That sounds like not buying anything to eat for lunch because, based on past trends, you already predict that you will lunch today.

Jesus Christ. Please stop with the analogies.

I'm flattered, but I only redeem manufacturer's coupons.

Analogies are helpful in communicating ideas because they help people go from everyday, concrete experiences to general ways of thinking. At the beginning of my post I gave a general way of thinking about complex causal interaction which you dismissed as "semantic". You were right that it was a semantic point (that is, a logical analysis of the meaning of words) but wrong to dismiss it. Immediately after dismissing it, you stumbled right into the same tautology as the OP:

What OP means is that "overpopulation" is a misnomer, since its not the population that's the problem, but rather the lack of infrastructure.

You claimed to be able to see that my statement about causes was more or less trivial and true by definition (it is), but weren't able to see how it applied here. I don't blame you: if someone doesn't understand something to begin with (for example, the fact that a problem can have multiple causes besides population and still be a population problem), it's more likely that they don't have much experience thinking that way than that they don't know (for example) that overpopulation is a social problem, or that social problems normally have several causes. That's why I provide analogies: people know how to think through the concrete situation about pizzas or haircuts, and seeing the structural similarities between the situation they're very familiar with and the one they're not familiar with helps them think in a new way.

Not all analogies work. But if the analogy doesn't help your partner think in a new way immediately, he might still offer an analogy that he thinks works better; that gives you a better grasp on what assumptions he was bringing into the original situation, and you can show him how the two analogies are different, and what the first analogy captures about the situation that the second doesn't, and help him grasp the general way of thinking that way. Or maybe he criticizes your analogy and you find a more exact one, and he criticizes the analogy again and you find a third one, and eventually he realizes the problem wasn't the little inaccuracies in the analogy, but that he thought he had to think about his original problem one way, and there was actually a different way of thinking he hadn't even considered.

But if you just observe that I made an analogy, you're not contributing anything to the discussion. You're also welcome to quote my post and discuss which letters I use most, how long my sentences are, whether I prefer therefore or thus... but I can't respond unless you offer some criticism or counterpoint, no matter how huffy your factual observations about what I wrote become.

Just to give some historical context, the concept of overpopulation is ultimately Malthusian, which by its roots was a racist and elitist pseudo-scientific conjecture that was used to justify or rationalize famine and genocide of the poor and Irish during that time period.

That's absolutely false. Have you ever read Malthus' Essay? If you had, you would not call it racist or elitist at all, much less rooted in an attempt to rationalize British policy during the Irish famines. Malthus published in 1798. Malthus died in 1834. The potato blight reach the British Isles in 1845.

I'm happy to tell you about Malthus' actual motives and the actual content of his arguments if you ask... but I assume you aren't even slightly interested.

False, the last half century has seen a massive burst in feminism, and female empowerment as well as increased use, further technological development, and less social stigmatism towards birth control.

I really have to wonder what's going on in your mind when I say the initial surge in third world population was caused by the fact that improved antibiotics and sanitation spread faster than Western approaches to family planning, and you indignantly lecture me about female empowerment and birth control. I really have no idea whether you don't realize "family planning" means giving women the right to make choices about when to have children, how many, and with whom, or whether you are trying to imply there was no birth control or no female marital choice before 1965, or whether you are trying to suggest that these Western attitudes towards family planning were always spread around the globe as widely as antibiotics.

Your concept of "carrying capacity"

It's not my concept. I'm sure you learned about it in middle school biology. Maybe something about rabbits and lynxes? Does that ring any bells?