Sulla

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Posts by Sulla

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  52

  Old People Should Hurry Up and Die - says the New Japanese Finance Minister

  by fulltimestudent in

  1. social
  2. current

  the newish japanese government is conservative in bent, and its finance minister recently raised eyebrows with the above statement.

  japan, as you may know, is a rapidly aging society as the long falling birthrate bites into the demographics.. here's how the english guardian reports this tale:.

  let elderly people 'hurry up and die', says japanese ministertaro aso says he would refuse end-of-life care and would 'feel bad' knowing treatment was paid for by government.

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  Sulla

  Interesting. All this time I thought I was the right-wing, fuck-tha-poor, make-better-choices hardass. Looks like I'm an ol' softie compared to wasblind.

  Sulla: I'm trying to understand your position. As you note above, these girls are under tremendous economic and societal pressures. Do you then want to deny them abortion and force an unwanted child upon them? Or are you simply pointing out that the problem is complex and solutions earlier than abortion are necessary?

  Justitia Themis, I am indeed pointing out that the situation is complex. In a lot of these cases, there are "choices" made only in the broadest and least meaningful sense of the word. The girl in the Times article who had her first abortion at 15 and was back at 17 for another, and who couldn't predict whether she would use birth control in the future can hardly be said to be making an informed choice about anything important in her life.

  That said, the problem of what to do with a useless and inconvenient person seems to bring us full circle to the original post.
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  52

  Old People Should Hurry Up and Die - says the New Japanese Finance Minister

  by fulltimestudent in

  1. social
  2. current

  the newish japanese government is conservative in bent, and its finance minister recently raised eyebrows with the above statement.

  japan, as you may know, is a rapidly aging society as the long falling birthrate bites into the demographics.. here's how the english guardian reports this tale:.

  let elderly people 'hurry up and die', says japanese ministertaro aso says he would refuse end-of-life care and would 'feel bad' knowing treatment was paid for by government.

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  Sulla

  I'm suggesting, wasblind, that your influence on your daughter is of precisely the sort that the 17 year old in the article lacks. The choices your daughter has made are possible (well, made much more likely) by your guidance and by the social capital you are able to share. You know better than I how profoundly the social capital of American blacks has historically guided and molded the next generation -- and this is true even though most African American families have had lower incomes than their white neighbors.

  But the profoundly broken cultures in which many black girls -- and for that matter, a large number of white girls -- live leaves them vulnerable to exploitation from many directions. Simply put, the social capital that you provide for your daughter which enables her to make real choices does not exist for these others. The kind of choices your daughter has made -- to go to school, study hard, work, etc. -- have certainly required hard work; for these others, it would require a miracle.

  I don't thnk we can speak of meaningful choices when one set of decisions requires miracles and heroic virtue. Those are pretty rare.
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  52

  Old People Should Hurry Up and Die - says the New Japanese Finance Minister

  by fulltimestudent in

  1. social
  2. current

  the newish japanese government is conservative in bent, and its finance minister recently raised eyebrows with the above statement.

  japan, as you may know, is a rapidly aging society as the long falling birthrate bites into the demographics.. here's how the english guardian reports this tale:.

  let elderly people 'hurry up and die', says japanese ministertaro aso says he would refuse end-of-life care and would 'feel bad' knowing treatment was paid for by government.

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  Sulla

  You really think a 15 year old girl is exercising an informed choice when she gets an abortion? We don't think she can appropriately exercise free choice to buy a beer, but you suppose the right to choose is a meaningful concept with a terrified child. And if you think nobody forces these young girls to get abortions then you don't know very much about their lives. We can't know about her specific case, but very often the men who exploit these girls (yes, a 15 year old is a girl) are pressured into exactly this sort of thing.

  As for the family planning: it cannot be true that anyone in NYC fails to understand how a condom works. That it is not used is for the specific reason that boys don't like them. Again, the culture in which she must live takes away meaningful choices all the time.
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  27

  Can't afford to pay Candace, but they can afford this:

  by WinstonSmith in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  http://thetandd.com/news/local/jehovah-s-witnesses-unveil-million-assembly-hall/article_82f68742-6776-11e2-a641-001a4bcf887a.html?comment_form=true.

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  Sulla

  Columbia, itself, is the middle of nowhere. This is, therefore, is a bedroom community of nowhere. The estimate of $66 per person per day seems about right, though: night at the Red Roof and a few meals -- breakfast at McDo, supper at the Appleby's clone...
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  52

  Old People Should Hurry Up and Die - says the New Japanese Finance Minister

  by fulltimestudent in

  1. social
  2. current

  the newish japanese government is conservative in bent, and its finance minister recently raised eyebrows with the above statement.

  japan, as you may know, is a rapidly aging society as the long falling birthrate bites into the demographics.. here's how the english guardian reports this tale:.

  let elderly people 'hurry up and die', says japanese ministertaro aso says he would refuse end-of-life care and would 'feel bad' knowing treatment was paid for by government.

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  Sulla

  wasblind, I suggest you go look up some of the commentary from early proponents of the movement. Everybody figured and hoped that the result would be pretty much what it has been: lower classes aborting.

  For example, if you were a racist, what would you make of the fact that 74 percent of pregancies to black women are aborted in New York City, according to the Times? See here:

  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/nyregion/04abortion.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

  Or, if you thought humans were a blight, in general, and longed for the extermination of all of them, what would you make of this, from the article:

  A 17-year-old girl there to pick up a friend said she had had an abortion in May. It was her second; the first was when she was 15. The girl said she sometimes used condoms. “But I wasn’t using them when I got pregnant,” she said. “I might use them more now, but I don’t know.” Like the other women outside the clinic, she asked not to be named to preserve her privacy.

  One has to wonder whether "choice" has any sort of meaning to this young woman. Perhaps you mean to suggest that her birth control -- or indifference to it -- along with her sexual activity level is some sort of freely-given choice. I would disagree.

  But, whatever. Maybe this 17 year old girl should just hurry up and die, herself. Clearly, she isn't going to amount to much...
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  27

  JJ Abrams to direct Star Wars Episode VII

  by cedars in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  simultaneously breathing life into the two biggest sci-fi franchises?.

  http://news.sky.com/story/1043186/star-wars-episode-vii-new-director-revealed.

  as he boldly goes where no director has gone before, may the force be with him!.

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  Sulla

  Looking back on the first one -- Episode IV, I guess -- it seems to me that it really wasn't actually very good. And, on top of that, you have all the criminal acts of the subsequent movies: the Ewoks, Episodes I, II, and III, Vader's infamous, "Nooooooo!", absurd political pretensions, etc.

  Carried Fisher in a bikini helps, for sure; but that's a really high price to pay. Maybe JJ can work some magic.
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  52

  Old People Should Hurry Up and Die - says the New Japanese Finance Minister

  by fulltimestudent in

  1. social
  2. current

  the newish japanese government is conservative in bent, and its finance minister recently raised eyebrows with the above statement.

  japan, as you may know, is a rapidly aging society as the long falling birthrate bites into the demographics.. here's how the english guardian reports this tale:.

  let elderly people 'hurry up and die', says japanese ministertaro aso says he would refuse end-of-life care and would 'feel bad' knowing treatment was paid for by government.

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  Sulla

  Since we've managed to turn this partisan, it is worth noting that the idea of abortion as beneficial (in part) because it would reduce the number of undesirable (meaning, black) children was advanced and adopted by the American Left, back in the Progressive Era. Even now, of course, the idea that humans are a blight or disease on the Earth is almost exclusively a lefty position.
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  17

  If bacon ceased to exist would the world be a poorer place?

  by usualusername in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  there are few things in this world as good as a bacon sarnie.. .

  uun .

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  Sulla

  They haven't banned it because they haven't yet explored the roots of bacon-curing. It is well-known that the process of curing bacon (as well as other, non-bacon meats) was a crucial part of pagan spiritism throughout the Near East. Building the smoker was a communal activity with religious overtones, while consuming the product was always part of a religious experience where the local god was deemed to be present at the meal.
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  8

  Jacob wrestled with God?

  by MrFreeze in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  one story in the bible that always left me puzzled was the story of jacob wrestling with the man/angel/god.

  whoever it was that was wrestling with him was said not to have been able to overpower jacob so he disjointed his hip.

  at the end of the account it said jacob named the place peniel because "there i saw god face to face and and yet my life was spared.".

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  Sulla

  God, in Genesis, is not the sort of being that likes to be put into useful categories. So he shows himself in lots of different ways. One important thing to take from this sotry and others like it (see, for example, the sotry of Abraham's experience on the hilltop, surrounded by the bleeding corpses of slain animals, swooping carrion birds, and a sense of terror upon meeting God) is that God is dangerous. If God comes to you to kick your ass, you probably want to take care not to limit the way you think about him to the guy who delivers goodies. He isn't going to simply make it rain or protect you; it doesn't work like that.

  I think that's the message, one of them, anyhow.
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  50

  The Watchtower Society has come to grips with the futility of D2D preaching

  by wasblind in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  you don't even have to read between the lines, they say it straight out on their website.

  " in many countries, more and more people obtain information online.".

  who'd a thunk it .

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  Sulla

  Interesting idea, Vidiot. However, I think you may be underestimating the genius of the WT thinkers. In a million years, I never could have come up with "overlapping generations." Nobody saw that coming, the audacity!