Teaching someone to measure risk is part of parenting, and a good sign of maturity. Driving without insurance is strike one in that calculus, and then hitting a pedestrian is strike two. Helping them out of debt is merely enabling strike three in this scenario.

Take a look at your local newspapers mugshot section. Ours publishes them online, and when bored, it's a fun diversion. The majority of the arrests are for DUI, or driving on a suspended license from a prior DUI. A great cross section of people who don't even care about their impact upon others.

Not sure what DUIs have to do with this. I'm thinking about the guy who lost his job, and the closest position he could find was 50 miles away from his home, which he can't move out of without losing a lot of money. He's exhausted from the long commute each day and the stress of being up to his neck in debt, which is what he's distracted by when he doesn't see the pedestrian step out from behind a parked car. It's got nothing to do with maturity or whatever, it's about doing what is necessary to survive and provide for your family. It's pretty callous and insulting to tell someone in this situation that they deserve to be crushed under debt because you don't want to "enable" their behavior.

Funny. I was thinking of the guy who lost his job, lost his wife to leukemia and has all of her medical bills left over, had his car repossessed and his house foreclosed upon, and was just crossing the street to stay the night at his cousin's house when an uninsured driver puts him into the hospital by crushing his body with 2000 pounds of speeding steel.

Patronizing someone and linking to fox news to support a nonsense narrative isn't helping your case.

Edit on your edit: Selecting a single extraordinary instance to support your case isn't helping your case. This is no different from someone looking at the idiotic things on Fox News' prime time shows and saying they represent all conservatives.

I know many decent conservatives who think Fox News is for idiots, just as I know many poor people who are completely responsible and still struggle.

Really? The sentence the judge imposed might be extraordinary, but you can't believe idiotic driving is unusual.

You linked that in response to elemenohpee arguing that debt is not always, or even often, a result of irresponsibility. What exactly are you arguing? What was your goal in linking to that?

Elemenohpee was trying to argue that someone who drives without insurance and hits someone wasn't responsible for their actions. If that's an argument you want to back, have at it.

That's what you want my argument to be, because it would be much easier to dismiss. In reality what I'm saying is that I don't think it's right to have a society that puts crazy amounts of pressure on people and simultaneously refuses to acknowledge the negative influence that those pressures have on behavior.

I'm not dismissing the point that people have hard choices to make in life, but I am refusing to acknowledge that they lack responsibility for those choices.

Society puts a lot of pressure on me to live up to its standards. It's my choice as to whether I let that pressure influence me against my values.

Sometimes all the choices and options suck. Not denying that at all. But if I ran over someone while driving in a tired state, or otherwise impaired, it would be ridiculous to not assume the blame for it. Yeah, my fatigue would be a slightly mitigating factor that might garner some sympathy, but compared to the poor schmuck I just hit? Not so much.

You can't really control the amounts of pressure and negative influence you get in life. But you can control how you react and respond to it.

> You can't really control the amounts of pressure and negative influence you get in life.

The entire premise of OWS is that we can. Another world is possible.

It's amazing how two people can read the same thing and come to wildly different conclusions.