When I say it, and I say it quite a bit lately… I’m only referring to future children. Not present children. Nor conceived but unborn children. Just future ones.
You forgot what its like to grow up impoverished, doing without, and being forever crippled by the experience. All the homeless people you see everyday were most often homeless as children.
Children aren’t property. We care more about the means of a person adopting an animal than caring for a child. Because parents have the right to have children. Because we wouldn’t ever want to impinge on someones right to have a family… not that we care about the rights of the children born into the care of someone who can’t. Children get no votes, have no means to live, are totally dependent, and often just suffer through it.
People don’t have some right to have children… the have the opportunity to fulfill that responsibility. Were I king of the world, I’d happily make having kids a privilege. And I’d pick who got to have kids, and I would be ruthless… but since you all haven’t seen fit to raise me to that office, you must wallow in your suffering.
20% of the kids in my state are “food insecure” meaning not dying of starvation, but going for a day without food, or never getting enough. Yet 90% of people in poverty manage to get and use birth control. Hmm… Maybe that 90% are just overachievers.
To clarify, it’s not about the cooking, it’s about the idea that she thinks little diet microwavable meals are healthier, and tasty.
I’m close by, and am more than happy to do the cooking. I can feel useful.
I do appreciate your kind wishes. Sadly I have lived through real hardship, and I know first hand just how little help there is.
Its not like modern society got rid of the struggle for survival, it just ‘civilized’ it to where if you are on the fringes, you better play it smart, or you will suffer and die… and then society will sell your corpse for a profit.
Not how it should be, but how it is.
Maybe. But you know how I love to offend people by stating my horrible views on this subject 
I guess thats it. This one thing is all I’ve ever seen about poverty.
If we had had children at that time, it would have been the result of a bad decision on our part. I accept that, and we would have had to live with it if things had turned out differently. However, whether or not we had the right to have children at that point is not really relevant, as it’s not the same as stopping people from adopting a dog (incidentally, adopting or caring for a child is subject to stricter regulaon than for pets, while you won’t have regular visits from vets and social workers if you let your existing pets breed).
OK, so it’s 10 years ago and you’re the king of the world. Do you force my wife to have an abortion? Stop us from having sex? Take any children away from us and give them to more worthy parents? Because people have tried all of these things and it doesn’t help matters much.
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I had a think about the “disonnect” idea while in the shower today, and I want to clarify.
I don’t think all big corporations are bad, I’m just opposed to feeding the beast when it demands bailouts after fueling the desire to fuck up the economy, demanding help when it overproduces an item (like too many new homes), when it does more harm than good to the people like fracking, or when we simply let it write the legislation for us when it doesn’t think the people will let it do what it wants.
On the flip side, there are many wonderful mid- to small-size companies that provide us with great things, and if we could allow them to thrive, we’d get better competition and variation in our consumer world, and may just make working for a living a little easier on us as humans.
You’d have to take a pill to have a baby. Sometimes it wouldn’t work. This would be always on birth control. When it failed to work, you just wouldn’t have a baby.
No forced abortions… in fact, no abortions at all if it was 11 years ago you made me king. See birth control that you take a pill to make work. I’d give you the pill, were you worthy.
And your children would be taken care of, by you, with the money you’d need to do it. There would likely be a series of video lessons on child-rearing that you would have to finish, and complete tests showing your competence at doing so. I wouldn’t hesitate to affix you and your wife with shock collars to enforce compliance, but I doubt you’d give me any guff, so that probably wouldn’t be necessary.
But none of this iron handed benevolence can be yours… because you didn’t make me king of the world. Suckers.
You get to have your view, doesn’t mean we have to agree with you! 
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I’m not disagreeing with your overall points about the modern capitalist system. I think you’re right, but part of what you have to realize is that not everyone has the same options and choices in regards to buy in or disconnecting from the system. The reason why so many white middle class kids were able to drop out in the 60s was because they had the resources to do so.
But maybe Grrl from Cat and Girl said it best - “your ideals [and by that I mean mine too] are a luxury”:
Let’s all go eat cheap cookies in the dark now. The cheap agri-business cookies are on me, you guys.
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I grew up in a poor family, and really, there are few things better to make one miserable.
I don’t mean “poor middle class” but “borderline hobo kid class”. There were days I couldn’t eat, and we had to depend on charity (not “taxpayer money paycheck”, but “here, have something to eat”, instead). All we could afford was a ceiling on our heads. No cars, no vacations, no fun things like other kids did. For years my only toy were a few magnets and pieces of scrap metal that I used as a makeshift lego, and that is no joke. We had no regular clothes, only old stuff, and that turned into school fights, believe it or not. The local bullies were delighted to give a hard time to the one dressing odd. I took it as a nerd, my brother took it as a violent idiot (spoilers: he abandoned studies shortly after, because he was getting expelled all the time for beating on bullies and teachers).
Later, other kids were doing social life as teens, but I had to work, illegally (you can’t be legally hired until you are 16, here). I didn’t have that time of first love and growing street smart, I was busy just to be able to afford school stuff and clothes. Oh, and teachers don’t buy the excuse of “I had no money for it” when they tell you to read a book to write a paper about, or when you get to art class with only an unknown pencil and ruler older than yourself. Also high school bullies were far less tolerant of non-compliant clothing, and punched way harder.
Any little issue or trouble was a big deal. Someone stole or broke your PE clothes as a prank? Find a excuse to not do PE and face the accusations of laziness or being a fucking idiot for not bringing clothes, or direct failed grades. The power company got a wrong reading and is billing too much to pay? Oh shit call everyone try to borrow money! Dad got sick? Oh shit we are gonna get evicted. Something broke? Tough luck. You need medication? Tough luck. Also the lying about how you couldn’t afford some things everyone else had because you know people doesn’t buy it, so better them tell something less shameful.
The irony in all this is that I had the highest IQ in my entire town when I got it measured as a kid. Teachers spoke of things I could do and amazing career choices, but all it served is for them to be way more demanding and giving false hope. Also some decided that I was so smart that they had me go to older kid’s classes to show how much better I could read or so some things, and the older kids didn’t like being called “stupider than a weirdly-dressed first-grader”, so I had 13-15yos beating on a 6yo kid. (I didn’t know I was bragging, I was just told to do something and I just did).
That was my saving grace, though. The little datum was known to principals of the schools I attended, so three of them and some other teachers took pity or perhaps genuine interest, sparking my interest on both science and art, and allowing me to borrow various books that weren’t “fit” for the school library (fantasy books, science books with fancy cardboard popup thingies reproducing the mechanisms, and I remember a few about space and dinosaurs (before Jurassic Park was a thing)). in HS I also got a lab for myself in recess thanks to one of the teachers, where I learned how to use a computer seriously, networking, pneumatic circuits and all sorts of fun electronics, in return for keeping the computers free of crapware and the network functioning (I have seen things I can’t unsee… D: )
(and, well, while I was in the library or lab, the other kids wouldn’t try to beat me up, so yeah)
That was the bright side of my early years, certainly. I had few friends, but their parents seemed to understand our situation and allowed us to stay at lunch and stay around to play, so it was kinda fortunate as well.
I was also fortunately responsible and stayed away from vices I couldn’t afford, or from getting in trouble with the law, not leaving unpaid bills, you know the drill. I had nobody to warn me from it, so I am kinda lucky I figured it out before getting in trouble.
Why was it? Because my mother was super elite and stuff, but she was literally expelled from her family when she had kids as a teen with a poor-as-a-rat guy, who is my father. You can imagine how well it went. She can’t do anything but housekeeping, and has given up on life, as well as my brother. Fortunately, I had a brighter disposition, although I wasn’t free from depression and despair, and feeling useless more often than not.
That pretty much continued until a few years ago. I managed to make a successful career as a pastry chef, and things are looking up, I finally have things and clothes I like, even a computer that isn’t someone’s leftovers, although it’s hard to forget how easy it is to be living under a bridge if anything goes wrong. I am safe as long as I don’t get any sicker (I’m narcoleptic since birth, not the best thing to have a bright day) or I break an arm or something. I support my brother and my mother (yeah in soviet spain, mother lives in your basement!), although I am not in the best of terms with them (all they do is cry about their misfortune and do nothing about it, but well, it’s the only family I got).
I apologize for the super lenghty post, but trips through the memory lane tend to have that thing, and being a non-native speaker I tend to beat around the bush with idioms and verbose text.
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No! Make me your undisputed king and everyone will also have healthcare and meaningful work. All classes are welcome. The rich will be shock collared to ensure they don’t threaten my power.
Everything will be mine, but I will let you use it.
Gotcha.
Perhaps her taste buds and sense of smell have changed with age?
Thanks for sharing that. I admire that you’ve made a nice life for yourself, and are providing for your family.
I grew up food insecure. My father left my Mom when she was pregnant with me. They’d been married for 13 years. It literally came out of left field. He just didn’t come home one day. They went from firmly middle class to the food bank and not turning the heat on during winter. So please don’t intimate that all kids born into poverty are the result of poor decision, because we’re not.
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Nah, she’s fine. I’m the one who can’t taste some things because I can’t smell. I generally use her when testing recipe changes, too.
I think we can agree that people should think carefully about their family planning choices. I’ll choose to believe that you’re not being particularly serious in your suggestions for controlling the problem, considering how strongly you speak against benevolent rule on other topics, so it’s not really worth discussing eugenics with you. My main point was that many of us (myself included) made mistakes when we were younger. Sometimes people have to pay for it, while others get to live nice middle class lives.
Back to your criticisms of the writer - her pregnancy came just before her husband was deployed and they were in a weekly stay hotel because their apartment was flooded. Her family would be a lot better off if her husband hadn’t had his life wrecked by war or if he had better compensation for his inability to stay in work. There are many reasons why someone could have bad teeth, not being able to visit the dentist would definitely be a factor. She spends about $45/mo on cigarettes, which is hardly a huge expense for someone working full time and which helps her to keep working the insane hours she needs to do to survive. She can cook. but feels that being with her children is a better use of her very limited time with them than cooking and washing up afterward. She actually lives within her means, even though that means destroying herself in the process. The article itself isn’t even written as a justification for her decisions, but rather to help other people understand why people make them.
If you’re going to criticise people based on this article, how about restaurants that don’t give people a living wage, even though they are working well beyond the hours that should be legal? How about a system that allows veterans to leave the army without proper support? How about commending her for supporting her parents despite her own problems? She’s about as far from irresponsible, stupid, feckless and willfully ignorant as you can get.
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You know there was a study that came out this summer that showed that, when comparing the same individual, immediate money stress drops their IQ by about a standard deviation, with a corresponding reduction in the ability to make good decisions and think in the long term. Having been in that situation myself, it jibes with my experience, and that paragraph is as good a description of what it feels like as I’ve ever seen. Fortunately for me, I’m culturally a middle class white boy and have a stable and supportive family, so I was in a position to pull myself out of that situation. OTOH, if my skin were a few shades darker and my name were Lopez, or even if I just came from a poor family and didn’t pretty much start out my adulthood educated, the mistakes I made when I was much younger would probably still be holding me down today. That’s why we, as a society, really need a better safety net for everyone.
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Sounds like I was totally wrong about the writer.
I’m going to have to reevaluate some of my views now.
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