Do we have less compassion for the poor?

In My Humble Opinion
141

Funny how you insist on cites from me, but decline to provide them for yourself.

Which integer is 9000 closer to - zero, or four million?

4 million is the total number of pregnancies in the US every year - not the number of rape pregnancies, which is about 32K.
That’s why I said

Well, thanks for the correction, but unless you are claiming that less than a quarter of one percent is a significant number while less than a hundredth is not, it does not make much difference. Less than one quarter of one percent of illegitimate children are the result of rape.

A distinction without a difference is no difference.

There isn’t any flaw in my logic. Things that are easy to avoid are easy to avoid. It does not follow that therefore everything is easy to avoid, and the suggestion is silly.

Putting on a condom is no more difficult for me than it is for anyone else.

No, it is easy not to get someone pregnant if you are a man if you use a condom. It is easy not to get pregnant if you are a woman and you use a condom. I am surprised you didn’t know that - didn’t your mommy tell you about the birds and bees?

What is this strange hold that McDonald’s has over poor people? Is it magic mind rays that compel them to enter and spend money on crappy hamburgers? Pray cite the source of this phenomenon!

We are talking about a minimal standard - not being poor. By and large, being poor can be avoided with easy, simple steps, available to any adult - condoms, groceries instead of fast food, not getting hooked on drugs or alcohol. Do things like this, and in the long term you tend not to be poor.

It is like some tests I have seen - if you just show up and sign your name, you get ten points. Think of “not being poor” as “getting ten points”. The guy who gets 100% may be much, much smarter than me - but he also showed up and signed his name.

The chronically poor person is the one saying “I couldn’t show up for the test because I don’t have a car and it’s too far to take the bus and my pen ran out of ink and I didn’t have time to buy a new one because the baby kept me up all night and nobody reminded what time the test was. So be compassionate and give me more money.”

Regards,
Shodan

142

From here. Although, to be fair, the data on pregnancy from rape is not as clear as it might be.

Regards,
Shodan

143

Those figures are wildly wrong. I mean seriously, from Rape-related pregnancy: estimates and descriptive characteristics from a national sample of women - PubMed

A 1996 Medical University of South Carolina analysis of the federally-funded 1990-92 National Women’s Study of 3,031 women over 18. (Kilpatrick worked on both the study and the analysis.) The analysis concluded that among rape victims aged 12 to 45, 5 percent of rapes resulted in pregnancies, and, using the study’s figure of 683,000 “forcible rapes” in 1990, estimated that “there may be 32,101 rape-related pregnancies annually among American women older than 18 years.”

They are overstating the incidence of rape by almost an order of magnitude!

144

When you see a “poor person,” you do not and cannot know why that person is poor. Were you to learn of the exact details of that person’s history and background, in some cases, EVEN YOU would have to concede that that individual did not get to that point because of their own poor choices. That teenage girls impregnated by their own fathers had little say in whether that person used a condom, for example. Yes, that’s a small number of people, relatively speaking. But why should we speak relatively when we are talking about actual people? Do they simply not matter until there enough of them to reach enough of a tipping point? If you were that girl, wouldn’t you matter, even if you were the only one?
When you add up these small numbers, the people that CLEARLY did not blithely make poor decisions while you rode the bus and walked past the McDonalds and put on your condoms and went to high school, the number is not so small. Then add in the people who made decisions that statistically should have worked in their favor, but failed anyway, because that’s how statistics work. Add in the people who didn’t even have a clue what good decisions would look like, as they grew up surrounded by people making bad decisions and copied them. Add in the people with developmental disabilities and addicted guardians and dads in prison and teenage parents and the ones that were molested at an early age and the ones with religious parents who refused to let them learn about birth control and the number gets bigger and bigger.

How can you not see that your EASY may be almost completely out of reach for a nontrivial number of people?

When you see someone struggling with something, that means that it is HARD for them. Maybe you don’t see why or how, but why not just accept that it must be? Do you look at a dyslexic kid trying to decipher a book and scoff at him because reading is “easy”?

145

There are also lots of adjunct faculty who have multiple degrees, lots of experience, good evaluations and qualifications, etc.–and still end up on food stamps:

146

This.
(I was going to post something similar, but you did a far better job than I might have.)

147

I also explained why: I do not believe reliable data is available. Extracting non-consensual rapes from statutory rapes accurately seems highly problematic. Then they often try to include estimates of unreported rapes, which is surely most of them, but their guesses are not data.

And four million is way closer to zero that four trillion…
So all integers are practically zero! Seems legit.

So, easy things are easy, got it.
Round things are round… See, I can logic too!

No, it’s easier. You probably have some sort of penis, I reckon. And don’t suggest a “female condom” as any kind of viable alternative. Those are barely even for sale due to their extreme lack of popularity.

There was a time when I indeed did not know about the birds/bees, just as there was for you and everyone else. Lucky for us, we probably found out before it made any difference in our own lives.
But guess what? Not everyone even HAS a mommy, and some people who DO have mommies DON’T have mommies that tell them! And there are whole organizations of people fighting to stop schools from telling anyone… And they are actually succeeding in some places! I don’t like it either, but it’s true.

It’s not mind rays, silly, it’s highly effective marketing. There are very smart people working full-time to make this happen. They are studying human behavior. They are scientifically developing flavor profiles, they are determining ideal store placement, they are spending billions of dollars on ads… They are outsmarting people that are not very bright and fleecing them for their paltry dollars that add up to big giant stacks of money to fund more of the same.
Plus it’s very convenient and you can fill your belly without spending a bunch of time, which is our most valuable resource anyway. Personally, I can’t stomach the crap, but if I could, it would be far cheaper and more convenient than what I eat, though less healthy. Lucky for me I’ve made a string of brilliant decisions and have plenty of time to broil my lobsters and chop my organic veggies.

148

I think my compassion for the poor is still in working order (at least, I think so - it’s not easy for a Demon Prince to be sure), but I don’t have much compassion for bad argumentation. You got roundly spanked on your implication that many illegitimate children must surely be the product of rape, and on being shown the figures - that themselves appear to rely on an inflated rape-pregnancy statistic, which should have given you more of the benefit than you deserve - you start wildly flailing around appealing to emotion in the name of the ugly spectre of paternal rape.

Yes, it matters to the one person who is struggling to support the child that was forced on her by her own monstrous father, but you ought to have the intellectual honesty to concede that for every one of these there are orders of magnitude more who were perfectly capable of realizing that pregnancy is a common outcome of sex, that a 98% chance is not the same as a sure thing, and that you would not think it a good idea to cross the street if you had only a 98% chance of making it.

Some of your post I’ll leave alone, because surely it’s not necessary that I disagree with everything you say.

149

Except I see people immigrate here from other countries with far less job skills, far less language fluency, and far less resources than poor white people. Yeah, everybody’s experiences are unique, but when there are people worse off able to make it happen it does make me wonder how much others are over exaggerating their plight.

But this also intersects with race and culture. The perception of what you are willing to do to improve your life will vary by privilege. If you came from more privilege, then some options won’t even be on the table.

150

Yes, I am a bit astonished at how strident Shodan is about how managing to not be poor is “easy”.

Look, people grow up in a lot of different life circumstances. Peer pressure and how you are raised makes huge amounts of difference in those 18 and under and still has a large influence on adults. For example, if you have a circle of friends that decide not to have sex it is far far easier to avoid teenage pregnancy compared to having a circle of friends where they do. Teenagers listen to parents and peers more than anyone else when it comes to sex, and for the most part parents aren’t stepping up to the plate (in the usa anyway).

When it comes down to it, Shodan’s views would probably make 80% of people “stupid”. I made stupid decisions in my life. I’m college educated and make middle-class figures but damn if I can’t tell there was a ton of luck that went into making some of my really iffy decisions end up working out alright. If it hadn’t worked out he’d be pointing at my decisions and saying “how stupid” - but since it has worked out, well, I’m the poster child. That’s all the difference there is between “stupid” and “smart” decisions in this life sometimes.

Look, there are tons of well-off people that are financially stupid as much as the next “poor person”. This study may not cover the united states but it does go to show that a lot of people out there - what you might even call the “average person” - is just not very good with money. It’s a fact of life that it is not “easy” for a lot of people to understand even “basic” things like inflation, budgeting, saving, and interest. You need to adjust your idea of what an average person is capable of. This doesn’t even get into things like mental illness or capacity for stress which can wildly affect everything in our day to day lives.

151

Female condoms are available for sale at amazon dot com. They’re also at Walgreens. How is that “barely even for sale”?

152

Let’s put it this way. We’ve got a teenage girl that may not even know female condoms exist, who may not have a debit or credit card in order to buy things online without their parents knowledge, with parents who would explode if she even thought of having sex so she can’t breach the subject to them to even ask, and you want her to sort all this out and manage to buy a female condom at Walgreens (which may not be in her geographical area and may not have it in stock that day), with a boyfriend that’s pressuring her with a “you don’t need that, why can’t we do it now?” and “but condoms make sex awful”, and then use it correctly? We can’t even depend on teenagers to use a regular condom correctly and reliably.

Talk about some hurdles.

153

Tisk tisk… we’re suppose to come up with excuses, not solutions.

154

Only if you pull non sequiturs out of your ass.

Apparently not.

Regards,
Shodan

155

When you are surviving where you are, you still have something to lose. When you aren’t (you’re still alive obviously, but your situation is untenable), there is a certain freedom. Once you’ve been stripped of your possessions, you don’t have to cart them around anymore. Once you’re sleeping under a bridge, any bridge will do. Once you’ve lost all of your friends, you might as well live near any set of strangers. That doesn’t mean you’re doing yourself any favors by jettisoning any of the above, obviously, but if they are gone, you must live by your wits as that’s all you’ve got left.

Some people can’t though. You say you “see” immigrants that have surmounted these obstacles, but aren’t they the survivors? Don’t assume they are a random sampling. Picking up and leaving your country is risky and if it goes poorly and they are victims of sex trafficking, etc. it would seem they had made a mistake and some other decision could have worked out well for them.

156

[QUOTE=Macca26]
When it comes down to it, Shodan’s views would probably make 80% of people “stupid”.
[/QUOTE]
Obviously not, or 80% of people would be poor.

Regards,
Shodan

157

Only poor people are stupid? I disagree. I think there is a healthy mix of wealthy stupid people and smart poor people. In fact, I think stupid people occupy every economic level and that wealth is not necessarily tied to “smartness”.

158

Good heavens, no. She should go ahead and have unprotected sex, and the rest of us should be perfectly happy to support her and her offspring without complaint.

That’s compassion. You could look it up!

Regards,
Shodan

159

I didn’t say they were impossible to get. My point was that obviously practically no one likes or uses them. They are unpopular. People do not find them appealing. Many people have never seen one or even know they exist. They are also less than 80% effective. This all adds up to them not being a great option for most situations.

160

Good luck learning English!

Regards,
Shodan