Tosspot of the week

This week's clear winner is the Catholic Archbishop George Pell, who apparently hasn't taken his head out of his arse for long enough to see the problems his own country (much less the rest of the world) caused by overpopulation. He seems to think we need more people. Has this idiot not bothered to look around himself? Does he not think the world's resources are already stretched enough?

Does he not think there are enough homeless and starving children in places like Africa and India? Does he not think there have been enough wars fought around the world over increasingly scarce resources? Has he not noticed that EVERY Australian State Capital city bar one is facing a future of severe long-term water shortages -- the one exception being Hobart, which just happens to be the least populated? He's already proclaimed his ignorance of the larger global issues of climate change, so it's not surprising to see that he's overlooked the principle cause (i.e. rampant pollution stemming from the fact that the world has TOO MANY PEOPLE).

"No Western country is producing enough babies to keep the population stable, no Western country," Cardinal Pell said. "In many cases there is an increase in divorce and there is an increase in serial monogamy.

"Ruthless commercial forces are telling young people that this is the way forward, that this is the modern way, and they remain totally silent on the difficulty and damage this does to marriage and family life."

How does this idiot think that simply making more babies is going to ease or halt "relentless commercial pressures" or stem the "increase in divorce"? If all the whining in the media is to be believed, the average Australian family is already having enough trouble with inflation and the cost of living generally -- how is another mouth (or mouths) to feed going to fix this? How are more children from broken homes and divorced parents going to fix "marriage and family life"?

If this guy really gave a flying f*ck about those issues, he'd be telling people NOT to rush into marriage and children until they were SURE it was what they really wanted, and were prepared to COMMIT to the 25 years that it takes for children to grow up and leave home these days. It looks to me like he has another agenda, most likely more children that his kind can brainwash into following their misguided and destructive ways. Or maybe he just wants more little boys to fiddle with, he doesn't seem terribly repentant or apologetic for that at the moment, nor terribly concerned for the victims.

It really astonishes me that someone who claims to be a man of God can have such little respect for God's creation (and I'm talking about the world and it's resources here, something our species is chewing through at an alarming rate with our rampant breeding). Fortunately, it seems that not everyone is falling for it, with one Christian coworker of mine describing the whole "World Youth Day" shenanigans (how does World Youth "Day" last for a week?) as "not a Christian event". The more I think about it, the more I agree with her.