quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: somewhere between 'largely' and 'almost entirely' depending on region. removing the ability to have an abortion apparently according to sociologists cannot reduce abortion rates down below a homeostatic rate of performed abortions, whether these performed abortions are legal or 'back alley.'
this homeostatic rate is fixed almost entirely on the rate of unwanted pregnancy
guess what impacts unwanted pregnancy positively? comprehensive sex ed and birth control coverage. in some states it has more than halved the rate of unintended or unwanted pregnancy. guess what conservatives want to get rid of? comprehensive sex ed and birth control coverage.
That's what I would have guessed, because the most effective way to tackle any issue is generally to attack the root cause. And if the root cause of abortion is usually unwanted pregnancy, then the easiest way to prevent abortion is to prevent unwanted pregnancy, not to simply make it difficult to get an abortion.
But it seems like it would be pretty easy for conservatives to point to falling abortion rates and say, "See? All of these anti-abortion laws are working! We'd better keep it up!" So I guess the next question is, do you have a link to a study that shows the causes of the declining abortion rate?
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quote:Abortion rates have been falling for three decades in the developed world, as Vox’s Sarah Kliff has explained. But in developing African, Asian, and Latin American countries, rates have either held steady or increased since the 1990s. That’s because women in developed countries, such as in Europe and North America, have much better access to higher-quality methods of birth control, and live in a culture that treats contraception as less of a taboo.
But abortion rates in the US have been falling even faster than usual since 2008 — 3 or 4 percent per year instead of about 2. And while Guttmacher researchers Rachel Jones and Jenna Jerman caution that more research is needed to fully understand the link between abortion access and abortion rates, better contraception appears to be the main reason.
“Fewer women had abortions in 2011 than in 2008 because fewer women became pregnant when they did not want to,” the researchers write. Over this period, the proportion of pregnancies that were unintended fell from 51 percent to 45 percent.
The best explanation for this sudden drop is that use of long-acting reversible contraceptives (or LARCs) like IUDs and implants increased 130 percent among US women between 2007 and 2009. LARCs are much more reliable and less likely to fail than either birth control pills or condoms (LARCs fail less than 1 percent of the time, compared to 9 percent with typical use of birth control pills or 18 percent with condoms).
That trend likely continued between 2011 and 2014, Jones and Jerman conclude. Low-income family planning clinics supported by the Title X program gave LARCs to 11 percent of their patients in 2014, up from 7 percent in 2011. Low-income and young women have the most unintended pregnancies, and are mostly served by Title X clinics.
quote:Over the past six years, Colorado has conducted one of the largest experiments with long-acting birth control. If teenagers and poor women were offered free intrauterine devices and implants that prevent pregnancy for years, state officials asked, would those women choose them?
They did in a big way, and the results were startling. The birthrate among teenagers across the state plunged by 40 percent from 2009 to 2013, while their rate of abortions fell by 42 percent, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. There was a similar decline in births for another group particularly vulnerable to unplanned pregnancies: unmarried women under 25 who have not finished high school.
“Our demographer came into my office with a chart and said, ‘Greta, look at this, we’ve never seen this before,’ ” said Greta Klingler, the family planning supervisor for the public health department. “The numbers were plummeting.”
To me, the evidence is clear: free, readily accessible contraception and comprehensive sex education are responsible for the profound decline in abortions.
The pro-life movement will mostly reject this conclusion because this conclusion is not morally allowed for them and they seek to remove women's access to contraception and sex education. They will continue to push a claim that the reduction in abortions is primarily or wholly due to their effort to close abortion clinics across conservative states.
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I admit I'm looking forward to OSC pivoting around and dismissing the growing evidence for close ties between Trump and Russian intelligence services. I think it's gonna be good.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: I admit I'm looking forward to OSC pivoting around and dismissing the growing evidence for close ties between Trump and Russian intelligence services. I think it's gonna be good.
I doubt he will. He has no love for Trump.
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Yeah, he's been playing that game for years. He may not like Trump personally but he explicitly supported the framework that elected him. He's on record claiming that Republican staffers won't obey unethical or illegal orders-and here we are!
Not a chance in hell Card cops to that being probably wrong now, really.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: I admit I'm looking forward to OSC pivoting around and dismissing the growing evidence for close ties between Trump and Russian intelligence services. I think it's gonna be good.
I doubt he will. He has no love for Trump.
He can actually play it very safe: he can say that Democrats were wrong to jump on that wagon so early and so loudly, even if they prove to be right.
He's not very pro-Republican in my opinion - never has been. Just very much anti-American Left.
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quote:Originally posted by Dogbreath: I'm probably using the wrong word here, but I'm using "dogma" in a way not meant to be synonymous with "doctrine." To clarify, I read an article a few months ago (I think it was in the November issue of the Atlantic) that delved into the psyche of Glenn Beck, and argued that a lot of the seemly bizarre or otherwise inexplicable of his beliefs and actions are actually inspired by his understanding of Mormon Dogma. By which I mean, a set of non-doctrinal, prophetic beliefs or theories about the future/the end of days that have been interpreted or extrapolated from various opaque, ambiguous statements made by early church leaders and are essentially treated as if they were doctrine. Especially by folks in more conservative, occult groups of the Church.
I thought this was really fascinating, and since then whenever I read a seemingly nonsensical or absurd statement from Card I wonder if it's because he's been drawn into one of those groups, and is consequentially interpreting current events through that lens. Like maybe Oliver Cowdery once said "and lo it shall come to pass that one half of the nation shall turn their hearts against their mothers and slay their children, and in those days the golden man of flaxen hair shalt descend from on high upon a moving stair..." or something like that. I dunno.
Okay, I see what you're saying, though scifibum already kind of answered your question. No, I wouldn't say that there's a Mormon folk doctrine that half of America is against motherhood, though as scifibum said, there are certainly a lot of beliefs, both official and unofficial, about the importance of the family and the threats to it.
So while I've never before heard anyone say anything like "half of America is against motherhood", I certainly see how Mormons who believe in certain folks doctrines could come to that conclusion, even if I still think it's quite a leap.
Late I know, but thanks for your response. I appreciate it.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: I admit I'm looking forward to OSC pivoting around and dismissing the growing evidence for close ties between Trump and Russian intelligence services. I think it's gonna be good.
I doubt he will. He has no love for Trump.
He can actually play it very safe: he can say that Democrats were wrong to jump on that wagon so early and so loudly, even if they prove to be right.
He's not very pro-Republican in my opinion - never has been. Just very much anti-American Left.
The thing of it is, to me, is if Card and Americans like him (of which there are many who don't actually like Trump in a vacuum), if he doesn't want to get tarred with the brush of being a Trump supporter it's simple: support third party candidates in elections such as the most recent, and in times such as these.
I can't recall Card ever doing so on national level politics, and he definitely didn't in the 2016 presidential election. Instead it was 'Clinton is mega evil and so is the American Left, so yeah even though Trump is a schmuck if you love freedom you should support him'. You can be a Trump supporter without actually liking Trump.
Oh, and I'm on the edge of my seat waiting to hear Card denounce Trump's handling of Flynn where one day he fires him and the next day it's the media's fault and gee willickers we can't be soft or ineffectual on America's enemies for example by having the NSC horribly understaffed and...
Yeah. Card will definitely lay out the wrath and certainly won't parrot the White House line about the real problem being the leaks, and he will absolutely not fail to throw a spotlight on the absurdity of Trump whining about leaks now.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: I admit I'm looking forward to OSC pivoting around and dismissing the growing evidence for close ties between Trump and Russian intelligence services. I think it's gonna be good.
I doubt he will. He has no love for Trump.
He can actually play it very safe: he can say that Democrats were wrong to jump on that wagon so early and so loudly, even if they prove to be right.
He's not very pro-Republican in my opinion - never has been. Just very much anti-American Left.
The thing of it is, to me, is if Card and Americans like him (of which there are many who don't actually like Trump in a vacuum), if he doesn't want to get tarred with the brush of being a Trump supporter it's simple: support third party candidates in elections such as the most recent, and in times such as these.
I can't recall Card ever doing so on national level politics, and he definitely didn't in the 2016 presidential election. Instead it was 'Clinton is mega evil and so is the American Left, so yeah even though Trump is a schmuck if you love freedom you should support him'. You can be a Trump supporter without actually liking Trump.
Oh, and I'm on the edge of my seat waiting to hear Card denounce Trump's handling of Flynn where one day he fires him and the next day it's the media's fault and gee willickers we can't be soft or ineffectual on America's enemies for example by having the NSC horribly understaffed and...
Yeah. Card will definitely lay out the wrath and certainly won't parrot the White House line about the real problem being the leaks, and he will absolutely not fail to throw a spotlight on the absurdity of Trump whining about leaks now.
The idea that Card did not support a third-party candidate is an alternative fact. In multiple essays he advocated for Evan McMullin. .
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Even at the end? Honest question. If he was consistent in his support for McMullin until Election Day, then I was wrong to be so critical and harsh-about that-and apologize for it.
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yeah afaik card was never in the tank for trump. everything i have seen, iirc, boiled down to 'trump and clinton are both terrible, but because trump would helm a republican administration, republicans will hold him in line and hold him accountable, but democrats would never hold hillary accountable!'
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Ah, I admit I had mostly forgotten about McMullin. I was wrong to say he needed to support third party candidates, because of course he did. Apologies for that.
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'never trust a person who was literally on the board of directors for the National Organization for Marriage and calls liberals the real bigots for calling him a bigot'
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: 'never trust a person who was literally on the board of directors for the National Organization for Marriage and calls liberals the real bigots for calling him a bigot'
posted
Listening to osc talk about the new yorker is like watching him get tantalizingly close to a breakthrough. "now i tell you what the new yorker is some fine stuff, they produce some really deep important information and they're credible. but ... they have all these articles about that conservatives are being horrible and undermining democracy! hmm. hmmmmmm.
hmmmmmmm
...
oh well, besides that part where they're obviously wrong and crazy, it's all good!"
he's soooooo clooooooooooose to figuring it outttttttttttttttttttt, it's right theeerrreeee
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Try the word "eructation" or "eructate" on your friends. "Oh dear, I'm afraid your new blouse has made me eructate." "Yes, let's eat at Olive Garden; I haven't eructated enough this month." "Disney can't do worse with Star Wars than the three eructations that Lucas called prequels."
It will make you popular. People are always impressed by those who know and use obscure but slightly dirty-sounding words.
OK but this is some pretty nicely executed sarcasm. (I mean, I really hope it is.)
Posts: 4287 | Registered: Mar 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: Listening to osc talk about the new yorker is like watching him get tantalizingly close to a breakthrough. "now i tell you what the new yorker is some fine stuff, they produce some really deep important information and they're credible. but ... they have all these articles about that conservatives are being horrible and undermining democracy! hmm. hmmmmmm.
hmmmmmmm
...
oh well, besides that part where they're obviously wrong and crazy, it's all good!"
he's soooooo clooooooooooose to figuring it outttttttttttttttttttt, it's right theeerrreeee
Did you see the part in today's paper where OSC advocates for a cap on the mortgage interest tax deduction because it's not fair the poor to subsidize the rich to have millions lopped off their taxes?
To be fair, it's nice to see some subversive liberal ideas slipped into the conservative rag.
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OSC has always been - and continues to be, afaik - pretty solidly progressive on fiscal issues and things like welfare, housing assistance, immigration, etc. He's just deeply opposed to socially liberal policies like legal protections for gay and transgender folks, gay marriage, abortion, and Environmentalism (the last one I've never really understood why). Oh, and in the past few years, if it's a progressive policy that helps black people then he's suddenly a conservative about it (see his defense of voter ID laws and voter suppression in North Carolina, his "Obama recruiting poor young black men for his national police", his articles amounting to "real racism ended in the 1960s, BLM folks are just thugs who just don't respect police officers", etc.). I'm not really sure where this animosity towards black people came from because, AFAIK, it wasn't there more than a few years back.
Posts: 2222 | Registered: Dec 2008
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yeah the infamous "what if" rant purely hypothesizing about Obama's gangs of innercity negro thugs being used as a private police force to violently suppress conservatives was a bit out of left field but
quote:Obama is, by character and preference, a dictator. He hates the very idea of compromise; he demonizes his critics and despises even his own toadies in the liberal press. He circumvented Congress as soon as he got into office by appointing "czars" who didn't need Senate approval. His own party hasn't passed a budget ever in the Senate...
Having been anointed from the start of his career because he was that magical combination -- a black man who talks like a white man (that's what they mean by calling him "articulate" and a "great speaker") -- he has never had to work for a living, and he has never had to struggle to accomplish goals. He despises ordinary people, is hostile to any religion that doesn't have Obama as its deity, and his contempt for the military is complete.
You'd think that such a man could not possibly remain in office past the Constitutional limit of two terms -- but I think the plan is already in place.
Look at how Hillary Clinton is being set up as the fall guy on Benghazi. Her lies under oath will destroy her in the run-up to the 2016 election, while the press will never hold Obama's feet to the fire.
This is because Michelle Obama is going to be Barack's Lurleen Wallace. Remember how George Wallace got around Alabama's ban on governors serving two terms in a row? He ran his wife for the office. Everyone knew Wallace would actually be pulling the strings, even though they denied it.
Michelle Obama will be Obama's designated "successor," and any Democrat who seriously opposes her will be destroyed in the media the way everyone who contested Obama's run for the Democratic nomination in 2008 was destroyed.
But the plan goes deeper than this. Barack Obama, like Hitler and the Iranian dictators, announced his plan, though the media (as with Hitler) has "forgotten" it.
Barack Obama needs to have a source of military power that is under his direct control. Like Hitler, he needs a powerful domestic army to terrify any opposition that might arise.
Obama called for a "national police force" in 2008, though he never gave a clue about why such a thing would be necessary. We have the National Guard. We have the armed forces. The FBI. The Secret Service. And all the local and state police forces.
The trouble is that all of these groups have long independent histories and none of them is reliably under Barack Obama's personal control. He needs Brown Shirts -- thugs who will do his bidding without any reference to law.
Obama will claim we need a national police force in order to fight terrorism and crime. The Boston bombing is a useful start, especially when combined with random shootings by crazy people.
Where will he get his "national police"? The NaPo will be recruited from "young out-of-work urban men" and it will be hailed as a cure for the economic malaise of the inner cities.
In other words, Obama will put a thin veneer of training and military structure on urban gangs, and send them out to channel their violence against Obama's enemies.
Instead of doing drive-by shootings in their own neighborhoods, these young thugs will do beatings and murders of people "trying to escape" -- people who all seem to be leaders and members of groups that oppose Obama.
Already the thugs who serve the far left agenda of Obama's team do systematic character assassination as a means of intimidating their opponents into silence. But physical beatings and "legal" disappearances will be even more effective -- as Hitler and Putin and many other dictators have demonstrated over and over.
i have to say in retrospect this is my favorite stormfront article. perfect 5 out of 7
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You know, it's been a few years since he wrote that, and in the intervening time I've sort of willed myself into believing it wasn't really that bad.
I wonder if anyone who he listens to anymore has asked him how things are going for him under the Michelle Obama administration.
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I liked the bit how he destroyed all rivals by, say, inviting them into his administration at top cabinet positions.
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Thing is, compared to what's published today on Breitbart, Infowars, GatewayPundit, etc... that's even pretty tame.
Still lunatic-fringy, but that fringe has crept more and more into the mainstream of the conservative movement.
I wonder if he can look back on that now with any perspective at all, or if he's still completely in the tank for the Obama-conspiracy-of-the-week.
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OSC has always been - and continues to be, afaik - pretty solidly progressive on fiscal issues and things like welfare, housing assistance, immigration, etc. He's just deeply opposed to socially liberal policies like legal protections for gay and transgender folks, gay marriage, abortion, and Environmentalism (the last one I've never really understood why). Oh, and in the past few years, if it's a progressive policy that helps black people then he's suddenly a conservative about it (see his defense of voter ID laws and voter suppression in North Carolina, his "Obama recruiting poor young black men for his national police", his articles amounting to "real racism ended in the 1960s, BLM folks are just thugs who just don't respect police officers", etc.). I'm not really sure where this animosity towards black people came from because, AFAIK, it wasn't there more than a few years back.
What do they call people who are the complete opposites of libertarians?
Posts: 1757 | Registered: Oct 2004
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posted
as a member of the 'anti-defense left' i don't give a shit about defense. like if another country invaded us i would be all like 'eh whatever' and just roll over. maybe take a nap that's how it works
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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As a member of the 'Freedom-hating Left' I don't understand why we don't talk more about how much we hate freedom. I mean, I get it, we ALL hate freedom SO MUCH, but we never talk about it.
I think it's time to come out of the shadows.
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posted
If you are talking about the one over in IGMS, I don't actually moderate that board. I can't find any posts by him in Books, Film, Food, Culture or OSC.
Posts: 1194 | Registered: Jun 2010
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see the best part about it is that the left is simultaneously anti-freedom and anti-security, like this apparently actually isn't any sort of a thing that might maybe make less sense if you think about it
it's like good ol' ben franklin said, "those who would give up essential liberty to remove all safety, uh, and .. i guess that, uh, .. they deserve .. uh, .. this makes sense to someone i guess. wait is orson scott card trying to describe liberals again"
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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More than a dozen paragraphs about the (very real) problem of novel/unexpected research getting more funding and attention than research that takes longer or attempts to repeat/confirm preexisting work...
...and the moral of the story is that there's a science conspiracy to make sure nobody says anything novel or unexpected about global warming.
Posts: 89 | Registered: Apr 2013
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Fun! Can we trade out facade for fa-sod? Because I never liked that one. It's not a real word, but sod is. Other possibilities: sheik (Or is that pronounced shake?) foe coo And let's do rhyming ones! crokay, bokay (okay) kallone (Stallone)
Posts: 6367 | Registered: Aug 2003
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When I lived in England for a few months, my flatmates told me that "filet" is pronounced with a hard "t" sound at the end... like "fill-it", not "fill-ay". So, the McDonald's menu item was a "fill-it o' fish".
When I asked why, they said because they speak English, not French.
Of course, this didn't apply to an eggplant or a zucchini... which they called an aubergine and a courgette, respectively. Or to snow peas... which they called mange-tout (and pronounced "mahnj-too").
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