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 Albatross wrote:
A lot

Okay, I'll grant a large amount of the post, especially the removal of reproductive organs was a bit excessive. I overdid it, and it doesn't do me justice-you're correct that I came off as a jerk here. ITGS (internet tough guy syndrome) and all that: I'm nice IRL and occasionally act as a prick online, when I let my filter go. That said, I still feel her actions and her attitude are terrible, and she does not deserve what she has taken from you and your countrymen. Her kids deserve a good home, with loving parents that can provide for them.

If you'd like to PM me, and want to discuss a topic other than this one, I'd be more than happy to show I'm actually not a complete jackass.

Occasionally I do need a good reminder when I go too far. Thanks for reining me in.

Props to the "sexless mouthbreather"-it was an interesting title. (not sarcasm)

This is absurd. Some of those kids are probably going to have to share a room, maybe even, God between us and evil, share a Playstation. I also saw no mention of either live-in or on-call servants, so I guess the British government assumes the house is just going to clean itself? Get it together, guys.

I'm of the mind that this kind of thing will happen anywhere on the economic scale, one way or the other. Whether it be a welfare queen, ultra rich banker or whatever playing the system, and whatever turd lays in between the two, they are going to end up contributing to the collapse of everything one day.
The best thing a person can do is get out of debt and put in food storage along with anything else their family may need against the day the big reset button gets pushed.

 timetowaste85 wrote:

 Albatross wrote:
A lot

Okay, I'll grant a large amount of the post, especially the removal of reproductive organs was a bit excessive. I overdid it, and it doesn't do me justice-you're correct that I came off as a jerk here. ITGS (internet tough guy syndrome) and all that: I'm nice IRL and occasionally act as a prick online, when I let my filter go.

Dude, it's me you're talking to! I will concede that there was an element of the old 'people in glass houses throwing stones' to what I posted. When I log on, my filter logs off!

That said, I still feel her actions and her attitude are terrible, and she does not deserve what she has taken from you and your countrymen. Her kids deserve a good home, with loving parents that can provide for them.

I agree. I'm a Conservative after all, which is why I support the measures our government is bringing in to cap benefits, as opposed to forcible removal of reproductive organs... It's also the reason I wanted a source on the news story, because it sounds suspiciously like a news story from a couple of years ago, before the coalition got in.

If you'd like to PM me, and want to discuss a topic other than this one, I'd be more than happy to show I'm actually not a complete jackass.

Occasionally I do need a good reminder when I go too far. Thanks for reining me in.

Props to the "sexless mouthbreather"-it was an interesting title. (not sarcasm)

To be fair, I said I would be inclined to believe that you were one based on what you posted, not that you were one. An important distinction!

All's well that ends well, to quote the immortal bard.

 gregor_xenos wrote:

Palindrome wrote:

 gregor_xenos wrote:
wow.... with the rabid defence of the "left" on this site, I'm pretty surprised with the ire this topic has generated.
.

Are you talking about Dakka? The right wing nutjobs outnumber the left wing nut jobs here.

Not in my expierence.... maybe I just see the left because Im right?
lol no pun intended.

No, we're just so manly the lefties think each of us is ten men.

 Frazzled wrote:

 gregor_xenos wrote:

Palindrome wrote:

 gregor_xenos wrote:
wow.... with the rabid defence of the "left" on this site, I'm pretty surprised with the ire this topic has generated.
.

Are you talking about Dakka? The right wing nutjobs outnumber the left wing nut jobs here.

Not in my expierence.... maybe I just see the left because Im right?
lol no pun intended.

No, we're just so manly the lefties think each of us is ten men.

Believe that, if it gives you any comfort...

You're jealous because you're not Texan.

 Frazzled wrote:

No, we're just so manly the lefties think each of us is ten men.

Aren't you some kind of monsterous dogman?

The quality of life for this woman and her kids must be phenominally low. Child benefit is £20 a week for the first child, £15 for the rest. So most of those kids will be living on £15 a week, and that will have to cover electricity, gas, water, household appliances, food, drink, transport, school uniform, etc.

She can have all those kids if she wants. Their chances in life are pretty much nil though.

That's the issue with capping benefits and the like. It hurts the children who had no choice about being born to this idiot woman and are now going to suffer. There's no way she can look after them all properly, which means some of the older children are raising the younger. These kinds of families are linked to poor attainment in schools, low prospects and are likely to become parents in the same trap, as the older children in her family already are. I don't think cutting benefits will prevent people having children so much as put huge pressure on those already with children.

Articles about this family don't seem to suggest the children are actually being neglected or abused, so at what point would you remove children from a parent? If you take them away they end up in the care system which isn't a nice place to be either, and frankly the state can't just take on children because a family has had too many, there has to be better reasons to take children into an already overburdened child care system. Much as people are disgusted by her treating her womb 'like a clown car' what do we suggest of people similar to her? Forced sterilisation? We're not nazi germany, it's barbaric and won't go down well with the public like similar talk of population control.

If you cut money to these families you simply damage the welfare of the children, punishing them for being born to the wrong people and harming their development even further, any prospects that they'll escape they life they were born into dwindle further. Kids like these, in my experience, are the ones going to schools hungry, with broken shoes that don't fit and uniforms that only get washed once a week if they're lucky. So we cap benefits to their parents for having too many children and give them even less. There has to be a more constructive way of handling these people than simply writing them off and just finding a way to make it cheaper to do so, which is all child benefits caps achieves.

She can afford £200 a month for a horse?!

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
That's the issue with capping benefits and the like. It hurts the children who had no choice about being born to this idiot woman and are now going to suffer. There's no way she can look after them all properly, which means some of the older children are raising the younger. These kinds of families are linked to poor attainment in schools, low prospects and are likely to become parents in the same trap, as the older children in her family already are. I don't think cutting benefits will prevent people having children so much as put huge pressure on those already with children.

Articles about this family don't seem to suggest the children are actually being neglected or abused, so at what point would you remove children from a parent? If you take them away they end up in the care system which isn't a nice place to be either, and frankly the state can't just take on children because a family has had too many, there has to be better reasons to take children into an already overburdened child care system. Much as people are disgusted by her treating her womb 'like a clown car' what do we suggest of people similar to her? Forced sterilisation? We're not nazi germany, it's barbaric and won't go down well with the public like similar talk of population control.

If you cut money to these families you simply damage the welfare of the children, punishing them for being born to the wrong people and harming their development even further, any prospects that they'll escape they life they were born into dwindle further. Kids like these, in my experience, are the ones going to schools hungry, with broken shoes that don't fit and uniforms that only get washed once a week if they're lucky. So we cap benefits to their parents for having too many children and give them even less. There has to be a more constructive way of handling these people than simply writing them off and just finding a way to make it cheaper to do so, which is all child benefits caps achieves.

I agree with you to a certain extent, but in my opinion there has to be a price for failure, be it failure to find work, or failure to practice responsible birth-control. No-one forced her to have so many children, after all. This is not a situation that was forced upon this family, they brought it upon themselves. Welfare should not be a lifestyle choice, and it absolutely should be a difficult existence. Speaking from experience, it WAS a difficult experience for my family, growing up as I did in the 80s. What that meant was that I was motivated to try and better myself, because the alternative was a life of poverty and want. We need to accept that, beyond a certain point, people should be forced to live with the consequences of their behaviour. If a message was sent out that we as a nation would not support workless families that have more children than they can support, and that such familes will struggle to feed themselves, people wouldn't do things like having 11 kids, safe in the knowledge that the state will pick up the tab. They might think about their actions more.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Squidbot wrote:
She can afford £200 a month for a horse?!

That's a LOT of lasagne....

 Albatross wrote:

That's a LOT of lasagne....

Palindrome wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:

No, we're just so manly the lefties think each of us is ten men.

Aren't you some kind of monsterous dogman?

The rumors that Frazzled is so manly he has 2-10 wieners is...accurate.

I don't get it - my dad has 10 siblings, his dad was a carpenter and his mum a housewife, my mum has 7 siblings and her mum didn't work. They didn't have massive houses. How did people cope back then?

Aye, both of my parents come from very large families. They managed without council handouts.

I'm not sure why she is so long in the face

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2281172/Mother-11-having-400k-taxpayer-funded-house-built-says-in.html

Palindrome wrote:

 Necroshea wrote:

Agreed, if we're working towards what best for the kids, I think it's safe to say that someone besides their train wreck of a mother would be better for them. I don't know why after complaining for two years they didn't just take them from her anyways.

Because taking children into care is, and always should be, a last resort. It is not something that should be done lightly. Reducing welfare levels or simply removing the children can't help but cause more social problems than it solves.

The numbers don't really add up here. If she has 11 children and is a grandmother where is the grandchild(ren)?

You gotta work on your reading comprehension her 21 yr old daughter has a son named Ashley that is 2 years old.

I need to reevaluate things in my life... this woman wasn't at all how I pictured her...


Edit: I enjoy how the story linked Pilau Rice's post keeps calling the gaggle of children, a "large brood"

The most surprising aspect of this story is that she managed to convince someone to breed with her eleven times.

A horse, God damnit, I always wanted a horse. I guess i have to get on welfare then.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
A horse, God damnit, I always wanted a horse. I guess i have to get on welfare then.

If you lived in Europe I would have said it's quite likely you've had a horse, you just don't necessarily know about it

 Pilau Rice wrote:
I'm not sure why she is so long in the face

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2281172/Mother-11-having-400k-taxpayer-funded-house-built-says-in.html

She may not have held a gun to anyone's head but I dare say that had she not gotten a house she wanted the housing authority and their lawyers would have heard all about it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Spyral wrote:
I don't get it - my dad has 10 siblings, his dad was a carpenter and his mum a housewife, my mum has 7 siblings and her mum didn't work. They didn't have massive houses. How did people cope back then?

My family was the same. The simple answer was that they had to live within their means and often had to go without if the money wasn't there - something that is completely alien to many people today sadly.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
That's the issue with capping benefits and the like. It hurts the children who had no choice about being born to this idiot woman and are now going to suffer.

So people who can't afford to have more children because they can't afford it on the money they earn have to subsidise those who have as many kids as they want on welfare? That seems to give the impression that hard work isn't rewarded, but playing the system is.

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
There's no way she can look after them all properly, which means some of the older children are raising the younger. These kinds of families are linked to poor attainment in schools, low prospects and are likely to become parents in the same trap, as the older children in her family already are. I don't think cutting benefits will prevent people having children so much as put huge pressure on those already with children.

So does that make her an unfit mother if she is giving birth to more children than she can manage? Should social services become involved if she is not taking care of the children adequately? My parents came from large families, as did my wife's. Both their families managed to cope pretty well with what they earned, with many of the children going to college.

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
If you cut money to these families you simply damage the welfare of the children, punishing them for being born to the wrong people and harming their development even further, any prospects that they'll escape they life they were born into dwindle further. Kids like these, in my experience, are the ones going to schools hungry, with broken shoes that don't fit and uniforms that only get washed once a week if they're lucky. So we cap benefits to their parents for having too many children and give them even less. There has to be a more constructive way of handling these people than simply writing them off and just finding a way to make it cheaper to do so, which is all child benefits caps achieves

Going to school hungry, with broken shoes and ill fitting uniforms while they spend 200GBP a week on a horse? I'm finding a hard time mustering any sympathy for this family. Other families who struggle with a low paying job and raising children I have the utmost sympathy for. But this is not one of those families.

At first, I wasn't sure that a 16 year old claiming that she pays for the horse (200 quid a month, remember) is really any better than her mother paying for it. But after thinking about it ...

I suppose the expectation goes like this: whatever resources you derive from the state should be invested into the project of no longer receiving resources from the state, at least regarding welfare recipients of able mind and body and of working age.

Put it another (more familiar) way, the goal of welfare is said to be that the poor should be rescued from poverty rather than merely maintained as poor. "A hand up rather than a hand out."

If this is all true then the logical conclusion is that social welfare programs are designed to eliminate poverty under the assumptions that (1) those who receive benefits share that goal as regarding themselves and (2) the combination of the welfare benefits and the willpower/hard work of the recipient actually can end their poverty.

Critics of welfare focus their criticism on the first assumption. They say the poor are often lazy. The poor like being poor and welfare supposedly takes away a basic incentive, i.e., the depths of suffering in squalor, such that the poor are enabled to stay poor. This goes back to the Randian notion that welfare is actually a means of oppression.

Regardless of whether impoverished people are lazy (or rather without hope for that matter), I think the bigger problem lies in the second assumption, that X amount from the state per month and a can-do attitude is a sure recipe for success. It seems to me that the focus in this assumption is not on the amount of the benefit but rather on the can-do attitude. Therefore, even if the state only gives pittance, the burden is still on the recipient.

From a rightist perspective, that makes sense: as Albatross said, there must be a price for failure. Again, the assumption being that success should be negatively incentivized. But do the actual conditions of our society support the theory that hard work pays off?

I think so -- to a point. Hard work pays off in different proportions. The more you start with, the more your hard work pays off -- and vice versa. This is most true of the middle class because those who start off with the most and the least theoretically have little incentive to work hard; they have respectively little to gain and lose.

I said above that the goal of welfare was to eliminate poverty. Looking at that through the lens of hard work paying off to the greatest proportion in the middle class, the question of eliminating poverty finds its answer in moving the poor up into the middle class. And how does one do that?

Most simply, one allows the poor to possess some of the characteristics of the middle class. For example, a girl from the council estate owning a horse -- if, as she claims, she herself really does pay for the horse's upkeep. That's very middle class: paying for your own luxuries. Being poor means that you cannot pay for your own necessities much less your own luxuries.

And that brings us back to the house. Whether it's a bare necessity or something more (an eco-mansion or whatever), the fact remains that Heather Frost and Jake cannot afford to put any roof over their own and their children's heads. So should the 200 pounds/month that 16 year old Angel Frost somehow finds to keep a horse be confiscated by Heather and put toward the wider family's expenses related to, for example, housing?

From a conservative perspective, consider what lesson that teaches Angel. "If you have money of your own, it can be taken away from you and redistributed according to the larger needs of your social unit."

I see people complaining about bad sex education here. Well, I used to teach "lifeskills" in the UK.
In lessons, kids were told (more than once, in fact I'd say between age 11 and 17 this was all repeated AT LEAST 3 times):
- The mechanics of sex and how pregnancy happens.
- The different forms of contraception, advantages and disadvantages, how they work, and even how to put a condom onto a prostetic penis.
- The symptoms and routes of infection of STIs.
- Risk factors for teen pregnancy (drunkeness, pressure in relationships, etc etc)
- The laws and procedures around abortion in the UK (this wasn't covered until much later on).

All of this, and I and other teachers dealing with this topic had a policy of an anonymous question box so if a kid was too shy to ask a question, they would all put one in the box (putting one in was mandatory to prevent kids from being singled out) and then I'd answer them frankly the next week.

What more do you want out of the education system? The kids mostly didn't give a crap because teenagers are arrogant know it alls, and they knew there was "no exam" in sex ed. But as far as it goes, I thought the system was pretty damn comprehensive, and better than my biology teacher in good old catholic ireland telling us that condoms don't work because rubber is porous.

After delivering a course like that, the onus is on the student.

 Da Boss wrote:
I see people complaining about bad sex education here. Well, I used to teach "lifeskills" in the UK.
In lessons, kids were told (more than once, in fact I'd say between age 11 and 17 this was all repeated AT LEAST 3 times):
- The mechanics of sex and how pregnancy happens.
- The different forms of contraception, advantages and disadvantages, how they work, and even how to put a condom onto a prostetic penis.
- The symptoms and routes of infection of STIs.
- Risk factors for teen pregnancy (drunkeness, pressure in relationships, etc etc)
- The laws and procedures around abortion in the UK (this wasn't covered until much later on).

All of this, and I and other teachers dealing with this topic had a policy of an anonymous question box so if a kid was too shy to ask a question, they would all put one in the box (putting one in was mandatory to prevent kids from being singled out) and then I'd answer them frankly the next week.

What more do you want out of the education system? The kids mostly didn't give a crap because teenagers are arrogant know it alls, and they knew there was "no exam" in sex ed. But as far as it goes, I thought the system was pretty damn comprehensive, and better than my biology teacher in good old catholic ireland telling us that condoms don't work because rubber is porous.

After delivering a course like that, the onus is on the student.

Education isn't the issue in this case. I think after the first 3-7 kids she would have figured it out...

 Frazzled wrote:
You're jealous because you're not Texan.

I'm Cornish, we stand closest to the Gods. Also, we have pasties.

The lack of pasties is the worst thing about moving from the UK to Germany :(

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
You're jealous because you're not Texan.

I'm Cornish, we stand closest to the Gods. Also, we have pasties.

In the US "pasties" is a term used for little bits "dancers" used to put on to avoid local nudity restrictions. I don't know if Cornwall having that is a good or bad thing.

 Da Boss wrote:

After delivering a course like that, the onus is on the student.

I think its is more on the parent.

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
That's the issue with capping benefits and the like. It hurts the children who had no choice about being born to this idiot woman and are now going to suffer.

So people who can't afford to have more children because they can't afford it on the money they earn have to subsidise those who have as many kids as they want on welfare? That seems to give the impression that hard work isn't rewarded, but playing the system is.

I agree that the system is back to front in that regard. But as indignant as you want to be about it, I'm a British taxpayer, without children, subsidising this woman and you're not. But I'm still going to argue that there has to be a way found to tackle such people that doesn't damage the welfare of the children, and taking their kids into social care as they're popping them out also isn't an option. Where possible, the failures of the parents shouldn't be borne by the children IMO, but that is what will happen when you cut people's benefits unless it's done in a constructive manner, but I can't see our current government being particularly careful about how they go about it.

A lot of attacks upon those on benefits are very negative, they're scroungers and workshy trying to exploit the system. Forget this woman with her 11 kids, most families are not like that, but families like her are being used to tar everyone. Masses of unemployed people want to work, that's why you get single jobs with 500 applicants. But wait, that doesn't fit the narrative of the right wing press that the unemployed are scroungers who could actually get a job if they go out and tried. Our fundamental problem is that we have poor job creation and a lot of areas of long term unemployment where it's become normalised. That's because our heavy industries have dried up and there's little replacement. The last government tried to push as many people as possible through university because it would supposedly guarantee a a good job, not everyone is suited for university education and there aren't nice middle class jobs for everyone at the end.

A full time minimum wage job is not good money, it's not a huge amount more than someone claiming full benefits. There's a carrot and stick approach, but there aren't enough jobs for the carrot to work and they don't want to address things like low wages. The government instead of trying to create industry in this country, improve working pay and conditions, instead choose to attack the unemployed. They want to make work more 'favourable' not by making work better, but making unemployment a lot worse, even though minimum wage work is still pretty poor. The other benefit is that even if none of these people can get out of the unemployment they are trapped in, the government have saved money anyway. And that's their goal, they don't care so about the number of unemployed so much as making the unemployed a cheaper burden on the state because they know that the jobs aren't there and it's easier than creating them.