. WAR: When war happens, it knocks out established marriage rules, kinship rules and structures, killing off spouses and giving people from another population fertility opportunities they would not have had before. This occurs through widows remarrying, through rape, through young people who would have found no one unmarried of their age, or of suitable station, now exposed to an invading population or to a new host population as refugees and other kinds of immigrants. The melding of the invaders with the invaded, or migrants with the host population, becomes a permanent new population,which may become bigger than the original with a higher fertility structure. You can reexpress this by saying that the quality of endogamy in the viscosity of the people in the place was reduced by a wave of exogamy. (Depending on economic technology, the conquered may have their living spaces reduced as slaves or a lower caste, or work in factories - otherwise, in a subsistence society, the population for the area will come down to its original size.) This process has happened over a couple of centuries in the Middle East, where colonialisation and its accompanying industrialisation have pushed viscous endogamous tribes/peoples together, thus destroying their viscosity and greatly raising their fertility. The same process has both caused and used wars to change patterns of settlement and economic distribution in favour of new classes. Industry also encourages high marriage rates because it wants a lot of labour that is reliant on wages. We can see how this affects Australia. Even if you completely wipe out a viscous population, as long as its territory is still viable, a new population will fill it with the associated increase in fertility opportunities associated with new land. UNLESS they have an ethos of NOT filling up new land - but currently these kinds of ethos are overwhelmed by the commercial imperative of capitalism which will leave no living scrap of earth unconcreted if it can. This process is happening all over the world - but less in populations that live under Roman Law - notably those in continental Europe - because their inheritance and land-tenure system protects viscosity. Their identification as nations assists this. The European Union wants to destroy this viscosity and land-tenure. HOW GLOBALISATION RAISES FERTILITY OPPORTUNITIES Globalisation is a process of de-viscousing (or dissolving) our populations, and it causes many more fertility opportunities. To show this on a computer you would have to model a whole lot of discrete viscous populations (tribes) at some point, and start inserting events like global warming that reduced land availability and resulted in migrations, wars, takeovers, with the usual increased fertility opportunities. Eventually you would get to the 21st century, with the Australian property development industry overwhelming yet again the native born (now including many non-aboriginals) with new couples and fertility opportunities; US-NATO yet again pushing the peoples of the Middle East together by paying 'rebels' to chase them this way and that, rape them, kill their males and marry them; and Angela Merkel welcoming many new young unmarried males to Germany and the EU. This is how you get a world population with an average growth rate of maybe around 1.2, with growth lobbyists all trying to raise the rate, especially in Australia, US, NZ, UK, Africa, India, China and probably South & central America (haven't looked there lately). You did mention Yemen in the original post that I edited. If the Saudis, financed by the countries of US-NATO using British, French and US supplied weapons, get their way, they will almost annihilate the Yemen population. Then the Saudis and others will move in to resettle. Those Yemenis who survive will be in a situation where there are many more fertility opportunities than previously. US-NATO will probably open up some factories or other slave opportunities and the surviving Yemenis will continue to survive through very low wage labour. They may have large families because there will not be child labour laws so each child will raise the family income which otherwise would be stuck. We will be told that the Yemenis are finally 'developing' (uggh! hate that term) but that they have an overpopulation problem, which will require education of females and the eventual use of contraception. The only reason you hear more about Syria here than about Yemen is that we just don't have enough hands to type with! We are well aware of the immense tragedy, and in that tragedy, I include the political fallout of population structure destabilisation. I don't approve of what is happening in the Middle East or in Australia. I wish it would all stop, but war is going to make it worse. IMHO and my scientific opinion. What do you think, David?