I don’t know…it seems to me that this is the idea that has been pushed for about the last 20 years.

As for the genetic component of obesity…not according to Mayor Bloomberg. It’s all due to those nasty soft drinks and transfats etc.

Guess he never learned that there are beef cattle and dairy cattle.

That’s rather the point of nihilism. Ending future human generations. Same with abortion.

As for overpopulation… there’s no such thing. There’s plenty of space for everyone and then some. Human beings are the only creatures in the universe that remodel the environment to suit their needs, regardless of what that environment looks like. You may think that beavers do the same thing, but put beavers in the middle of the savannah and see what happens. Whereas Man… ah, put us in the Sahara, we’ll be alright more or less; transplant us to the Arctic, and we’ll also do fine, more or less.

Jack Haldeman’s plenty okay, but if you bought into his story, then you’ll have to buy into the notion that homosexuality is neither genetic nor congenital, but mostly learned behaviour.

Something I never did understand, though. Why is it that only homosexuality is treated this way? I mean, there are babies born drug-addicted, there’s some fairly good studies that suggest alcoholism and obesity are in some cases also genetic or congenital traits. And yet nobody ever says that this is just an alternative lifestyle, they have every right to indulge, it’s not their fault…

Somewhere, sometime, there was an experiment or a study done on rats. They were placed in a limited area, and simply observed. They multiplied and multiplied. Eventually they overpopulated the area (now I’m wondering if the food supply was regulated somehow), and problems developed, with gangs of males attacking individual rats, multiple matings of females, and killing and eating the newly born rats. Pregnancies became less frequent – in spite of the matings – and eventually the population stabilized. I don’t know what happened after that…no memory…I think that’s as far as we went. The point of the narration, as I recall, was that population pressures will affect ferility. In fact, what has stuck in my mind was not the fertility issue, but the behavior issues. It seems so similar to what happens in our cities today. I don’t recall any mention made about the male rats mating with other males, but with a reduced fertility – now I’m wondering. It seems to me that the assumption at the time was that the reduced fertility was the response to stress.

Same-sex marriage and the minimalist defense of abortion are both tactically sound for now. But the strain one begins to feel in public discussions is that people of good sense are being compromised by sentimental rhetoric originally adopted to convince bigots. Sentimentalization may be effective in a Hallmark regime, but it’s a bummer at home. Around the kitchen table, we ought to speak plainly. The goal of gay marriage, in the pro-marriage position, has to include indifference to marriage as an institution. Marriage must remain abstract—it hardly matters if anyone does it once the original blush is off and the initial rush abates. But the point of abortion rights, in the “pro-choice” position, should truly be abortions. Abortions need to occur concretely, readily, until the day contraception is magically universal and perfect; the idea that they’re inevitably tragic is just false.