QUOTE(Cla68 @ Tue 7th July 2009, 5:02am)

That's what these POV-pushers don't seem to understand and which Jossi, Jayjg, SV, and several others apparently belatedly realized, I assume to their chagrin, which is that POV-pushing will eventually attract enough negative attention to the articles that they're trying to control to ruin what they've spent so many hours trying to accomplish.
Ah, Cla, you srsly overestimate the importance of pragmatism in the lives of idealism-driven fighters. These people don't really care whether their efforts make the goal less likely, even if you could PROVE it to them.

Why?

Because it's the
struggle itself that addicts them, rather than the outcome. They love the drama of it, the caramaderie of it, the being counted as on the side of the angels. This is one reason why you see so much of this in the religious community. These folks figure it will all be reset in the end by God Almighty, and the criterion then will be less
what you actually got done, than
what side you were on. Thus, you're free to do things you know very well aren't helping, in the short term.
I first realized this in the issue of teen pregancy, when it soon became apparent statistically from Europe that the way to decrease it the most was to teach contraception. Then we found out that the people who are against teen pregancy are willing to allow MORE teen pregnancy rather than to give up their single real goal, which is to be on the side of those who support the Great Fight Against Unauthorized Fucking.
Legalized prostitution? Same problem, more or less, though the stakes are even higher. Illegal prostitution results in a far more dangeous world for the women who practice it. But danger to women was not really what the opponents were interested in. They were interested in a world where what you trade sex for, is way more complicated. And damn the people who want a simple transaction: let them be murdered, if that's what it takes.
The American drug war is a similar thing. In this country we have 4 times more people in jail per capita than Europe and more than any place else in the Western world (nobody really has these figures for China but we may beat even them). And it 's not working. It's gotten to the point were we let people with long histories of violent crime out on the street (like this recent Carolina random killer) so we have space left to keep drug convicts locked up for their mandatory federal time, which can be decades.
The penalties for being caught using or dealing drugs are to interrupt a young person's education, remove them from their legitimate job if they have one, and give them a criminal record so they are henceforth unemployable in any kind of reasonably satisfactory job, ever again. So guess what they then turn to, instead? We've now created a permanent underclass which gets worse the harder we "punish" it. Can we get out of this hole by realizing that the cure is worse than the disease? No! I once thought it was just a matter of explaining to those who want to see less life-destroying drug use, that they were destroying more lives by how they were "treating" the problem. Didn't matter. Turned out lives-destroyed weren't what they were interested in, but being on the side of the angels. Same problem. Destroy em all and let god sort it out.
Milton The Village
Atheist Humanist
Who thinks we need to try to get it right the first time, in the one life we know we have...