Seconding toomuchtodo's comment, I also take issue with
> saying we need fewer people and enacting policies to achieve that seems dangerous: you’re trying to destroy other people’s families for no reason but your religious beliefs
Trying to conflate a natural (or at least unintended [1]) population drop with some deliberate policy of "family destruction" is the height of dishonesty.
> Trying to conflate a natural (or at least unintended [1]) population drop with some deliberate policy of "family destruction" is the height of dishonesty.
Your sibling comments (including the one you support) are arguing that we should continue policies which abuse the young to the point they are too distressed to breed because we have “too many people”. That would be animal abuse if I did it to cows: intentionally abusing a herd so they were too distressed to procreate.
I think you not admitting that I’m responding to sentiments expressed in this very thread is dishonest.
Quality of life and fertility seem to be very strongly anti-correlated. It does not seem like any sort of "policies which abuse the young" are needed to reduce population - education, gender equality, and some baseline material security suffice.
That the countries least desirable to live in have the highest fertility, and that there is a global ecological catastrophe slowly unfolding, are both well-documented common knowledge, that you became instantly ignorant of when they became inconvenient to your argument.
I would ask you to explain why you think "policies which abuse the young" are what people have in mind, or why they are needed, when obviously what has been shown to work and is popular is raising living standards. But I won't, because given the above, I already know the answer: it's much easier to argue for perpetual population growth if you can pretend the only alternative is "abuse the young to the point they are too distressed to breed".
> that there is a global ecological catastrophe slowly unfolding, [is] well-documented common knowledge
I find it strange you can’t show me actual support for that then, after my repeated requests — are you sure it’s not a widely held dogmatic belief?
> I would ask you to explain why you think "policies which abuse the young" are what people have in mind, or why they are needed, when obviously what has been shown to work and is popular is raising living standards.
Surveys of young people point to financial distress as why they don’t have children.
The entire system is set up in a way which is crushing the middle class (in the US and likely other developed nations), causing them to choose not to breed. The evidence suggests that people aren’t having as many kids as they would like due to policies which harm them (eg, high taxes) — policies which people support here despite knowing that they’re driving those outcomes.
> I already know the answer: it's much easier to argue for perpetual population growth if you can pretend the only alternative is "abuse the young to the point they are too distressed to breed".
This is you creating a strawman to avoid recognizing the negative impacts of your own policy and the harms it’s causing to humanity.
Just under 3% of the world's land remains ecologically intact [..] The study paints a gloomier picture than previous analyses of wilderness areas, focused on human impact on habitat, which estimated that 20 to 40% of the earth's terrestrial surface has been little affected by humans. - https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/15/world/intact-ecosystems-repor...
I.e. the overly optimistic studies showed that ~70% of Earth's land has been significantly affected by humans.
> Surveys of young people point to financial distress as why they don’t have children.
Clearly young people in Somalia are financially better off then, and we should emulate their policies.
> saying we need fewer people and enacting policies to achieve that seems dangerous: you’re trying to destroy other people’s families for no reason but your religious beliefs
Trying to conflate a natural (or at least unintended [1]) population drop with some deliberate policy of "family destruction" is the height of dishonesty.
[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/10/18/national/social... Japan’s total fertility rate [..] stood at 1.36 [..] The government aims to raise the rate to 1.8.