Thank you, Wirt, for providing documented statistics and a superb analysis
of them.

You have pointed out the real reason that young Chicago males (and likewise
in other places with similar profiles) kill each other: overcrowding.  In
an earlier message in this thread you also pointed out that we can help put
natural selection back into the world of humans by making it easier for
people to kill each off.  So now we see that nature (reflected both in
"human nature" and in genetic selection, which really are the same thing)
has provided us a fair and just method of determining who should remain in
the gene pool.  In the long term, we'll be most fortunate if this selection
is fierce enough to also help with the overcrowding.  With fewer people,
those non-breeding males will again have places to go where they aren't in
perpetual conflict with the dominant breeding males. When population is in
a (fluctuating but on-average) relative equilibrium with the resources
(energy, food, elbow room, etc.) of the planet then the real quality of
life will be vastly improved.

A few radical ideas from Robert Heinlein:
=====
All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young
children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly
which can -- and must -- be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime
function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic
is possible. Attempts to formulate a "perfect society" on any foundation
other than "Women and children first!" is not only witless, it is
automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them
male) have tried endlessly -- and no doubt will keep on trying.
=====
All men are created unequal.
=====
"No man is an island--" Much as we may feel and act as individuals, our
race is a single organism, always growing and branching -- which must be
pruned regularly to be healthy. This necessity need not be argued; anyone
with eyes can see that any organism which grows without limit always dies
in it's own poisons. The only rational question is whether pruning is best
done before or after birth.

Being an incurable sentimentalist I favor the former of these methods --
killing makes me queasy, even when it's a case of "He's dead and I'm alive
and that's the way I wanted it to be."

But this may be a matter of taste. Some shamans think that it is better to
be killed in a war, or to die in childbirth, or to starve in misery, than
never to have lived at all. They may be right. But I don't have to like it
-- and I don't.
=====
When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not
far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is
that it made it possible to go elsewhere.
=====

Again, thank you making the point so well.

--
Jeff Woods
"It seems...that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in
the limiting of privacy." -- Isaac Asimov in Foundation's Edge (6.1)

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