h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I didn't see an idea thread attached to this entry. Certain people seemed to know who Cavell was, but I did not have a clue. Margaret Sanger happens to be well known to me because I volunteer for Planned Parenthood.


This one is nicely done looks real good. Two nitpicks:

1) The first sentence has a lot of dependent clauses and took me a few reads to understand. How about instead of "Characterised by Gloria Steinem, women's rights leader" ->Characterised by women's rights leader Gloria Steinem,

2) The sentence "And even today" reads just as well without the "and".

You are right. Thanks for the tips!

And good for you about Planned Parenthood. I tried to represent Sanger fairly - I think she did a lot of people a lot of good.

Sorry - just realised I couldn't edit this any more. Maybe whoever's editing it will check on the thread and take the heads-up.

Thanks anyway.

Fixed, thanks Sea Change.

And thank you, echomikeromeo!

You're very welcome.

I think it's rather interesting that she joined the socialist party. Did she ever leave it? It seems that that's the last place to campaign for a right to your own body, considering it's owned by the state.

I don't know that she ever did - leave it, I mean.

I didn't think that the Socialist Party thought that your body was owned by the state - just the means of production. But I'm not much of a political scientist.

I would've thought that the Socialism of the early-to-mid-20th-Century, with its emphasis on the rights of ordinary working people - as opposed to say, entrenched interests such as big business - would have been exactly the right place for someone who wanted to give people a chance to climb out of the hole they were being exploited into.

I may be misinterpreting socialism, but, isn't workers rights exactly what they lost in soviet Russia?

And, what man lives off is his pride in knowing that he has achieved something some way- productive work is how you do that. To control someone's productive work is to cut off their lifeline.

You say that the socialist party was a good way to get out of the whole you were exploited into, but she wasn't being exploited into it by big business(she would probably be encouraged by big business), she was being exploited into it by government and it's anti-contraception laws.

I don't know what any of that has to do with Margaret Sanger. You probably have a point that socialism is a difficult scheme to make work. Capitalism obviously works - at least, for those smart enough and ruthless enough to take advantage of it.

I didn't mean to imply that I thought socialism was a good way to go, merely to state - which I believe is historically defensible - that Margaret Sanger had reason to believe it. She lived in a different time, and they were far too optimistic about social improvements, probably. But that was her time, and her experience.

Socialism is a difficult scheme to institute on a large scale - which is why it more or less failed miserably in the former USSR. The thing is that all the participants really have to be willing, which is why it works quite well in kibbutzim (communal farms) for instance, but less well in large countries.

From a theoretical perspective, socialism is quite helpful to workers. "From each according to his ability to each according to his needs" is the main tenet of socialism, so that means that someone isn't necessarily going to get a bad lot just because they're a factory worker and not the owner of the factory, or if they haven't been to university, for example. However, one must really question (at least, I do) whether it's better to have at least some people who are well off and then a smaller percentage of people who are starving, or to have everyone equal but starving, as tends to happen in socialist countries.

The problem, of course, with a country like the United States where there are a great many people who aren't starving, is that the country's leaders and lawmakers tend to point out the people who are doing well and say what a wonderful job they're doing. But they are ignoring the minority who is still starving, instead of instituting better welfare and healthcare programmes to improve their lives.

So it really depends on what you want out of your country. And for workers in the early 20th century (and even today) who definitely had the worst of a bad lot, the idea that they could potentially be socially equal to their bosses was a very powerful idea. Which is why socialism was and is such a popular idea among the downtrodden. Think about it: doesn't it sound like a nice idea not to have anyone automatically better off than you, just because of where they were born?

I have to confess that I myself would not prefer a socialist system, because that type of system tends not to favour intelligence and intellectual ability. The idea of socialism is that everyone is equal - and while I believe that everyone should be seen as equal despite their economic status, I don't think that everyone should be seen as equal despite their intelligence. There are, frankly, some jobs and roles that are more suited to intelligent people, which should be filled by intelligent people. Unfortunately, in countries like the former USSR, it would seem that intelligence was/is often discounted in favour of brute strength.

Sorry for the rant. I will shut up now.

Please don't, emr. I found it very enlightening.

Personally, I think living by the Sermon on the Mount would not be such a bad idea. And I never did hold with Jeremy Bentham. I think there really ought to be a way of optimising the lifestyle for everyone.

When I was a student I worked in a lunch counter once. I was terrible at it - spilt coffee, was a wreck. But a lady who worked there, who could barely read, was great at it. She loved her job. I figured I'd have to find something to do that I was as good at as she was at what she did - her customers came back because she took care of them.

I can do words, and I can do languages, but I'd still make a really bad short-order cook.

That doesn't mean I think I deserve better in life than she did.

I did try to tie that in to Sanger, I swear. You said that that (socialist party) was an ideal place for her, it's a way to go against those who have exploited you into a hole. But it was the government that exploited her into the whole, not big business or enterprise.

Also, less than three percent of the American stay "poor"(what exactly is the criterion, I don't know) for longer than eight years. Or, so Thomas Sowell points out, and he referenced a liberal study trying to prove the opposite. It really depends on your criterion of poor though, because some of the households who had been extremely succesful and were suffering short problems, but wouldn't give up all of the nice things. Therefore, the amount of money they actually had would have plummeted(to "poor" levels), but it would have risen soon and the people suffering wouldn't really be suffering at all.

No one is better off than you because of where they are born. There are millions of rags to riches stories. Sure, some people are born millionaires and become playboys, but many are born poor and rise to a much higher level than those playboys, even if not on a million dollar scale. "From each according to ability, to each according to need" ultimately ends up punishing those who have ability- more is taken from them as they have more ability to create, and the "needy" are rewarded- whether or not they are needy because they spend faster than they can earn or are actually suffering a disability that prevents them from doing so.

But now, we are most certainly not talking about Sanger, and we probably should stop. My apologies for bringing it up.

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If you like (it depends on what measurement you use). But those that do stay "poor" are caught in the poverty cycle for generations on end. Their children aren't given access to the tools they need to "succeed", so they're just stuck behind a counter at McDonalds, or even worse, as illegal immigrants out working in the fields all day, all year. And that cycle continues for generations, and there's very little chance of breaking out of it.

Editorial Note: This conversation has been moved from 'Margaret Sanger - Pioneer in Birth Control and Women's Rights' to 'h2g2 University Project: Forgotten Heroines'.