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Attention.

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Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

This is how I've always felt, in fact I'm sure I talked about it in a thread somewhere here.

I think it absolutely is the woman's choice but if the man doesn't want anything to do with it that he shouldn't be forced.

If anything, he should be willing to front 50% of the money for an abortion if not 100%.

Much as I think people share inane nonsense and crave attention, I will always support free flow of information, regardless of how little value the information has.

If destruction exists, we must destroy everything.
Shuruppak Yuratuhl
Slaad Shrpk Breizh

I enjoyed this read - it took the idea I've proposed (mass sterilization) and made it much more functional. Simply eliminate the incentive to have children if you cannot support them without a consenting male. In cases where your entire family cannot support children, ban it outright.

It's interesting you would post this though, Aestu, as it highlights another point that I thought we disagreed on. People who cannot support themselves or their children lean on society to do so. This is the essence of a "welfare state" that so many fear America will become. I am taxed on my earnings...and my taxes go to a variety of things...and part of what it goes to is to support people who have more children than they can afford, or who have abandoned their children and made them become wards of the state. So it's not so much that I mind paying for roads, moderate military protection (far less than what is actually spent), schools, and yes even healthcare...it's that I mind paying for people who have no business having children. Does this make me heartless? Does it really benefit society that someone from a low SAS has little to no incentive to not have kids? In fact, some argue they are given incentives to have many kids to receive more aid (perpetuating the historical cultural handicap many have been given due to oppression, and preventing them from truly rising above it)


This got me thinking about someone in my family. She's from small town Ohio, uneducated, and got knocked up in high school by one man. The man she got knocked up by ended up having to move away, and she proceeded to meet another man and start dating him. Then the baby was born and she put the 2nd man's name on the birth certificate (not the actual father's name). Tuhl, from my understanding this is illegal. In any case, such is her lack of understanding...now I see her facebook posts about her child. She gives her child all the sweets she can have, and posts many status updates complaining how she "Can't take [her] anywhere, she always makes a scene!" Clearly this 18-year-old high school dropout who works at K-mart is not fit to be a proper parent.

Yet society will/must bear that cost and the consequences.

I linked the article, but I don't completely agree with the implied viewpoint that the obligations of society towards the individual are entirely negative in nature. I believe that a society has an obligation to establish equality of opportunity and social structure for all its members, regardless of their reputation or contributions.

Equality of opportunity and social structure is, of course, very far off from simply cutting checks.

But it's actually more difficult and offensive, and that's why we have the status quo. As I'm fond of noting, welfare as it exists today is an instrument of the right wing, not the left. It is a cheaper (at least in the short run) and more ideologically palatable alternative to spending money doing all the things you listed and more.

It is the right wing which insists that we stick to cutting checks rather than doing things that would make those checks obsolete. Go look at CA. It's the right which refuses to repeal Prop 13 so we can raise taxes to pay for schools and hospitals. Instead we teach kids in "portables", send people with easily treatable conditions to the ER, and wipe out the middle class through "non-optional fees" for "tuition-free" CSU/UC.

So what do we have instead? Welfare. And what if we didn't have welfare? We'd have food riots and such, just like in societies that had the same problems before welfare was invented. And who would that be a problem for? The people with the most to lose.

What's the alternative? Basically, what they have in the EU and Japan - moderate socialism, with higher taxes, high spending on infrastructure and education, and an emphasis on stability over growth. If you don't think that works, go watch the rest of the EU squirm as Germany's far-sighted moderate socialist policies have won the peace, leaving more short-sighted countries (including the US) unable to effectively compete. The same could be said about India and to some extent even China. The only free-market forces in play are really our own.

Americans waste their resources on things like personal cars, bottled water, HMOs, tuition, which in practice mean absolutely nothing more than capitalizing on aging infrastructure. Meanwhile other cultures ride mass transit, live in tenements, drink faucet water and go to public schools and hospitals.

So even though a lower-middle class American may earn more than a middle-class German, he gets less, and the cash this produces isn't representative of the value exchange taking place. Every year, the Americans suffer more DR while the EU and India stack more infrastructure. And now we're coming to the point where the American infrastructure has diminished so much that the EU/India are pulling ahead.

But why is it all so? The answer comes back to the central problem you identified in your OP. Social media. The inability of the Americans to develop core social values.

I believe that part of the solution is going back into space exploration.

From my study of history, I know that cause and effect are not so discrete as we believe them to be. This is a major theme of that book I sent Necra. To put it another way, a good hammer will always find a nail. I believe if we commit to building massive space infrastructure, it will find a way to make itself useful. Just like the American military and the Internet. It will also provide an outlet for social energy more productive than sheer consumerism, and bring society closer to full employment, which will help stabilize things.

Fully funding space exploration will also create an entire pyramid of economic support - i.e., the people who get jobs as rocket scientists, and the people who get jobs getting the rocket scientists coffee. Just like the US military and its massive military towns that are really nothing but the world's biggest welfare program and a siphon for national talent and energy, people paying their taxes with money they get from other people's taxes.

Except space exploration could be a more viable social value than celebrating some people's prowess at blowing stuff up.

Every society needs goals, visions, aspirations, to maintain its integrity in the long run. I think the lack of a national mission is central to what is lacking and it is the meta-reason for our current social and economic difficulties and why the country has descended into decadence and nihilism.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

Social Darwinism.



There will always be the fit and the unfit, there is no cure, if we stop "hunger" we run out of resources soon, so we go back to only the fit surviving. Shit happens people die.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/887 ... all/page57
greatest thread in the history of the interwebs.

If only facebook had the power to cull the weak.

Your taxes supporting the children of indigent parents is the band-aid solution this country is saddled with because neo-puritanical halfwit fuckfaces refuse to teach safe sex to middle schoolers, won't put condom dispensers in schools, and block morning-after pills. I get that you're annoyed, and you're right to say that this is treating a symptom rather than curing the disease. Problem is, "family values" politics are as big a contributor to this disease as the indigent parents are.

You'll never be able to keep people from fucking. That's most of the reason we exist. But if taxes were properly allocated so that fucking didn't automatically turn into children, you'd be taxed that much less.




Can't speak about the legality of that move (I assume not), but a simple DNA test would answer the question anyway.

At any rate, no one is fit to be a proper parent until they start parenting. I'm not condoning this girl's actions, but at least she's trying to take care of the kid. Better that than neglect. And better K-Mart than unemployment.

If destruction exists, we must destroy everything.
Shuruppak Yuratuhl
Slaad Shrpk Breizh

I don't buy this argument. I've dealt with these people. They don't usually have any moral opposition to abortion or birth control nor is their access thereof wanting.

They just don't care.

If welfare didn't exist, they STILL wouldn't care.

The problem is one of social identity, not right-wing puritanism.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

Aestu hist some nails on the head.

I be t i'll have some more discussions points though when I am of more sober mind.

I was talkking about how forced child support can invoke a a moral hazard earlier todayh though.

This has taken so long to type mostly coherently.

God damn.

I agree wholeheartedly with aestu on this matter, but i also agree with tuhl.

I think there's both types of people who exist, but I don't know how big either group is. TOO big on both counts, for sure.