So what about the crashing of the US dollar?

[system11]

My sister (1 child, divorced) at one point chose not to work because she would have been worse off.

Follow-up question: do you think the real problem here is that the standard of living being offered on the public dole is so unduly generous that a fair number of people are powerless to resist it, or that so much of what's on offer from employers nowadays is so paltry that the government has been forced to compensate (to some degree) to avoid having even working people starving in the streets (I imagine you've already seen my past rants about how full-time McDonald's employees are openly told by the company to apply for food stamps and Medicaid)? If your sister was in a position to make a real living wage (not anything huge, but enough to live with some measure of comfort, dignity and security) from a job she was considered "qualified" to do, how much longer do you think she, or most anyone like her, would choose to remain on welfare?

It's my opinion that welfare should be 'something you can survive on while looking for work', and for single people it is. Barely. As soon as you add children there's priority on social housing and all manner of extra benefits. With enough children and relevant sob stories it's possible to 'earn' a better than average working wage by doing nothing.

Disclaimer - the following IS a sensationalist and biased article, so just look at the actual numbers and actual quotes.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -wage.html

There's a point where earning a very small amount results in a loss of benefits resulting in an overall net loss. I believe recently there's been noise about trying to address that ('work should pay' slogan), I don't know how much has actually changed.

[Ed Oscuro]

It's my opinion that welfare should be 'something you can survive on while looking for work', and for single people it is. Barely. As soon as you add children there's priority on social housing and all manner of extra benefits. With enough children and relevant sob stories it's possible to 'earn' a better than average working wage by doing nothing.

So then why is it that conservatives (and many so-called liberals) view the only choice as eliminating welfare altogether? The problem also gets disproportionate attention, just like how "tough on crime" often is used to win more votes than "gee, maybe we shouldn't have one of the worlds' highest percentages of incarcerated people" in the US (a long-standing travesty and nightmare which is still only slowly attracting responsible attention).

Especially in the US, it's almost impossible to get into a discussion with anybody right-of-hard liberal about welfare without having this rare case trotted out as an excuse to kill the safety net off for the 98%+ of people (numbers in the UK are similar) who use the system as it was intended.

I've run into a fair number of poor people who game the system. It's not pleasant. But it's also damned idiotic to pretend that they represent the typical beneficiaries and targets of welfare, or that being poor signifies that a person is irredeemable scum. A few bad apples does not spoil the barrel, because poor people live everywhere and in very different families and communities. Likewise, wealth does not equate to having the characteristics that make a person deserve praise, either.

[neorichieb1971]

In Italy I heard they give women the snip if they want the first child on welfare. I think thats an excellent idea and it should be law throughout the world.


As for UK power. Most stations are coal. I see coal trains day and night (just search "Barnetby station" on youtube). If you were to stand on that station for one whole day you would see at least 35 coal trains a day (the mind boggles). Didcot has been shut down and the remainder of the stations use gas or are nuclear. Some coal power stations are being converted to wood chippings. However, my sources tell me the chippings originate from South America or the USA. Which is just silly. The coal comes from Poland and Romania as well since Mrs Thatcher shut all our mines down

The UK is in an energy mess tbh.

[system11]

The UK is in an energy mess tbh.

You're not wrong there, decades of mismanagement.

[Ed Oscuro]

In Italy I heard they give women the snip if they want the first child on welfare. I think thats an excellent idea and it should be law throughout the world.

This has more to do with private jealousy than it does with actually trying to engineer a good society - kids gonna happen. We've left the boundaries of decency if we decide that our own wish to keep a few dollars could ever justify physically disfiguring somebody else - for fuck's sake!

Beyond that horror, kids end up being the usually victims here. There certainly isn't much good to be had with simply letting incapable people be the point of disbursement of monies for dependents they can't take care if, I'll agree. While I don't happily advocate such a thing, I'll point out that nations can provide for parents to be disqualified from retaining custody of their current or future children, which may end up being just as effective.

[BryanM]

Breeder nuclear reactors promise a lot if they can ever be realized. Maybe it's not completely ideal, but nothing in life is. It's certainly a step up from fossil fuels, which of course have a much higher kill rate.

I've run into a fair number of poor people who game the system. It's not pleasant.

It's been repeated a thousand time but I'll mention it once more: Our welfare system is literally biblical. Women are cursed to poop out babies, men are cursed to labor. There should not be a financial incentive to have kids. (Of course it should be pretty clear I stand in the red on this matter: Pro-citizen's wage/dividend. It really isn't fair that a man working retail doesn't get his fair cut.)

We can't live in a pretend conservative world where every one can have a job. These layabouts are leaving open opportunities for someone else to take. The participation rate has always been around 60%, and has been consistently sinking with labor saving technology:



^ You can call it "peak employment" if you like.

It's also very fair to say absolutely everyone is on a form of welfare. Each dollar on SNAP has an economic multiplier of something like 1.6 (tax cuts tend to be around 0.2). Everyone in that particular chain has a portion of their labor actuated by that welfare: from the cashier to the truck driver (which will be obsolete before we die of old age) to the farmer (which was largely obsolete for certain crops that can be entirely tended by one guy in a machine, such as corn and what, and is why those farmers need to receive additional welfare to make those crops economically viable).

Ripping out the welfare core would rip the guts out of the private sector. Ripping out workfare (another form of welfare, such as cops, firefighters, DMV, post office) would do nearly as bad.

[Sometimes I wonder if the Kochs don't literally want the world to turn into a Mad Max style dystopia where warlords divide up the territory. That their war machine would perform the best due to their stores of oil, or some crazy conspiracy theory thing like that.]

It's just annoying that the TV has things like Jerry Springer to propagate all the worst of the conservative hate memes, while you never hear anyone defending laziness. It's built into the human condition for a reason; evolution would have obliterated it if it had no reason to exist.

They made quite a lot of people work for absolutely nothing for hundreds upon hundreds of years, until their governments, for various reasons, finally forced them to stop.

Right. They used to lock women in rooms to burn to death and murder people on the streets when they asked for a raise. The middle class was a very small percentage of the population. The past was fucking horrible.

And that's where they talk about taking us 24/7. I'd rather live in Kurzweil's Star Trek communist utopian fantasy paradise than go back to that. Or even live under something like Alaska's socialist "everyone owns a part of this country" hippy oil share program.

The people in ovens thing? Don't like that idea at all.

We had a civil war here over the issue of whether employers should have to pay their employees anything. And that still didn't the practice, until 1950ish.

This isn't a secret I thought? I remember this sort of thing was taught in socialist public elementary schools. Those public schools that were derived from the Communist Manifesto and other such hippy guys from back in the day.

Short version: whoever you are, you can earn and earn and earn until the day you drop dead, but you will have absolutely nothing to show for all that earning unless someone sees fit to give it to you

And modern day peonage is still done through rents. Rent, the biggest single tax a working man will ever have to face on his labor. If you want to have sex or a family, well, to the bottom of society you go. If you're not lucky enough to have gotten into a trade like plumbing, which is open to white people several times over that of others. Which is the reason the median wealth gap between races here exists.

"Taxation is theft" gets a million google hits, "profit is theft" and "rent is theft" barely eeks in the low hundred thousand.

When I think of how quickly artificial selection can say domesticate foxes, and how long our sexual selection has been dependent on conforming to the serfdom system, it's perhaps surprising we're animals that can muster up that much resistance to the conditioning we're assaulted with since birth.

[Skykid]

Britain's soft dole package coupled with a string of other benefits and tax reliefs has been the pot at the end of the rainbow for lazy people and emigrating Europeans and asylum seekers everywhere.

Actually when I was departing the little land of sheep and concrete young piglet-face Cameron and his army of Etonians were doing something to curb the numbers claiming on the dole. I seem to remember something about chopping benefits for single mothers with more than 1 bedroom in the home and forcing lazy kids to perform community service to earn their benefits if they had been jobless for too long.

No idea what happened with all that. I'm sure it didn't work, nothing in England does.

Conversely the US is much more hard line. Go to work or get fucked, is more the message; and while I like that to a degree, it has issues of its own: mass homelessness, areas with 3rd world levels of poverty (Detroit) and lotsa crime that leads to prisons heaving under the weight of its inmates, which costs the taxpayer billions.

[BryanM]

Moyers had a nice little episode on those sacrifice zones awhile back. Those are the regions that used to be booming industrial centers like Camden and Detroit, then when industry pulled out there was a huge population left behind with no work slots available. Moyers always has nice calming episodes for the sleepy political enthusiast.

Here in Oklahoma we've got a few hundred earthquakes a year seems like, when it used to be in the range of ten. Fracking is suspected. Meanwhile North Dakota lights up like a christmas tree every night from the fields burning off the cheap natural gas that isn't economically worth capturing.



I guess like most people my perspective of society was formed in my childhood. I come from the central valley of California. When the annual "rich guy who wants to divide up California so he doesn't have to pay as many taxes, gets it on the ballot" story came up... the current proposal plans to carve out the central valley as its own state. This state would be the absolute poorest state in the country. Poorer than the ones with Camden or Detroit in them. Poorer than Mississippi. If you think the general region you came from was below average, have a look at the town that harbored the majority of my elementary school's population:



Plainview. Something like 100 acres. Five blocks. I thought it was kind of like a modern day feudal type setup, where the (often non-citizen) immigrant workers would rent from their boss. Which is very common there.

But wikipedia claims half the buildings are owner occupied, which seems really strange to me. No one wants to live in Plainview if they can help it. Go to google street view, it's terrible. Borderline like living in one of those abandoned Japanese island mining towns. Who'd want cops hanging out by their house every single night.

But on the other hand we get cheap olives, they don't have to work for Mexican drug cartels, so it's a win-win for everyone.

Oh yeah the economy outside picking/packing is basically drugs and welfare. You can get a job in retail if you're sexy enough, especially if you're bilingual, but there's only a few hundred businesses within driving distance. It's not like it's enough to support the thousands of people in the area. Really rancid with despair.

[Ed Oscuro]

Yeah, there's a good point about how it's nonsense to talk about how everybody needs to get a job, when this simply isn't possible.

Did people like, not pay attention to the fact that *the economy* is doing much better despite the recession being used as an excuse to make the workforce as slim as possible? IIRC, the rate of Worker Divestment actually increased substantially during that episode, yet productivity continued to increase. That's a good deal for businesses, but without income it leaves other people at risk in this "where yo money" obsessive world. The people who lost their jobs didn't all get fired because they were bad. Feels like deja vu all over again - I'm sure BryanM discussed this earlier!

Not everybody can work on rockets to the mooon or selling muffins every day. We shouldn't want that, anyway. It would be nice to find a way to make the kinds of things people want to spend time on work out, and I don't think anybody's ideal world includes welfare people. But the history of the world is basically that, but remove "welfare" with "no technology, just hunting and gathering and fending off lions with a stick." We sure do know ways to force the unfit out of the gene pool - the only problem is that we sacrifice everything else we hold good to achieve this.

Yet the majority of people "have hard hands...these hands want to work, Meg," and they (and their ancestors!) actually did work hard giving the insanely jealous entrenched money-owning folk their position. So it's terribly convenient to cast them out the moment that somebody in Human Resources decides that a robot (or somebody else being worked harder) has absorbed their job.

[neorichieb1971]

The issues here are not really related to what is out there in terms of welfare benefits. The problem is that its so inviting, so comprehensively covered by the media and the fact that the kids that have parents on welfare will not ever want to get out of welfare.

I'm still for snipping the women after 1 kid. If they can afford to privately un snip themselves then fair play to them. But letting 5 or 6 kids sprout out for no good reason other to live in London's Mayfair in a £750000 house is just ridiculous.

If you really want to see this kind of thing for real just go here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uACsTjamFLM

Parading this sort of thing in front of working people is just wrong.

[Skykid]

I'm still for snipping the women after 1 kid.

The People's Republic of China applauds your methodology!

[Ed Oscuro]

the fact that the kids that have parents on welfare will not ever want to get out of welfare.

Boy, such Facts you bring. I'm totally convinced about your off-the-cuff reporting from the trenches.

p.s. go back and read what I wrote about state custody of children

[CMoon]

BryanM> Nothing important to post, but we don't have like buttons like facebook. Great post about Sacrifice Zones and yeah, that shit head who wants to turn CA into 6 states. There is a real question raised by Chris Hedges (though which of us hasn't thought about it), which is how can you possibly reverse this problem where our government is effectively the corporations. The very fact these corporations have survived and are doing what they are implies that at no point will they say no to more profit regardless of the sacrifice. I don't see anyway to reverse that situation.

[neorichieb1971]

Ed its a very positive way of thinking you have. Yes, there is a slight chance that one out of X offspring might be sharp enough to get into a trade or have some extraordinary skill.

The stats that I can see with my own eyes is this.

1) One out of X isn't good enough.
2) Welfare children grow up without a boss. So REALLY hate being told what to do later in life.
3) Jobs are thin on the ground and homes cost an absolute fortune here in the UK. So FREE house or Pay through the ASS house?
4) The mothers are thick as shit if they keep pumping out babies with no means to support the ones they got. Its demoralizing to the rest of us because we hear the country is in debt and the working class should expect higher taxes or service cut backs. The working class citizen in the UK feels like they have iron balls strapped to their ankles.

The other stat that nobody talks about is how the system is often exploited. Quite a few of these women get cash in hand help outs from the fathers. Quite often the fathers move into the welfare property and have FULL TIME JOBS. This is illegal but there isn't enough policing of this to detect its happening.

I am surprised you cannot see that when abuse is practiced that extra measures should be put in place to combat it. If women are taught about the "one baby on welfare" rule at schools they would know whats coming. Its not butchery or cruel if they put themselves in that situation by choice.

And yes, I am a pessimist. I care about the standards of people. I care about what I see when I walk down my garden path and even whats around the corner. I'm tired of living my life surrounded by hard working people that have to spectate this BS. It will only turn the good into bad the way it is now. I also see it as a lack of control by the government. What good is a government that cannot govern to a high standard?

And finally, population!!!!! If we are going to put 10B people on the planet lets at least make sure they are educated and brought up on sustainable income and not become phone junkies by the time they are 12.

[BulletMagnet]

There is a real question raised by Chris Hedges (though which of us hasn't thought about it), which is how can you possibly reverse this problem where our government is effectively the corporations.

I still maintain that step one in any such process would be to educate the general populace on the situation enough that most of them can begin to see how badly they're being fleeced by such a setup and thus stop approving of it - far too many poor people remain convinced that treating corporate greed as a positive force ("running government like a business") is in their best interests.

[Ed Oscuro]

Yes, there is a slight chance that one out of X offspring might be sharp enough to get into a trade or have some extraordinary skill.

But this works for anybody. Your concern - that the money society spends gets used effectively - is pretty easy to support because once parents have had their own children taken away, then any future children they have will be taken away (unless they follow the steps they need to convince society they aren't totally awful here).

The people who are most harmful to us, the system, and to each other are not these mythical people who have all kinds of smarts and know how to game the system just so they can stay poor. People smart enough to do that are overwhelmingly going to have pride and ability enough to be, well, your normal person who is at a temporary disadvantage. But even if these people do exist, social welfare agencies take a dim view of people who live in poverty or who want to raise kids on the dole.

The people who are most harmful are people who have no clue what to do and aren't in control of themselves - people who step left when the system says to step right. These are the people who have all kinds of family dysfunction and yet find it hard to trust well-meaning strangers. They still soak up their personal share of public and private charity which is just open to them (until such groups turn them away - which does happen); people within the system aren't incapable of seeing that these people are self-destructive and don't throw resources after them indiscriminately.

Most of the people who pose problems to the welfare system by having kids they can't raise are going to be effectively enough dealt with just by taking away their kids. That puts a damper on having more kids. These most vulnerable people don't need any help self-destructing, so going back to the horrors of pre-1970s policy and forcing sterilizations on them is just rubbing salt into the wound of their inability to cope.

[Jonathan Ingram]

Heh, not that it's of especial relevance to the subject, but those "Scandinavian socialists" in Sweden practiced sterilization all the way into the 1970s. The final number of people who'd undergone the operation was in upwards of sixty thousand.

[Ed Oscuro]

Yeah, it did take an absurdly long while for that to end. It's funny how quickly lobotomies - which apparently happened at a faster rate, through the '40s and '50s - made an impact quickly and saw about as many performed (in the US, about half the number was performed by the infamous Dr. Freeman) as the entire run of sterilizations throughout the years. However, while the idea of actually cutting, rending, and pulling apart bits of the brain ended up banned relatively quickly, the sterilizations which served as "a stepping stone to the Holocaust" still has its misty-eyed devotees.

Mentioning the fascists isn't itself necessary to make the jump to the next conclusion - but realizing that sterilizations, like lobotomies, were often used unjustly is important. Everything the disgusting right-wing says about the mythical evil welfare queen has precisely zero relevance to the vast majority of people on welfare. It is clear, or at least it should be blindingly obvious, that no modern society will see serious reductions in the rate of poverty through forced sterilizations, because in most cases one can't make anything like a legitimate case that somebody needs to be sterilized, even if you feel that the most at-risk poor should be sterilized - because most people on welfare are not that bad off mentally and are just temporarily in a rough spot.

It is also ironic that everybody thinks that they are the temporarily disadvantaged millionaire or billionaire. But somebody they don't know at all who is poor? Why, they must be scum! What makes any of us so sure that somebody looking at us won't assume the same thing? Do you really want to put yourself (or your spouse) at risk of being sterilized just because you have a rough year? This sure isn't getting government off the backs of the people.

[Jonathan Ingram]

It is also ironic that everybody thinks that they are the temporarily disadvantaged millionaire or billionaire. But somebody they don't know at all who is poor? Why, they must be scum! What makes any of us so sure that somebody looking at us won't assume the same thing? Do you really want to put yourself (or your spouse) at risk of being sterilized just because you have a rough year? This sure isn't getting government off the backs of the people.

I always wondered the same thing. These people extend the laws of natural selection that Darwin observed in wild nature to other humans, but don't even entertain the possibility that they might too one day end up as bottom feeders on state welfare, or worse - subjects of sterilization that some of them come out so strongly in support of. Ironically, even most of the laissez-faire economists don't support the outright abolition of welfare benefits, because they at least realize that the latter serve as an important tool in amending some of the systemic ills associated with the capitalist mode of production, like unemployment(although Keynes would argue that unemployment is an excess and not an inherent feature, but that's beside the point), but even these simple truths seem to be beyond the understanding of many rank-and-file "ethical" egoists who'd rather twaddle about segregating, sterilizing and putting folks in the ovens than try to understand that all social illnesses can be easily addressed through economic reorganization and a more effective resource allocation.

With our technologies having advanced so far that we can simulate nuclear explosions on a computer, we are at a point where complex models of computer economic planning are finally within our grasp. We can do exact real-time calculations of supply and demand without the need for the archaic market mechanisms, calculate the socially necessary labor time it takes to produce anything from pins to space stations, track and manage social production on an integrated basis, monitor every economic activity for feedback and coordinate billions of processes simultaneously. Every one of the seven billions on this planet can be provided for in a timely manner with the tools we have at our disposal. The prospect of solving all social issues is no longer a matter of 'maybe', but a matter of 'if' and 'when' - 'if' we remove the unnecessary link in the chain of production that's the capitalist class from its position of political and economic domination and 'when' that happens, but no! - Eugenics and people who're worth more! Human nature and survival of the fittest! It's always been that way and will never change! Let's snip the fucking balls instead!!!

[Ed Oscuro]

I think a large part of the answer to why people argue against their own interests, and are so quick to argue against the interests of their fellow person, have to do with a couple ancient traditions (more ancient than humanity): Tribalism (which has gotten a lot of focus lately in the psychological literature) and dynasticism. Tribalism lets us pretend that we have chosen our own groups, rather than that we are stuck on the same earth with other people who are not inferior to us; dynasticism is that tendency of people to try to do what is best for their own immediate family, without any regard for the greater good or the rightness of it.

How to explain away something like this is beyond me, because despite the fragility of the ideas people throw forward in order to defend their lack of care for other people, these tendencies are ancient. They may be out of place in the current climate (one would hope), but they are strong and successful, at least in a world without nukes and total domination of the world economy by elites.

[BryanM]

Yeah, tribalism. : \

You hear some doofus say "black people voted for Obama only because he's black", or libertarians who keep saying that the GOP should just drop the social wedge issues and everyone will flock to them in droves. It's like, eh wot. 43% of Romney's voters identify themselves as white evangelical protestants. There's one party that's monolithic. And politicians know damn well where their votes come from. If talking about penises and the way Yahweh, god of war, wants us to use them cost them any votes today, they would have dropped the angle of attack long ago.

Or whenever someone would list some of the benefits of Obamacare and they'd be like "those sound like good things, but I'm still against it", it's all tribal identity. There're things in there that blow, but at the end of the day it eliminates the "die like a peasant because you can't afford a bone marrow transplant" issue. Thousands of people a year will live longer due to it, and it tempered down the ballooning medical care cost on the budget. (Medicine being one of those "prosperity sinks" that soak up any extra cash a society might have gained against inflation. You'd pay anything to Not Die. The other one is finance. Good old finance.)

I see it rather holistically. We had a civil war over whether or not you have to pay your employees anything. Then in the mid 1950's we phased out the entire prison slave system. Then it was carved in stone in 1964 after people set buses on fire for the crime of interracial bus riding and MLK got hit by a brick in his head. Then our leader got shot in the mouth and our current party leader is an elderly senator in Vermont. Yeah.

[system11]

disgusting right-wing

Eugenics and people who're worth more! Human nature and survival of the fittest! It's always been that way and will never change! Let's snip the fucking balls instead!!!

You left wing folks are so militant and emotional.

Yes Mr Ingram, we certainly can provide for everyone on the planet. For a while. Either something is done about the population problem or the future is bleak. I'd advocate eduction on the subject of population, resources and impact on wildlife in schools, along with entirely free contraception (or sterilisation) for those who choose it. Diminishing returns on child benefit (hello China) might help too. And before anyone starts going on about people being coerced into it, that's the exact same approach pro-life people use when talking about abortions, which should also be easy to obtain.

[Jonathan Ingram]

Yes Mr Ingram, we certainly can provide for everyone on the planet. For a while. Either something is done about the population problem or the future is bleak.

With the industrialization of the world's rural and most underdeveloped regions and the concomitant conversion of families to the urban type, the overpopulation is no longer going to be a problem. The issue of high birthrates is one of poor economic conditions and the resulting social backwardness - a simple fact of our material reality that's apparently too hard to grasp for right-wing idealists.

I'd advocate eduction on the subject of population, resources and impact on wildlife in schools, along with entirely free contraception (or sterilisation) for those who choose it. Diminishing returns on child benefit (hello China) might help too. And before anyone starts going on about people being coerced into it, that's the exact same approach pro-life people use when talking about abortions, which should also be easy to obtain.

And when these measures inevitably fail to produce the desired effect, then what? Let's follow the example of the neo-Malthusian from Dan Brown's Inferno and release a virus that makes half the world population sterile, I guess?



I believe this is relevant to the discussion:

http://www.colorado.edu/Sociology/gimen ... issue.html

[Skykid]

The issue of high birthrates is one of poor economic conditions and the resulting social backwardness - a simple fact of our material reality that's apparently too hard to grasp for right-wing idealists.

This is true.

[neorichieb1971]

Based on known energy resources I'd say the current population is over inflated already and we are idiots to ignore it.

The amount of people on the earth is respective of how much oil we have used. Once it runs out I think about 3/4 of the earths population is in deep shit.

The other reason we are idiots is because we are spawning babies because we want sex. There is only one spot where shooting your load is going to score. Anywhere else is a win win situation. Why don't people get this?

I will only congratulate a new born if it were planned. I'm not congratulating someone for not having the common sense to withdraw a penis at the right time. It should be illegal to have sex whilst under the influence of alcohol.

The things we don't talk about is EXACTLY what should be talked about. Hopefully there are some 13 year olds paying attention here.

[dcharlie]

[quote]
2) Welfare children grow up without a boss. So REALLY hate being told what to do later in life.
quote]

lol - what? any you say you have -stats- for this?

[Teufel_in_Blau]

I don't have much meaningful to say since I honestly never followed those themes too closely. But isn't overpopulation a 3rd world problem? Last time I watched TV, our government was desperate trying to convince those goddamn academics to make more children because we're running out of working taxpayers and when those baby-boomers finally going into their pension, we'll get tons of problems. Btw. our population is shrinking even WITH immigrants. Isn't the Japanese console market largely in the shitter because of the lack of children?

So I don't see how making a guy or women sterile is going to help a 1st world country unless there is no education to turn those kids into working bees. Oh, and last I read was that Chinas one child politic is already biting them in the ass because the modern Chinese women doesn't want one kid, she doesn't want any kids at all. They rather invest their money in new Louis Vuitton bags or Gucci sunglasses or the latest iPhone. Somehow related. -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAM3rIBG5k

[Skykid]

The other reason we are idiots is because we are spawning babies because we want sex. There is only one spot where shooting your load is going to score. Anywhere else is a win win situation. Why don't people get this?

Seriously I'm all for face painting, but convincing girls to take it there is way more difficult than it is in AV.

I will only congratulate a new born if it were planned. I'm not congratulating someone for not having the common sense to withdraw a penis at the right time

Say what?

Sounds to me like you're advocating unprotected sex and a last second removal of the delivery vessel. Newsflash: sperm is released during sex, not just at the overture. People still get pregnant this way.

Like Ingram said, it's a social and economic issue that comes down to lack of education and availability of birth control materials.

[LordHypnos]

I will only congratulate a new born if it were planned. I'm not congratulating someone for not having the common sense to withdraw a penis at the right time.

RegalSin approves this message

couldn't resist :p

[BryanM]

I believe this is relevant to the discussion:

http://www.colorado.edu/Sociology/gimen ... issue.html

Yeah, I get really tired of how disingenuous these agents are. "Libs get emotional when I suggest eugenics programs that coincidentally just happen to impact different racial groups at different rates har har." All you can do is ignore the person who's either crazy or a blood gurgling sociopath (such as the people who want to start a 24/7 ground war with everybody, and install super fun happy torture rooms in our POW prisons.). Otherwise you're just screaming CONTRADICTION! at them all day.

For example, if US citizen sincerely believed that overpopulation is the biggest issue facing humanity (and we've demonstrated that it's not, global warming is) and you wanted everyone to get sterilized that wants it, then you had to have voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, or you're lying. Since Obamacare expands the coverage of voluntary sterilization. To people who never would have been able to afford it in the first place. We might get some hard numbers out of Kentucky if someone bothers to check the IUD and tubal ligation rates in the coming years. All of that in a country with a shrinking indigenous population already.

They can be really sneaky in their ways, too. For example, a liberal friend copy pasta'ed a Democracy Institute infographic that advocates term limits in congress. It sounds really good to people, since dude, fuck congress amirite? But it's a terrible idea since what you're advocating is a revolving door of total strangers: money would have a lot more power than it already has under such a system. Term limits for presidents were only imposed because of FDR. Have to love that Orwellian name: "Democracy", as though that's something a Koch advertising group cares about.

Anyway, Malthus. Exponential population growth has been proven wrong. The behavioral sink proven right. Whenever I talk about human beings getting it on and equaling mass to equal a star within a few hundred years, or converting all the atoms in the universe into human flesh after some many thousands of years, that's all just a theoretical bullshitting exercise. Similar to Marx's gold sphere with the radius to Jupiter bullshitting exercise when it comes to another system with compound interest. (Which is somewhat held in check by the estate tax. Without the estate tax fiat currency would have had a pretty good chance of collapse.)