[quote]theuofh wrote:
Anybody ever read freakonomics?
I kept coming back to the basic statistics principle, correlation does not equal causation. I wonder what other factors are correlated with a drop in the crime rate.
[quote]Powerpuff wrote:
I kept coming back to the basic statistics principle, correlation does not equal causation. I wonder what other factors are correlated with a drop in the crime rate. [/quote]
They mentioned three other contributing factors in the video: the increase in police officers, the increase in incarcerations, and the reduction in crack cocaine addicts. It does stand to reason, though:
If children are raised in poverty and neglect, they are more likely to become criminals.
An unwanted child is more likely to be neglected, especially if the family is also poor.
Fewer unwanted children equals fewer poor neglected children, ergo fewer criminals. Ergo less crime.
Not very PC, but I cannot really fault the logic.
On the bright side, just as advances in industrial and agricultural machine technology eventually made human slavery obsolete, advances in human induced pluripotent stem cell research could very well make all of this a moot issue.
If scientists can grow a functioning heart from adult stem cells extracted from skin tissue, they should potentially be able to grow any human organ tissue, without having to harvest any fetal organs at all.
Don’t know how far away this technology is, but it looks promising.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]Powerpuff wrote:
I kept coming back to the basic statistics principle, correlation does not equal causation. I wonder what other factors are correlated with a drop in the crime rate. [/quote]
They mentioned three other contributing factors in the video: the increase in police officers, the increase in incarcerations, and the reduction in crack cocaine addicts. It does stand to reason, though:
If children are raised in poverty and neglect, they are more likely to become criminals.
An unwanted child is more likely to be neglected, especially if the family is also poor.
Fewer unwanted children equals fewer poor neglected children, ergo fewer criminals. Ergo less crime.
Not very PC, but I cannot really fault the logic.[/quote]
There is really no question about the logic.
I have spent a lot of time working in one of the worst and most violent neighborhoods in the US. In it, more than half of pregnancies end in abortion. Everyone – every person – knows the direction in which this neighborhood would go if those children had been born, in what is effectively hell, to (single) mothers willing to kill them.
I am for restricting abortion heavily, but we should all be realistic about the results, and willing to accept or deal with them.
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]Powerpuff wrote:
I kept coming back to the basic statistics principle, correlation does not equal causation. I wonder what other factors are correlated with a drop in the crime rate. [/quote]
They mentioned three other contributing factors in the video: the increase in police officers, the increase in incarcerations, and the reduction in crack cocaine addicts. It does stand to reason, though:
If children are raised in poverty and neglect, they are more likely to become criminals.
An unwanted child is more likely to be neglected, especially if the family is also poor.
Fewer unwanted children equals fewer poor neglected children, ergo fewer criminals. Ergo less crime.
Not very PC, but I cannot really fault the logic.[/quote]
There is really no question about the logic.
I have spent a lot of time working in one of the worst and most violent neighborhoods in the US. In it, more than half of pregnancies end in abortion. Everyone – every person – knows the direction in which this neighborhood would go if those children had been born, in what is effectively hell, to (single) mothers willing to kill them.
I am for restricting abortion heavily, but we should all be realistic about the results, and willing to accept or deal with them.
[/quote]
Maybe. You see people do research based on social policy changes, and you could consider this change in the law as a variable, then study the effects before and after the change. But determining causation is a fairly high standard. This isn’t my area of expertise, by any stretch. BUT there are correlations everywhere and many other social changes happened during the time span studied. Of course, none of this would make me an abortion fan, even if we all accepted that this is absolutely a causal factor in lowered crime. A five minute clip that shows a correlation makes me think, but it doesn’t convince me that I know enough. It’s hard to imagine that I’m the more skeptical person in this group. 
[quote]Powerpuff wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]Powerpuff wrote:
I kept coming back to the basic statistics principle, correlation does not equal causation. I wonder what other factors are correlated with a drop in the crime rate. [/quote]
They mentioned three other contributing factors in the video: the increase in police officers, the increase in incarcerations, and the reduction in crack cocaine addicts. It does stand to reason, though:
If children are raised in poverty and neglect, they are more likely to become criminals.
An unwanted child is more likely to be neglected, especially if the family is also poor.
Fewer unwanted children equals fewer poor neglected children, ergo fewer criminals. Ergo less crime.
Not very PC, but I cannot really fault the logic.[/quote]
There is really no question about the logic.
I have spent a lot of time working in one of the worst and most violent neighborhoods in the US. In it, more than half of pregnancies end in abortion. Everyone – every person – knows the direction in which this neighborhood would go if those children had been born, in what is effectively hell, to (single) mothers willing to kill them.
I am for restricting abortion heavily, but we should all be realistic about the results, and willing to accept or deal with them.
[/quote]
Maybe. You see people do research based on social policy changes, and you could consider this change in the law as a variable, then study the effects before and after the change. But determining causation is a fairly high standard. This isn’t my area of expertise, by any stretch. BUT there are correlations everywhere and many other social changes happened during the time span studied. Of course, none of this would make me an abortion fan, even if we all accepted that this is absolutely a causal factor in lowered crime. A five minute clip that shows a correlation makes me think, but it doesn’t convince me that I know enough. It’s hard to imagine that I’m the more skeptical person in this group.
[/quote]
Yes indeed – there has been plenty of research into this, including a long and famous exchange between the two researchers most associated with it and their critics. (I didn’t watch the video, so maybe this was mentioned.)
Even beyond that, the logic is simply unassailable. The majority of abortions are had by poor women, many of them in the inner city (not to be confused with abortion ratios, which are skewed by the fact that rich women get pregnant far less often). If you look at NYC numbers, for example: the worse the neighborhood, the more abortions its residents will likely have had. Which means that terminated fetuses would have ended up in the social and economic environment by far most creative of delinquent kids and criminal adults, and, by definition, they would have been born to a mother who was willing to kill them in the womb.
In short, put another 1000 kids in Brownsville, BK and violent crime rises in 15-25 years.
Edited: phone typos.
[quote]sufiandy wrote:
[quote]PonyWhisperer wrote:
I’m not pro-abortion, though I’ve never truly cared one way or the other about it as a man (and subsequently not having to carry a child), but since abortion is legal, regardless of your feelings on the matter, what is so wrong with what they are doing? I’m not trying to be tricky here, I’m just wondering if the real issue is the abortion itself and not the disposition of the remains?
The fetus/baby whatever you want to call it, is destroyed/dead/not viable, so why shouldn’t the tissue be used for research that could potentially help others? Doesn’t that at least add some element of good to a situation that in the very best case scenario is probably neutral (removing unwanted tissue) and in the worst case scenario is straight up evil (baby murder)?
[/quote]
Its just the abortion itself. Look at this thread and all the anti abortion folks who posted, things like this just give a reason to bring up the issue again, nobody really cares about the tissue stuff.[/quote]
They are not distinct issues. The “Doctor” is preforming abortions purposefully crushing and destroying the parts of the human no one wants so they can preserve the in demand stuff. Though I largely agree that the video mostly highlights the reality of abortion, I can assure you that I care about the casual bargaining and pricing of human legs and hearts and lungs, even if it wasn’t for profit. If it doesn’t churn your stomach, I can only at best assume you have no children and are ignorant or just completely lack empathy all together.
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]Powerpuff wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]Powerpuff wrote:
I kept coming back to the basic statistics principle, correlation does not equal causation. I wonder what other factors are correlated with a drop in the crime rate. [/quote]
They mentioned three other contributing factors in the video: the increase in police officers, the increase in incarcerations, and the reduction in crack cocaine addicts. It does stand to reason, though:
If children are raised in poverty and neglect, they are more likely to become criminals.
An unwanted child is more likely to be neglected, especially if the family is also poor.
Fewer unwanted children equals fewer poor neglected children, ergo fewer criminals. Ergo less crime.
Not very PC, but I cannot really fault the logic.[/quote]
There is really no question about the logic.
I have spent a lot of time working in one of the worst and most violent neighborhoods in the US. In it, more than half of pregnancies end in abortion. Everyone – every person – knows the direction in which this neighborhood would go if those children had been born, in what is effectively hell, to (single) mothers willing to kill them.
I am for restricting abortion heavily, but we should all be realistic about the results, and willing to accept or deal with them.
[/quote]
Maybe. You see people do research based on social policy changes, and you could consider this change in the law as a variable, then study the effects before and after the change. But determining causation is a fairly high standard. This isn’t my area of expertise, by any stretch. BUT there are correlations everywhere and many other social changes happened during the time span studied. Of course, none of this would make me an abortion fan, even if we all accepted that this is absolutely a causal factor in lowered crime. A five minute clip that shows a correlation makes me think, but it doesn’t convince me that I know enough. It’s hard to imagine that I’m the more skeptical person in this group.
[/quote]
Yes indeed – there has been plenty of research into this, including a long and famous exchange between the two researchers most associated with it and their critics. (I didn’t watch the video, so maybe this was mentioned.)
Even beyond that, the logic is simply unassailable. The majority of abortions are had by poor women, many of them in the inner city (not to be confused with abortion ratios, which are skewed by the fact that rich women get pregnant far less often). If you look at NYC numbers, for example: the worse the neighborhood, the more abortions its residents will likely have had. Which means that terminated fetuses would have ended up in the social and economic environment by far most creative of delinquent kids and criminal adults, and, by definition, they would have been born to a mother who was willing to kill them in the womb.
In short, put another 1000 kids in Brownsville, BK and violent crime rises in 15-25 years.
Edited: phone typos.[/quote]
Thanks SMH. I need to go, but taking this further -
If we assume a causal relationship, and use this type of research to justify abortion -
For the pro-choice lobby, “the ends justifies the means” reasoning bolsters their position. I don’t have to tell you this, but a lot of bad stuff goes down when people result to this level of ethical decision making.
We make the mental leap that that abortion doctor is not a monster. She’s a crime fighting hero, like Superman or in this case Wonder Woman.
[quote]Powerpuff wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]Powerpuff wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]Powerpuff wrote:
I kept coming back to the basic statistics principle, correlation does not equal causation. I wonder what other factors are correlated with a drop in the crime rate. [/quote]
They mentioned three other contributing factors in the video: the increase in police officers, the increase in incarcerations, and the reduction in crack cocaine addicts. It does stand to reason, though:
If children are raised in poverty and neglect, they are more likely to become criminals.
An unwanted child is more likely to be neglected, especially if the family is also poor.
Fewer unwanted children equals fewer poor neglected children, ergo fewer criminals. Ergo less crime.
Not very PC, but I cannot really fault the logic.[/quote]
There is really no question about the logic.
I have spent a lot of time working in one of the worst and most violent neighborhoods in the US. In it, more than half of pregnancies end in abortion. Everyone – every person – knows the direction in which this neighborhood would go if those children had been born, in what is effectively hell, to (single) mothers willing to kill them.
I am for restricting abortion heavily, but we should all be realistic about the results, and willing to accept or deal with them.
[/quote]
Maybe. You see people do research based on social policy changes, and you could consider this change in the law as a variable, then study the effects before and after the change. But determining causation is a fairly high standard. This isn’t my area of expertise, by any stretch. BUT there are correlations everywhere and many other social changes happened during the time span studied. Of course, none of this would make me an abortion fan, even if we all accepted that this is absolutely a causal factor in lowered crime. A five minute clip that shows a correlation makes me think, but it doesn’t convince me that I know enough. It’s hard to imagine that I’m the more skeptical person in this group.
[/quote]
Yes indeed – there has been plenty of research into this, including a long and famous exchange between the two researchers most associated with it and their critics. (I didn’t watch the video, so maybe this was mentioned.)
Even beyond that, the logic is simply unassailable. The majority of abortions are had by poor women, many of them in the inner city (not to be confused with abortion ratios, which are skewed by the fact that rich women get pregnant far less often). If you look at NYC numbers, for example: the worse the neighborhood, the more abortions its residents will likely have had. Which means that terminated fetuses would have ended up in the social and economic environment by far most creative of delinquent kids and criminal adults, and, by definition, they would have been born to a mother who was willing to kill them in the womb.
In short, put another 1000 kids in Brownsville, BK and violent crime rises in 15-25 years.
Edited: phone typos.[/quote]
Thanks SMH. I need to go, but taking this further -
If we assume a causal relationship, and use this type of research to justify abortion -
For the pro-choice lobby, “the ends justifies the means” reasoning bolsters their position. I don’t have to tell you this, but a lot of bad stuff goes down when people result to this level of ethical decision making.
We make the mental leap that that abortion doctor is not a monster. She’s a crime fighting hero, like Superman or in this case Wonder Woman.
[/quote]
You are correct, and, to be clear, I don’t think that any of this justifies abortion. I just think that we have to be realistic about the consequences of heavy restriction or an outright ban, and we have to come up with a way to deal with or, I suppose, accept them. Are conservatives willing to accept more violent crime and more welfare dependence? Almost all are, which, I think, says a lot about the sincerity of the notion that abortion is, in at least many cases, truly and clearly immoral.
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]Powerpuff wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]Powerpuff wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]Powerpuff wrote:
I kept coming back to the basic statistics principle, correlation does not equal causation. I wonder what other factors are correlated with a drop in the crime rate. [/quote]
They mentioned three other contributing factors in the video: the increase in police officers, the increase in incarcerations, and the reduction in crack cocaine addicts. It does stand to reason, though:
If children are raised in poverty and neglect, they are more likely to become criminals.
An unwanted child is more likely to be neglected, especially if the family is also poor.
Fewer unwanted children equals fewer poor neglected children, ergo fewer criminals. Ergo less crime.
Not very PC, but I cannot really fault the logic.[/quote]
There is really no question about the logic.
I have spent a lot of time working in one of the worst and most violent neighborhoods in the US. In it, more than half of pregnancies end in abortion. Everyone – every person – knows the direction in which this neighborhood would go if those children had been born, in what is effectively hell, to (single) mothers willing to kill them.
I am for restricting abortion heavily, but we should all be realistic about the results, and willing to accept or deal with them.
[/quote]
Maybe. You see people do research based on social policy changes, and you could consider this change in the law as a variable, then study the effects before and after the change. But determining causation is a fairly high standard. This isn’t my area of expertise, by any stretch. BUT there are correlations everywhere and many other social changes happened during the time span studied. Of course, none of this would make me an abortion fan, even if we all accepted that this is absolutely a causal factor in lowered crime. A five minute clip that shows a correlation makes me think, but it doesn’t convince me that I know enough. It’s hard to imagine that I’m the more skeptical person in this group.
[/quote]
Yes indeed – there has been plenty of research into this, including a long and famous exchange between the two researchers most associated with it and their critics. (I didn’t watch the video, so maybe this was mentioned.)
Even beyond that, the logic is simply unassailable. The majority of abortions are had by poor women, many of them in the inner city (not to be confused with abortion ratios, which are skewed by the fact that rich women get pregnant far less often). If you look at NYC numbers, for example: the worse the neighborhood, the more abortions its residents will likely have had. Which means that terminated fetuses would have ended up in the social and economic environment by far most creative of delinquent kids and criminal adults, and, by definition, they would have been born to a mother who was willing to kill them in the womb.
In short, put another 1000 kids in Brownsville, BK and violent crime rises in 15-25 years.
Edited: phone typos.[/quote]
Thanks SMH. I need to go, but taking this further -
If we assume a causal relationship, and use this type of research to justify abortion -
For the pro-choice lobby, “the ends justifies the means” reasoning bolsters their position. I don’t have to tell you this, but a lot of bad stuff goes down when people result to this level of ethical decision making.
We make the mental leap that that abortion doctor is not a monster. She’s a crime fighting hero, like Superman or in this case Wonder Woman.
[/quote]
You are correct, and, to be clear, I don’t think that any of this justifies abortion. I just think that we have to be realistic about the consequences of heavy restriction or an outright ban, and we have to come up with a way to deal with or, I suppose, accept them. Are conservatives willing to accept more violent crime and more welfare dependence? Almost all are, which, I think, says a lot about the sincerity of the notion that abortion is, in at least many cases, truly and clearly immoral.[/quote]
I can guarantee that human deaths would go down. So, yes, I’d accept more robberies and democrat votes.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
You know the child at this point of gestation feels pain,right? [/quote]
At which point of gestation? After the 29th week, maybe, in which the abortion would be illegal in much of the United States, or if performed at all the mother would be administered a general anaesthetic for the procedure, which would in turn anaesthetise the fetus as well.
“Pain perception requires conscious recognition or awareness of a noxious stimulus. Neither withdrawal reflexes nor hormonal stress responses to invasive procedures prove the existence of fetal pain, because they can be elicited by nonpainful stimuli and occur without conscious cortical processing. Fetal awareness of noxious stimuli requires functional thalamocortical connections. Thalamocortical fibers begin appearing between 23 to 30 weeks’ gestational age, while electroencephalography suggests the capacity for functional pain perception in preterm neonates probably does not exist before 29 or 30 weeks.”
Fetal pain: a systematic multidisciplinary review of the evidence - PubMed [/quote]
This argument makes me sick.
[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
This argument makes me sick.[/quote]
Well, then I hope for your speedy recovery.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
This argument makes me sick.[/quote]
Well, then I hope for your speedy recovery.[/quote]
I literally couldn’t sleep last night with this on my mind. I probably really should take a break from this thread.
[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
If it doesn’t churn your stomach, I can only at best assume you have no children and are ignorant or just completely lack empathy all together.[/quote]
I do have children, I consider myself rather well-informed, and I do not completely lack empathy.
However it does not “churn my stomach”. Sorry.
I have a finite number of fucks to give, as do we all, and I have to be extremely selective in choosing what to give them about. The recycling of preterm baby parts that would otherwise have ended up in a dumpster or an incinerator is perhaps distasteful, and not a subject I would personally chat about with my dinner guests, but it does not keep me up at night seething with rage and disgust.
Children being blown to pieces by aerial bombing, now that’s a different story.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
If it doesn’t churn your stomach, I can only at best assume you have no children and are ignorant or just completely lack empathy all together.[/quote]
I do have children, I consider myself rather well-informed, and I do not completely lack empathy.
However it does not “churn my stomach”. Sorry.
I have a finite number of fucks to give, as do we all, and I have to be extremely selective in choosing what to give them about. The recycling of preterm baby parts that would otherwise have ended up in a dumpster or an incinerator is perhaps distasteful, and not a subject I would personally chat about with my dinner guests, but it does not keep me up at night seething with rage and disgust.
Children being blown to pieces by aerial bombing, now that’s a different story. [/quote]
Bombs - horrible: forceps - who gives a fuck
Got it.
At least bomb victim body parts aren’t being causally traded.
And I thought the Republicans were tough on crime.
[quote]Powerpuff wrote:
And I thought the Republicans were tough on crime. [/quote]
They are, the Dems are just really hard on PRE-crimes.
I have to say, this revelation has really made me think long and hard about my stance on abortion. Up until now, my personal stance has been pro life, but my “political” stance has been pro choice. But what these people are doing is disgusting. Absolutely disgusting.
Something has clicked inside my little brain. I don’t quite know what it is yet - I have to hash it out - but my opinion has definitely changed…
[quote]angry chicken wrote:
I have to say, this revelation has really made me think long and hard about my stance on abortion. Up until now, my personal stance has been pro life, but my “political” stance has been pro choice. But what these people are doing is disgusting. Absolutely disgusting.
Something has clicked inside my little brain. I don’t quite know what it is yet - I have to hash it out - but my opinion has definitely changed…[/quote]
Talking about human livers and lungs and hearts and legs makes you realize what it really is. Genocide.
I just finished the book Cloud Atlas and the part that takes place in the future has 2 classes of people, genetically engineered, and natural humans. The natural humans regard the engineered people as soul-less and devoid of the “it” that makes someone a “real” human though the distinction is without factual reasoning. They kill the engineered people on whims or for sport or as jokes.
One guy takes a “living doll” he bought (a human engineered to be small) and tosses it off a bridge on to rocks as SHE screams so he can get his money back as his daughter doesn?t want the “doll” anymore. The parallel to abortion is striking. Only instead of “engineered” it’s “in the womb”. Instead of “fabricant” (what they call the engineered people) it’s “fetus”, as if that term makes them not really human.