Scylla. Discretion is the better part of valour.
PLONK
Enjoy,
Steven
It’s up to you to provide the relevant information.
Somehow I’m not surprised that your going to keep secret your proprietary value system and special circumstances that absolve you from the responsibilty for providing for your children, and somehow transfer it to everybody else but yourself.
Unwillingness to assume personal responsbility is pretty much the defining characteristic of the excuse culture we find ourselves in.
Scylla, I see no reason why mtgman, or anyone else, is under any obligation to exercise full disclosure of their personal details. Unless you are in a situation where a specific, binding judgment is necessary, you should withhold judgment when lacking necessary facts, instead of making up ones that serve your agenda.
Clearly the burden of proof is on me to provide further personal details to refute your arguement from ignorance. If I do not do so I run the risk of being considered a irresponsible leech on the basis of the information already in evidence. After all, the only reason one might not be fully forthcoming to such a righteous inquisitor would be if they had something to hide.
As noted the information in evidence is only a very small part of the picture, but it is clearly my fault that Scylla’s arguement is incomplete. It was my obligation to provide full details and background if I wished to be judged fairly. Any inaccurate judgements on his part, stemming from his use of an incomplete view of the situation to form a judgement, are completely my own fault. In no way should Scylla be expected to reserve judgement until all the facts are in.
Mea culpa. Mea MAXIMA culpa
Enjoy,
Steven
**
He’s not. It’s fine with me if he doesn’t. He offered his own situation up as an example, and I responded to it. Now apparently there’s secret information he doesn’t want to share which somehow changes the situation.
You can’t offer up an example for judgement, and then withhold relevant information and expect your example to stand. If he didn’t want to talk about it, he shouldn’t have.
If I’ve made something up, please point it out so I can retract it and apologize. I’ve attempted in good faith to respond to the example as it’s been presented to me.
Scylla, nobody is going to want to debate with you if every time anyone around you says anything, you attack them.
This is what you do. It annoys people, and it makes them reluctant to treat you as anything other than an asshole.
Note that the mere fact that nobody is left to argue with you does not make you right.
Note to mods: I am not calling Scylla an asshole. I am stating that his behavior makes people tend to want to treat him as a asshole.
**
If you are going to assert that my argument is ignorant and that I am wrong, than yes, the burden is on you to provide the relevant details supporting your stance.
Nonsense. I don’t consider you an irresponsible leech. It seems to me that from your standpoint going on aid temporarily, to fill the shortfall while you complete College is for you a good decision that ultimately places you in a better position as a provider for your children over the long haul, then if you dropped out and worked out Roadway.
Oh stop your whining. You told one story, and now you say there’s another. Tell it or don’t. I don’t care, and I doubt it will change the facts as you’ve described them.
You chose to have two children while in school. You chose to stay in school and depended on the government to fulfill your obligations for you, rather than accepting the consequences of your choices and doing it yourself.
Is that not accurate?
KellyM:
Could you tell me what facts I made up, please?
So then, you wouldn’t have any problem with the person putting in a trust for their child or just outright giving it to their child while they were still alive, or would you?
The piece you don’t seem to understand is that the handful of facts I shared about my life were not offered for judgement. You, actually first it was milroyj, but you seemed all too happy to continue his line of attack, took it upon yourselves to question my situation, motives, and decisions.
I choose to withdraw my contributions to this thread at this point, particularly personal details. You will get no further insight into my private life. All you have done with the meager information you have thus far is attempt to hurt me. I have no doubts that my actions and decisions during that timeframe were reasonable and honorable and that this assessment would be verified by a reasonable and honorable person who was in posession of the details behind the decisions. What I have doubts about, and why I refuse to reveal further information, is the capabilities for reason and the sense of honor of some of the participants in this thread.
Goodbye,
Steven
I’m sorry Steve, but I beleive that to be a load of cockamamy horseshit that you’re trying to shovel at me.
The fact of the matter is that I responded to your situation with courtesy and sensitivity in my posts addressing it. If you like I will be more than happy to repost them in their entirety.
I stopped being considerate of you at the exact moment that I read the post wherein you ridiculed my POV. I stopped feeling sorry for you and worrying about your feelings when you attacked me personally with the old Scylla-is-incapable-of-understanding-other viewpoints bullshit.
You can hardly claim aggrieved status when you ridiculed me without provocation in direct response to a very courteous post. In fact, you have not answered any of the issues that I brought up, and instead you have attacked me personally, and cried about how put upon you are because I dared voice my opinion and share my beliefs. Then you cried because I didn’t ask you nicely to share your secret evidence.
You have felt free to judge me and my attitudes. Why should I not return the favor?
Now we can let this take the usual course, or you can walk away with hurt feelings, or self-righteousness or whatever the case may be:
Or we can do something usual. We can back up and treat each other with courtesy.
Let me propose the following. I will repeat my post that I beleive to be fair and courteous in response to the situation you described. If you beleive it to be neither, if you beleive it to be offensive, or unfair, please show me politely and without hyperbole or ridicule where you believe I am being a pig-headed prick.
If you do that, I promise to give your words as much weight, courtesy and consideration as I possibly can, then I will respond in kind, addressing every issue you bring up.
Thusly we will prove that not every conflict need escalate or end badly. Here is my post again:
There is a central question that I’m getting at, and I think it’s a fair and proper one:
That question was and is:
Why are others compelled to support the consequences of your personal beliefs and values, to the detriment of their own?
May I just say, Scylla, that that is pretty damn cold.
:eek:
Hell, at one point, we qualified for WIC-my sister was born severely lactose intolerant and had to have special prescription only formula. Somehow, Mom and Dad were able to have it covered.
I suppose, though, they could have pulled me out of the Catholic school I attended, and sent me to an inferior public one.
Or when my dad lost his job-right after my family bought a house. We didn’t foresee that.
Sometimes, these things happen, and you can’t predict them. Sometimes, people need help. It’s all well and good to talk about pulling oneself up by the boot strap, but really-didn’t Marx say that because it’s physically impossible to pull yourself up by your boot strap?
Guin:
Yes it is cold. I’m sorry about that, but not having made the world, that’s the way I think it has to be. I’ve often thought that the perfect safety net was invisible. If nobody knows it’s there, nobody realizes on it. I see no way to transfer that concept into the real world.
The problem is that for any given level of assistance there are x number of people who would rely on it who otherwise would not. As the level of assistance increases x goes up.
Any safety net has to be high enough to allow meaningful recovery for people who fall into it, and to prevent unnecessary and chronic suffering, yet it has to be low enough not to be a potential habitat so that x is minimized.
It’s the lifeboat problem.
Let’s say you’re ten miles from shore, and there are fifty people in the water. The boat can hold 5 people safely and each person above that risks swamping the boat. The current is taking you out to see. Some people will be able to swim to sure on their own. Others won’t. If you put only the weak and the injured in the boat there’s nobody to paddle it to shore. If you overload it, you may exhaust the strong.
It seems to me that any method you employ for using that boat needs to make sure that you don’t doom anyone who would otherwise be able to make it to shore on their own.
It is easy in such a situation to allow compassion to doom more people than would die if there was no boat.
Social welfare programs run the same risks. Their very existance at what seems reasonable and compassionate levels can similarly result in a reliance on them that furthers poverty rather than ameliorates it.
In order to be maximully effective (and I think the scenario that minimizes suffering and poverty overall is the best one,) the safety net has to be set very low. Unfortunately this will mean that people who would otherwise only need a small temporary relief from a passing circumstance must be denied aid and suffer more than would be necessary than if the net were higher.
To lower the net to their circumstances would increase x out of proportion to the suffering releived. Losing three to save one is not a good trade.
For my opinion, I think a minimum safety net should include food, medecine, shelter and education, in the quantity that alleviates the total need for these things so that nobody has to go without these things.
Right now I think we have a very expensive safety net that fails completely in all three categories. The whole system needs to be abandoned and completely redesigned from the ground up.
"Unfortunately this will mean that people who would otherwise only need a small temporary relief from a passing circumstance must be denied aid and suffer more than would be necessary than if the net were higher.
"
No, that’s where you’re wrong. There’s no reason in the world why any such unnecessary inhumanity has to be tolerated in order to make a social program both reasonable and pragmatic. We are ingenious enough to do better.
One problem we’re having now is that our society has fallen back into a punitive model–something that went out of style the first time almost a century ago. Although you’re not really advocating a punitive model, by insisting that any reasonable program has to tolerate a certain amount of suffering you end up flacking for those who do.
Actually, I would. I think a fairer model would be to allow them to give their kid an endowment amounting to 10 percent of their wealth or $100,000, whichever is lesser, once the kid reaches 25, and after that, nothing.
this would still constitute a huge advantage for some, of course, but would tend to even things out to some extent. A rich kid could blow through $100K pretty fast, so they’d have to get off their duffs and earn some dough pretty quick.
mandelstram:
Cool. Can you tell me how? Right now I would argue that the most succesful Welfare program is the Japanese one, and that’s one pretty damn cold.
Evil Captor:
But I thought we agreed it was the guy’s money while he was alive? What right do you have to tell him what to do with it while he’s alive?
People grant and buy and transfer things all the time. Are you now by default eliminating all such transfers over 100k, or only for children?