Arguments about forced sterilization??? EEEEEEEK!!!! Be afraid, be very afraid
(But that won't stop me from weighing in!)
It seems to me that zerospinboson, rickymaveety, and desertgrandma have all raised excellent points.
ZSB is absolutely right that we (the US) banned compulsory sterilization exactly because it was seriously misused in far far too many cases. (But I take some issue with your particular argument style back in post 182. You'd have done much better to follow your first paragraph with "The US banned the practice in the 70s exactly because it got out of hand and was being seriously misused." plus the reference. And left it at that.)
Ricky and DG each gave real examples of people who, well, let's charitably say "really shouldn't have had children." (Yes, I know that's a massive understatement!) And those people are, in fact, a real problem too.
It might help if ZSB were to respectfully consider that the problems Ricky and DG point out are real -- and that (for whatever reason) existing law
is not being deployed to address them. Useful suggestions on fixing that combination would go over far better than overheated argument.
Ricky and DG -- If you haven't read about our countries shameful history with forced sterilization, you really should. Warning: prepare to be disgusted by our government's behavior. We had to study it to pass the IRB tests for being allowed to design experiments that might (even peripherally) involve human subjects, and believe me it ain't pretty.
Digression: For those outside the Ivory Tower, the IRB is the Internal Review Board at each academic institution that is charged with ensuring that any experiments we perform DO NOT cause the sorts of messes created by the eugenics folks, or the perpetrators of the Tuskeegee experiment (another one to be disgusted by!), and plenty of others both within and outside the US. Most academics think that IRBs go way overboard with restrictions on experimental practice -- and I mostly agree. But better that than going wrong in the ways I mentioned above.
I had to do the whole IRB thing in order to certify that my research (which included field trials of software analysis tools) did not constitute "experimentation involving humans." Before the IRB training, I thought it trivially obvious that this was the case. After the IRB training, I could honestly certify "no human experimentation" -- but I was aware of dozens of ways my pre-training opinion might easily have been wrong. Or to put it another way: My intuition turned out to be correct, but it certainly wasn't trivially obvious and I had been quite naive to think so.
Wearing my "I mostly don't trust da gummint" hat, I find myself in rare agreement with ZSB -- another law is probably the
last thing we need here.
But before DG and Ricky explode, I must add that the examples they give are real... and we
do need a solution. And I have no clue what that solution should be. My personal bias is that we as a society lack consistency on the concept of personal responsibility. We preach it for things like education (as indeed I just did in this thread), and then fail to apply it to people like the ones in DG and Ricky's examples.
Maybe taking personal responsibility more seriously and consistently might help us to fix some of these things. Or maybe not. And don't ask me how to get something as large as "society" to change in that direction. I have even less clue on that front!
Xenophon