Self-determined sexuality also in developing countries

Since May 1968 it has been a human right to be able to freely decide how many children you want. In 1994, the World Population Conference in Cairo adopted a plan of action to improve reproductive health care, including family planning and the empowerment of women.

        But a right to family planning is of no use if access to contraceptives is not made possible in practice. For large sections of the population in developing countries, the means for family planning are prohibitively expensive. They thus depend on aid organizations offering them contraceptives at a very low price or free of charge.

Left-leaning liberals and religious organizations prevent money from being spent on family planning in developing countries.

The Catholic Church refers to catechism.

http://www.vatican.va/archive/DEU0035/_P8C.HTM

2370 Temporary abstinence as well as the methods of conception regulation based on self-observation and the choice of the woman’s infertile periods [cf. HV 16] correspond to the objective criteria of morality. These methods respect the bodies of the spouses, encourage them to be affectionate and favor educating and raising in genuine freedom. On the other hand, “any act which, either in anticipation of, during or after the execution of the matrimonial act, at the end of its natural effects, is intended to prevent reproduction, whether as an end or as a means to an end, is reprehensible" (HV 14). While sexual union, by its very nature, expresses an unconditional gift of the spouses to each other, contraception turns it into an objectively contradictory gesture - a gift of not giving oneself completely. Thus the active rejection of openness to life is accompanied by a falsification of the inner truth of marital love ....

 When I read this section online, I initially thought that I had accidentally opened a version of catechism from centuries ago. But there is no more recent version.

Psalm 127 says: Children are also a gift from the Lord; whoever receives them will be richly rewarded. But one cannot derive from this that it is “reprehensible” to use means for family planning. In Europe, while hardly any Catholic adheres to catechism, they are unlikely aware that it causes great issues in Africa when they donate money to Caritas.

The following view held by left-wing liberal circles and do-gooders is no less inhibited:

In order to place women in a better position, access to family planning should not be improved, but education, health and prosperity should be promoted. Reproductive self-determination will then emerge automatically.

I recommend people who hold such views take a trip to a poor rural area in Africa. Look into the eyes of hopeful young girls who will probably never be able to raise the funds for family planning and imagine how these destitute girls will soon be mothers of six to eight children!

A lot of girls become pregnant at an early age and then prematurely end their time at school.

Every year there are 89 million unwanted pregnancies and 36 million often fatal abortions. https://www.dsw.org/freiwillige-familienplanung

There are certainly also men who want to prove their potency by means of the number of children they have, or mothers-in-law who urge women to have more children. However, millions of women in developing countries have no access to the means and materials for family planning.

Most African young adults have the opportunity to watch western movies on occasion these days. These then show them the sexual liberties that we enjoy in Europe and the US.

An American study revealed that young men think about sex 19 times per day. But it is obvious that this is no different in Africa.

We have brought life-saving medicines and a very permissive culture to people in developing countries, so we are now obliged to provide access to funds for voluntary family planning.

A racist mentality would be needed to want to reserve self-determined sexuality for the white population, only.

25.5 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are infected with HIV. This is another reason why more resources need to be spent on health care combined with education and access to contraceptives.

In Zambia, for example, 60 percent of the population lives on less than one dollar a day. How is the population there meant to raise the funds for HIV prevention and family planning by itself through more school education in the coming years?

From Carnivore to Fruitarian

The number of vegetarians and vegans is increasing significantly.

They believe that animals should not be killed.

For vegetarians and vegans, the difference between humans and animals is small.

For people who do eat meat, the difference between humans and animals is so great that they consume meat without a guilty conscience.

However, vegetarians and vegans also kill animals. While walking, they may involuntarily step on ants and for the cultivation of their plant-based food countless worms, beetles and mice are crushed while the fields are worked and thus die an agonizing death.

Most people have much more sympathy for horses, cattle, sheep and rabbits than for chickens and fish. But we also feel more for chickens and fish than for insects or even for the unicellular paramecium. Or don't we also hesitate when we have to kill a paramecium in biology class?

Do we have the right to feel more for horses than for a paramecium? We have more consideration for animals in which we see a resemblance to us or which behave similarly to us, such as dolphins.

Fruitarians take it even further. They believe that not only animals but also plants have a right to life.

Fruitarians strive for a diet with plant products that do not damage the plant. These include fruits, nuts and seeds, for example. The wood for furniture should only come from trees that have fallen over.

I feel bad when cutting lettuce in the garden. The crunchy lettuce actually wanted to shoot up and form seeds.

The stalk of a freshly cut birch ejects large quantities of xylem juice. Is that comparable to bleeding or crying?

Steve Jobs was a fruitarian for a while. He had empathy for growing plants. Was that why he was so good at understanding the minds of us IT laymen and became the first to develop a user-friendly cell phone?

Mahatma Gandhi also lived as a fruitarian for five years before becoming a vegetarian again.

On November 27th, 2017 I published a blog post in which I wrote that I would welcome the reawakening of a moderate pacifism. I think it's a pity that vegetarians and vegans aren’t expressing themselves in this direction as well.

In my eyes, meat eaters and fruitarians are the most consistent. Vegetarians and vegans have to face a lot of questions - questions they can only answer with great difficulty.

Vegans avoid carmine red, which is often used as a food coloring. Carmine is a red pigment extracted from cochineal scale insects and is therefore an animal product. But what do vegans do when their roses are infested by aphids/greenflies? No one is forcing them to use harsh chemicals. You can use ladybirds, which are now available in specialized stores. Is that permitted if you don’t also watch the ladybug gobble up the flies? Or are you allowed to use a nettle decoction to kill the aphids slowly?

Vegetarians don't want animals to suffer or be killed because of them. They only eat dairy products, eggs and plant-based products.

In the past, I thought vegetarians could easily live by their principles until I came across the website animal-rights-switzerland.ch/milch during my research:

Every second calf is male and would have to be killed immediately after birth if there were no meat eaters.

The newly born calf may spend just one to three days with its mother. After that, it is torn from its mother so that it does not drink away the cow’s mother's milk.

After only ten weeks, the cows are artificially inseminated again. Cows give the most milk after calving. If they wouldn't be giving birth constantly to calves, the milk production would drop significantly. Hence it follows that a lacto-vegan diet is only possible thanks to meat eaters.

Vegetarians and vegans don't want animals to be killed because of them.

Extreme animal rights activists describe the killing of animals as a criminal act. They demolish raised hides, free chickens and pigs from animal factories, deface butcher shop windows and threaten people who oppose them and despise even moderate animal rights activists.

In his book “Tiere Denken", Richard David Precht writes that this demarcation marks one's own identity and holds together self-esteem and group solidarity. ....an intellectual insight that one follows uncompromisingly, or the desire to see others as worse than oneself.

In my opinion, these are all characteristics that can be found in any other ideology and religion. These mechanisms can be found with the young socialists, with the neo-Nazis and with all extreme religious movements.

It’s called eat or be eaten in nature. Mice eat crickets, snakes eat mice and eagles eat snakes. Nature is brutal.

So why can humans not eat animal meat? Animal rights activists are often of the opinion that the difference between animals and humans is small. But why are we not allowed to act like a link in one of the food chains?

The difference between humans and animals must be so great that entirely different rules apply to us!

We are responsible for the animals.

When I was born there were 2.5 billion people, now there are 7.5 billion. Thousands of animal species are facing extinction. Humans have reproduced at the expense of animals without holding back. And there are still people around the world who oppose the promotion of voluntary family planning.

We are responsible for animals, so we must stop the extinction of species as soon as possible and we also need to stop the suffering related to livestock farming.

The surface area that is given to a single chicken or pig continues to be scandalously small! And many animal factories are horribly big!

Most consumers would hardly continue to eat meat if they were to visit an animal factory with the minimum and legally permitted standards.

Does the world improve/worsen without ideologies and religions

Violence causes the biggest disasters in the world.

      Anyone who defends the beliefs of an ideology or religion is partly responsible for ensuring that no acts of violence are committed in the name of their worldview.

Every Muslim must make it clear to like-minded and different believers that he opposes Jihadists.

Every Jew must take a stance against moving the borders of Israel.

Every Christian must admit that terrible crimes have been committed in the name of his faith. Every Christian must be aware that the biblical passages that condemn homosexuality cause huge problems for homosexuals - even up persecution.

Every Catholic must distance himself from the negative attitude of the Catholic Church and Caritas towards family planning in developing countries, as this leads to hunger, misery and violence.

Every social democrat should distance himself from the class struggle. Struggle leads to conflict and strife, after all. Social democrats must clearly distance themselves from violent left-wing extremist groups.

All parties that are to the right of the center must clearly distinguish themselves from right-wing extremist groups so that the atrocities of the Nazis can no longer be repeated.

It is certainly undisputed that all ideologies and religions have already been an origin of acts of violence.

B u t - do people without religion and ideologies simply become selfish and egoistical? Don't the morals decay? Doesn’t the social inequality worsen even more?

The influence of the churches fell drastically in the 1960s. However, the statistics reveal that the number of thefts among the local population has not increased.

The non-religious also try hard to get along well with their colleagues and circle of friends. In a tension-free environment, most people realize that their own selfishness usually harms them. We continue to love our neighbor because we, too, want to be loved by our fellow human beings and not because a moral code dictates this.

Divorces have certainly increased, but was it better, in the past, when people reluctantly persevered in marriage? I suspect that pro rata the consensual divorces have increased.

Those who openly confess the Christian faith must be aware that their way of life is judged critically by their fellow human beings. When a certain discrepancy becomes substantial, he is justifiably marked as a hypocrite. The sad examples include Catholic priests who assault children.

The Catholic and the Reformed Churches are losing lots of members.

The number of people without a denomination has risen sharply.

Only a few Catholics and Reformed (or Protestants) are still convinced that their faith alone create bliss. As a result, their churches lose some of their force and momentum for one, yet on the other hand their faith no longer leads to conflicts. Catholics and Reformed people today live without conflict with each other and with people of other faiths.

All churches benefit from the fact that people feel comfortable in the fellowship of like-minded people.

The same applies to clubs of all kinds, but also to parties and political groups.

              Most Europeans will agree that the world has not become worse with religious communities that are weaker or less forceful.

But can one then derive by analogy that the world will not become worse without socialism? Or is the Left’s fear that without class struggle the weaker will lose in our society a valid one?

Switzerland is a country where the wages of the low earners are as high as hardly any other country, although class struggle has been less important than in most other countries.

The functioning social partnership is a hallmark of the Swiss success model.

Just as religious people realize that their own egoism mostly harms them, politicians that are free of any ideology can realize that everyone is better if low earners also do well.

The Dance around the Golden Calf

in German published 2019-02

Weird relationship dramas are currently playing out in Europe. Although the starting position in Switzerland and the UK is different, there are striking parallels. In both countries, large sections of the population are against a new deal with the EU.
For the EU, enforcing its ideology is a priority, while EU citizens are secondary.

The EU is a project of do-gooders who take no account of non-members.

The EU has a democratic deficit!
What would the result be if all EU citizens were asked in a vote whether they want the EU to be a confederation or a federal state?

The EU has had bad experiences with direct democracy in the UK. The opinion will be consolidated in Brussels that the voters are not to be trusted.
The relationship between the EU and direct democracy is full of irritations.

The basic idea of the single market is widely accepted across Europe. But 
 u n r e s t r i c t e d  freedom of movement divides Europe. The EU's demand that everyone play only by its rules seems to be an imposition on sovereign nations that do not have to ask themselves if they share blame for the outbreak of the two world wars.

Countries that do not understand the inseparability of the four European freedoms are threatened with exclusion from the single market. The EU acts as a monopolist for the European internal market, but shows no trace of remorse. For me this is another example of how people who dogmatically support a “good” idea cause a lot of mischief.

If Britain and Switzerland do not comply with the dictates of the EU, they have to reckon with partial exclusion from the internal market. Prosperity may be less rapid in both countries for some time afterwards. Both countries do not know what “punitive measures” they can expect from Brussels, but since intra-European trade is also determined by WTO rules, the impact will be smaller than the EU supporters claim.

But is it the highest of all goals to optimize our wealth?

Is the dance worth it for the golden calf?

Are there no higher values than economic growth? Shouldn’t politicians advocate that the people can live according to their own rules and not be determined by others?

In the long term, however, prosperity will be higher if we don't become fixated on the golden calf.
Should we look at the planning of the Berlin airport, rigid French centralism or Italian chaos as a model? Isn't Switzerland the most successful European nation?