[LMB] Dark Beta (was: Re: Betan influence)

[Azalais Aranxta]

On Wed, 6 Jun 2007 onyxhawke at onyxhawke.com wrote:

> Secret scandals do not exist. Something is either one or the
> other.

Yes, but as long as one can pretend that something is not going
on, one doesn't have to act on it.  Or one can choose how one
acts on it.

> And why would someone need to declare what everyone
> already knows? Good god it'd be like Martin Luther Kng Jr
> running around screaming "I'm black, I'm black look everyone
> I'm black!!"

You may have noticed that gay people are not conveniently
coloured lavender for everyone's easy identification.  Everyone
can 'know' that someone is in a relationship, or has certain
sexual preferences, but if the matter isn't considered quite
polite and is never discussed, people can pretend that there's
nothing going on there.  Those who disapprove may prefer to
ignore the evidence, and those who think it's not such a big deal
but like you will keep it mum so that they don't cause you
problems.

> Where did I say illegitimate? On Barrayar an extra child is
> only frowned on if you can't afford it.

Or if its parents are not married.  To each other, anyway.

And you are wrong that people having a lot of children affects
no-one but them.  It affects the children, and the way they grow
up--particularly the older girls, as Rachel pointed out--and
often the youngest ones, who don't tend to get much of anything
that hasn't been used and used and used.

In an area that is short on resources, like Beta, if families
grow past a certain size, they affect other families who all have
to share the burden of strains on an artificial ecology that have
not been planned for.  If you want to have more than a couple of
children, you need to live in a natural ecology with freestanding
water and air and natural cycles.  If we do not stop
overpopulating this planet and break the natural ecology, we may
be able to save ourselves with artificial props to the ecology,
but a nearly certain consequence of this will be strict controls
on population.

Religious beliefs about population control are nearly always a
legacy of earlier historical periods when survival depended upon
a greater-than-replacement population growth rate.  I find it
hard to believe that G-d wants us to kill the planet.

~malfoy

****************************************************************
Azalais Aranxta (~malfoy)
ataniell93 on LiveJournal and Vox
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/malfoymadness

"I know the true world, and you know I do. But we needn't let it
think we all bow down." --Christopher Morley