z31maniac

*insert no abortions no funding joke*

Dann0

If everybody stopped conceiving unwanted babies, they'd be out of a job.

bahurd

iTrader: (8)

Planned Parenthood, by the numbers - CNN.com

Dann0

Let's take a closer look at what those numbers mean: 3 percent of Planned Parenthood's services are abortion but what about their revenues?

So would they have to shutter all their doors if they stopped performing abortions? Of course not, they get a lot of government grant money. But 10% of all their revenue is...$130 million dollars. Cut that out of their budget and I think we'd see a lot of layoffs at PP. And that's not counting what they make selling Plan B at $50 a pop. So yeah, unwanted conceptions keep a lot of people at PP employed.

bahurd

iTrader: (8)

And so, your point?

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

so what? why is the taxpayer money keep this company "afloat"?

$130 million annually could co back into something that effects more than .000001% of the population. Or stay in our own pocketbooks to spend how we choose to spend it.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

To be fair, eliminating the less desirable elements of the surplus population as early as possible has a buoyant effect on the economy and the population as a whole. It costs far less to abort someone or prevent their conception in the first place than to deal with them after the fact by giving them WIC / SNAP benefits, a free education, a free criminal trial and incarceration, etc.


Found this article interesting: Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy

From the point of view of the author, those of us born as early as the late 70s are supposed to be miserable because of unrealistic expectations of success and overvaluation of our own potential.

Not sure about you guys, but I suffer the opposite effect- I can't believe people pay me as much as they do what seems like relatively little actual work.

Dann0

I'm pretty sure TLP has written on this subject. Also how paying certain people welfare/disability is essentially a version of the same equation - the math says it costs less to just mail them a check than deal with them in other ways. So here's the check.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Why the suburbs are all wrong for my kids

By Erin Mantz May 12

“LOOK. AT. THE. DEER!” I say this to my sons, 11 and 14, as we do our normal weeknight swing down the tree-lined driveway, home from what feels like their 10th basketball practice of the week. But my boys are buried in their iPhones, watching for their friends’ reactions/likes/comments on one of whatever social media apps of the moment.

Amazing things are going on around them – I mean, I am floored, every time, by seeing the deer just calmly hanging out a few feet away, staring right at me, not even running away from our car. But unlike many parents, I don’t think it’s social media that has led to my kids’ indifference. I’ve firmly decided to place the much of the blame squarely on the suburbs. Yes – having my kids grow up in the beautiful, sheltered, suburban world of the suburbs of Maryland is the problem.

I grew up in Chicago, in a vibrant neighborhood where noise was my friend and nobody drove me anywhere. Sounds were all around me, and I walked everywhere, myself, alone. I fell asleep to the din of the Lunt Avenue buses outside my bedroom window, and the chatter of the second-floor neighbors talking with my mom because the windows were open. I woke up to the scent of blueberry muffins baking at Swiss Pastry across the alleyway, and the clanks of the first morning’s game of Kick the Can. From the moment I woke up, I was never lonely or bored. Sounds and people enticed me to go out and explore. Everything was outside, awaiting me.

I felt connected to all the neighborhood kids, shops, workers – even the caretaker of the pond at our beloved Indian Boundary Park, which was just a baseball’s throw away. It was at that pond that I saw my first turtle and discovered how they move and feel.

And that’s what I’m afraid my boys don’t have by living in the suburbs. That feeling of being connected. I bet my boys have never stolen or felt a turtle. They’ve probably watched animal tricks on the Internet, and have likely Googled “turtles” when they needed to learn about them for a school project. My younger son does know the neighborhood kids, but my older one is always out at some structured activity or sports practice he gets to by car.

They don’t have the kind of life where they can walk themselves to activities and chat with store owners along the way. They don’t have to figure out bus numbers and routes or try new things on their own. The suburbs: The planned community where everything is available, by car. With a schedule. With parents in charge.

Sometimes, at night, as I look out our big living room window at the woods behind our house. It’s pretty, but unnerving. It’s too quiet. I’m looking for some activity – even the deer – and waiting for something to happen. The suburbs, with all of their supposed security and conveniences, and book clubs for moms and hectic sports leagues for kids, are pretty lonely.

Do my kids feel the loneliness of the suburbs? I don’t think so. I think it feels like their haven, their home. It’s all they’ve ever known. But when my son has an urgent request for candy or a protractor for homework, the need will pass that night, unfulfilled, unless he can persuade me to drive him to CVS. If we lived in a neighborhood like the one I grew up in, he could walk to the drugstore to get it himself. He’d learn responsibility, independence and redefine initiative.

And as for me, the mom in the suburbs: Sometimes I just don’t feel like driving over to Starbucks to meet a friend for coffee. I yearn for the way it was when I grew up, in that three-story apartment in West Rogers Park, where our French windows stayed open all the time, and my mom could yell up to her friend on the second floor, to come have an iced tea. It’s not just that I’m a mother who wants it to be like it was “back in my day.” I wish for my kids to experience some of the kind of childhood and independence I gained from living in the city.


It’s not just helicopter parenting, structured play dates and social media that have made their lives seemingly easier, or perhaps if not easier, lazier. It’s living in the burbs. I want my boys to experience how the little things in everyday life don’t always come so easy. I remember my mom searching for a parking spot on the street, carrying groceries way farther than across a porch, of trusting me to walk alone every day, make friends with the drugstore owner and actually talk to strangers.

I’m not saying that I wish I was a mom carrying groceries for blocks and blocks. I think that’s what I wanted to avoid when we first moved to the suburbs. I wanted the ease and convenience of a driveway, a front porch. But now all I feel is an anemic lifestyle. Car to gym to home to school to home to work to office to store to home again. Then the evening carpools start. For the kids, and I guess, for me, there’s no grit, no problem-solving necessary to get from Point A to Point B. And that’s what I’m afraid my children aren’t learning by living in this supposed utopia — a way of life that fosters self-reliance and problem-solving.

Why not just leave? Well, I can’t … literally and logistically. Legally, I’m divorced and couldn’t go even if I wanted to. But even if I could go, I wouldn’t want to uproot my boys now, to take them away from their dad, school and sports teams, and this neighborhood they consider home. They’re living their version of childhood, and they think this suburban one is just fine. But will they one day look back on this childhood with a misty eye, like I think of mine? Will I?

The irony is, I created this situation. As much as I loved my childhood as a kid, once I was in my 20s, I envisioned having kids of my own and giving them a “nicer” and safer life. I wanted to grow up and get a comfortable house for my family with the extras that I never had. A real rec room. A yard. Space.

I got married. I got the big house. I gave them a back yard and better schools and safer streets. The idea that all the stability I thought suburban life would bring them, and me, seems almost silly now.

I am restless here, and now there’s a longing for what I’ve lost, and for what they’ll never have – the buzz outside the windows, the sense of being part of something you don’t have to pay or try out for to join, expressions on real faces when they share exciting news with friends, not emojis from miles away.

I’d gladly give back their hoverboard and Xbox, Instagram accounts and carpools for a place and time that’s more of the childhood I had. Some would argue I had less. But I was happy. And decades later, sounds of the city still comfort me. Even when I don’t hear them, I can remember.

What will my sons remember? I don’t think it will be a sense of excitement, wondering who is outside, or which random people they will meet on their walk to school. They won’t learn how to make nice with shopkeepers or smell the bakery as they walk past. But perhaps they’ll remember the safety and predictability of the suburbs. And for them, if not me, maybe that’s enough.

Erin Mantz is a writer, marketing professional and mother of two boys.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...bs-make-me-sad

Dann0

$130 million is what they take in each year charging for abortions - they get half a bil from the government. Honestly, I don't think PP should get a dime of taxpayer money. If people really support what they do, then I'm sure that private contributions will make up that $528 million a year difference. (Yeah, right.)

But my cynical side thinks that that PP is simply a way for the government to deniably subsidize eugenics; white women with good jobs from good families are not PP's primary clients. Their abortion clients are majority poor, and blacks are vastly overrepresented.

Of course, "The government is participating in population control of poor blacks," is the kind of talk that causes riots and people to be shot at dawn. So we dress it up in a frilly hat and look the other way.

And before somebody starts claiming that government dollars don't directly finance abortions due to the Hyde Amendment,

To say nothing of the fact that half a billion dollars a year of government money allow PP to keep their doors open and continue to perform these procedures, whether that money directly funds them or not.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Final warning: respond to Braineack's troll-baiting about planned parenthood and the government conspiracy which supports it elsewhere.

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

It's completely fair, but there's still a high number of the population that simply don't want their earned dollars to contribute to abortions.

I'm pro-choice, but I don't want the gov't to fund PP.

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

how was it baiting, i was trying to actually have a conversation instead of just posting pictures/videos with analysis or context.

I even went as far as just looking up their annual report to actually see the breakdown for myself:

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Brain, we already had this conversation. I stopped trying to have serious discussion in your cop thread, and you promised to stop dragging politics into my GenWu thread.

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

Actually I promised to stop "just posting lots of little videos without any sort of scholarly analysis or context", because "this thread is for studied analysis, not cute little videos".

People were talking PP, and I wanted to toss in some .02; my mistake.

I'm sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooo sorry to derail your discussion little pansies. Carry on.

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

I'm afraid to post this here, Joe might ban me.

Pretty good discussion on the bathroom issue here at 53:00:



I think that's a fair discussion for this thread... his final comments at 2:13:00 are a good quick food for through as well. Even calls out Joe's BFF: Bill Nye the Sketchy-Science Guy.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

The New Language of Protest

Story by Teddy Amenabar Published on May 19, 2016


As what some societal observers call a “new civil rights movement” begins, U.S. colleges and universities are faced with reconciling differences of opinion on a broadening set of issues: racial equality, sexual assault, Middle East policy, LGBT advocacy, mental health awareness and more. At the same time, they must reconcile increasing differences in background and culture as schools become ever more diverse.

Amid the volatile protests and debates on campuses this year, students at Princeton University called for rechristening Wilson College, named after the president who supported racial segregation. Students at Yale University forced the resignation of a professor who objected to strict limits on Halloween costumes. And at the University of Missouri, what started as a protest over racism expanded into a controversy about press freedom.

Just as the social turmoil of the 1960s generated new vocabulary — turn-on, sit-in, sexism — this latest wave of activism and upheaval is adding to our lexicon, with terms such as safe space, trigger warning, microaggression and cultural appropriation, which we explore here. We asked student leaders and activists from local universities to define these terms for us and to elaborate based on their own thoughts and experiences.

Many students believe these concepts foster inclusion, increase sensitivity and set up parameters in which difficult conversations can occur and marginalized voices can be heard. But critics, both on campus and off, call the concepts limiting, unrealistic, even un-American. They argue that creating safe spaces and using trigger warnings, for example, serve only to stifle free speech, coddle students and ignore both history and the reality found off campus.

The student leaders and activists we talked to have a ready answer to that last point. “I don’t think it’s outrageous for me to want my campus to be better than the world around it,” says Sasha Gilthorpe, outgoing student government president at American University. “I don’t think that makes me a stupid, naive child. I think that makes me a good person.”


Cultural appropriation

Naomi Zeigler: I see cultural appropriation as kind of taking different aspects of certain people’s culture without proper respect

Fadumo Osman: When I wear my traditional clothing I’m a foreigner and I’m criminalized for it, but when you wear it you make money off of it, and it’s cute.

Roquel Crutcher: Recently, braids are a thing, and that to me is cultural appropriation because I spent my entire life wanting to look like a white person, basically, and then the one moment where I do decide that I actually like the way that I look, it was kind of taken away from me. It’s just kind of hurtful, because the reason we wear braids is completely different from the reason white women wear braids, and it just takes away from the culture and from the fact that sometimes cultures don’t have a choice.

Meri Salem: These people have historically been marginalized and have been shamed for what they’re wearing or what they’re doing with their hair, etc., and now companies are profiting from it. But that profit isn’t changing the situation of the people who are still marginalized.



Microaggression

Zeigler: Microaggressions are words or actions that people say kind of without thinking of them that end up being offensive to certain communities. … A lot of times people will say, “Oh, you’re so busy and you’re so high-achieving because you’re Asian,” and that’s not really any of the reason. … And an interesting facet of it, too, is I’m adopted and my family — apart from my younger sister, who’s also adopted — is white. So there’s nothing there if we want to say it’s a cultural thing that’s really making me a quote-unquote better Asian.

Crutcher: People ask me to touch my hair. That’s a microaggression. The idea that my hair is something that is different and it doesn’t make much sense to you, so I have to, like, give you my head for you to experiment with is kind of degrading.

Liam Baronofsky: One microaggression is like one paper cut, so it’s something small but it hurts the person at the core of their identity level. But it happens so often, you come home every day with like 15 paper cuts … and it really hurts.

Zanib Cheema: Sometimes they’ll just stick my face on something… They were doing a university life presentation… and they had one slide and the title was “diversity,” and the face was me. That’s it … I’m not the only person, you know, it’s not just about me. There are so many minority groups; you can’t just put one title to it.



Safe space

Osman: A place where usually people who are marginalized to some degree can come together and communicate and dialogue and unpack their experiences.

Nick Webb: Sometimes I feel the white population can be left out of these conversations. … You can’t build and create equality without having everyone involved in the conversation.

Crutcher: When I wake up, I think about the fact that I’m black, I have to think about my hair, I have to think about my edges, I have to think about how I look … whether or not I look too this or too that, and that’s something that I get tired of doing sometimes. And so it makes me feel good to know if I can go somewhere and just be me without having to worry about changing who I am — that’s a safe space.

Cheema: You’re trying to create an environment which promotes people to feel comfortable enough to talk about things that typically won’t be spoken about … where people can speak up, where they feel like nothing that’s going to be said is going to be taken out and used against them.



Trigger warning

Zeigler: It’s not a form of censorship, it’s just kind of a heads-up, like, “This is coming and we want you to be engaged, so we want to tell you this is here.” I welcome free speech, and I welcome speech that I don’t agree with, stuff that can be controversial. But at the same time I’m a real fan of empathy, and I think that’s what trigger warnings teach us.

Sasha Gilthorpe: A trigger is a psychological thing. Our generation hasn’t invented triggers, we are working to address the fact that there are people whose experiences exclude them from parts of our conversation. … You have to do something to be make sure that everybody can be educated; they can’t do the work and they can’t participate if you don’t create the conditions where everybody can participate.

Cheema: We have something called Take Back the Night. It’s basically like a protest rally that takes place on campus. We give a trigger warning before that because we have survivors who come up to the stand, and they talk about their specific experience in which they were sexually harassed and they go into a lot of detail. So it’s very vivid, it’s very real. … So we give a trigger warning then.

Salem: You don’t have to be tied to any one political identity to believe that people who have gone through post-traumatic stress deserve the right to acknowledge whether they want to participate.




Responding to the charge that they are coddled

Crutcher: Another thing that bothers me as a black woman is the idea that it’s my responsibility to educate people about these things. … You’ve been completely ignorant to my identity, and I’ve been forced my entire life to learn about yours. So I feel like it’s not too much for me to ask for you to learn that on your own. … Or for the administration, who is having all these kids come together who look differently, who act differently, to try to explain to them what those identities are and what they mean.

Osman: The questions get tiring, but they’re not malicious. There’s a difference between someone saying, “Hey, why do you wear that on your head?” as opposed to someone saying, “You’re a terrorist.” It’s tiring, but I think it’s needed.

Salem: If we’re in the classroom… I expect the professor to have some type of role in directing the conversation. We’re not seeing that in classrooms. Instead you’re trying to have people say their feelings but not necessarily have an academic perspective.

Zeigler: I like to think that people are good — we’ve just been socialized to do bad things, to have a mind-set that’s discriminatory, that’s problematic. But I like to think that most people want to be better.

Peters: Our society is changing. We’re broadening the scope of what it means to be a man, to be a woman, to be a person.






The new vocabulary of protest: What students mean by terms like ?safe space? | The Washington Post

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Roquel Crutcher seems to have some fairly deep-rooted issued regarding her hair.


Lame pun intentional.



I wonder- do college kids eat ramen noodles any more? Because that's cultural appropriation.

hornetball

iTrader: (4)

So, I wonder . . . is using a computer cultural appropriation? How about wearing a coat or shoes? What about flying in an airplane or paddling a kayak?

Throughout human history when people are exposed to ideas/habits/devices that are useful to them, they start to use them too. Other species also do this, but the effectiveness with which human beings can learn and adapt is the reason we "rule" the Earth (was "rule" a microagression)?

If cultural appropriation is really a thing . . . does that mean Muslims should not be allowed on commercial aircraft -- since that is clearly a White Christian invention? Should White Christians not be allowed to use gunpowder -- invented by the Chinese? Maybe all cultures should just revert to being stone-aged tribes restricted to their ancestral localities? If so, what would be the appropriate point in ancestral time?

Beyond whether college kids still eat ramen noodles, do college kids learn anything anymore? Or is that blatant cultural appropriation? I wouldn't hire any of the above people . . . they're useless to me and society in general.

As a counterpoint, my youngest is currently attending Texas A&M in the honors genetics and microbiology program. She's doing great, working hard and learning a lot. There are a few of these types of "people" there too, but the smart kids just roll their eyes and get on with their work. Is the real issue not that there is a giant generational gap, but rather that the jerks have a much louder bullhorn and public forum through social media? I've often lamented how the 24 hour "news" sources, that are really opinion outlets, cause people to be more divided and ignorant of truth even though we have so much more real information available to us than at any other time in human history.

sixshooter

iTrader: (12)

White man speak with forked tongue