That those conditions were NOT the general norm in Europe
Which is false - obviously, they were, at the time specified. That's what industrialization was all about. Just go have a look at the standard British or French "suburb" from the era.
Why? Because everyone in Europe lived in French and British suburbs during the dawn of industrialization?
This is exactly what you have been questioning all the time.
I say crowded conditions existed -> you say "bullshit".
Yes, because what you ACTUALLY said was that crowded conditions were "fairly standard" or that personal privacy was an "incredibly rare luxury" for most people in the world. Basically you made a sweeping generalization that in hindsight turned out to be absurd and now you're reduced to "You don't believe me that crowds
exist!"
I say two people having sex in a crowded room is a likely scenario, as per well-known historical fact -> you say I'm imagining things.
Yes, because what you actually said is that it is a COMMON scenario that would be more the rule than the exception.
All in feeble attempts to sidestep the fact that the existence...
It's not their existence we're debating, it's their UBIQUITY. This in a context of a discussion of the planet Gideon, where those conditions ARE depicted as being ubiquitous, primarily because of the population's long life and irrational aversion to birth control or self restraint of any kind. And lest we drift too far from the point: it wasn't about prudishness or the morality of public fornication. It was about the fact that the GIDEONITES seem to find their living conditions unbearable, and both their leader and his Typhoid Mary daughter make statements implying how miserable they all are due to the overcrowding.
To be clear: they're not overcrowded because it's cold outside.
They're not overcrowded because all the jobs are in the city.
They're not overcrowded because their houses are small.
They're not overcrowded because the governor's mansion uses up way too much land (it obviously
does, but that's not the reason). They're overcrowded because there are so many people on their world that their population density approaches that of insects and you literally can't find a spot on the entire planet that doesn't have at least ten people standing on it.
your original claim that Gideonite-like folks procreating would somehow be unlikely.
And I claimed this is because the Gideonites THEMSELVES find those conditions uncomfortable. I could only imagine they find sex equally uncomfortable to be still doing it under those conditions. Which means they either don't care for sex all that much and have it for other reasons ("love of life," or maybe some sort of Mote-In-God's-Eye reproductive drive) or they're a bunch of incredibly short-sighted hedonists who are perfectly content to fuck themselves into extinction.
YOU made the claim that everyone, everywhere, lived like that at some point.
Well, in Europe, yes. In North America, yes. In Asia, yes. In Africa, yes. In Oceania, I sort of doubt it.
You're 0 for 5 on that one, unless you backtrack again and amend that with "in a few places in special cases." Otherwise, I maintain a writ of "Bullshit."
rural areas are less densely populated than any time in their history.
Which in no way leads to spacious accommodations.
And is in no way equivalent to what we're talking about. If the people of Gideon were crowded because of their
accommodations, then anyone who wanted more room would be to simply move the hell away from each other or build bigger houses. Introducing a virulent alien plague among their population makes no sense at all unless it is the ONLY way to thin out their population (i.e. there is no "elsewhere" for them to move).
. Suffice to say, a planet whose population is so massively saturated would have HUGE downward population pressure even without the introduction of a plague. I sort of thing that without the introduction of Kirkitis, nature would eventually run its course and the Gideonites would start murdering each other like a NORMAL dystopian society.
