Every time the planes land at Adelaide airport, the pilots remind passengers to set their watches back 20 years.
Got my coat and gone.
…and about Trump’s SC appointment, I’m surprised he has avoided making some stupid remark about how ‘hot’ she looks for a Supreme Judge…I feel confident it will come.
Well yes, but that was only until 1991. At that time they realised it was pointless and stopped doing it.
Yes, it’s amusing to note that religion’s sexual repression, more often than not has the opposite effect that religions claim to be aiming for.
The catastrophe of religious abstinence teaching by religions in the US is a prime example, far higher unwanted pregnancies and STD transfer rates than if children were told fuck all, and left to work it out for themselves.
The best results come unsurprisingly from proper thorough and candid sex education lessons starting at a young enough age, and of course linked to availability of contraceptives and family planning from medical professional.
Religions don’t care about failure rates, or suffering, it’s all about faux piety and lording it over sinners.
2 Likes
I have read more than a few well supported and researched articles that to solve much of poverty world wide in mostly peaceful countries, all you had to do was proper sex education, highly accessible birth control, and the advancement of women’s rights.
Almost no other action more strongly correlates with poverty then teenage pregnancy.
Not sure that’s entirely true, although I agree that it’s partly true…
Poor countries, such as India, China, much of Africa and south America have no welfare system, which of course means no age pension.
People have large families to make sure they will have some one to care for them in old age. That way they won’t starve to death when they get too old to work. I think child mortality rates are high in such societies.
It is my understanding that in parts of India at least, anal sex is practiced as birth control.
I do agree that general education is a magic bullet to kill poverty. But an not convinced that sex education alone will do it.
Starvation is a very real fear for billions of people. This is not because there is not enough food to feed everyone. Enough food is produced to feed everyone world wide, but that doesn’t happen because of the world market economy.
WHEN the time comes that vastly more food needs to be produced, the farming of large animals for food will dwindle or cease completely. I suspect the farming of certain insects for food may become much more widespread.
I remember reading (I forget where) that the Pope of the day was warned against imposing celibacy on the clergy in the fifth century… As a far as I’m aware priests commonly had wives at least into the thirteenth century. There is no scriptural reason for clergy to be celibate as far as I know.
The religious sexual prudery and rules against sex have never been anything more than a form of social control. No surprise such rules are found in all major religions
Agreed, hence my wording of: “solve much of,”
At least one of the articles, from what I can recall of the top of my head. (I really need to archive what I read for later reference!) - I can try and find these articles and reference them here if anyone is interested.
Anyways, the article mentioned the:
Issue.
The badly paraphrased author’s rebuttal went something along the lines of:
For those in poverty and w/o rights, or easy access to contraception, many women end up having many more kids then necessary to reach this goal.
- having many kids to care for at once increases the mortality rate for all the kids.
- You only need 1 child to survive to adulthood to care for you in your old age, especially in many of these cultures where marriage rates are very high, and it is expected to take care of in law parents like your own.
Contraception would allow a mother to keep the number of kids they have to manageable level, instead of having kid(s) every year.
Teenage pregnancy in many poor societies usually means all education stops, especially for the mother, but quite often for the father as well.
I personally suspect all this is greatly over simplified, but data comparison has shown that:
Works in places it was well implemented. It lifts entire societies out of poverty. I been to several countries in central africa where I saw this effort underway and saw over the years, poverty levels to be measurably reduced as the number of kids per capable female drops. Infant and child mortality rates drop greatly as well.
Fast forward to 2020, and some of these central african nations now has lower baby/child mortality rates than some parts of USA.
Teenage pregnancies? Be very interested to learn about any specific poor societies in which that is common. Yes, please let me have links to relevant articles.
The kinds of societies to which I referred are quite often subsistence farmers or labourers. It would be extremely difficult for one such person to look after mum.
Getting data on the highest poverty areas, (like sub-Sahara Africa countries.) Is difficult. Many of the countries themselves can not and/or will not collect this kind of data.
Data on US pregnancy is a lot easier to find, (some of the highest rates of poverty and teenage pregnancy in any industrialized “first world” country especially in poorer areas of the country like the “bible belt.”)
" Only 38 percent of girls who have a child before age 18 get their high school diplomas by 22."
" Seventy-eight percent of children born to teenage mothers who never married and who did not graduate from high school live below the federal poverty level. "
Moving on to what I can find on the very poor, < 2 dollars a day we find:
Oke, Yetunde F., Poverty and Teenage Pregnancy: The Dynamics in Developing Countries (November 29, 2010). OIDA International Journal of Sustainable Development, Vol. 2, No. 5, pp. 63-66, 2010, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1717155
I did not read through that article however.
An easier, less dense article from WHO
Agreed, it is hard to find any real data on this sort of process. I am aware that in many of the poorest districts, it is entire extended families looking out for each other and entire communities. The ones that do not have that, simply die, quite often completely unrecorded.
In my own personal experience: I have gone off the beaten tourist path in sub-saharan Africa, and I saw younger family members that would literally chew food for most of the elderly population, that lacked teeth to chew unprocessed food. Even after spending a huge amount of effort to “mill” the grains/rice/etc.
Every remote village I visited, I saw a lot of home made fermented foods (alcohol) that quite often was the best way to give these elderly the calories they needed to survive. (I tried some and it tasted awful to me.) I saw tons of kids just “wandering around,” usually naked or near naked, and my driver/guide told me the entire village “dressed” in their sunday best and partied in anticipation of my group’s arrival.
Don’t worry non religious, which really weirded out a lot of these people, where their only contact with “rich white people” was almost always accompanied by strong religious motives.
All that said, I saw local orphanages bursting at capacity, there is millions of children in these countries that were abandoned by parents. With widespread birth control, these numbers could go down, and some couples could choose to adopt and fill a major need (unadopted children that have horrible poverty life outcomes typically,) to care for them in older age.
You hear often times in the news of celebrities adopting children from places like this, but realize that is a 1 in a million sort of scenario. 99% go on to live entire lives of extreme poverty, with very poor average life spans.
All of this got 10x worse since covid came along is my understanding. (If you want I can see if I can find any data to back this particular claim.)
Welcome @JayHatcher
Just a note. This thread is old. There are more current ones that members will look in.
Enjoy your time here!
For some background on the process and its origins, see Federalist 68 for commentary by the Founders (Hamilton in this case) on the issue.
Welcome to Atheist Republic DennisBryant.
That is a lovely utopian ideal, but any nation with any resources is a target for foreign influence.
But in this political and economic world is co-dependent on other nations for trade and finance, a sad reality.
I fucking don’t
Move to N Korea. Fuck, even China was “influenced” by capitalism when the positive economic aspects were apparent.
Education, health, finance, science, aid, wars - all are ideas passed to one another and we learn from each other (failures and successes).
NOT anywhere near a utopia (not my idea of one anyway).
It’s been awhile, but I’d thought I’d post there here.
My wife and I got our ballots for the 2022 primary election.
Sorry the image isn’t very clear; mine is the white one (lower part of image), hers is kind of blue (upper document).
Why does she have more than 2x as many races to vote in than I do? Simple; if you are a member of party X, then you can only vote for members of party X (and in a few very local races where the office has no party affiliation). And since I’m not a member of a political party, I’m not allowed to vote in races that have party affiliations (almost all of them).
My wife is a member of a major political party, she is allowed to vote in races that have a candidate for that office (that is why she has so many more races).
So freaking complicated. We just voted in our provincial elections. A little card is mailed to me a month ahead, giving directions to the polling station, and early voting stations. And if I do not get my card in the mail, no biggie, I just present ID and I get to vote.
As long as I am a Canadian citizen and live in my riding, they make efforts to get me out to vote.
We just vote for the representative of our riding. Just place an X for your selection in the little white circle.
Whoooaaaa…
I didn’t know that.
So much for voting privacy. Or choice if you decide to NOT want to vote for a party you’re registered with.
It locks folks into political identity.
1 Like
It’s probably even worse than you think. The idea of a primary is for people to vote for who they want to be a candidate for their chosen party. Unfortunately you can get up to all kinds of shenanigans. You’re not obligated to vote in the election for the person you voted for in the primary. Since Trump was going to be his parties nominee and not be challenged in a primary he encouraged Republicans to register as Democrats and vote for a weak candidate to run against him in the actual election. Democrats have also registered as Republicans to block Trump nominees.
This has always struck me as one of the many bizarre consequences and antics of the U.S. electoral system. Why would you register your party affiliation in a (presumably) secret ballot? Doesn’t that fly directly in the face of the principle of the ballot being secret, making people’s political leanings more or less a public secret? Why would the public have any say at all in which candidate a particular political party elects as a candidate? Wouldn’t it be more logical to leave it up the the actual card-carrying party members? And as you point out, the current U.S. system seems vulnerable to organized campaigns of outright manipulation, even fraud.
1 Like
You don’t actually have to register your party affiliation and I didn’t for many years, but if you want to vote in the primary for the candidate you want to run then you have to register. It does open the process to out right fraud and manipulation and there has to be a better way. That the government has the rolls of party affiliations is unsettling, but most don’t keep their votes a closely guarded secret any way, even those manipulating the system and registering against their real affiliation announce the fact and are proud of themselves. It would be pretty hard to keep affiliations a secret in this day and age any way. You can even accurately discern someones voting preferences by what news programs they watch. Someone with their TV tuned exclusively, or mostly, to Fox news is a republican. Fox news is not carrying the Jan. 6 riot investigation, going so far as to not even break for commercials for fear that someone might be tempted to switch channels and see footage of Trump supporters storming the capitol and beating police, or the text from their anchors urging Trump to call them off when publicly these anchors insist Trump had nothing to do with it.
What I’d really like to see fixed is that damned electroral college that allowed Trump to be president when the majority of americans didn’t vote for him in the first place. It’s also vulnerable to manipulation and was targeted by Trump to keep him in power. I think it came closer than most people want to admit to corrupting the election and we might not be so lucky next time.
1 Like