Well then what’s the solution? I think you just made a rather good case for universally available birth control… if not healthcare 
We kinda do now. Planned parenthood makes birth control available and poor people have Medicaid (a whole discussion unto itself).
The solution is to reverse institutional welfare. When I was in the 8th grade (1972) I looked at long-term welfare as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even at that age I was able to figure out that it would quickly turn into a breeding program for the disaffected. In a way, that’s what happened. In recent years the welfare program has been restructured away from a long-term institution. Over time there should be a reversal of welfare trends.
This is a different definition of “sucking it up” than I’m used to.
Where I’m at, SIU means “Shut up and take it.” Shodan uses it to mean something on the order of, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.”
That would be a good summation of how the expression SIU is used. And you’ve managed to do it by using other expressions of speech as examples.
To do this, you would have to eliminate almost every religion. That can’t be done. Religion fills a vital role in the human psyche for many reasons. (Yes, some of us eschew it. I’m speaking in general terms.)
People want to believe that their existance doesn’t just* end *when they die. They also want to believe that those who do them wrong will get their just deserts, if not in this life, then the next. The notion of an all-seeing invisible being has a powerful influence over controlling behavior. (It was more pronounced in the past, but it still exists today.) People want to believe that there is a resource to which they can turn for any kind of help, one which has the power to preform miracles on their behalf. Lastly, people want the comfort of feeling that there is a being which loves them no matter what they’ve done or who they are.
There is also a value in religion as a social stratifier. Believers can have the pleasure of knowing they belong to God’s chosen group and form sometimes very tightly-knit social groups with fellow believers. As in all groups, some of the members have more status as being more holy or pure than other members, but even the most sinful believer can rest assured he’s better than a non-believer. Some groups take exclusivity to the extreme in hating non-believers.
The reason why you would have to eliminate religion to have a simple ethical system based on Bill and Ted’s “Be excellent to one another” is that religion inherently creates rules which define harmless behavior as forbidden. Some groups take it further than others but almost all faiths have added layers of taboos on top of what their culture already forbids and include at least some aspects of self-denial.
And while it pains me to say it, I think we’re going to be seeing a lot more moral restrictions in the future as religious groups gear up for more political involvement. I’m a bit concerned that the much-vaunted-bullshit of the “War on Christmas” and the shameful anti gay marriage legislation drive were just the opening salvos. I hope I’m just paranoid.
As a moral relativist myself, I agree. As a logical person, though, I can’t. You cannot fully seperate yourself from your culture in order to make a completely impartial judgement of what is “rational.” Your views will always be colored by your life’s experience and early socialization and may differ greatly from what is believed to be rational in the future.
Well, it’s all based on your socialization. Most of us have at least a rudimentary form of empathy, yes, but there’s a surprising number of people who don’t.
Empathy is something which is taught in early childhood. Parents may not even realize they’re doing it, but it’s an essential part of development. Most of the time, the training comes in the form of, “That was wrong to take the doll from Maggie. How would you like it if that happened to you?” (I.E training the child to put itself in others’ shoes.) It also comes from watching the parents’ actions. Do they get sad when other people around them do? Do they ever express consideration of others’ feelings?
Empathy is not a trait which would stop pedophilia if it were socially acceptable. To have empathy, you have to be able to recognize that a person was harmed by an action. If everyone around you thinks having sex with children is okay, you’re not going to think the kids deserve sympathy.
“Freedom” is relative. Why don’t people notice when legal rights are taken away from them? Because their daily lives don’t change. They’re not troubled by NSA wiretapping because they’re not hiding anything. They don’t care about the latest Supreme Court decision on law enforcement rights because they’re not breaking the law. As long as they can watch what they want on TV, can marry, travel, and work however they please, they’re happy.
Laws usually follow the way society is going, not shape it. In essence, the people take away their own freedom by creating an outcry over the Moral Panic of the Week, to which politicians respond by offering legislation to control that behavior.
For a brief time, public outcry was devoted in a large part to giving people rights: ending slavery, women’s suffrage and civil rights. The people moved because there was a great wrong being perpetrated. Now, in the modern era, social movements are mainly comprised of sporadic and small-scale Outrage Groups whose focus has been controlling behavior.
Problem is, all the big issues are gone. It’s hard to get worked up about a girl fighting for her right to have green hair, or even things which affect us economically: worker’s rights. The comparitively subtle racial problems of today don’t bring us to tears the way seeing a black protester attacked by a dog in Birmingham once did.
Social change comes about through strife. We’re too fat and happy for all that much strife these days. Even our poorest citizens don’t starve to death-- hell, a lot of impoverished people have cable TV. Everyone is allowed to vote, but few bother any more. No matter who wins the election, things stay pretty much the same. Even the war in Iraq and the current strife in the Middle East makes barely a ripple on the periphery, busy as we are with dental appointments and basketball practice, and, dammit, the pool is leaking again.
Hey, I’m against them, too. I have just accepted that there’s nothing that we can do about it.
Welfare is what keeps the poor from beating us to death with our own designer shoes. Until there are enough jobs out there which pay enough to support a family for every poor American who wants one, there will always be poverty. Increased poverty means more crime. Perhaps it’s cheaper this way, when one considers the human cost.
And, by the way, the dissafected will always breed. The choice comes down to whether you want those kids to have food or not.
I wonder if the time spent praying to the tooth fairy wouldn’t be better spent working to correct those wrongs. But then again I’m not sure that all the perceived wrongs people think that have been aflicted upon them are completely valid. Stories tend to have many sides to them.
And
A very good point. Things like the ERA don’t make much sense to most people when legally everyone is equal to everyone else, eg. If the majority of a particular minority are doing well there is no reason why the rest of them can’t, too. Yeah, life ain’t fair, but if you pull up your socks and work at it then maybe you can get past that. The responsibility for the rest of us to help you in some way isn’t there anymore and when we hear that people are being held back because of things like skin colour, we think of the guy with that particular skin colour working in the office next to us making the same pay as we do.
Well people can be unfair, but it is more like the person who preceives patterns of fair/unfair(ness) in the randomness.