It's hard to imagine trusting any government enough to allow them to sterilize anyone.
Or kill anybody. This isn't dystopian science fiction, after all!
Like voter tests, race-based ideas of intelligence, and other deceptively appealing social engineering proposals, the repulsive way such programs have been implemented should be enough to forever bar them from our consideration. There is no planet on which forced sterilization is ever going to be a good idea.
And that op-ed is astonishingly lame in its juvenile depiction of the costs of childbearing as an individual consideration independent of the social and economic context in which that decision occurs.
"I broke down and cried. My husband and me wanted children desperately. We were crazy about them. I never knew what they'd done to me."
Doris Buck, who was unwittingly sterilized by the US government during an operation she was told was for a burst appendix.
Quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, p. 366.
Like voter tests, race-based ideas of intelligence, and other deceptively appealing social engineering proposals, the repulsive way such programs have been implemented should be enough to forever bar them from our consideration.
This. There are certainly people who I can look at and think that they probably shouldn't have had kids, or should have had fewer. But no one's ever limited the right to have children in a way that wasn't horrifically unfair and oppressive, and I don't see any potential that anyone ever will.
It's hard to imagine trusting any government enough to allow them to sterilize anyone.
But of course people did trust the U.S. government to do just that for decades, at least insofar as "trusting" means not interfering. And you'd find plenty of support for that now, sadly.
The closest we've come in recent years was a huge push in the '80s & '90s to get poor black women to use Depo-Prevara. It wasn't forced, but it definitely smacked of stopping "those people" from having lots of baby welfare queens.
This, from the link, is awesome:
"All it takes for the development of a normal personality is to have someone irrationally crazy about you."
It may not be strictly true, but everyone deserves to have someone be irrationally crazy about them.
I used to think that theoretically - in a utopia a thousand years hence or something - licensing births might be appropriately done. But no, reproductive freedom is an important social value, and it's not just freedom to terminate/prevent pregnancy.
I will say that we have very likely "domesticated" ourselves genetically over the past ten thousand (or hundred thousand?) years, and that's a good thing for quality of life, but shelpings that along with state coercion would be wrong.
Clearly this thread will need a maverick willing to take up the cause, or it will not thrive. Are you that bold?
Damn.
Well, with a pop of 7 billion, and rather than the old horrible practices of singling people out, couldn't we just add something like fluoride to the water for a couple generations? And then do a lottery for the one in a million chance, and have like reality shows for the rest to be vicarious parents?
All the fucking Cardassians or whatever are following the basketball player to Dallas . All of them.
think of how much water it could save.
All the fucking Cardassians or whatever are following the basketball player to Dallas . All of them.
What, if anything, does this mean?
But props to Bob for taking up the challenge.
Something to do with Star Trek?
Got to keep you folk up on Current Events
So far, it's Rob and Khloe. And Malikka Haqq. (???)
Khloe Kardashian also posted a picture of her husband wearing his new team uniform on Twitter with the words "Soooo handsome!!!!!"
"So....handsome?" would likely have caused trouble for her.
The linked op-ed isn't nearly as out there as I expected it to be. This paragraph, toward the end:
There are no obvious answers. But we must take far more seriously the task of educating young women especially about the reality and consequences of having children they cannot care for.
fairly agrees with the OP's third paragraph, doesn't it? I don't see any suggestion of forced sterilization, though the op-ed title weirdly suggests it.
This seems the crucial point:
The contrast between the lottery of birth parents having children whatever their circumstances or abilities to care for them versus the exhaustive process in choosing a perfect family for them could not be greater.
Early on the op-ed is effectively distinguishing between the having of children as a right, versus as a privilege, though it doesn't use the latter term (similar blurs occur over the right to vote); then later about the raising of children as a right versus a privilege.
So far, it's Rob and Khloe. And Malikka
This would be so much cooler if it were actual Cardassians.
Although they'd probably have no qualms about forced sterilization. They seemed pretty unpleasant on DS9.
Malikka is plausible as a Cardassian name.
I got one, got an idea, I mean if we are into a re-engineering society mode or something, and since I have almost never ever thought:"They shouldn't have children." or "Way cool parents, they should have more." Anybody should;nobody should.
Here we go.
How about we let everybody have children, but then we foster them all out to a random family anywhere in the world? You can't give resources, but parents can watch what happens when the scion gets raised in the Sudan, or god, by some Cardassians or Bachmanns or Romneys or Baldwins or Swedes?
Fucking Egalitarian Utopia in months!
If I can't have my locked library creches. Or Beatnik Bayou.
It's hard to imagine trusting any government enough to allow them to sterilize anyone.
It's hard to imagine trusting any individual person enough to allow them to create a whole new person of similar complexity, without expert oversight. In other words, if weren't already a childbearing race, and someone proposed the idea, wouldn't we all, for good reason, totally freak out?
You can't give resources, but parents can watch what happens when the scion gets raised in the Sudan, or god, by some Cardassians or Bachmanns or Romneys or Baldwins or Swedes?
Reality television on steroids! I like it; of course science fiction novels have included this as a premise, and it mostly amounts to women/parents as breeders.
In other words, if weren't already a childbearing race, and someone proposed the idea, wouldn't we all, for good reason, totally freak out?
What if we all had six heads and were entirely made out of processed cheese?
If we were made out of unprocessed cheese, we couldn't have six heads.
Would you need to glue on little scales and nose ridges if your baby were raised by Cardassians?
19 sounds like a recipe for horrible wars. All of a sudden, it matters how those people raise their children. They must be stopped at all costs from abusing our children!
It's hard to imagine trusting any individual person enough to allow them to create a whole new person of similar complexity, without expert oversight.
If that is hard to imagine, it's a significant shift from our actually existing sensibilities, or at least from our previously existing ones. That's maybe the interesting thing about all this. The advent of child-bearing and -raising experts is, I think, mostly a 20th century thing -- maybe late 19th. Though I guess it depends on what you mean by 'expert.'
(Also, hello, Halford: I'm sorry for my outburst the other night. Peace.)
22: In our actually existing world, bearing and rearing children is a tremendously significant act of power. Just because we're used to it doesn't mean it's not playing god.
Peace, Parsi! I apologize for being a jerk.
I take it Benquo goes for the privilege rather than right option.
28: Oh, good. Let's argue with Benquo. (Kidding, Benquo: it's an interesting topic.)
26: I admit I'm coming at this with a very modern moral sensibility where I think that creating a person is a ridiculously disproportionate response to the desire for companionship or an extra hand on the farm.
Of course a slaveowner would be perplexed by my perplexity. But once you accept that it's not okay to use a whole person primarily as an object, you should start becoming a lot more ambivalent about child creation.
Sorry I'm on the ipad and overseeing a whiny/shouty child with strep and so I can't make links like a civilized person, but my thoughts on this are pretty well covered in Sharon Astyk's post on the subject, http://sharonastyk.com/2011/08/30/family-planning-isnt-a-condom-and-a-pamphlet/
And I also promise that even though the kids we're maybe hypothetically talking about preventing are my kids, I won't be actually offended or hurt if anyone decides to speak up for sterilization. I'm actually being honest and not passive-aggressive about that, though I can't find any way to say it. I have a passionate response for personal and political reasons, but I know that others' opinions differ.
In related news, the dentist congratulated me on our adoption and said that Mara seems much more alert, communicative, and able to follow things. I think he doesn't realize that she's a very bright kid who was terrified probably to the point of panic attack when seeing him before (this time involved screams for the nurse, but she was fine with him checking her cavity-free teeth) and not someone with major intellectual and emotional disabilities.
31: I understand what you say, but I'm also aware that I'm in a minority.
Further to 32, the dentist did want to talk about how messed up the foster system is in terms of sending kids back to unsafe homes in the presence of Val and Alex after I'd said they were going home soon, but that's a run-of-the-mill response and I just said what I always say, that I'm so impressed with their parents' commitment and the work they're doing to be able to have Val and Alex back where they belong.
Back to the OP, there are interesting things to be said about differences in fostering and foster adoption in the US vs. UK. I like that they say "foster carer" rather than "foster parent" but also think there's a lot of paternalism and one-size-fits-all in their system. And while I'm not a blanket fan of transracial adoptions, the extent to which they're unacceptable to British authorities is really preventing kids from getting families. So I could suggest a lot of fixes before hopping to sterilization. I just read an article about a class action suit in the UK by parents who've had their rights terminated. I'll have to go find that after I deal with this bout of whining. (Is read okay with it if the child's shrieking and I'm right there, just online because I think ignoring might work better than engaging and definitely better in the long run than trying to rip my own eardrums out?)
So I could suggest a lot of fixes before hopping to sterilization.
You may as well hop to a vasectomy. From what I've heard, you won't be hopping after it for at least a week.
33: Darn it, I'm trying my best to come up with something contentious here!
My actual opinion, on this as on many other things, is that there's lots of objectively horrible stuff going on, but since attempts to stop it would not be unresisted, if I tried I would likely do more harm than good, and this is likely true for the state as well.
31: I admit I'm coming at this with a very modern moral sensibility where I think that creating a person is a ridiculously disproportionate response to the desire for companionship or an extra hand on the farm.
This would seem like more of a brain-teaser if procreation were actually reducible to such things.
The point in 20 raises something of interest, though: why shouldn't there be expert supervision available for childrearing? We make people go through specific training to drive a car. Why shouldn't there be something far more intensive available for the support and guidance of parents?
But just as with "whom should we sterilize," the devil's in the details. Actually implementing any such system would be so fraught with pitfalls -- and the enterprise would attract so many pathological bullshitters, racists, cultural imperialists, quacks and cranks -- that it's likely to create more problems than it solves. I'd want to see baby steps first, like child welfare and foster care systems with actually adequate resources and training.
When I worked in a hospital for the mentally handicapped there was a lot of contraception being prescribed. It was reversible, but it was de facto sterilisation of a sort. I have a hard time thinking it was necessarily wrong for them to do so.
Is read okay with it if the child's shrieking and I'm right there, just online because I think ignoring might work better than engaging and definitely better in the long run than trying to rip my own eardrums out?
I think you know the answer to that, you monster.
We make people go through specific training to drive a car.
When I was younger, we all took the driver education class because the insurance company offered a big discount for it. I don't think it was, or is, required here.
40: You still have to have certain basic skills and knowledge to pass a driver's test, though, at least theoretically. (Although I guess some testers are easier-going than others if Canada's Worst Driver is any guide... I wonder if that show has an American equivalent.)
I flunked my first driver's test. I didn't know you had to stop for someone trying to cross in a crosswalk. I thought it was just a nice thing to do if you felt generous.
37: why shouldn't there be expert supervision available for childrearing? We make people go through specific training to drive a car. Why shouldn't there be something far more intensive available for the support and guidance of parents?
Certainly. There's a lot of talk all around everywhere about the lack of pre- and post-natal support for pregnant women (mostly those who are socioeconomically challenged). I heard something recently about a program that was available to teach about breastfeeding and infant care, but only available once the child was 3 months old -- completely ridiculous. I believe they said the guidelines for admittance to this program were now being changed. About time.
So yes, we could do a lot more in this regard.
42: I know how you feel. Made that same mistake six times in a row.
44: You flunked your first driver's test six consecutive times? Is that mathematically possible?
I failed my first driving test on the reversing round a corner section. Someone came up behind me. So I paused. He then waived me through so I continued the reverse. That was a fail. He had right of way so I should have stopped, let him through and then done the reverse.
I am in the difficult position of suspecting that our population at our current resource use will doom a lot of people to worse than sterilization (and, however hippie and veggie I am by NAm standards, I'm still way on the guilty side); but taking away the ability to have children has always been too creepy.
Agreeing with Benquo that we would be startled by childrearing if it were new -- what do you think is going to happen if we become capable of creating sentient creatures through AI or genetic engineering? Me, I think there will be a lot of nonhumans tortured, enslaved and driven crazy before we're willing to legally admit they have rights, although there are a lot of people who are nice to their Roombas.
So I'm still wistfully imagining that we could have a second economy, in which everyone gets an equal share of the vital, uncreated, externality-rich common goods of the planet -- but let's just start with the rights to pollute air and water, that will do. In a free-market dystopia, the rich still just buy the poor's rights to live, but more explicitly. In a free-market meliotopia, there's some breathing-room in everyone's share and money gets funneled steadily from the rich to the poor (and *also* there's massive incentive for efficient living).
I've never decided how to handle new people, though. Fixing national shares by current population would be political but illogical. Providing a whole share for a new baby would actually be a short-term incentive to have kids (I think they use less extra than adults...). Tapering up shares for new babies would be more bookkeeping, maybe not significantly more. Allotting a new share only at adulthood would be a hell of a population control measure, as parents would have to scrimp, save, buy or beg the extra. In my totally imaginary *novel* this is definitely what happens, because in my novel we are so terrified by heavy weather, and also I can then reuse a lot of Victorian inheritance plots. But I think it's too Draconian.
But back to reality, I was under the impression that increasing the health, safety, education, and employment chances of women generally dropped the birthrate fairly voluntarily. If social relations are still f'n sexist, sometimes drops the birthrate a *lot*. Yes? No? Insufficiently exciting?
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Even more in reality -- we used to have visiting nurses! Who would check the layette and mother's health before birth, and help with care and nursing afterwards! At least, Cherry Ames was one for one book, and it sounded very useful.
I'm still not sure why Mara's dentist is giving running commentary on her cognitive development.
45: No, just the one time. But there were six people in that crosswalk, all in a row, on that ill-fated day. I also probably shouldn't have shouted "twenty points!" when the elderly retiree failed to jump clear, because apparently that's also a no-no.
46: It sounds like ttaM's driving test was much more rigorous than what I knew. True, I took mine shortly after a 5-foot accumulation of a snow storm, so driving was a little challenging in itself, but I was only on the verge of failing when I failed to pull the emergency brake when parking. I just got a warning.
Reversing round a corner? What? Why would you even do that at all when driving?
California had a mandatory education period (I think it was 30 hours of classroom instruction) before you could take the written drivers' test, and then a mandatory period of driving with an instructor. But I went to something called the "Ford Driving School" (n.b. -- not affiliated with the Ford Motor Company) which was in a second floor walkup in a seedy part of Hollywood, and they just made you spend about an hour and a half reviewing the answer key to previous written tests and then certified your 30 hours. I think I got about 2 days of instruction in the car from some shady Armenian dude.
Reversing around a corner is common, unless I don't know what it means. Whenever I pull out of the driveway, I reverse around a corner. Reversing up a freeway on-ramp is a challenge.
The UK driving test would include all of the following things:
a hill start
reversing round a corner
performing a 3-point turn
parallel parking
emergency stop
But yeah, you'd reverse around corners a fair bit, I'd have thought. When using a side road to turn back the way you came, for example.
47: I was under the impression that increasing the health, safety, education, and employment chances of women generally dropped the birthrate fairly voluntarily.
I think that's uncontested.
On visiting nurses, yeah: how did that used to work, funding-wise? My mom when she retired looked into becoming a visiting nurse for the elderly -- I guess there are no longer programs funding similar things for new mothers?
52, 53: When using a side road to turn back the way you came, for example.
Right. I hadn't thought of it that way. That's basically a three-point turn, really. I was envisioning somehow backing up into a side street in order to park or something - like driving backwards. So never mind.
re: 55
Yeah, but the idea in the test is that you are able to hug the kerb and do it smoothly, while properly watching for oncoming traffic, and so on. I guess the examiners believe it's enough of a different process to test both.
performing a 3-point turn
I've never taken the test in Pittsburgh, but there must be a section where they teach you how to make a 3-point turn and then inform you that it is mandatory to make 3-point turns on busy 4 lane roads at rush hour because going around the block is for fools and nobody can do a regular U-turn if you give them only 50 feet of road width to work with.
What's an emergency stop, on a driving test? The instructor yells "Stop!" unexpectedly while you're driving?
38: This makes sense, especially as it does not involve the removal of body parts involving incredibly invasive surgery.
For example, I knew of a case that occurred maybe 25 years ago, where a fairly seriously developmentally delayed woman in a state mental hospital was given a hysterectomy because she had difficulty managing her period, and would bleed on things. Seems pretty draconian. How hard did anyone try to use behavioral principles to deal with her period? (Don't know the answer, but the way it was explained, it sounded like no one bothered to try.) Granted, this would have been before things like depo-provera was available, but still, a creepy decision being made by male doctors to a disadvantaged patient = creepy.
We do not create babies. Our bodies produce babies following genetic coding and various physiological processes, and then we nurture them more or less well. There's no real paradox that untrained people are allowed to make babies from scratch when untrained people can't build automobiles (which are much less complicated) from scratch.
We can choose to prevent babies, the same way that we can prevent weeds or pests by various methods, or we can choose to allow them.
re: 58
More or less. They pick a clear stretch of road, tell you that at some point in the next X minutes they'll yell stop. When they do, you have to do an emergency stop. i.e. stop as quickly as possible, safely, without skidding or losing control. Usually brake then clutch, come to a stop, put car in neutral, check mirrors, etc.
If Benquo wanted to say something contentious, he could claim that child-having and -raising should be a privilege rather than a right, like driving: you would need a license. Said license would be granted after so many hours of instruction, or passing an equivalency exam. I'm not sure how we'd distinguish between the child-having as opposed to the child-raising portions of the endeavor.
60 and 61 are each blowing my mind. In different ways.
61: With an automatic and ABS, you just push on the brake pedal as hard as you can.
re: 64
Which is what you'd do on the test if you were driving an automatic with ABS. But most people in the UK are driving manual transmission cars. Some of which will be older and may not have ABS. Most people I know drove shitty cars for a few years after they passed their test. FWIW, the car I drive _now_ doesn't have ABS.
was a huge push in the '80s & '90s to get poor black women to use Depo-Prevara. It wasn't forced, but it definitely smacked of stopping "those people" from having lots of baby welfare queens.
There's definitely houses we deal with on a regular basis where I'm pretty sure we could lower the future crime rate by offering extra money on the benefits check for someone to get Norplant.
But that's just an immediate fix for extreme cases and of course doesn't address the core issue. Like discussions about "school reform", all of it is pointless without a plan to address the last several decades of gutting the middle and lower classes.
66: My current car doesn't have ABS or a decent coat of paint or a cooling system that doesn't leak slowly. Of course, if I had to take a driving test, I'd take our nice car.
We put a whole new radiator in the thing and all new hoses. I have no idea where the coolant goes, but it takes about a pint a month.
Malikka is plausible as a Cardassian name.
It's also Lakme's mezzo sidekick. So now that's in my head.
re: 68
Mine is functionally and cosmetically good. It's just 10 years old, and only the top models in that range [it's a small car] had ABS as standard.
I'm not saying that genetics is not a factor or that nurturing is completely unimportant, but a person coming into being is not at all like a skilled process of manufacture or creation. Which means that it is possible for stupid, ugly, deformed, uneducated parents to produce intelligent, good-looking, educated children, if they're together enough to meet minimal childraising standards, and if there are other people involved in the kid's life. They're less likely to be successful parents for various reasons, but it's not like child-raising is a skilled craft like woodworking where you have to get everything right.
Remember that time when you shouted at Newt six years ago so that he cried, LB? Think of it as a 1" deep gouge going all the way across a $1000 plank of tropical hardwood. I'm sure you'll never do that again.
I suppose you do have to have an initial cash outlay if you're going to produce intelligent, good-looking, educated children.
What's an emergency stop, on a driving test?
The fact that you ask that question makes my blood run cold. ttaM correctly describes the test, and Moby is right regarding automatics, but the idea that people are allowed to drive anywhere in the civilised world without first demonstrating their ability to stop rapidly in an emergency is terrifying.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/video/2011/dec/15/aidan-moffat-bill-wells-video
The dulcet tones of my home town. Odd to see the trumpeter -- he played with a band I was in for a few gigs. At the time he was a super-fresh faced guy.
>
At least, Cherry Ames was one for one book, and it sounded very useful.
I used to read that series (my grandmother was a nurse, so supplied my sister with a steady diet of Cherry Ames). I thought that "Department Store Nurse" was a strange occupation, but Grandma said that she knew some department store nurses back in the day. I don't think they had a "Cherry Ames, Sterilization Clinic Nurse," however.
I think I've said this before, but I've never had to take an official driving test in my life. I got my license in Texas at 16 based on my driving school certifying that I had completed their course, and have transferred the license from state to state ever since.
We make people go through specific training to drive a car. Why shouldn't there be something far more intensive available for the support and guidance of parents?
we used to have visiting nurses! Who would check the layette and mother's health before birth, and help with care and nursing afterwards! At least, Cherry Ames was one for one book, and it sounded very useful.
We still do have these programs. They range widely in quality, but the good ones are truly excellent and meaningfully helpful in providing contextualized support for new and/or multiply-stressed parents. There are "visiting midwife" type programs and early intervention programs that do home visits and practical support for families as a preventative strategy for all kinds of poverty- and stress-linked illnesses.
Like everything else, though, funding for these programs gets chopped by people who are seduced by the authoritarian punishment model of human interaction. Never mind that the six months of early intervention support from the nice nurse pays off threefold in reduced costs down the line. ARGH.
transferred the license from state to state ever since.
You haven't yet figured out how to stop?
I did have a test, in 1974. Didn't have an emergency stop portion. This is good enough that I'm allowed to rent a car in the UK, and terrorize all and sundry whichever side of the road I'm on.
70:Best use of Lakme Flower Duet in movie?
Oh, sure everybody remembers the Walken/Hopper scene in True Romance, Someone to Watch Over Me and Sarandon with Deneuve.
But in the elevator scene in Shanley's Five Corners Tony Bill actually understands what a barcarole is. Exotic eroticism in motion.
"We do not create babies. Our bodies produce babies..."
Once from this life, I would not take my bodily form from any living thing, but while in this life it's damned creepy to say that I'm not my body, nor it me.
Licensing parenthood is a real bad idea. Can atheists have kids? Can gays? Put it up for a referendum.
I certainly wish I knew how to stop the car in an emergency. I haven't had the need to do so yet, and I presume it'll take a few emergencies accompanied by futile instinctive efforts to stop the car before I learn how to do it.
I don't see how you could safely do the test described in 61 unless you lived ass out in the middle of nowhere, or were giving driver's licensing exams at 3:00 am. There were no deserted stretches of roadway anywhere along the route where I took my driving test. (And I would think testing anywhere that deserted would miss other, more critical components of driving anyway, such as interacting with (sometimes unpredictable) other cars).
Characteristically, people on this tack begin by suggesting that some people be prohibited or punished for having babies wrongly, and next that licensing be required. How many also say that things like well baby care, nutritional support (WIC) or counseling services be available? I think that the three together might still be problematic, but the first two without the third is just meanness.
Clew. OK, suppose you're a craftsman with many years of experience, and your body creates a wonderful art object. And then in a night of passion you create a baby (I'm assuming you're male just for brevity). Can you see some sort of difference between those two forms of creation.
You gave an answer to a different question than the one being talked about.
I don't think Katie and Chloe are waiting to be adopted. Somebody found a stock photo of two kids in a field and made up names for them, because those kids are too cute not to be adopted.
What's needed is a proxy for poor parenting that can be applied universally. I say mandatory birth control for everyone under 30.
And then in a night of passion you create a baby (I'm assuming you're male just for brevity)
Even women can have nights of passion, John. Or so they tell me.
Is the flower duet a barcarolle?
Wow, IMDB lists a grillion uses in movies. Oh wait, this is Delibes in general. Who knew Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties featured the music of Delibes?
92: I believe brevity, in terms of duration of passion, is more characteristic of the male of the species.
For a lady, the passion may be brief, but they have to lug the gut around, etc., for 9 mos. God bles their hearts.
Nobody every blesses me for my gut.
re: 61
You might do the stop part on a residential street, or an industrial estate. Anywhere where the road was quiet for a few minutes. I did my test in a fairly busy fairly large town in central Scotland, at rush hour. There were still places the examiners knew to go that were quiet. I can't believe that every single road in a town is busy all the time.
My test started in a residential area, we drove around through the main part of the town in busy traffic taking in lights, roundabouts, various types of junction; then out onto some back-roads where I could get up towards 60mph, some more residential streets where I did some of the set moves, back through the town, another quiet residential area for a few more of the moves and then back to the centre. About 45 minutes or so, all in. Round distance driven, maybe 6 or 7 miles.
Gah. This conversation just made me look up the rules for exchanging a foreign license in the UK. Were I Canadian, I could just turn it in and get a proper UK one (automatic only). But Americans have to take the test. That'll be fun. 16 all over again!
Oh, and I think they've relaxed the test a bit since you took it, ttaM. A friend recently got her license and she said she needed to be prepared for all of the things you listed, but was only tested on some of them. (No parallel parking, I believe.)
Jesus Christ. My driving test was 5 minutes. Maybe 10, tops. I didn't exceed 30 mph.
Mine was about as long as the UK, and involved a stretch on the freeway. It's amazing how much regional variation there is in the US regarding driving tests; just going 30 minutes south in my area got you an easier test.
Women whine about the discomfort, but 9 months from now I'll still be uncomfortable and won't have a cute little baby either.
Actually, this seems like one of those things where my memory could be way off. It was 5 minutes as I recall it, but may have been more.
re: 99
I checked earlier, just to make sure that I had the list right. So those are still on the official test. But looking at wiki now, the examiner doesn't test on all of them any more. Just a selection. I did all of them. They've added a new independent driving section that wasn't there when I did it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_driving_test#Independent_driving
re: 100
Yeah. We discussed this before. I think the UK is somewhere in the middle for driving test difficulty. Some Scandinavian countries test you on a skid pan, and things, and the testing is very difficult. The US sounds like it's more on the easy side.
106.1: Yeah, that was my understanding - be prepared for all, but only have a selection to do. (I'm really hoping they choose not to test on parallel parking when I take it.)
That independent driving section scares me. I'm 30! I've been driving for 13 years! I shouldn't feel this way.
(I should note that it scares me only because while I'm quite competent if I've looked a decent map, spoken directions here just leave me confused. But perhaps it'll be better in a year's time.)
Yeah. We discussed this before. I think the UK is somewhere in the middle for driving test difficulty. Some Scandinavian countries test you on a skid pan, and things, and the testing is very difficult. The US sounds like it's more on the easy side.
Amazing that this correlates with how possible it is to live as an independent adult in said country without being able to drive.
Finland has the toughest driving test and the best drivers in the world, according to some episode of Top Gear I saw sometime.
I just got a haircut and my hairdresser told me how she and her husband have gained custody of their 10 month and 4 year old grandkids because the father was physically abusing the kids to the point where the baby needed brain surgery to relieve pressure from his swelling skull, and it was also discovered that he had signs of 7 broken bones. By age 6 month or so. The story was beyond horrifying. I nearly started bawling in her chair.
Emerson, imagine being female and being told you didn't make your baby. Indeed, imagine being female and trying to make plans that didn't identify your body with your self. I can't imagine such plans likely to turn out well for either my self or any child arising.
It's only a different question if you assume you aren't your body to start with.
Did you read anything else I wrote, or did you just attach on to the words convenient to your philosophicla and feminist objections?
I could probably go back and rewrite what I first said to please you and still make the point I wanted to make, but before that, do you have any idea what that point was?
The story was beyond horrifying. I nearly started bawling in her chair.
Yeah, wow, holy fuck.
I read a mildly interesting -- in the sense that I'd never particularly thought of things in these terms, more fool me (I?) -- thing this morning from Alasd/air Mac/Intyre's A Short History of Ethics, from a chapter on Luther and Calvin, describing a historical shift from viewing moral matters in terms of the community to a view in terms of the individual.*
It strikes me that the question whether child-bearing and -raising should be a matter for community policing rubs up against this distinction.
* Duly noted that I picked this up in the middle, and Mac/Intyre was building on the previous chapter, unread, on Christianity.
Holy shit this traffic. Over an hour to go four miles. You may say I shouldn't comment while driving, but at this speed I could be drinking Bacardi 151 laced with Ketamine from my commuter mug and still be perfectly safe.
Good lord. I just decided to check out Balko's Agitator blog, which showed a post recommending that one donate to Reason and Cato, which led me to try to remember which commentators from a recent panel discussion who incensed me were from Cato and Reason -- I could not remember -- so I went over to Reason magazine and read some thing about how the IPCC is totes faking it, and climate change isn't that big a deal, and in fact, "the faster developing countries grow and the more emissions they produce, the wealthier they will be - even taking into account all the damage that is expected from climate changes caused by those emissions", and this incensed me in turn, so I went back to Balko's blog vaguely considering yelling at him ...
But nah.
Oh my god a hobbling old dude walking with a cane is passing me.
Halford, you should consider public transportation, or hobbling with a cane.
Fuck public transportation. I just need to earn enough for a helicopter.
How would Paleolithic man travel four miles?
There you go, Halford: offer the hobbling man with the cane to sit in your car for however long, while you get out and trot until he and your car catch up with you.
You may say I shouldn't comment while driving, but at this speed I could be drinking Bacardi 151 laced with Ketamine from my commuter mug and still be perfectly safe.
Oh, I only say such things to needle.
Why does RH keep his ketamine in a travel mug?
Some babies quite predictably (in the statistical) sense have much greater expected value to society than others and it seems sensible for society to enourage the production of the more valuable babies and discourage the production of the less valuable babies. But thinking in this way seems totally taboo.
Also, totally non-valuable babies should be fed to endangered large carnivores. And ladies with valuable ovaries should be dedicated to the production of valuable ova to be implanted in valuable wombs.
the further south you go, the less taxing the tests become. in GA, outsides savannah, you do the whole thing in a parking lot, with cones pretending the be the other cars (for parallel parking).
126: your views fascinate me, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
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Making eggnog for tomorrow night. I'm perfectly happy with a raw yolk base, but am wondering whether my guests might prefer that I do a cooked base (of course, the whites will be raw in any event). What say you, Mineshaft?
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You can use radiation to kill the germs without cooking the egg. They may sell them that way. If not, buy 40,000 smoke detectors and get to work.
But thinking in this way seems totally taboo. insane. That said, you pop out as many kids as you want, Shearz.
I think if you make vanilla ice cream but replace the freezing bowl o' blades with nutmeg, you get eggnog.
I am drinking eggnog right now. Came out pretty good this batch, if I do say so.
While I don't know all the ladies here personally, it seems to me that they are mostly producers of highly valuable ova.
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Holy fucking shit, there's another fucking Republican debate tonight! On the TV screens of Amerika right this minute!
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Excellent. Raw it is. I knew I could count on you lot.
140: Just be sure to use highly valuable ova.
We made our eggnog this morning. We set aside a gallon or so for my lab's holiday party tomorrow, and a mason jar's-worth for my advisor and his wife. Shortly thereafter, I got at email from my advisor asking if I'd like to go in with him on the making of a batch of "real, old-time" eggnog for the holiday party. I AM SO THERE, SIR.
One of these days I should standardize on a single spelling of advis[o|e]r.
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NMM to Christopher Hitchens. (This means you, T/otten.)
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145: huh. I suppose no more mocking him, either, at least for a while.
Give me a couple hours. I'm benificent on nog.
You're going soft!
Good thing you're not going to be masturbating.
it's been at least 10 minutes, right? I say we go back to mocking. the only thing about not cooking the egg yolks with the sugar is that you need superfine sugar to ensure it is never noticeable. also, I feel when you do the yolks and sugar in a double boiler you can whip the ensuing mixture to a thicker consistency. but either way is good.
THE WORLD'S LOSS IS HELL'S GAIN.
I was wondering if 151 was going to weigh in.
the only thing about not cooking the egg yolks with the sugar is that you need superfine sugar to ensure it is never noticeable
No?
also, I feel when you do the yolks and sugar in a double boiler you can whip the ensuing mixture to a thicker consistency
Perhaps that is why when beating the eggs for this cake (best ever flourless chocolate cake? probably!) you do so over a double boiler.
I would like to make and also to drink some old-skool nog.
Well, gosh, I think you should.
It's hard not to like someone who hates God, Mother Theresa, and Henry Kissinger all at the same time, but screw him. The 9/11 crap was too much.
I feel that help should be enlisted in the second operation mentioned, and that the first would only be worthwhile if done in quantity.
158: But how do you feel about hating Kissinger?
Also Lady Di. How could I forget Lady Di?
146: Hitchen's setting the precedent on respect for the recent dead (on CNN after Falwell died in 2007). The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you will just get yourself called 'reverend', and later on C-Span, If he had been given an enema, he could have been buried in a matchbox.
If there is an afterlife, I imagine him going on in a rather entertaining manner right at the moment, "Are you fucking kidding me?"
"The five most over-rated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex, picnics and death."
what? champagne, lobsters and anal sex are all accurately rated as awesome. picnics--eh, not always all that one would have hoped. death, is it accurate to say it is overrated? I tend to think of everyone abhorring it, so I don't see how it could be anything but underrated. I suppose when you're suicidal you're overrating it since you see it as a definite end to sorrow.
Maybe you should try having lobsters, champagne, and anal sex on your picnics.
153: OK, the sugar will dissolve if you beat it enough/wait a good while, but caster sugar is still better. also, a small amount of allspice is good.
there is a ship with 1,000 marines headed to afghsnistan in town, and you can offer to host them. so we are having 2 marines come for Xmas eve dinner. my husband is concerned I will kill my self with a frenzy of hostess overkill, but I'll try and hold back. I have invited 2 single female friends on the grounds that my marines are likely to be hot. also 19, but whatever. and it's not necessarily the case they'll both be dudes, just likely. we are going to have standing rib roast, cooked over hardwood charcoal (indirect heat) just like halford would have wanted. after he came down from the ketamine in his go-cup.
I can't tell you how much anybody who is in favour of eugenics creeps me the fuck out. It always starts with nice, well meaning lefties worrying about "the poor" or the "sub normal" and how there seem to be more and more of them around and anything constructive "we're" doing is futile because of the great mass of "them" and it ends up with mass sterilisations of whatever race the eugenics boards find a problem. If even Canada goes all nazi about it, what hope do you have that your neo-eugenics programme will be run properly?
It annoys but doesn't surprise me it's the BBC doing a programme broaching this "controversial issue" (it isn't; anybody sane knows better than to try that again) as they've been on a roll lately promoting rightwing mythology, e.g. with their programmes on "benefit cheats" and "rip-off Britain".
what do you think is going to happen if we become capable of creating sentient creatures through AI or genetic engineering? Me, I think there will be a lot of nonhumans tortured, enslaved and driven crazy before we're willing to legally admit they have rights, although there are a lot of people who are nice to their Roombas.
Peter Singer (the other one) had a great story about this: some guys build a mine clearance robot that looked kind of like a stick insect or a harvestman spider. The idea was that it would walk across the minefield, treading on the mines - each time it hit one it'd lose a lower leg, but it had lots, and it was spindly enough that the complicated expensive bits in the body would be far enough away to be unharmed. And they'd written lots of clever software so that it would still be able to walk even once it had lost a few limbs.
Anyway, they took it out to an army proving ground for a test, and set it going across a minefield they'd laid. And it worked fine - even when it was down to one undamaged leg it was still moving forward.
At that point the colonel in charge ordered the test stopped. He couldn't bear to watch any more, he said: what they were doing was inhumane.
165: Prob should have invited the two women who havent had sex in a year.
I plan on denying my daughter the right to have children. Hopefully, that will happen this year.
Maybe you should try having lobsters, champagne, and anal sex on your picnics.
And make sure always to have a ready supply of Oxford commas, which make the al fresco lobsters, champagne and anal sex so much more awesome.
this incensed me in turn, so I went back to Balko's blog vaguely considering yelling at him
Libertarians. Does Jim Henley's blog still carry the "Center for Union Facts" ads?
Meanwhile, I share chris y's horror at the idea of not teaching an emergency stop. (I failed on the reverse around a corner, by touching the kerb. Additionally, I got a black mark for speeding on the way back, knowing the rest of the test was now a waste of time.)
And did Aidan Moffatt actually use the word "spurk" as a past tense of "to spunk" in that song? It's a strong verb in Scotland?
re: 173
I'm guessing he's using it in the second sense here: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=spurk
Moffat is from the north west side of Falkirk, as am I [although my village is a bit further norther than his, so different school catchment area]. So, if there was some local use of 'spurk' specifically involving spunk, I'd have heard it. So I'm guessing it's his idiosyncratic usage.
Some Scandinavian countries test you on a skid pan
Emergency vehicle training is awesome. We spent a week straight on a track with a pan doing nothing but courses, evasive maneuvers, etc. PIT training on these cars with big steel armored up bumpers was also fun as hell.
Wait, Jerry Falwell is dead? How did I miss that?
178: That was just his outsides dying. His insides were dead long before that.
Champagne and lobster are overrated in the sense that they've been branded to be better than a lot of things that are equally good. Diamonds as gemstones are another example, though they're still the best for industrial use.
I did not know: diamonds have the highest thermal conductivity of any bulk material, per wiki. Thus, a coat made of diamonds would not keep you warm. To my knowledge that metaphor has not been used yet.
179:
«Io credo», diss'io lui, «che tu m'inganni;
ché Jerry Falwell non morì unquanche,
e mangia e bee e dorme e veste panni».
«Nel fosso sù», diss'el, «de' Malebranche,
là dove bolle la tenace pece,
non era ancor giunto Michel Zanche,
che questi lasciò il diavolo in sua vece
nel corpo suo, ed un suo prossimano
che 'l tradimento insieme con lui fece.
179: "For the great and powerful of this world, there are only two places where their courage fails them ... the manger and the cross."
To the OP, I was surprised that this didn't result in more of a dust-up.
Those wishing to dispute the categorization of champagne/anal sex/picnics/lobster will need to take it up with Hitch when they get to the getting place.
183: That was sort of tricky to get outraged about. The doctor writing the article didn't sterilize the patient -- he was just in the room when the Tanzanian doctor did it, which makes the 'imperialism' argument a bit tricky (and sort of explains why he didn't condemn the Tanzanian doctor, too -- he's being deferential to the local authority.) And the motivation for the sterilization seems to have been that the doctor thought the woman was unlikely to survive a sixth pregnancy.
It's very much not the standard of care we expect in the US, sterilizing a patient without prior consent, and if I were in the hospital governance system in Tanzania I'd want someone to be addressing it with that doctor, and possibly taking disciplinary action. But it really seems to be on a different spectrum from the sort of "those people shouldn't be allowed to have children" in the OP.
Also, 128 is no longer true, in my pretty recent experience. The parking lot thing, anyway. The bit with the cones is true, but (a) they also have you parallel park between cones in MO and in my current state, and (b) it's not like that makes it easier, because you can't see the fucking cones once you're within 3 feet or so.
180. Thermal conductivity of diamond is pretty interseting; isotopically pure diamoond is a much better conductor than you would expect compared to natural diamond. Thermal conductivity in carbon nanotubes is also high, which surprises me a lot, and is something I keep meaning to read about. Normally, thermal conductivity of a single crystal happens from phonon (quanta of crystal vibration) interactions with Brillouin zone boundaries. A combination of very strong interatomic forces in diamond with some peculiarities of the geometry of diamond crystals leads to the diamond lattice being nearly transparent for heat-carrying phonons. The details of exactly why this was so were still a topic of debate 15 years ago.
"When the blizzard came the evil queen froze to death in her diamond coat....."
I'd kind of like to go to skid school to get extra supplementary training.
I once had a student health services nurse ask met what I was doing for birth control. I wasn't doing anything, because I wasn't having sex at the time. I was also taken aback. I had seen her once before, but she wasn't treating me that day. I had fallen off my bicycle and was being seen by someone else. I was in a big open room (I don't think there was even a curtain), and she said, "You should get an IUD. It would be a disaster if you got pregnant while taking the medications that you're on.) This wasn't accutane or anything. Hardly ideal, but not the worst thing--except for the fact that I didn't want a kid then. She was totally ill-informed, but if I had been a little less educated, it would have been worse.
That whole visit was horrible. They kept offering me a pain med that interacted with one of my medications even though I had told 3 different people about the drug and that the med was contraindicated. Gah.
180: Good think I didn't waste my money on copper cookware, then.
163: What about all this "death gives meaning to life" stuff? There was a recent thread where I was distinctly in the minority in aborring death almost unconditionally.
That diamond thing is quite interesting. I hadn't realized that the electrical conductivity thermal conductivity relationship only held in metals, though I suppose I should have realized that.
I did not know: diamonds have the highest thermal conductivity of any bulk material, per wiki.
For a moment I thought that a wiki was a unit of bulk material, used when measuring thermal conductivity. Heehee.
contraindicated
I feel this is the place to announce to the world that I really dislike that bit of medical jargon, "contra/indicated." The negative form is the worst: six goddamn syllables? Seriously? "Deprecated" saves you two, and I'm sure someone could come up with something less jargony with a bit of thought. But even the positive form is annoying as hell, because it's a reasonably common word that has a misleadingly different sense in everyday usage. This wouldn't be such a problem, except that talking about what drugs are recommended for what ailments is a conversational topic that everyday people need to be able to engage in with their healthcare providers, and it doesn't help things if the providers are accustomed to thinking and talking in words that are even slightly confusing to the laiety. I mean, really--is "recommended" so bad? "Suitable"?--you even save a syllable, there. "Apt"--only one goddamn syllable, you can't beat that with a stick.
When you look at egg donation prices you really get to see whose potential babies are "valuable" and whose aren't in a way that's less coated in euphemism and faux concern. There are ads all the time in the newspaper and on the bulletin boards of the elite private college I'm at, and it's amazing how much value-adding certain hair colors or ethnic backgrounds will bring, sometimes by a factor of 5 or 10. (The highest someone has been willing to pay that I've seen is $20,000, and the lowest was $2,500). Neo-eugenicists claim it's not about race, but I'm not sure who they're fooling.
If population control is a big worry and you're not terribly concerned about heavy-handedness or depriving people of rights, then probably something like China's one-child policy is the way to go, because at least it's applied equally (at least theoretically).
This seems like the right thread for this bit of super-NSFW music video. Courtesy of The Great Whatsit. (Did it already make it over?)
SUPER-NSFW! But probably also good for illuminating the difference between "obscene," which it is not, and "NSFW", which it really is.
173: Libertarians. Does Jim Henley's blog still carry the "Center for Union Facts" ads?
God. I don't know whether I should try to read libertarian blogs or not; I do not, normally. I feel the urge to argue with them, because some of them sound so ... persuadable, or reasonable, or something. Henley, I suppose, and Will Wilkinson. I'm pretty sure I can remain completely un-shouty should I engage. And yet.
As I understand, Henley is no longer a libertarian. He was the only one I ever liked.
I thought Wilkinson was also no longer a libertarian. Have they adopted the newish "liberaltarian" mantle?
201: There's a whole new post and everything.
He was the only one I ever liked.
I like Balko. He's as wrong as hell about most stuff, but he's also a brave and humane individual for some values of.