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1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...

This study shows religious tend to donate more to charity.

https://www.philanthropy.com/article/Religious-Americans-Giv...

It turns out jerks are jerks, and the church bashing is unwarranted here.

/s/Jesus/trickle down

I think that fixes it

Then I was thinking "What happens if tomorrow I get injured and cannot work for 12 months".

- I lose my place of living because I can't afford the bills

- I move into my parent's house

- My family loses their health insurance entirely.

- I have to pay for COBRA... but I don't have a job...

- I may need to take out loans to just get by for some time till I can get my health back in order.

Yeah we have ZERO social safety nets.

Nobody is responsible for anything. If anyone is in a bad circumstance (health, money, job, housing, debt, drugs, addiction, abortion, sex, crime) it was not their fault; it can't be. It was therefore a failure of the system, and therefore the system needs to fix it. Either they didn't get the proper mental health care they needed, physical health care, or education, or <insert system failure>.

I'm sure plenty of Americans that I have not encountered do think this, but they are in a negligible, near-non-existent minority.

It's an article about criminals trying to game the system in court: the disingenuous insanity plea has been a feature of Hollywood court dramas and other movies forever. There's nothing new here.

Here is a nice quote from the article though:

> “This is such a fraught area, and it’s prone to hype and overstatement,”

1. No, you can't have an abortion for any reason (rape, abuse, etc.). OR do you mean you can have one, as long as you can afford it.

2. You can't have rehab for any reason it's your fault for doing something dumb. OR is it that you can go to rehab only if you can afford it.

3. You can't have healthcare for any reason. OR is it that you can have healthcare if you can afford it. OR is it only free if you aren't overweight, sit too much, stand too much, floss twice daily and only ever eat fruits and veggies.

4. Financial assistance should only be accessible to the rich. Or is it meant to be accessible to the poor, but they must pay for it?

Certainly, most people, even gasp liberals, tend to ride some middle ground.

1. Abortion is only acceptable in the cases of rape and the mother's life being in danger. Abortion as post-pregnancy contraceptive is totally unacceptable. The correct course is to mandate adoption (in the case the mother doesn't want it) instead, expand adoption opportunity and lower adoption barrier to entry.

2. Patients going through rehab should not simply receive it for free. They should have to "give back" by helping the next generation of addicts via volunteer work.

3. Healthcare should be subsidized more for those who strive to live healthy lives. The people that eat right, exercise, etc, should have higher priority at the doctor and more healthcare-related benefits than people who are overweight, non-exercising, drug-abusing, etc.

4. Financial assistance should not be unconditional. It should be accessible only after the the applicant has gone through financial counselling and taken steps to become more responsible over their finances, learned to budget and eliminate waste from their expenses.

That is how to keep people accountable for their actions while also providing a way out.

I, a progressive, value personal freedom and want society to support that.

What choices people make with their one shot on earth is up to them. If a handful make choices I don't agree with, I don't give a shit--they're still people are as deserving of the social safety net as anyone.

And that's what it comes down to. I don't care if people make choices I don't agree with. It's their choice, their body, their whatever. Society should work for them as much as it does me, or it's a shitty society.

Yet you also want me to subsidize the fixing of any consequences related to poor choices, no? In other words "Do whatever the heck you want. If you do something incredibly stupid, everyone will help you recover whether they want to or not."

> It's their choice, their body, their whatever.

But it's my tax money that will bail them out of the hole they get themselves in. This is exactly what I'm talking about. The liberal mindset does not reward personal responsibly - it punishes it. The responsible people have to foot the bill of the irresponsible.

I exactly want your tax dollars to subsidize behaviors you don't approve of. (Not relevant, but mine sure do, in the form of subsidies, funding the military, paying for the militarization of police, etc.) I want all of us to pay into a social safety net that doesn't discriminate.

I have absolutely zero sympathy to this repeated use of this phrase you love, "personal responsibility." Society is all about shared responsibility, and you'd do well to learn that.

This assertion nullifies your point. The part in parenthesis is obviously in no way implied, and is just hyperbolic rhetoric in an attempt to create a strawman. If you're interested in reasonable debate, I would suggest refraining from such tactics.

Give me an example of a liberal stance of one of the above issues that factors in personal responsibility. Hint: none of them do because universal healthcare* (*except for obese people and drug abusers and other people that didn't take care of their bodies) would be very unpopular. Ditto for all other services/stances.

It still amazes me how politicians who practically wear their absurd hypocrisies on their sleeves can manipulate entire population segments with this sort of puerile garbage.

If you think so, I think you're somewhat missing the point. Or arguing against one that isn't there.

To take your assertion to its logical end:

- system provides "universal" healthcare

- the above system therefore excuses personal responsibility for... healthcare access existing? I'm not really sure where this leads?

What you seem to be assuming is that an "irresponsible" actor impinges on service provision by virtue of their irresponsibility. Believe it or not, this is not an assumption rooted in reality. If it were, the US per capita healthcare budget would be much lower than that of France.

When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

> According to data compiled by The Washington Post, 50 percent of the victims of fatal police shootings were white, while 26 percent were black. The majority of these victims had a gun or "were armed or otherwise threatening the officer with potentially lethal force," according to Mac Donald in a speech at Hillsdale College. > > Some may argue that these statistics are evidence of racist treatment toward blacks, since whites consist of 62 percent of the population and blacks make up 13 percent of the population. But as Mac Donald writes in The Wall Street Journal, 2009 statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics reveal that blacks were charged with 62 percent of robberies, 57 percent of murders and 45 percent of assaults in the 75 biggest counties in the country, despite only comprising roughly 15 percent of the population in these counties.

This is saying that while cops shoot more blacks than the population would indicate, we also arrest them at a higher rate. Because they are arrested at a higher rate, we would expect the shooting rate to be high b/c they have a higher-than-population-level-would-indicate interaction with police.

So.. it's unclear as to whether there's selection bias here. Are blacks given disproportionate police contact which increases arrest rate (aka differential exposure)? This would also lead to the same circular logic.

In Portland, Oregon, where I live, there was a report tracking different ethnicities through the criminal justice system called the Relative Rate Index. Article about it: http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2016/02/blacks_... and source: http://media.oregonlive.com/portland_impact/other/RRI%20Repo...

In there, it says the rate of each stage of the prison pipeline is approximately the same across race. So to explain why 4x the number of black people are in the pipeline than the population would point to the pre-sentencing side of the world.

What's this statistic even supposed to mean? It looks like you're dividing an absolute number by a per-capita rate but never adjusting for a higher base population of whites in America.

Of the total 987 deaths by police for 2017 Caucasian - 2016 percentage of pop: 76.9 * 987 would be: 759 This group total was actually: 457 or 46.3% African American - 2016 percentage of pop: 13.3 * 987 would be: 131 This group total was actually: 223 or 22.6%

That is a significant difference and nowhere near in line with population percentages. There may be some stories behind the shootings as the article you link to mentions. However, that article is relying on an article at the Marshall Project which was written by Heather Mac Donald who is the author of a book called "The War on Cops". A quick search on this shows quite a few articles claiming bias.

It took just 20 minutes of following sources and looking at available data to come to the conclusion that there are biases in your statements and sources. please do some more research and math in the future.

Also, as posted below, this information can be inferred from two popular left leaning media outlets, in addition to raw FBI statistics.

1.>According to data compiled by The Washington Post, 50 percent of the victims of fatal police shootings were white, while 26 percent were black

2.>But as Mac Donald writes in The Wall Street Journal, 2009 statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics reveal that blacks were charged with 62 percent of robberies, 57 percent of murders and 45 percent of assaults in the 75 biggest counties in the country

Because of the agenda of the media featured on google (wapo, huffpo, et all), it is left to the readers to compile these two sets of data and infer that, if we take the disproportionate confrontation rate for assaults alone, per capita it would explain why more black people appear to be dying.

I don't have time to provide you with a statistical analysis, just note that the sources for this data should be "legitimate," especially when they effextively lie through omission by selectively reporting data to further their pre-drawn conclusion.

--Restrict crime stats to 75 counties (ie major cities) without also restricting fatal shootings

--Assuming population ratios are constant among those counties as compared to the wider nation (required to generate percapita) --Not addressing the issue of scale between your two data sets. I don't know for certain, but I'd wager the number of violent crime incidents is at least an order of magnitude greater than the number of police fatal shootings.

--Related to the population point above but not accounting for potential inequalities in the who is charged in which counties.

You don't have "time" to provide a comprehensive statistical analysis because doing it right is nontrivial and very likely isn't going to conform to the views you spent so long searching the net to validate.