Re: Optimal Population?

John Goves wrote this:

>Even if pop control has been justified in the past for bad reasons and with
>bad methods doesn't mean there aren't good reasons and methods now for it.
>If a racist built an affordable non-polluting car for racist reasons, I
>would still be inclined to buy it for my own reasons. This is a typical
>fallacy of many of my colleagues on the left. The same fallacy is committed
>in the sociobiology arguments. "Some sociobiologists were racist, therefore
>sociobiology is necessarily racist." I am not interested in taking up that
>argument again, I only want to point out a recurring fallacy.
>
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Well, that MIGHT be a fallacy. But not always. After all, I can say that
SOME people who call themselves Nazis have done bad things. Is it therefore
a fallacy to label  ALL Nazis as bad?

By the way, any ideology that says that the stratified social order is
genetically determined is saying that the racial stratification is therefore
genetically determined. And that's a pretty good definition of a racist
argument.

And saying "both" economic problems AND "too many people" to the question of
why parts of India are difficult to live in is a way to evade what is the
core cause of India's problems. Yes, I'm sure there are some houses with too
many people inside. But  mixing up micro-example exceptions and using them
to define macro problems is characteristic of pro-capitalist propaganda.
It's fallacious reasoning that all of us, including myself, sometimes fall
into. But it's still fallacious.

Alan Spector
Alan Spector