The dumb kid cannot go get a paying job, that's the problem. How do you get a paying job when your resume shows literally nothing, zero, except perhaps graduating high-school (if that) which is the case with many young people, especially from poor backgrounds? And on top of that when your crappy school and your poor, uneducated parents didn't even give you skills to introduce yourself properly, never mind any useful work skill or work ethic. Until you grow a power to FORCE employers to hire people even against their will, i.e. forget about liberty and switch to a full on communist dictatorship, they will simply not pay money to dumb kids to do crappy work and potentially do more harm than good to their company. It's the attitudes like yours that cause 50% under-25 unemployment in countries like Spain, Greece etc.
But what if their work is not realistically worth even the minimum wage to the employer? What if they can get a more experienced person for the minimum wage instead of a dumb kid who never did any work in their life?
It's not slavery. It is a way for young people with no experience and no valuable skills to contribute to the employer in exchange for money, to instead trade their labor for work experience which they can later use to make real money. The concept of apprenticeship has been around for centuries and nobody ever said it was immoral until you just did.
And who are you to decide that rather than the employer and the employee involved? You learn a lot just from being on a movie set, working in a hospital, or in a senator's office or in a science lab. These are experiences that are extremely hard to get and valuable and many people will gladly do them for free without any of your additional arbitrary conditions.
Doesn't matter. Perhaps Republicans thought a yes vote would serve them better in the next election (strong on national security) whereas some of the Democrats were leaving the option open to distance themselves from the potentially unpopular policies etc. Regardless, as always the outcome is decided in the backroom meetings long before the actual vote and the Democratic party leadership and the house and senate leaders Reid and Pelosi strongly supported those policies. Of course, individual members might then vote in a way that they think will serve them best politically, but if their 'yes' vote was truly needed they would have provided it (except for a handful of true mavericks, Ron Paul, Russ Feingold etc.)
Counting the votes is meaningless. 'No' votes were symbolic since they knew the act would pass. Both parties are exactly equally to blame, because as a whole they both supported the Patriot Act, just as both Bush and Obama renewed it (and Obama made it permanent), just as both parties voted for the Iraq War Resolution, against the closure of Guantanamo, etc. etc. Democrats could have blocked any of those things if they wanted.
You are completely missing the point. Your primary system enforces a two party system. You can only declare yourself as a Republican, Democrat or Independent full stop
Not true. you can register as a Libertarian, or a member of any party. There is no legal reason why a third party cannot be more successful in the US. It is a different issue that our political and media elites who set the political agenda have been convinced that a two party system is more stable and it is the problem for the Libertarians and other parties to convince them otherwise. Btw, I find it amusing that Canadians always express such exaggerated confidence in the fundamentally undemocratic first-past-the-post political system they inherited from UK. Inferiority complex?
You only have a choice between Obama and Bush at the end of a very long and involved process of vetting and primaries that is reasonably democratic, although many people do not participate out of laziness and ignorance. It would be ridiculous to have 50 presidential candidates in the general election. You start with 50 but they get narrowed down to 2. I would personally prefer 3 but not more than that.
The progress does not happen by politicians spending money but by private entrepreneurs having the freedom from oppressive taxation and regulation to take risks and innovate. The stagnation in the west is happening not because of austerity programs by the government but because of the excessive obsession with safety and fear of taking risks. The Oakland bridge eastern span replacement cost was $6 billion and took 11 years. Chinese put up bigger and better bridges than that for 2 years and $300 million.
Let's say a) more guns in the hands of potential rape victims = less rape b) more guns in the hands of rapists = more rape. Gun control affects only a).
20,000 of those were suicides. Since the US suicide rate is comparable to other countries it seems that those people would commit suicide anyway by other means if a gun weren't available. It is dishonest to include this statistic in a gun regulation debate.
Out of the remaining 10,000, take out those committed by felons (who are banned from owning guns anyway) who wouldn't care about any gun laws, plus justifiable homicides in self-defense by citizens and by the police, and you find that number beginning to look far less impressive.
Then you have to decide if the number of deaths is the only criteria to consider. Is it better to increase the rape statistics by one or to add a dead rapist to the "gun death" statistic? You can "improve" all kinds of statistics very easily: banning driving over 5 mph with 20 years prison penalty for violations would overnight save 10s of thousands of lives each year. Killing a healthy person and harvesting his organs to save 5 dying patients would improve statistics too - 1 death is better than 5, right?
Then, even the proponents of Feinstein/Obama style gun laws (such as banning black plastic guns but allowing brown wooden ones, limiting capacity etc) would admit in the end that they won't make a single bit of difference. After all, those exact same laws were tried before by Clinton so its not like we don't know.
Finally, none of the above matters. It's a basic human right to defend one's own life and the lives of one's family and the only way to do that realistically is by owning a gun. By denying someone that right you are denying them their basic humanity and treating them as interchangeable part of a machine, to be sacrificed if needed as long as the machine as a whole would benefit as measured by some statistic.
Yeah, so they can pick up a spare gun after one ambushes you, like happened in Santa Cruz not long ago. Leave law enforcement to the trained professionals.
I am against using statistical data and in favor of anecdotal evidence, and I support modding this to 5 Insightful.
Prejudiced? What did I say that isn't a fact? As for the GGP post I was replying to the idea that we have injured Muslims (rather than the other way around) and that we need to somehow try to understand that they might hate us because of that. My point is that in the big scheme of things we have not injured the Muslim world at all, without us (the West) they would be far poorer, far more backwards and pretty much worse off in every single way.
Muslim countries on the whole are black holes of civilization in every way, from human rights to education, not to mention science and technology. Nothing positive has come from Islam for many, many centuries. Islam is a primitive, violent, mind suffocating ideology of fear and oppression and we are trying to drag them out of it's grip and into the modern world even against their will, as it is not in our interest to share the planet with a bunch of medieval ignoramuses armed with nukes. The entire Muslim world, all one billion of them, have accomplished exactly TWO Nobel prizes for Science (both of them Western educated scientists who happen to be Muslim) and few more for Peace, mostly terrorists! Meanwhile 20 million Jews have won 177 Nobel prizes! Islam needs to be radically reformed if the human civilization is to progress and I don't give a crap if Muslims feelings are hurt as there are actually more important things that Muslims feelings. So shove your cultural relativism up your liberal ass.
Strange that in one post you are accusing others of strawman tactics while in the very next post you build couple of your own strawmen by accusing global warming "doubters" of a) asserting that "climatologists are part of some evil liberal conspiracy to destroy the economy" and b) somehow thinking that political thinking influences behavior of nature (?!).
While the first accusation is somewhat understandable given the wilder claims of the nuttier section of the right wing (which should in fairness be discounted in the same way you are discounting the nutty environmental extremists), the second accusation is puzzling and yet you keep repeating it over and over again. The issue is obviously the political implications of the actions proposed to supposedly combat the global warming, not somehow thinking that liberal thinking "causes" global warming. Can you give me one example of somebody even claiming the latter?
Anyway, it is the overall chain of reasoning that is the suspect in my opinion:
a) Global temperatures are increasing (more or less universally accepted fact - except for above mentioned nuts) -> b) This is mostly caused by human carbon emissions (not a generally accepted fact with solid proof behind it, just a very, very, very often repeated assertion) -> c) This has serious negative consequences for the planet (the "negative" part is simply stated with little evidence, the "serious" part is often vastly exaggerated without any evidence) -> d) There are specific policy actions proposed involving centralization of the global power through UN, global taxation system levied mostly on developed countries, and in general great increase of government control over private industrial activity (zero evidence that they will make any difference to the global warming, and if they do that the difference will be measurable and even if it is that the benefits will outweigh the cost)
The problem is that people are jumping from a) to d) and that is just about as scientific as some of the wilder claims of the extremist fringes that you like to shoot down.
The universe doesn't but you are naive if you think that the climate change debate here on Earth, and on both sides, is immune from politics. There is plenty of history of the "environmentalist" lobby, i.e. mostly left groups, using bogus or exaggerated environment related issues to drive their political agenda. See "peak oil" fiasco as an example. I don't know if you are old enough to remember but it was all the rage in the 70s. They are now even publicly lamenting that there is enough oil after all for "capitalism to continue", making it pretty obvious what their true intentions were.
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The dumb kid cannot go get a paying job, that's the problem. How do you get a paying job when your resume shows literally nothing, zero, except perhaps graduating high-school (if that) which is the case with many young people, especially from poor backgrounds? And on top of that when your crappy school and your poor, uneducated parents didn't even give you skills to introduce yourself properly, never mind any useful work skill or work ethic. Until you grow a power to FORCE employers to hire people even against their will, i.e. forget about liberty and switch to a full on communist dictatorship, they will simply not pay money to dumb kids to do crappy work and potentially do more harm than good to their company. It's the attitudes like yours that cause 50% under-25 unemployment in countries like Spain, Greece etc.
But what if their work is not realistically worth even the minimum wage to the employer? What if they can get a more experienced person for the minimum wage instead of a dumb kid who never did any work in their life?
It's not slavery. It is a way for young people with no experience and no valuable skills to contribute to the employer in exchange for money, to instead trade their labor for work experience which they can later use to make real money. The concept of apprenticeship has been around for centuries and nobody ever said it was immoral until you just did.
And who are you to decide that rather than the employer and the employee involved? You learn a lot just from being on a movie set, working in a hospital, or in a senator's office or in a science lab. These are experiences that are extremely hard to get and valuable and many people will gladly do them for free without any of your additional arbitrary conditions.
There are jobs that people really, really, really want to do for zero pay. Why wouldn't you allow them to make that decision for themselves?
If you have to pay interns like regular employees, what's the point of hiring interns?
Slightly faster reactions to a visual input is a poor tradeoff for reduced person to person social interaction and physical activity.
We are talking about Bloomberg here, the guy who blames large cups for obesity.
Doesn't matter. Perhaps Republicans thought a yes vote would serve them better in the next election (strong on national security) whereas some of the Democrats were leaving the option open to distance themselves from the potentially unpopular policies etc. Regardless, as always the outcome is decided in the backroom meetings long before the actual vote and the Democratic party leadership and the house and senate leaders Reid and Pelosi strongly supported those policies. Of course, individual members might then vote in a way that they think will serve them best politically, but if their 'yes' vote was truly needed they would have provided it (except for a handful of true mavericks, Ron Paul, Russ Feingold etc.)
Counting the votes is meaningless. 'No' votes were symbolic since they knew the act would pass. Both parties are exactly equally to blame, because as a whole they both supported the Patriot Act, just as both Bush and Obama renewed it (and Obama made it permanent), just as both parties voted for the Iraq War Resolution, against the closure of Guantanamo, etc. etc. Democrats could have blocked any of those things if they wanted.
You are completely missing the point. Your primary system enforces a two party system. You can only declare yourself as a Republican, Democrat or Independent full stop
Not true. you can register as a Libertarian, or a member of any party. There is no legal reason why a third party cannot be more successful in the US. It is a different issue that our political and media elites who set the political agenda have been convinced that a two party system is more stable and it is the problem for the Libertarians and other parties to convince them otherwise. Btw, I find it amusing that Canadians always express such exaggerated confidence in the fundamentally undemocratic first-past-the-post political system they inherited from UK. Inferiority complex?
You only have a choice between Obama and Bush at the end of a very long and involved process of vetting and primaries that is reasonably democratic, although many people do not participate out of laziness and ignorance. It would be ridiculous to have 50 presidential candidates in the general election. You start with 50 but they get narrowed down to 2. I would personally prefer 3 but not more than that.
The progress does not happen by politicians spending money but by private entrepreneurs having the freedom from oppressive taxation and regulation to take risks and innovate. The stagnation in the west is happening not because of austerity programs by the government but because of the excessive obsession with safety and fear of taking risks. The Oakland bridge eastern span replacement cost was $6 billion and took 11 years. Chinese put up bigger and better bridges than that for 2 years and $300 million.
Hmm, I think this is a new low actually. Yes, it's been bad but not this bad.
Let's say a) more guns in the hands of potential rape victims = less rape b) more guns in the hands of rapists = more rape. Gun control affects only a).
31,076 gun deaths in 2012.
20,000 of those were suicides. Since the US suicide rate is comparable to other countries it seems that those people would commit suicide anyway by other means if a gun weren't available. It is dishonest to include this statistic in a gun regulation debate.
Out of the remaining 10,000, take out those committed by felons (who are banned from owning guns anyway) who wouldn't care about any gun laws, plus justifiable homicides in self-defense by citizens and by the police, and you find that number beginning to look far less impressive.
Now, you have to ADD the number of people who would have lost their lives if they did NOT have a gun ( http://www.cato.org/guns-and-self-defense )
Then you have to decide if the number of deaths is the only criteria to consider. Is it better to increase the rape statistics by one or to add a dead rapist to the "gun death" statistic? You can "improve" all kinds of statistics very easily: banning driving over 5 mph with 20 years prison penalty for violations would overnight save 10s of thousands of lives each year. Killing a healthy person and harvesting his organs to save 5 dying patients would improve statistics too - 1 death is better than 5, right?
Then, even the proponents of Feinstein/Obama style gun laws (such as banning black plastic guns but allowing brown wooden ones, limiting capacity etc) would admit in the end that they won't make a single bit of difference. After all, those exact same laws were tried before by Clinton so its not like we don't know.
Finally, none of the above matters. It's a basic human right to defend one's own life and the lives of one's family and the only way to do that realistically is by owning a gun. By denying someone that right you are denying them their basic humanity and treating them as interchangeable part of a machine, to be sacrificed if needed as long as the machine as a whole would benefit as measured by some statistic.
And in case anybody starts feeling sorry for the hunted and soon to be deceased Mr. Tsarnaev Jr., just remember this picture: http://media.tumblr.com/3ee5f3e27917c83a3810cd688da60817/tumblr_inline_mlhg426NpU1qz4rgp.png
Yeah, so they can pick up a spare gun after one ambushes you, like happened in Santa Cruz not long ago. Leave law enforcement to the trained professionals.
I am against using statistical data and in favor of anecdotal evidence, and I support modding this to 5 Insightful.
The rest being done by the other side of the same collectivist coin, the radical leftists, such as this guy: http://cdn.abclocal.go.com/images/wpvi/cms_exf_2007/news/local/032913_image_Sunil_Tripathi_FB_1.jpg
Prejudiced? What did I say that isn't a fact? As for the GGP post I was replying to the idea that we have injured Muslims (rather than the other way around) and that we need to somehow try to understand that they might hate us because of that. My point is that in the big scheme of things we have not injured the Muslim world at all, without us (the West) they would be far poorer, far more backwards and pretty much worse off in every single way.
The insensitivity of your post is only matched by the ignorance of your signature.
Muslim countries on the whole are black holes of civilization in every way, from human rights to education, not to mention science and technology. Nothing positive has come from Islam for many, many centuries. Islam is a primitive, violent, mind suffocating ideology of fear and oppression and we are trying to drag them out of it's grip and into the modern world even against their will, as it is not in our interest to share the planet with a bunch of medieval ignoramuses armed with nukes. The entire Muslim world, all one billion of them, have accomplished exactly TWO Nobel prizes for Science (both of them Western educated scientists who happen to be Muslim) and few more for Peace, mostly terrorists! Meanwhile 20 million Jews have won 177 Nobel prizes! Islam needs to be radically reformed if the human civilization is to progress and I don't give a crap if Muslims feelings are hurt as there are actually more important things that Muslims feelings. So shove your cultural relativism up your liberal ass.
You are as much of a nut as he was.
Strange that in one post you are accusing others of strawman tactics while in the very next post you build couple of your own strawmen by accusing global warming "doubters" of a) asserting that "climatologists are part of some evil liberal conspiracy to destroy the economy" and b) somehow thinking that political thinking influences behavior of nature (?!).
While the first accusation is somewhat understandable given the wilder claims of the nuttier section of the right wing (which should in fairness be discounted in the same way you are discounting the nutty environmental extremists), the second accusation is puzzling and yet you keep repeating it over and over again. The issue is obviously the political implications of the actions proposed to supposedly combat the global warming, not somehow thinking that liberal thinking "causes" global warming. Can you give me one example of somebody even claiming the latter?
Anyway, it is the overall chain of reasoning that is the suspect in my opinion:
a) Global temperatures are increasing (more or less universally accepted fact - except for above mentioned nuts) ->
b) This is mostly caused by human carbon emissions (not a generally accepted fact with solid proof behind it, just a very, very, very often repeated assertion) ->
c) This has serious negative consequences for the planet (the "negative" part is simply stated with little evidence, the "serious" part is often vastly exaggerated without any evidence) ->
d) There are specific policy actions proposed involving centralization of the global power through UN, global taxation system levied mostly on developed countries, and in general great increase of government control over private industrial activity (zero evidence that they will make any difference to the global warming, and if they do that the difference will be measurable and even if it is that the benefits will outweigh the cost)
The problem is that people are jumping from a) to d) and that is just about as scientific as some of the wilder claims of the extremist fringes that you like to shoot down.
The universe doesn't but you are naive if you think that the climate change debate here on Earth, and on both sides, is immune from politics. There is plenty of history of the "environmentalist" lobby, i.e. mostly left groups, using bogus or exaggerated environment related issues to drive their political agenda. See "peak oil" fiasco as an example. I don't know if you are old enough to remember but it was all the rage in the 70s. They are now even publicly lamenting that there is enough oil after all for "capitalism to continue", making it pretty obvious what their true intentions were.