Don’t get me started on home births. My son would be dead, and I might be as well, if I’d attempted a home birth, and I had no risk factors, other than being older than average for a first birth. I was all-go for a regular vaginal birth, and didn’t end up with the c-section until after three hours of pushing and two styles of forceps had failed. As they were prepping me, my son’s heart rate dropped, so the decision had been made none to early. He was born blue, but had a pulse. He was revived quickly, thanks to the immediate presence of medical equipment and extra doctors, none of whom we knew in advance we would need.
I can’t imagine the horror of the 911 call, and the emergency transport when his heart rate dropped-- or worse, a midwife with the attitude, which I have seen in some blogs, that death is natural, and sometimes babies just die, and we need to accept it.
My seven-year-old is happily spending a rainy Sunday watching SpongeBob. Tomorrow he starts swimming lessons.
Hey, Urbanredeneck, can you do me a favor? Try reading one of my posts before you respond to it. Because I’m getting tired of you ascribing ideas and positions to me based on the fantasy going on in your head, particularly when it’s so completely at odds with what I’ve actually written.
It does. The troop structure for GSA and BSA is very different. For BSA, the troop is a long term ongoing organization that contains hundreds of boys in units of varying ages. The troop works as a cohesive whole.
For Girl Scouts, the troop is the girls in their age bracket locally - my troop is currently THREE girls. The closest thing the GSA has organizationally to a Boy Scout troop is a Service Unit - but Service Units don’t work together the same way BSA Troops do.
Also, BSA is very clear about the volunteer commitment up front to parents. BSA parents tend to be very involved. GSA parents tend to be less involved - you get out of an organization what you are willing to put into an organization - if some parent wants to take my girls camping - go for it. I’m not much of a camper and my coleader needs her CPAP - we don’t camp much. That said, my daughter averages three or four weeks of camp a year through GSA - just not with our troop. She likes it.
GSA expects girls to do different things than boys. They both have religious badges and camping badges - but there are a lot of girly craft and girl self esteem activities in Girl Scouts - that appeal to girls and parents of girls - i.e. it isn’t camping focused by a long shot. Each troop may have a focus - ours is a “service troop” - my girls work with an Alzheimers home, singing with the residents, planting their gardens in the Spring - they also do some things for younger Girl Scouts, pick up trash for Earth Day, collect food for food drives, have garage sales and donate the money to libraries…
But frankly, the GSA/BSA thing here is a hijack - and one we’ve done many times on this board. If Urbanredneck is interested in why BSA hasn’t always had the full throated support of liberals, he could open a new thread or search up old ones.
Me, when you are told your six year old “isn’t welcome” it isn’t a news story hypothetical, its the real thing. My kid COULDN’T join Boy Scouts with his friends because atheists could not join. Yes, he could lie about his religious beliefs, but Scouting is about developing character (see my GS troop and their service commitment). I’m not signing my kid up to a character building organization and telling him to lie.
Yeah, I’ve never understood why risk a serious issue when you dont need to. Truth is hospitals already have midwife programs where you have the baby in a home-styled delivery room with a midwife if you wish. However down the hall is the ER with every other possible medical tool available just in case.
So if you have the insurance, have the kid in the hospital.
Now what SHOULD happen, is when a mother has a baby, her friends should all get together, come over, clean her house, and leave her with a refrigerator with a week’s full of casseroles or offer to come over with daily meals. Plus do any yardwork. She needs rest and needs to be treated like a queen for just a little while.
I say this as a liberal but among certain relatively popular attitudes:
-Nuclear power is bad
-GMOs are bad
-Race-based affirmative action is good
-Cultural supremacism is racist/all cultures are inherently eqaul
-Gay marriage and gun control are the most important issues of our times
-All Southern whites with socon views (or even more broadly all working-class whites) are inbred retarded racist hicks who deserve to be mocked at every opportunity. Of course its racist when you mock urban blacks as stupid or criminal. This view more than any other has probably helped ensure that much of the South goes regularly Republican
-Modern abstract art has any redeeming value
-All family structures are more or less equally good
-Oriental mysticism is superior to the Western tradition
-Primitive societies are better than modern civilization
-The death penalty is morally equivalent to murder
But it’s the same thing every week: the Left inherited the approach to thought control described in 1984, which the author wrote following his experiences in Spain.
Ah, I didn’t realize you meant believing that it was supposed to be particularly good for you. For example, I frequently try whatever new foods, like quinoa, become available, but for a new experience and varied diet. I was not aware quinoa was supposed to be particularly good for you.
This may be an example of censorship…
But this certainly isn’t. Disney no longer releases it because they think it will make them look bad. To my knowledge they have received no organized pressure to do so.
I would be amazed if this was true.
Bingo
Done these.
There is definitely a fad in avoiding Gluten. Hard to say if this counts as stupid when the major thing they claim is that they don’t feel as good when they eat it. Hard to disprove that.
Hell yeah, but change it to, “Bottled water is better for you.” I am not at all sure that liberals do this more than conservatives though. This seems to be an everyone problem in my experience.
Did homeopathy and Vaccines (in the OP and the fact that opposition to vaccines is not a liberal idea was what resulted in the thread), but the natural childbirth one is good.
These could be good. Need data to support it, but the unwillingness of liberals to condemn another method of doing things/living as inherently not good could be one so long as data supports problems. I think it comes from so much time and energy taken to get people to accept some nontraditional ways to live (gay, interracial couples, etc).
You would need data to say that the first one is not good and it would need to be overwhelming for this to count as a stupid liberal idea. Modern art is subject to taste and condemning it as a whole would better count as a stupid conservative idea. When you say, “morally equivalent” you are by definition speaking of morals and therefore cannot mark something as just blatantly stupidly incorrect.
I have no idea who either of these groups are. Without background I cannot even tell if this is a criticism of liberals, conservatives, both, or neither.
Over the years, there has been organized pressure for them to release it. Its an important piece of Art History. And for Disney completests, its lack of availability is distressing. Moreover, it fits in a racial analysis along side the crows in Dumbo and the Indians in Peter Pan. (Don’t get your cultural sensitivity training from old Disney movies - or gun safety from Fox and the Hound).
I may have been unclear, I am aware people have pushed to release it (though I did not know how organized). I don’t think anyone has been pushing for them to NOT release it.
This is what I came in here to say. It seems to be a philosophical axiom in Liberalism (even though many Liberals don’t necessarily articulate it) that people are born good, and the only reason anyone is bad is that they are corrupted by environmental factors. Last week I saw an article about how we need more programs to combat school bullying, and it included a quotation from some social-science professor that “violence is a learned behavior.” Seriously? How can anyone who has raised kids, or been around toddlers, believe that? They grab whatever they want, they hit, they even bite, all instinctively. They have to be taught not to do those things. You seriously believe those ideas only entered their heads through the influence of morally corrupt older people?
Liberals tend to talk as though all economic systems, including capitalism, are planned, as though Our Leaders “decided” at some point to implement capitalism, as opposed to communism or anarchism or whatever, intentionally. In actually, capitalism is simply what happens. Even in the most hardcore socialist countries, there have been black markets galore, naturally arising from people’s tendency to trade something they value less for something they value more.
I’d have to go with the whole anything “artificial” is bad, and that “natural” foods and medicine is somehow better. It’s like, snake venom and nightshade are natural, but I’m not going to consume them. Or chemical phobia. That drives me fucking nuts.
I was quoting the parts that pointed out the flaws in that study. Such as where the rats with a higher intake had fewer tumors yet the authors still tried to claim that the study proved GMOs are harmful. Along with concealing the rate of tumors in the control groups.
And if GMOs really caused tumors like that, why don’t we see such results in the human population?
Wheat in general and modern wheat in particular has been a disaster for human health. Modern wheat was bred and introduced without any testing, and it’s even worse than older varieties. So no, I don’t think GMOs will strike a person dead, but there is no knowing that their gradual and long-term impact on human health will be. They simply haven’t been tests.
But if you are eating primal/paleo, you are avoiding grains anyway. I am also not a big soy eater (mostly in the form of tamari = wheat-free soy sauce, but I use organic, non-GMO tamari anyway). So there go most of your GMO issues anyway.
The paleo community does not seem particularly leftie to me (although I am a leftie); in fact, I think it has a strong Libertarian strain (but includes various types in any case).
I think this is a good point, but I think it applies to both sides. Conservatives will talk about capitalism as though we wisely chose it over some other economic system, when in fact it was merely the accretion of practices over the long term. Thus, I think a better name for it is the “legacy economic system.”
I consider myself to be left of Liberal, and there is a lot of thinking on the Left that is impractical and stupid. A lot of it seems to consist of:
Whining about problems but proposing no solutions, as though merely having the right thoughts and intentions were enough.
Shaming those who don’t agree, just because.
Climate change is one such area. It’s horrible because:
Liberals talk stupidly and inaccurately about the science. They frame the debate as obviousness vs. idiocy, when it is anything but. They also mush the scientific and political aspects of the debate into an intractable congeries (this last complaint applies to many Conservatives as well, however).
They try to shame anyone who disagrees as a “denier” unworthy of respect, without recognizing any nuance in various positions.
They propose no practical solutions of any sort. Or provide any kind of cost-benefit analysis.
They seem content to lose on this issue just so long as they can bitch about Conservatives, etc. And it’s this way on a lot of issues.
I’m a leftie but I eschew the label “Liberal” or even “Progressive,” as I associate them with a whole lotta pissing and moaning and never getting anything done. Like Obama (who is a coopted crypto-Conservative at this point, but I digress…).
