Bittersweet Candy Bowl Forums

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Because the existence of an additional tire doesn't gradually decrease the quality of life for other tires.

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We got a taste for hunting human beings in 1941 and we're still struggling with the addiction. I would appreciate your support as we struggle through this time of trial.

I'm aware of how much we spend on foreign wars. But we weren't talking about that, were we? Yes, it's bullshit, but we're tackling one issue at a time.

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And a lot don't. The system is overburdened, they should at least exercise more responsibility in controlling the population so that those remaining children are assured quality of life. If that means third trimester abortions, so be it. I don't care. Just because it can become a human being doesn't mean it is one. We might as well capitalize on that potential to build a more ideal distribution system.

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Saves the trouble of bringing out the salad prongs to make protein paste.

See, I've had a very personal tangle with the matters at hand.

My father was a former degenerate who, having gotten my mother pregnant, straightened himself out. Threw his meth and coke habits. Strong man, my father.

My mother... every single person my mom knew told her to abort me. Even her christian father told him it was too soon for her. He kicked her out because she wouldn't abort.

For the first five years of my life, I was dirt poor. Could barely keep clothes on our backs and food on our table. A lot of the times my dad would go to the neighborhood McDonalds at 11:30 and pick up the bag of trash they tossed with all the extra McBreakfasts. Sometimes somebody else got it.

I was in the most destititute of poverty. I was homeless, filty, my clothes didn't fit, my hair was lanky, and I didn't eat every day.

Here's the thing that you guys seem to consider impossible.

I.
Was.
Happy.

I was alive. I had plenty of friends. I had so much fun with them, we did so many wacky things. I never went more than three days without a good meal. Dad got a job as a local plumber when I was four, and he got skilled very quickly, and there was promotion after promotion, and our life got better.

Couple of my friends were orphans, one ran away from the orphanage because it was a terrible place and he was bullied there. He slept in an alleyway in an abandond house's cleaned garbage cans. I don't know where he is these days, but last I saw him he had an apartment and a steady job. Craziest little bastard I've ever met, and a good friend. The other one got adopted, and I was there when he met his parents. He cried, and so did I. It was wonderful. He never stayed angry at them for more than a few minutes. I have his cell phone number, at least, and he doesn't know where John is either. I dunno. Maybe he's gone. Who knows? I would help him if I knew where he was.

My mother left my father when I was eight, and I stayed with her and my three little brothers in a quaint little house that my father's money made the down payment on and my mother's wages could afford the payments on, if barely. My dad went on to become a commercial plumber, got better and better wages, and with careful saving he managed to buy a house two years ago when the market was down, and got himself a screaming deal on it too. He makes something around $40 an hour these days, working as master plumber at some skyscraper job or another.

Me, I got a couple scholarships to college because of a few good essays and short stories I wrote. Sitting in my dorm, looking sideways at my roommate who looks like he's doing a science experiment but he's just making himself the strangest lunch ever concieved, I came from crawling in the dirt to... this place. It's awe insipring, and very humbling.

My point is that there is no life that does not have the capacity to make itself a living, redeem itself, rise up, if only given a chance. And even in the most poverty-stricken homes, one can find something to laugh at, something to busy themselves with, something to learn and something to strive for.

I understand that we in America enjoy freedoms like no other country. I'm glad to live in the land of opportunity, proud even. But, honestly, I don't see a reason besides selfishness that someone could be so foolish as to have risky sex and then rather enact murder rather than step up to the plate. It's lazy. Selfish. Wrong. To deny a child life because you made a poorly thought out choice? That's sick. You can pander on about how fetuses aren't really people, how the parents have a choice, how denying the choice violates rights or somesuch, but the fact is that the potential of human life is there, the potential for a smiling, laughing, beautiful little girl or boy is there and you deny it even the slimmest of chances to redeem itself.

In cases of rape and cases in which one or both of them would die if the pregnancy was not terminated, then I would support it as a necessary evil. Sickness happens, and if one did not make a choice beforehand they should be given the chance to make a choice later. But today's society is becoming soft if murder is considered a right.

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In that case, you can't use the argument of limited resources against me.

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If selfishness is our only guide to morality, then we really are doomed.

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That's the fallacy of irrelevant thesis - whether it's economically beneficial to allow third trimester abortions or not is beside the point of it being right or wrong. The only question is whether the living thing, call it a human or not, can feel pain.

Capitalizing on moral uncertainties is a really, really bad idea. Why don't we start taxing people with more than one kid more instead? Allowing or denying third trimester abortions isn't going to fix the overpopulation problem at all - there are so few of them to start with!

This post has been edited by Starwatcher: 12 March 2012 - 08:02 PM

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It's separate from the abortion issue, but not from the resources issue. One does what one can about the wars, however little that is. I'm not defending that.

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Because clearly selfishness entails concern for a gradual increase in quality of life through responsible population control.

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Economically, morally, it doesn't matter. You take this "human life is holy and sacred" line. It can be, but not inherently. Me, I have no problem with the idea of putting down a newborn baby anymore than I would a dog or euthanizing a terminally ill patient. My bottom line is decreasing the population to increase quality of life. If a child tax does the job? By all means go for it. I just don't have a problem with third trimester abortions. Whatever it takes to emphasize some degree of responsibility in the reproductive process.

Would it make you feel better if they didn't use tongs? Just let it be born and then put it to sleep? I don't have a problem with that either.

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If there's so few of them, it's likely that the majority of those are extenuating circumstances. Fetuses that endanger the mother or those that have serious abnormalities that can't be detected until that late in development are expendable.

I actually had an argument with a pro-lifer at one point. My scenario was that the baby could not survive at that point in the pregnancy for whatever reason, and the mother would die if she carried the baby to term. The person actually told me that the mother's job is to protect the child, and if the child couldn't survive the mother would die.

Keep in mind this isn't a person who pickets abortion clinics; she doesn't get involved in anything politically and has flat out said that it's not her place to judge. There are very few issues this person and I disagree on that I find their position completely absurd (in fact, only one other pops to mind), yet it took me 5 minutes to say something at all because that position was so fucking horrid. If I have to kill somebody to survive, it's self defense--at that point the fetus is essentially threatening the life of the mother the same way a murderer would if he had her at knife point.

A similar stance of mine involves sharks, that could be used to illustrate my point. Sharks cannot be fished viably; they reproduce too slowly. Most species are in some way or another endangered and should not under any circumstances be killed... except when they're in the process of attacking someone. As rare as this happens, and as rare as it is for people to die as a result of it, if I have a bull shark chewing on my arm I am going to do everything in my power to save my life, even if it means killing it.

Sounds like a bad comparison, right? Not really. That fetus hasn't been born yet and isn't a person, not legally, and not in my eyes. It's just a lump of flesh that's sapping health from the mother. Jerk has previously compared the relationship to that of a parasite; he's not wrong. The mother's health suffers while the fetus is in the womb, and the fetus gets all of the benefit. So yeah, I really don't oppose late term abortions--well, I do, but more in a "you had six months to decide, why are you changing your mind now" way (think of it as an idiot getting 2/3 of a tattoo and chickening out at the last minute). In the few cases it occurs it's usually warranted--not always of course, but usually. A fetus is not a person, and should not be considered one.

Edit, @Biblioholic: There are 18 Countries more free than the US. Even on the economic freedom point, there are 7 countries higher up on the list than us.

This post has been edited by Carcharocles: 12 March 2012 - 09:29 PM

Starwatcher, on 12 March 2012 - 08:01 PM, said:

Don't do that. The fact is resources are limited and that's all that's relevant to the argument, reasons are irrelevant. What you are doing is imagining a perfect world and rejecting arguments that don't work in that perfect world. We're not in a perfect world, else we wouldn't need abortions at all.

You can say "If (somehow) we stopped having limited resources, then...", making it clear that you're talking about that ideal scenario, but how things currently are you can't assume resources aren't limited and you can't force others to assume that false premise.

@Biblioholic: Things went well because they actually wanted you, and because of that they fought for the family. If parents don't want the child, and you force them to keep it, things aren't gonna be so pretty. Ultimately, it's the choice of the parents, no one's forcing them to abort either.

This post has been edited by Itu: 12 March 2012 - 11:29 PM

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That's a false dilemma. It doesn't have to be a perfect world for things to be just a little bit less messed up, which is all that I need.

I put blame on a system for allocating resources the way it does. If we're talking about resources, the reasons we don't have enough are definitely relevant.

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What I'm saying is more along the lines of "you need to stop spending resources here, and use more here."

What you said in the post I replied to was "you can't use that argument because we could get those resources from somewhere else". This doesn't work. It's equivalent to saying that since people could stop committing crimes and instead work to improve the country and increase the amount of resources, we can't say we have limited resources or use arguments based on that.

It seems more than just "a bit" less messed up. Having the government possess enough resources and allocate them wisely and productively is not trivial at all.

Again, this is not the argument at hand, and I'm not saying it can't be done at all. I'm also not saying you can't argue in that "if we used our resources correctly" situation, all I'm arguing against is this line:

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He can, because it's true.

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Intelligence is what makes something a person, it is not necessarily a valid means of sorting so-called "lesser life forms". A tree is not intelligent, but that doesn't mean it isn't important or worthwhile, and I would certainly rate its importance above, say, a deer's, even though a deer is more intelligent.

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Life has no inherent meaning, but that does not mean we cannot say that life has a meaning for us personally. You simply have to understand that whatever meaning you ascribe to it is arbitrary and your own. This is liberating in a way.

And I would say that yes, there is less worthwhile in a retarded person's life than a normal person's life who could have been in the place of that retarded person. It is irresponsible to bear retarded children, simple as that. Just abort and try again. If all you can make is retards or otherwise severely defective offspring then you should not reproduce and should instead adopt. It is that simple.

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Thing is though, we already hold people to have different values whether we admit it or not. Why is an engineer worth more than a person who works at McDonald's?

Regarding equal rights: if someone is too retarded to really comprehend their rights, I would argue that they don't really have them. If someone is at the mental level of a 3 year old, should they be allowed to vote?

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Firstly: The world is already vastly overpopulated.

Secondly: No one has the right to force a woman to carry a parisite to term.

Third: This is moronic because people don't actually want to adopt random babies, they want to adopt -perfect- babies. Many babies which would be aborted are on the lower end of the spectrum due to their parents being on the lower end of the spectrum - the poorer you are the more likely you are going to need to have an abortion, as wealthier, more well-off folk tend to not need them because they have better access to education and birth control.

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Sure they do. Intelligent expenditure of resources is a major part of morality.

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They were right, too. Just because things ended up working out for you doesn't mean that they were wrong. This is a logical fallacy. Not everyone born into a desperate situation ends up screwed, but most of them do. Just because it works out for a small percentage of them doesn't mean its the wrong decision to abort. Because guess what? It ruined your mother's life, and possibly your father's as well.

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Have fewer people, have fewer wars. Overpopulation causes conflict over limited resources.

Titanium Dragon, on 13 March 2012 - 01:24 AM, said:

You can call it arbitrary, you can call it stupid, you can even call it an illogical fool's philosophy, and you'll never shake my belief. Enjoy your liberation. I'd rather have purpose. It's not like I'm blinding myself to anything, I keep an open mind and continue to read the papers and consider other's views. I simply choose to think positively about the universe and it's existance and meaning. Perhaps it means nothing, perhaps there is no purpose to my life, perhaps I'm simply insane and we're all just animals who have made it too easy for ourselves to live and thrive. Who's to know? I know that murder is a sin, is wrong. That's all I know.

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It is irresponsible to beat children. It is irresponsible to raise children to be intolerant. It is irresponsible to not teach children the right way. It is completely responsible to give the child a chance.

I am willing to hit my head against this brick wall for as long as you are, TD. A mentally incapable PERSON, no matter what you qualify as incapable, has the right to procreate as much as you do, and they deserve it despite how much you look down on them. All logic and reasoning you are, riding high on your ideals and suppositions that you know best for society. Could you stare into a mentally handicapped person's eyes and be the first to tell them that they do not have the right to exist and/or reproduce?

Titanium Dragon, on 13 March 2012 - 01:24 AM, said:

Because they perservered, and clawed their way from the dirt from which they were born in. Or, much more likely, they were dragged to their feet, told to sit up straight and to do their homework like robots, taught the right behaviors like dogs, and stifled into becoming a perfectly obedient drone to society who produces and contributes enough to satisfy even your sad idea of worth. I pity you if you cannot see that no matter how much money the engineer makes or how terrible a worker the McDonalds employee is, they both interacted with people, they both made impacts on people's lives, and they both have equal worth.

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Yes. Because they are people, citizens who have that right and, if they DO vote, then clearly they understand it well enough that they're not just checking a box at completely random. If they have the wits to get their voter's card, if they qualify to vote, then they should be able to vote if they are allowed to live. If you're worried about stupid people making their opinions count, you should be worried about the 70% of the voters who watch about three biased commercials before they cast their ballad. Perhaps you should sterilize the ignorant, or the hateful. It's as sensible an idea of sterilizing those with mental handicaps.

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We're going to resort to that sort of word choice are we? I suppose I brought it on myself when I mentioned the oh-so controversial term "murder."

If you don't like children then say it outright, TD. Say it, and don't have them, and don't let any of your female kilth and kin have any either if it floats your boat. I, on the other hand, love children. My father was a degenerate, his mother was schitzophrentic and his father was bipolar. My mother is scatterbrained and uneducated, and her mother is SOME sort of crazy, yet out of that comes me, sharp as a tack and nothing wrong with me at all. Pretty damn handsome, too, if I say so myself. Genetic abberation? I have three little brothers. None of them are insane. I am going to have a double handful of kids if my wife lets me, and the chances are that one of them's going to have some sort of mental disease like at least three eighths of their genetic material's originators have. Don't care. Because they'd be my kids, my legacy, my descendents that will carry on my bloodline, and you'd have to shoot me to stop me from having them.

The right to swing my fist ends when it connects with your face. Likewise, the right for somebody to choose ends when the child develops brain activity and becomes aware, alive, human.

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Not everyting in life is about logic. The world doesn't work like that.

Titanium Dragon, on 13 March 2012 - 01:24 AM, said:

You're telling me how much I as a person am worth?

HA! To that strangely personal jab I am only going to respond with a cheerful fuck you and have a nice day. Meet people before you judge their worth. If you had even met my mother and father in passing you would think otherwise.

This post has been edited by Biblioholic: 13 March 2012 - 06:39 AM

Biblioholic said:

What if the mentally handicapped person is incapable of raising or supporting children? Should that person still procreate regardless? Who makes the final decision?

Kind of irresponsible for the mentally incapable person to procreate just as much as it is for a teenager with no funds to procreate. I mean it happens, but it doesn't mean it's not a pretty selfish and shitty thing to do.

Biblioholic, on 13 March 2012 - 06:23 AM, said:

Oh snap. Of course. It's a sin, that's what makes it wrong. How could we forget?

Biblioholic, on 13 March 2012 - 06:23 AM, said:

You're doing the same thing, only without reasoning + worthless emotional appeal.

Biblioholic, on 13 March 2012 - 06:23 AM, said:

Equal worth for whom? For society? No. As an advancing force for humanity? No. They only have equal "worth" for being people, which is completely subjective.

Biblioholic, on 13 March 2012 - 06:23 AM, said:

No. They don't.

Biblioholic, on 13 March 2012 - 06:23 AM, said:

If I knew the fetus my wife is carrying will be an ignorant, hateful bigot who will make the world a worse place, I would stop it from being. We're not talking about killing fully grown people here, we're talking about stopping them from being in the first place.

Biblioholic, on 13 March 2012 - 06:23 AM, said:

lol TD hates children, now your arguments are suddenly valid

Biblioholic, on 13 March 2012 - 06:23 AM, said:

schitzophrentic children

Yes go and fill the world with mentally ill people. That's gonna make you feel better with yourself.

Biblioholic, on 13 March 2012 - 06:23 AM, said:

My face is not a parasite you're being forced to feed and bear.

Biblioholic, on 13 March 2012 - 06:23 AM, said:

It does. Sorry.

Biblioholic, on 13 March 2012 - 06:23 AM, said:

Stop taking everything personal, bibleholic, or people will start telling you exactly how much they think you're worth.

This post has been edited by Itu: 13 March 2012 - 05:21 PM

Biblioholic, on 13 March 2012 - 06:23 AM, said:

I'm schizoaffective. Do you know what that is? That is schizophrenia + bipolar. There is a genetic predisposition to the disorder, and while not everyone with said predisposition will develop the disorder (as in your case), the risk factor is *very* high. Considering psychosis runs in your family, I'll ask you how you know you're NOT psychotic. I mean, you probably have had some experience with the disease, so you'd know that the definition of psychosis is loss of touch with reality. One of the primary symptoms is "delusion," which is a false but irrational belief that the sufferer believes is true even when given definitive proof to the contrary.

Likewise, you're probably aware that you are not born with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, but rather, an increased risk of developing in it. It most commonly sets in in the teens or young adult years, but can develop as late as the thirties and forties. Hell, there's even a variant called "paraphrenia" when develops when you're in your sixties or later. Sorry, but saying you're normal now has zero weight, because you could wake up psychotic tomorrow.

I'm not going to have children. This is a decision I made, and I stand by it. There is so much mental illness in my family that I have little doubt my children will develop the disorder. But saying you are normal, despite your children having a very high chance of developing the disorder, is a foolish argument. My life sucked because of my disorder. It's fine now, but that was over 17 years of pure hell. And now? I can't work. My mental health is fine as long as a take my meds, but a minor slip-up can cause problems. So I'm living off of a 690 dollar a month income. That's not a life! I can barely survive on that!

Your argument that murder is a sin doesn't fly with me, either. "Sin" is exclusively an Abrahamic concept, and I'm neither Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Baha'i. If you're in the US or anywhere with religious freedom, well, your Christian morals deserve no place in the legal system. Sorry. Use another argument.

Edit: "Schizophrentic" is not a word. The correct term is schizophrenic. You should know this.

This post has been edited by Carcharocles: 13 March 2012 - 05:56 PM

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... you ever wake up thinking you did something good the night before, only to realize it was full of stupid? Usually I'd have deleted that sort of early morning before-sleep essay....

Looking back at my last post, my heart was in the right place but I was just being a bigoted ass.

For the above comments, I'm sorry.

@Carcharocles Thank you for your concern. I know because I have studied it thoroughly and am very careful in watching for the signs in myself. I have also asked my roommate to watch for it. He pokes fun at me all the time, but I can tell when he's joking.

I am not perfect at spelling. I don't usually write that word down, and no matter how many times I read it it's just one of those problem words that keeps bugging me. That's how I hear it said where I'm from. Blame the North Western accent, with all the y'knows and whichamacallits and wazzaps.

@Itu I know that I was being an ass but that gives you no right to be a dick. I am agnostic. I disbelieve 90% of what the church and the bible says, the most I can say is that I believe that Jesus was a good man with good things to say and that there is probably something "up there." I'm sorry that I agree with them about murder. The terminology is just how I was raised and, apparently, at 7am with no sleep on a monday morning, I sometimes slip up. I hardly think that one slip makes the "bibleholic" necessary. I'm one to talk, but I at least tried to contribute to the argument. Your post seems to have no point other than the moral "I hate you now" only thinly veiled by insults.

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You have confused knowledge and belief. You BELIEVE that murder is wrong.

And I think quite positively about the universe. I just know that it doesn't give two shits about people on a little blue and green rock.

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The greatest harm you can inflict upon someone, short of death, is brain damage. Why is it that Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is seen as such an awful thing? The brain damage.

Mentally retarded children have fucked up brains which are equivalent to fairly severe general brain damage.

Ergo, giving birth to a mentally retarded child is... let's wait for it... deeply, deeply wrong!

The outcome is the same (mental retardation); it doesn't matter how they got there.

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Absolutely. Hell, I told you your mother should have aborted you, what makes you think I'm not willing to tell someone who is mentally retarded the same thing?

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Society, insurance companies, and reality beg to differ.

Value of an engineer > value of an unskilled laborer. They produce vastly different amounts of useful things for other people. VASTLY. There's a reason why everyone wants engineers, and there is far less demand for unskilled laborers.

Also, its pretty ironic that you're talking about the "right behavior" when you are embracing false values that are "held" by many people who are too cowardly to realize that they don't really hold them. You value that engineer far more than you value that McDonalds' worker, because the engineer brought you your computer, and the McDonalds' worker, unless they work at YOURS, did nothing at all for you.

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I never said I disliked children. If one living creature dwells in the flesh of another, draining nutrients from it to fuel its own growth, we call it a parasite (unless it is a symbiotic relationship, but the baby isn't giving anything back to the mother). A fetus is a parasite, and it is a drain on a woman's health.

You see, you are what is wrong with the world. You are selfish and destructive. The world already has 7 billion inhabitants, and you want to pollute it with a double handful more? If everyone did that, they'd all be eating each other in 30 years. The world can't take even 7 billion sustainably, let alone 35 billion.

Every child you have takes resources away from everyone else on the planet, because in the end the Earth-Sun system is essentially closed. Ergo, resources must be divided between all those who dwell on the planet.

You say murder is wrong, yet you are willing to cause mass murder, democide even, via your reproductive choices, because in the end, if there are 35 billion people, they will kill each other until there aren't. Its simple really - the planet cannot sustain that many people. Ergo, some must die. Be it starvation, or disease, or war, they will die.

Moreover, you are taking resources away from the rest of society. Who will pay for your childrens' education? It costs nearly $100,000 to society to raise a child. If you have 10 children, that's a million dollars. Are you going to pay a million dollars in taxes, PLUS pay back the $100,000 we spent raising you? Hell, more than that really, as your family, being destitute, likely saw a lot of government support. Way to steal from the rest of us, dude.

What was that about where your rights end?

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The world operates entirely on logic, I'm afraid. What do you think physics are? Why do you think math exists?

This post has been edited by Titanium Dragon: 14 March 2012 - 01:26 AM

Then use math and physics and go stop nature, Titanium Dragon. Stop people from doing what instinct demands of them. The world is chaos, unfortunately, and science agrees that it's always been like that. Greater men than we have carved out the little spheres of partial order that we know and love, but people kill people, and people listen not to wisdom that is contrary to what they want. Do what you will, and if you don't mind being called a monster for your meathods then I don't mind calling you one.

If a fetus is a parasite, then in your view every human being on the planet is a tiny parasite, leeching on the limited resources of the earth. Humanity, nay, all of life on Earth is a blight to the planet, and you would rather resort to kill or be killed habits where there could still be some form of fairness, some form of order. You would bring down that order far before it's time if you had your way.

I never got government support, thank you very much. Not an iota of it beyond free school cafeteria lunches. As much as people like you cry of how much money it takes to sustain a welfare state, I never saw a bit of it because my parents were too proud to admit they needed help. I was being an unnecesarily provocative dunce when I said I'd have a double handful of children, but where I jest and prod others will do, and almost all of those too smart to have your ready excuse of mental capacity to be rid of them. There is nothing to be done about that.

I'm sorry. An engineer made a machine that cranks out thousands of computer parts a day, and yet laborors run that machine now and keep it running and put the parts together. So who really has the bigger hand in me being able to buy this computer? No, no, I'm not talking of the McDonalds employee. In your narrow utilitarian mindset they really will never be anything but useless, they do absolutely nothing for society but live and disperse what little money they get. I'll allow that. I never disputed it, as seen from your point of view. But they are far from the useless wretches that you would portray them to be. Some of them will write, and some of them will sing, and some of them will do enough good with what little they manage to wrest from the world that they will be remembered a little. Though I am well aware that you'll see this as only sentimental foolishness and I'll not convince you with it.

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Like my grandfather always said, plan for the worst, hope for the best.

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Because we are on the internet, and not face to face. I have good reason to doubt that you really would be that foolish in person. I know I'd have reacted differently should we have had this conversation face to face. How tall are you? I'm 6'4". Do you know Karate? Blackbelt, though slightly out of practice I'll allow you.

The world is a balance, and sometimes the balance is tipped, throwing much off of either side before it is righted. Sometimes it could have been prevented, but sometimes it's just not possible. There is no stoping greed and lust, so there is no stopping population just as there is no stopping the stock market from rising only to fall once more. So I make peace with that and build as strong a house as I can, while you fight the hurricane winds. I make friends who will help me in crisis and I give no man a reson to hate me besides poor fools hundreds of miles away like you, and you hate me because I speak my mind without reserve and I would steer clear of you sort of people in the real world so I only had to watch my tongue with my grandmother and boss. I speak like this because society at large has become nearly as dangerous to itself as the wilds ever were to the individual human, yet on the lowest levels there is still family and community units who would more or less stand together, and I am known for my candor and outspoken opinions and, most importantly, the ability to admit I'm wrong when there is actual proof against my side.

Wish I was never born all you want, I'll never return the favor.

Murder is unetical, then, if you must nitpick at my word choice. Unless you WANT people to be able to get away with murdering their neighbors.

This post has been edited by Biblioholic: 14 March 2012 - 07:10 AM

Biblioholic, on 14 March 2012 - 05:15 AM, said:

Not choosing to make tough decisions simply means other people or worse yet, nature, will make them for you. I choose the ethical route of reduced reproduction; it causes by far the least harm of all solutions.

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The Earth is not a living thing, ergo we are not parasites.

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I think a welfare state is a good, efficient way to lower crime and raise overall standard of living. I just don't like to see people abuse it.

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I've worked in places that make computers. There are fewer laborers and fewer UNSKILLED laborers over time. It will not be long before automation will largely end the need for unskilled labor; it has already started to happen, which is why you see people who have been unemployed since they lost their mine/lumber job.

And yes, some people do make themselves useful despite not having technical skills. Its fine. I don't really mind. Its just that I think our society needs to work hard towards not producing any unskilled laborers, because we will have them anyway, and in 40 years there will be even fewer jobs for even more people as automation continues to rise. In my current place of employment, a huge factory producing tons of material per day will have fewer than 50 workers, and many of those have college degrees. It is possible to operate the entire facility with 7 people on site, and if we were willing to spend the money on robots, we could cut that down by two.

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6'2" and yes, though its kind of irrelevant.

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All of these things are wrong. Let's see:

Greed: Theodore Roosevelt helped break the backs of the robber barons of the late 19th century and broke up numerous monopolies.
Lust: The catholic church, in response to widespread corruption and passing of clerical titles from father to son, banned its priests from marrying or reproducing. This rule has held for over a thousand years.
Population: China established the one child rule that resulted in a single generation change from a population like a developing country to a population with an age distribution like a developed country. They curbed their population growth and prevented (or at least greatly mitigated) catastrophe.
Stock market: Post-depression reforms made it a lot more stable, and it was only when they were removed that it happened again.

So yeah, no, you can indeed do these things. You give people tons of reasons to hate you; many people already do, and you don't even know it.

You can't see people like me in the "real world" - we don't look different from other people. Let's face it though, there aren't very many people like me anyway - that's part of the problem. I've met very few people like myself; there's a good chance you've never met anyone like me.

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I didn't "wish" that you weren't born. I said that you being born was a mistake. There's a difference between the two.

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Aborting a fetus is not equivalent to murdering your neighbor any more than clipping your hair or having your appendix removed is.

I'm going to admit it, just say it outright. Your every argument seems fine-tuned to infuriate me. You insist that mentally hanicapped people have absolutely no worth, that abortion is akin to cutting your hair or ridding yourself of a tapeworm, and that the stupid have no rights. You even say that my own existance was a mistake, a poor choice that ruined my parent's lives, which is definitely a bald faced and very personal insult where I come from.

Yet now that, finally, we come to ground that actually seems remotely reasonable, I find that I would almost resort to ilogic and dispair than agree with you. I had to delete several times last night to make something that seemed even remotely reasonable, and now looking back it's almost entirely useless. Again. I look in on myself, and find stubbornness and revulsion the only reason to respond again and again, and I find it harder and harder to not simply go off on you and your...

... your education.

I see that I am the least educated party here. The least experienced.

I see that I am the least reasoned and the most driven by hot emotions, the quickest to anger and the most reluctant to admit that any of the other's points carry value.

I am not saying I agree with you on everything. Mass sterilization is going far too far. There are better qualifications for those who do not deserve to have children than I.Q.. I will never see abortion as a thing to be done so casually as what you imply.

But I do admit that my arguments are flawed. Perhaps my position is flawed, perhaps my manner that I went about proving it was flawed, but nevertheless the end is the same.

I concede.

This post has been edited by Biblioholic: 14 March 2012 - 03:55 PM

black people sure don't

Titanium Dragon, on 13 March 2012 - 01:24 AM, said:

Have there been more wars in the last century than there have been since the dawn of humanity? Curious question. I'm guessing the amount of war is proportional to the world population? War has always existed. The question is whether the overall rate increases.

The other thing I'm curious about is how truly limited these resources are if the small upper class comprise the majority of the world's wealth. Assuming a minimum amount ensures what we define as a good quality of life, how would anything extra contribute to humanity if not everyone benefits from it? I'm pretty sure Africa would be a whole lot better place to live if management of its natural resources was done a lot more effectively, because it probably hasn't been exploited to its full potential.

This post has been edited by Marshmallow: 16 March 2012 - 11:31 PM

Marshmallow, on 16 March 2012 - 11:15 PM, said:

Overpopulation is relative to the scarcity of resources. While the population has exploded, so has resource consumption, indeed at a faster rate than population growth. However, this is unsustainable, as we are expending resources we will not get back for hundreds of millions of years in the space of a couple centuries - all major expendable fuel sources save possibly uranium are going to be in decline by the end of the century unless we start doing something really stupid like burning water (and even then, FRESH water has possibly already peaked, even though it is renewable, as consumption outstrips supply). There are also other factors at work which have decreased war independent of overpopulation. Overpopulation is not the only cause of wars.

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Honestly the reason Africa is a hellhole is because of the people living there; resource allocation is only a small part of it.

Marshmallow, on 16 March 2012 - 11:15 PM, said:

War. War never changes...

KAS Bat, on 17 March 2012 - 11:46 AM, said:

I prefer the first one's, but yeah, more relevant to this topic.

I'm leaning towards TD's stance on this one. Morals are an arbitrary social statute, therefore they should hold little bearing on laws and ordinances that should be grounded in logical thought. Therefore, if we place value on the efficient survival of the human species, mass sterilization of people with bad genes is a good idea.

Additionally, wars are caused by far more than overpopulation alone.

This post has been edited by Dr. Klaus: 23 March 2012 - 04:24 AM

KAS Bat, on 17 March 2012 - 11:46 AM, said:

War has changed.

Titanium Dragon, an anti-choice argument that can be brought up is that one person can make a huge difference to someone's life -- even for the better! This point was brought up by Steve Jobs; even if the latter was true, what would you say to that?

We'll never get anywhere with this circular argument. One person says, "But there's so much good!" the other guy says, "But look at all the bad!" Then the first guy says "But you're forgetting the good!" and the other says "You still obviously don't see the bad." And on it goes.

Unless we weigh each viewpoint objectively, we won't get anywhere.

Jerk, on 12 March 2012 - 07:52 PM, said:

Quality versus Quantity. To some, quality is obviously the best choice. I personally agree with you, but I can't speak for those who don't.

This post has been edited by Dr. Klaus: 25 March 2012 - 04:25 AM

Quality is logically the best choice for human beings because it increases the quality of life for everyone. Saying all these things have the right to exist simply because sperm met egg cripples the long view. It's a choice regarding economic feasibility over a much larger term, which is the only reasonable way to think considering resource scarcity.

Well duh, but emotional people who have been, as some might put, "indoctrinated" into the religious or "moral/ethical" viewpoint won't see that. Therein lies our problem.

Every single societal problem stems from the ineducation of people. No one is taught to think logically. Those who are are outnumbered by the moronic majority.

Kind of amusing, actually, how of all the things people are taught to think of as "wrong," it's apparently not "wrong" to impose one's beliefs on others.

This post has been edited by Dr. Klaus: 25 March 2012 - 04:44 AM

It becomes invalid the moment emotion enters.

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Its not a relevant argument at all; indeed, it is a sign of severe lack of logical reasoning.

Sure, one person can make all the difference. Like Hitler! So why are you not aborting Hitler?

And you're far more likely to grow up to be worthless than useful, and the cases where people abort are cases where people would not be good parents.

Generally speaking, if you think seriously about having an abortion, you should have an abortion. If you didn't mean to get preganant, you should probably have an abortion.