Returning to the roots: a hardcore Highlander post
"Palestinian resistance and persistence is growing fierce rather than weakening. As an IDF intelligence general predicted already at the first Intifada. ‘In order to win, all Palestinians have to do is to survive’. They survive and they are indeed winning."
Read the above on a blog last year and came across again today.
Type rest of the post here
4 comments:
I think both the IDF officer and the blogger have shown political correctness in their choice of words.
To obtain the true meaning, I think "survive" must be replaced with "breed".
Personally, I admit that I have a problem with all defined groups of people where the number of children per woman is significantly above 2.1.
Maya in Libya the number of children per woman I believe was at least eight 40 years ago, now it has dropped to an average of 4.5 ? I don't have the statistics but this looks about right. I have no problem with that :)
And breeding is definitely one mode of survival of one's own species, most problem this is keeping Israel sleepless.
You have heard the legend about the chess and the grains, haven't you? That a wise man taught a ruler to play chess and the ruler told him to name a wish. The wise man said, "put a grain of wheat on the first square of the chessboard, then double the number of grains for each square and give me as many grains as correspond to the entire chessboard". This tale is told to kids to illustrate geometric progression.
You said that you believe the average number of children per woman in Libya is about 4.5, and this is OK. Let's say, for simplicity, that there are as many men as women, that Libyans form distinct generational cohorts (in order to count the entire population as "one generation"), that the average number of children per woman is 4 and they all reach adulthood. This way, the population will double its number every generation.
Libya has 1.76 millions of square kilometers land and currently 5.67 millions of people. If the above parameters remain constant, my calculations show that it will take between 21 and 22 generations to obtain the density of a rally (4 people per square meter) for the entire Libyan territory, including the desert. This makes a little more than 7000 billions of people.
Of course this arythmetrical problem resembles other doomsday scenarios in its (faulty) assumption that the current trend will be preserved indefinitely long. I just wanted to illustrate that 4.5 children per woman in the long run IS a problem.
In fact, according to Wikipedia, currently Libyan women have on average only 3.7 children - and I guess the number continues to fall.
3.7 children ? I did not look but I was not that far off thanks :)Still I would argue that a big number of Libyans actually have at least 4 children now between the ages of 3 to 12. Yes they number will inevitably decrease by half but unless we have a war or some form of famine or plague of Biblical proportion our continuity is assured on this land. On the other hand for Palestinians in the Occupied Lands breeding is one of the means to assure a continuity of their species. I know that someone will come up that their numbers have increased so they are assured continuity but yes this is true because their women are having 6-8 children to compensate for the inevitable loss of a minimum of 4.
I'm sure this breeding will stabilise once they are assured of a stable future, whether by the power of the gun or 'democracy'.
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