You blame the religion but the true blame lies with those who mindlessly follow (any) religion without questioning both its doctrine and the men who administer it.

That, and at least around here, daring to suggest that someone who doesn't know where their next meal will come from is not in a good position to become a parent is like turning the sacred cow into cheap hamburger. It's amazing how angry and emotional some people will get when you point out what should be common sense. It's part of a larger general movement to dismantle the notion of personal responsibility and the idea that cause precedes effect or decision precedes result.

I personally would never consider impregnating a woman under such circumstances. If I somehow did, the inevitable and predictable suffering of the child would be personally my fault, the result not of "luck" or "the way things went" but my own poor judgment and lack of discipline. That, by the way, is the single number one way to become poor and to remain in poverty: having children you know you cannot afford.

So long as it is voluntary, I like your idea concerning surgical sterilization. The payout could be increased to tens of thousands of dollars and it would still be a bargain compared to what a bunch of poorly (and usually singly) parented children are going to cost society when they grow up. The only people who would truly have a complaint are those who profit from the private prison industry and politicians who need have's and have-not's to secure elections.

Actually those leeches are a symptom and the ignorance itself is the problem. You will never run out of symptoms if you don't deal with the root problem.

A lot of people don't recognize that working to help those who are in poverty is useful and might constructively reduce suffering, while talking to those who are not impoverished and trying to make them feel bad about it is useless, childish, and changes absolutely nothing.

We've had the ability to feed, clothe, and shelter every last man, woman, and child on this planet a few times over ever since the Industrial Revolution. The fact that we haven't done so is why, if there are any advanced aliens who can travel here, they have wisely decided that we're not worth meeting.

This is one of those lessons that lots of people are just going to have to learn the hard way. A lot of completely predictable, entirely preventable problems are like that. Isn't our species great?

If it makes you feel better, I recently bought a wireless router from a major manufacturer. I plug it in, connect it to my computer, go to http://192.168.1.1/ and fine-tuned all the settings to be just the way I want, particularly those involving setting my own passwords (on the router's administration and on the secure wifi network). Everything nice and neatly set up. That's the first thing I did as soon as I took it out of the box because I try not to be an irresponsible douchebag.

I run my own local caching DNS server. I don't own a domain. I just use it to resolve hostnames because it's more reliable than my ISP's. Imagine my surprise when I found that my router's UNDOCUMENTED "first-use" behavior was to hijack all DNS traffic. Suddenly google.com resolved as 192.168.1.1 and so did every other domain. With my own DNS server on my statically-configured machine (not proxying DNS through the router like its DHCP settings for attached clients would direct). The router was actually intercepting and hijacking UDP port 53 traffic.

Apparently they do this so that irresponsible dumb users can't go to any Web site without first accessing the router's configuration page. Nevermind that I had already done the configuration. Nevermind that irresponsible dumb users tend not to have statically (thus, manually) assigned network information. Nevermind that irresponsible dumb users tend to just use their ISP's dns servers by proxying DNS through the router (shows 192.168.1.1 as DNS server) instead of running their own. Nevermind that this was mentioned nowhere in the documentation.

The default passwords were at least unique if not particularly secure. But this company was definitely proactive against the "turning irresponsible people loose with unchanged default settings" tendency. To the point of hassling someone who, in multiple detectable ways, does not use the device that way.

Heh you're right, they certainly did. I hadn't noticed because I've been using NoScript for so long.

Unreasonable people often think that a little authority, such as "I'm the customer!" will make them magically become reasonable without ever going through the effort of evaluating their ideas and rejecting the ones that make no sense

Anyone who has ever been young and worked an entry-level job that involved customer service knows this. I sincerely believe businesses are encouraging stupidity by ever accommodating such people. If no one did so, no business would feel a need to do so in order to remain competitive. One could almost argue it's a form of tragedy of the commons (inasmuch as a given marketplace is "common" to all participants), in that Business A knows it better tolerate such stupidity because the competition would.

Not necessarily. That's more true for users who think the Internet (I assume you mean the Web) is for passive consumption of corporate-owned one-to-many content, like television. Other users appreciate that it's a two-way many-to-many communications medium and take a much more proactive stance on how it should be used. If anything, those users are sharpening their skills and their ability to think and reason. They tend also to realize that their systems retrieve only the information they are configured to retrieve, not someone else's idea of "programming" content, hence the selective downloading based on desirability that ad-blockers help to achieve.

The point of NoScript is not do disable Javascript alltogether. The standard browser settings include a checkbox to disable Javascript entirely for all sites. That isn't what the add-on NoScript is for. NoScript is there to selectively disable the scripts that you decide are unnecessary.

I wish people who actively choose to comment on a thing would take a moment to acquire the most basic familiarity with that thing. It would lead to far fewer redundant posts and far fewer posters who are convinced they've pointed out the "obvious flaw" that no one else was smart enough to ever think of...

By selectively enabling just the scripts that facilitate the content you want to see and keeping all the rest disabled. Which is exactly what NoScript is designed to do.

Did you put even a moment's thought into this prior to posting a comment? It does not appear like you did.

You saw all the trees and asked where the forest is. That happens far too often on this site because too many of you want to find fault with the other guy so you can feel clever.

The (slightly) abstract principle here is that overcoming inertia in order to effect change is often difficult no matter what that change may be or how overdue it is. That's what the otherwise unrelated issues of same-sex couples, legalization of marijuana, and implementing the metric system all have in common. You'd have noticed that if you were looking for it.

Or (unrealted to the Target hacks) of having an unreasonable returns policy that is not consistent with what the sales guy promised. So yes, I suppose that is fraud, though incompetence is a more likely explanation.

No, but it is abundantly possible to say "hey, I am not knowledgable about this subject, so perhaps I should avoid forming any snap judgments until such time as I inform myself (not rely on anyone else to do it for you)". It takes such a slight amount of humility to recognize that your own ignorance is not equivalent to someone else's skill and knowledge, that to do otherwise is simply a severe character flaw.

If it does that anyway, it's because there is a monied interest behind it. All the more reason to mock and ridicule it as it deserves, or else that monied interest won't view that form of stupidity in the desirable terms of "wow, backing this could cost me a lot of profits".

The root of that problem is a particular form of arrogance or ego-centrism. The form is: it is so ridiculous *to me* because I understand what's wrong with it, that no one else will ever be persuaded by it, so there is no reason to expend the minimal effort it would take to nip it in the bud...

The Prohibition of alcohol happened this way. The Al Capones of the world were thankful.