Universal Birth ControlFollow

And why would you think that? Young people have sex. They will frequently have sex regardless of the presence of birth control.

Besides, where your argument fails utterly is that the only way it will work is if people don't use it. If people don't use it, it won't cost much money, will it? Do you think people are just going to go pick up free contraceptives and not use them?

I'd rather be naive than biased beyond reason, but I don't think I'm either.



How can you miss the point by such a wide margin? The point is that welfare is that it is a method of treatment to societal problems. IF free birth control proved to be an effective preventative method to those problems, then we wouldn't NEED a treatment, or much less thereof. IF we do nothing, then we have as much need for a treatment as ever. You seem to think that if you take away the treatment (the "reward" lol) it will fix itself. That will work just about as well as depriving people of the flu vaccine because it only makes them weaker because they depend on the vaccine and can't fight the flu themselves. Your argument is therefor, ridiculous, and all throughout your post you managed to come across like a condescending prick yet again. Your credibility is on a steady decline lately. I suggest a little reflection.



You talk as if this is a genetic trait that is hereditary. Your kids could turn out the same way. Do you know what the single most influential variable is thought to be in a child's success right now? Socioeconomic status. The ability to have basic needs met. You want to take that away, because you think that what? Children who are born to ignorant egocentric parents inherit those traits?

The harsh reality is that we have thousands and thousands of citizens who aren't "languishing on the government's dime" and are only barely surviving, as if all we want for our citizens is for them to survive. Yes, because if they survive, then they are successful. You seem to be trying to apply Darwinism to the American social structure. That might work fine for a herd of boars in the serengetti. It does not apply to creatures intelligent enough to -kill themselves- despite their basic needs being met, and why? Because humans have other needs. Those needs are harder to meet the more time is consumed in meeting basic needs.

Personally I think we need to establish a minimum standard of living and provide for that standard.

Your delusional rants are the 'basic lessons'in the Healthcare thread? You are one seriously self centered fUcked up moran.

My wisdom so antiquates known knowledge, that a psychiatrist examining my behavior, eccentric by his academic single corner knowledge, knows no course other than to judge me schizoprenic. In today's society of greed, men of word illusion are elected to lead and wise men are condemned. You must establish a Chair of Wisdom to empower Wise Men over the stupid intelligentsia, or perish.

All knowledge of the human word animal, is insignificant, when his fictitious word world is compared to Nature's own Dynamic & Harmonic Time Cube's Creation Principle.

God created only a single 24 hour day rotation of Earth, while I have created 4 simultaneous 24 hour days within a single rotation of Earth - therefore, I am wiser than the word god, and all word worshipers. All words are fictitious.

Edited, Mar 6th 2007 6:43pm by Jophiel

And yet you agree that the solution is to try to prevent those who can't support their children from having them (what other reason for arguing for universal birth control?).

You keep dancing around that point. Your own argument assumes that the purpose here is to try to prevent those women from having children. The difference is that I want to do this by making the choice a more obvious one for them. If the consequences for having children without a means to support them is painful, people will avoid it. By removing those consequences, you provide incentive for them to do so, and no amount of free birth control will change that.

You seem to think that simply providing more access to birth control will fix the problem, yet there is absolutely no evidence to support that. No previous action to increase the availability of birth control has prevented poor single women from having children at alarming rates. In fact, the trend has been upwards.


The problem with this issue, as with most, is that in your mind people don't have free will and the ability to make choices. Thus, you don't understand a system that rewards those who make good choices, and punishes those who make bad ones. Instead, you prefer to assume that everyone's situation is a result of conditions totally outside their control, so we must correct for those things by helping those who end up in bad situations.


This is incredibly noticable here. Because you are right that the advent of reliable birth control has helped reduce unwanted pregnancies. However, that reduction has largely been amoung middle class and higher people. Every statistic shows this. Middle class folks enjoy the freedom of active sex lives with very low rates of unintended pregnancy. Poorer folks seem to have had the opposite effect. You assume that this is the result of availability. That the statistics for the poor folks are a result of a lack of ability to obtain the birth control. Thus, you embark on a campaign to make it cheaper and cheaper (or even free), never noticing that no matter how free you make it, the stats don't seem to change.


And that's because you're totally missing the point. You'll never get it unfortunately, because it goes against everything you believe in. But the reason people are poor or middle class or rich isn't because of luck, but because of action and choices. Yes. The *child* didn't choose which home to be born into, but that child's parents took actions and made decisions that made that home what it is. And those parents pass the ideals that they used to get where they are on to their children. Middle class folks gain more benefit from the availability of birth control because they've been taught to be responsible, by their parents who were themselves responsible (hence why they're middle class instead of poor). Thus, they know to be careful about certain decisions that might ruin their lives. Statistically, this results in a more dilligent use of birth control. Poor people are poor because of their choices. You can extend this back through generations if you want, but their parents were poor because they were raised in a poor family and perhaps never learned how to be anything else. We can debate the exact causes, but there is absolutely nothing preveting any individual in this country from suceeding in life. If they are raised with the correct values and a sense of personal responsibilty.

Poor people don't gain as much from birth control not because they can't afford it but because statistically, they're less likely to be responsible (their parents weren't either, right?). They're more likely to make bad choices. And one of those choices is to have unprotected sex. I'll also toss in that when you're already poor, you're not going to see living off public assistance as a step down. In many cases, for young women living in the ghetto, they see this as a source of liberation. They get their own place. They get to be a parent. In some strange way they think that this will make them responsible, even while they are doing something incredibly irresponsible.


Of course, this flies against your entire social ideology. You cannot accept that people make their own choices and that it's largely those choices that determine their fate and the fate of their children. Because if you accepted this, then you'd have to reject pretty much every single goal you support politically. It no longer makes sense to support a wellfare state if you believe this, because you're simply incenting people to make bad choices.


It's obvious to me because I already believe that people make choices and their choices are the cause of their own condition. Thus to me, it's incredibly clear that the problem is that we're making it easier for people to make bad choices. It's equally clear that no amount of increased availability will have the effect you seem to want. All it'll do is cost us money. I'm sure the middle class folks will appreciate not having to pay for their birth control, but it wont make a dent in the rates of poor children being born into this world.

This post wins.


Infinite knowledge... <3

Edited, Mar 7th 2007 5:32am by Shinjaki

Oh Shit.

I agree



And again, I agree (I feel dirty now)

Phew! And now you turn on your 'black or white' pseudo logic so I can point out that you're a selfish **** who is lucky to have been born white in a racist society still showing post-slavery bigotry.

Maybe like me, you've suffered from poverty and hunger in the past.

Maybe you (like me) have had the breaks and been able to clamber your way to comfort and financial stability.

And like me, you're not a black woman living in a Shithole who's been written off by a selfish society that will donate bajillions oif dollars to a billioinaire TV Evangelist while crossing the road to avoid the smell of poor people.

I hope your nipples are kidnapped by aliens and converted into acid-yielding skin terrorists!

As a wise man once said:

FUck you and the fUck-truck you fUcked in on!

So, in otherwords, I was correct when I proposed earlier that you believe that providing free birth control to people is a means in and of itself, and that it has no purpose other then to simply exist.

The birth control is not supposed to help anything at all then, right? It's not supposed to actually you know "control births"? Just be something that the government pays for and provides for the people, but like the appendix has no actual purpose or benefit.

Got it. You could have simply agreed with me when I asked you earlier if this was true, and we'd all have concluded that you like to spend money on programs that have no actual benefit for anyone and been done with it...


Silly me though. I expect that if the government is going to tax me and spend my money on some social program, that it actually have a stated goal for doing so and some measurement of that goals success. But hey! That's just me. You seem to have an "anything that puts more money in the hands of the government" approach, so I guess it works for you.

Um. Whatever Smash. Brain fart.

How about I just repeat what I said earlier:




Same question Smash. Are you saying that we should pay for a government service even though the service provides absolutely no benefit?


So. If I propose a new government program to provide left handed monkey wrenches to everyone, you'd be all for it? Why?

Again. Unless your entire agenda is to simply increase the total amount of money and control the government has, I don't see how this makes any sense. At least others have argued that the birth control would have some effect (or believe it would). You seem content just to do it for the sake of doing it...

Guess I have to go hunt down a quote I heard long time ago.

"Biggest cause of childhood provery was divorce."

Not that I wouldn't know from first hand, how fast one can go from middle class to poor. Nah, then I would be making sense and I don't post at this hour to do that.

+1 on my post count towards maing 10,00 before I turn 50.

I think it's the part where some people might have to give up buying a second SUV in order for all the kids in the country to receive free health-care.

Except that's not a very good analogy, since presumably a starving person is starving specifically becuase they don't have any food to eat. There's no separation between providing the food and the person eating.

In this case, the problem is that poor single women are having children that they can't support. The problem of support occurs some time after the act which creates the child (unlike the problem of starvation which occurs as a lack of food occurs).

A better analogy would be a specific method of providing food that is failing to get the food to the starving people. Let's say you're using a specific organization that promises to provide food to starving people. However, no matter how much money you pump into this organization, the food never reaches the starving people and the rate of starvation among your people does not decline.

Would you not think that this was a waste of money? Would you not seek other ways of fixing the problem? I think so. At least I would hope so...


Your problem is that you've decided that more availability of birth control is simply a good thing, regardless of its actual effects. Thus, you believe it's worth providing free birth control to everyone, no matter the cost, just because. I think that's insane.



It's exactly that you think your political philosophy isn't complicated that creates the problem. You think the solutions to the worlds problems are easy. But (as I've stated many many times), I believe you think they are easy, not because they actually are, but because you are only looking at half of the equation. You see people in need and assume we can just provide for them and everything will be fixed.

But that just doesn't work. You are correct that there is plenty of wealth in the world to do this. Today. But the bulk of that wealth is currently being used doing such trivial things as providing the very goods, services, jobs, and quality of life that you seek to provide directly. Your approach is like the lotto winner who thinks "I've got tons of money, so I don't have to work and I can have anything I want...", and ends up destitute a few years later after the money runs out. Why did this happen? Because he consumed the very thing that he needed to ensure continued prosperity and lost it all for a short term gain.

Your approach literally consumes your own future. Your children's futures. Sure. We *could* take all the wealth in the world and spend it providing a wonderful living for everyone. But when it ran out, we'd have a whole bunch of people needing food and goods, and nothing to provide it for them. The wealth of the world doesn't magically appear. It's created over time by careful investment. Your method would take that away, robbing us of it in the future.

You are so obsessed with punishing those who hold the wealth, that you don't see how important it is that "someone" holds it. It really doesn't matter who it is. As long as they are re-investing it and the result of those investments is more jobs, newer and better products, and continued growth of the total pie, then they're doing with it what they should and what will benefit us all the most. If we decide arbitrarily to take it away and spend it, we'll have nothing left. It will eventually run out and then what will all your starving people eat?




I'm not confused by this at all Smash. I understand exactly what you want to do. But unlike you, I know how horrible of a mistake it would be to actually do it. That's the difference...

Actually, training people to use their offhand as well as their on hand can be very beneficial, if it indeed helps condition the connections between the left/right side of the brain nad the body. I've don ie myself; i can now throw and typewith either hand, individually and at the same time. granted the most I've utilized it for is dual-boxing EQ characters on adjacent computers, but um, I had somewhere else to take this argument but lost it.

with you liberals it's always "Bisexual this" and "Bisexual that"

I have nothing against the ambidextrous, but they're hardly the core components of a Nucular Family