Earth population to hit 7 billion today!

I haven't seen SJ or anyone else here make that argument.

The people trying to push population reduction on the third world are misguided "progressives" and self-styled "leftists" who think that capitalism would work just fine if only we could thin out the poorer populations of the earth. The environmental movement is, unfortunately, full of such people.

Citing Stephen Harper and the U.S. Congress as counter-examples completely misses the point. The defunding of Planned Parenthood and abortion-related services has nothing whatsoever to do with population issues, but rather has everything to do with with the struggle between women's rights to reproductive freedom and the forces of religious obscurantism.

Not only that, the ruling classes are quite happy to see the environmental movement dominated by people who prefer to label the human race as vermin bent on destroying the planet, rather than developing a real analysis and strategy based on understanding the fundamentally destructive nature of the world political-economic system. The very last thing they want to see the environmental movement get behind is a class analysis of the problem.

The idea that Planned Parenthood is actually the solution to the environmental and food crises is exactly the kind of misunderstanding and mythology that must be combatted if we are to have any chance of turning this juggernaut around. But that's not to say that Planned Parenthood should not be funded - for reasons having nothing to do with overpopulation and everything to do with reproductive choice.

Population deniers join the climate warming deniers in the use of various specious arguments.
There are many reasons (often targeting each other) for adversarials: capitalists, anti-capitalists, the US state department, the RC church, and the non-religious, to hold in common the Hardinian Taboo, (the taboo against confronting the reality of planet destroying overpopulation and, on smaller scale, demographic entrapment).

But, like most human uses of rationality, it is here also in the service of the irrational--not the least of which is the ultimate irrational of the hardwired impulse of organisms to propagate--translated into an unquestionable limitless human right, spurred by the unique human propensity for self-deception.
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Since this is an old controversy on Babble, I'll add this old postt:

It wasn't so long ago that many people in the industrialized west engaged in unprotected screwing on an almost epidemic level.  Ten kid families and counting were fairly standard at one time.  It's been only since the sixties really that families grew vastly smaller in number, to where most couples now have one or two if any.  And so now we find ourselves a position, nothing new in that, to tell other people and regions that they're having far too many kids.  The environmentalists are better off sticking to trees, rivers, recycling and such.

6079_Smith_W's style of debate:

Don't you think you're overdoing the red-baiting a bit? Don't you think this is how, say, Harperite cabinet ministers like to put down any NDP intervention in question period that they can't deal with? I bowed out of this discussion because you're having trouble making substantive points, or even understanding where Spector and SJ are coming from. I really am not sure how to tell you to cool down a bit, stop hurling the "revolution" sarcasm around, and try to discuss this important topic without (say) accusing others here of being opposed to women's reproductive rights. No one was rude to you.

Unionist. 

I am not red baiting at all; I just have a problem with trying to promote one progressive cause at the expense of another, using dodgy arguments. 

And I made no claims of personal attack.

(edit)

Didn't see your comment catchfire. 

If that's your assessment of the situation, then fine. There's not much more I can say, and I am done. 

(edit)

... not to mention the fact that we have outstripped resources in the past, long before the age of stock markets.

How the heck did anybody force the Chinese down the road of capital? 

It was a major sell job since the 1980s. Chicago School monetarists traversed the globe selling a better and more efficient way for Eastern Euriopean and Soviet, Soviet-friendly countries to integrate their economies with the West. Harvard and Princeton economists would go to these countries with stacks and stacks of papers, slide shows and a waving fistfulls of money to convince people like Gorbachev and Moscow intelligentsia, Deng Xiaching, Slobodan Milosevic etc that there could be a better way than the "inefficiencies" of socialism,  cold war embargoes and especially dirty wars and covert gladio operations, and economic warfare waged by the West against the East in general. The cold war sometimes resembled the plot lines from the book, 1984.

This is the most inscrutable verdict of "red baiting" I've seen.
It appears to be based on Smith's not beleiving that overpopulation is a myth
and that their are causes of the world's ills in addition to (not instead of) global capitalism.

Guilty secret - I have often had the same thought listening to some self-righteous privileged types. Their moralizing is generally aimed at others.

And besides...by not holding the line here, things would escalate and wind up encouraging the anti-trotsky faction.

Walk the walk!  I love it.

Since hypocrisy has been made a theme here, there is plenty to go around.
Most, if not all, Babblers who live in North America have an eco-footprint many times that of impoverished "developing" populations.  So obviously our role in the matrix of this disaster is great.

And regardless of a voiced concern for the exploited, we are the market and most take advantage of the bitter fruits of global capitalism in the form of cheap clothing, cheap food, and other products--along with the presumed inalienable right to reproduce within this North American cocoon of hyper-consumption .

Adding to the hypocrisy is the de facto alignment of some with global capitalism which depends on destructively high human reproduction which makes it a corporate buyers market in "developing" countries for cheap, disposable, labour--desparate for any income. This keeps the price of food clothing and other items low for us, the environmental destruction justified by "necessity" and the bottom feeding transnationals rich.

Geez, it's tough slugging being a social democrat these days. Being caught in contradictions at every turn, and always having to defend the indefensible.