May's population ideal is myopic, quite western-european centric, it wasn't that long ago the globe's population breached the 3 billion mark and we're now at 6+ billion; 25+ years of AIDS and multiple wars fought by multiple societies have made nary a mark on population growth. We'll see 9 billion people well before 2050.

The fact is in many societies children remain those society's most valuble assets if children long stopped being our most valuble assets, you know we got to weigh up the two kids against the tenured reputation, nice McMansion and two foreign cars in the driveway, the trust funds, the annual flights to Europe or Cancun or Jamaica etc., and those cheap foreigners without any documentation cutting our lawns and doing our dirty laundry and dishes tax-free. People are going to continue to have kids, especially in the "third world" which means most of the world, until some sort of global catastrophe hits, and I doubt that catasrophe is going to be a too-warm globe, unless the warming's caused by thermonuclear reactions, not excess carbon dioxide.

We could keep our southern border open as it remains a sieve, and suck up another 2.7 billion economic and political refugees before we reach India's population density, which for us here in the good 'ol USA would be 3 billion people. Just think of all the energy needed to keep 3 billion Americans happy, think of those Memorial Day jaunts to the national parks....

Nope, that's not feminism, that's Brightstar, or another of his ilk, hiding behind "anonymous. The combination of bold-face and bolder illogic sounds like Brightstar, however.

Johnny Come Lately to the party, however: I wondered how long it would take you to blame feminism as you define it.

Get a life, why don't you?

I was astonished at reading the following (I knew some people believed that but I didn't think they going to put it so bluntly):

but i feel that sending young men into machine gun fields of fire is more desirable than infanticide

I feel very sad that men are considered such a disposable thing and that the fact they die violently in wars is considered "more desirable" (in fact, this is the way it has been throughout history, while women were in a warm home, complaining that "men causes wars").

Imagine a statement telling "sending young women into machine gun fields is more desirable than infanticide". Unbelievable. Feminists would get outraged (and, for one time, they would be right).

So what are doing the women while men are dying in wars? Let's see.

better than both would be planning, but we're not there yet. educating women is not effective unless it leads to employment and independence

So is "more desirable" sending young men to die in war while women are educating to be independent.

Don't we believe in equality and independence? Why don't think about the idea of "sending young men and women into machine gun fields". Oops. I forgot equality is "only when suits women". This is feminism.

We were once the "alpha predator" on this planet. And one trait of a predator is that they proactively control their own population. Yet ever since grains were cultivated (Cain's way), we've gradually become a prey/parasite species, i.e., a race that has no control over its numbers and no real overriding sense of environmental stewardship. We have devoted some 6 - 10k years to the art of cheating nature and her natural checks and balances.

Now, as so many of us have become aware of our species-ending tendencies, the arguments have taken one or another side: either you're a man/woman of progress or a man/woman of what I would call regress." An example of a person of regress would be a 1930s Nazi, an Al Qaida terrorist, or a Woodstock hippie. As Fritz Stern wrote in his "Politics of Cultural Despair," the Nazi phenomenon was, basically, a study in collective irrationalism, i.e., for a few brief years, Germany became a nation of men and women of regress. As irrationalism is usually defined as an absence or breach of rationalism, regression is a turning back from any modern status quo's nominal plans of overall progress typically in favor of a vision of greater purity, simplicity, virtue, humility, et cetera.

Despite losing any and every objective debate, regress/anti-rationalism keeps popping up: the dream of a simpler time. And progressives -- both from the Left and Right -- keep berating them and beating them back. For example, Jutta Ditfurth, founding German Green, wrote a book exploring modern anti-rationalist environmentalism. In a nutshell she argues that any sympathy with paganism or New Age is tantamount to fascism! (If she counts out German environmentalists who have a Sulamith Wuelfing poster or a deck of tarot cards ... that leaves Jutta and five others, I believe.)

In much the same style as Stern, New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright describes Bin Laden as a rabble-rousing promoter of irrationalism in his book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Wright notes poignantly, what do they want to do after they've vanquished their evil foes? What sort of world will they build? He rambles on about how Bin Laden seeks to relive the times of the prophet Muhammad (no ice water, air conditioning, etc.), and how irrational this all is... Not very different from Hitler and his vision of modern Germany somehow transported back to the Wagnerian world of Siegfried and Brunhilde, or his Minister for Ag, Walther Darre who wanted the cities depopulated and all Germans on biodynamic (extreme organic) farms.

The most visible regress-progress fights are in the socio-political sphere; however, I'd say the real and deciding battlefield is the environment, i.e., will we solve our ecological problems with more science (progress), or will we abandon modernity to fall back to low population numbers plying low-tech? It is a simple fact that Medieval Europe -- even though half denuded of its forests, fresh waters progressively dirtied by human wastes -- was a window of history where the environment was not in any real danger of cataclysmic collapse. Of course, mining and other harbinger industrial destruction got going strong in the 15th/16th century, but we can safely say 13th century England, France, or Germany had no apocalyptic environmental issues -- and that from core Europe out in any direction the planet was also not too bad off, even though far from unoppressed by burgeoning humanity.

It's obvious that Mr. Leonard is 100% a man of progress, someone who will ultimately band with progressives of any and all political stripes as long as they oppose the Hitlers, the Darres, Rousseauian Pol Pots, communal hippies, Byzantine Muslims, SCAers, et cetera, who want to fumble around with turning the clock backwards. To a progressive, the only answer is more progress, the arrow of progress can only go in deeper, and to try and pull it out would simply be a horrid mess of gore ripped out on all the arrow's barbs. Yet anti-rationalist movements keep cropping up to oppose and consternate the progressives. They want to ride this or that collective nostalgic imagery backwards to a supposedly known, carefully selected and created past world.... Anyway that's what I think. That's what I think the fighting's all about.