I don't know about UK but as far as I know in the US if they change the terms you can terminate the contract without any consequences. What's the point of a contract if one side can change it at will after you sign it.
Safety laws covering any particular industry typically get written by that industry itself, or rather by the large players with the biggest pull in Washington. Who else has the knowledge necessary to write that regulation, random civil servants, or the Congressmen? If you were going to have experts on every detail of every industry that the government regulates in Washington you would need couple of more Washingtons to house them all. There are no two opposing sides here, there is only one side. That's why BP will get away with hardly any punishment, and will even get most of the compensation fund that it already paid back with interest. Competition and tort laws are what make companies behave, not the government.
It's a good buy but only if you don't feel bad investing in an evil industry whose 1 oil rig out of 10,000 has leaked thereby covering hundreds of innocent pelicans with oil! Hope you can sleep at night.
It is so obvious where you get your news from. It is so funny to see the lefties call for less vitriol and incitement to violence while at the same time accusing the other side of mass murder without any evidence whatsoever, and thereby keep on validating my original point. What on earth does he have to do with the Tea Party except that you have been manipulated into seeing Tea Party as violent and therefore you associate any incidents of violence with them? Is it his video of burning of the US flag? Or the fact that he lists Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf as his favorite books? Or that he was an atheist? Or that he was described by his classmate as a leftist radical? He couldn't be more different from Tea Party if he tried.
A Tea Party member shoots up a political gathering
This is just evidence of the accuracy of your nickname and I think a possible sign of mental illness as well due to excessively fearful personality susceptible to paranoia. What part of he was not a Tea Party Member do you not understand? If you are afraid of the Tea Party, fine. But the fact that, as I keep repeating, there was not a single incident of violence coming from them means that this irrational fear is all in your head. The sooner you can understand that the sooner you can try dealing with it.
Thank you for a textbook example of unprincipled utilitarian thinking. Perhaps we should send some offerings to the pirates too in the form of a few ships with some free booty and toss in a few virgins too if that would maybe cause them to be less violent? If the result is less violence overall, then sacrificing a few people is justified on utilitarian grounds, right?
Because you generally leave killing as a last resort.
I don't know if that's either smart or moral in this case. Being kind to the pirates = being unkind to the NEXT ship they target after you had a chance to take them out and instead decided to just scare them away with your laser. Now, if you could somehow arrest them or otherwise disable them without killing them, great, but that's not the case here.
You mean after paying £3700/year for the NHS (average cost per taxpayer), which you have no choice but to pay, you can pay for the private insurance as well? How nice. My completely private insurance in the US costs about half of that and I get much better care, non-existent waiting times, and no rationing of drugs I might need based on decisions of a government committee. NICE denies hundreds of important drugs, including latest cancer treatments, based purely on cost.
First of all, the discussion was about the recent election and the false accusations of violence from leftist media outlets towards the Tea Party. I said that there was more violence on the left, which you have done nothing to contest, and the constant false accusations of violence thrown by the leftist media outlets towards the Tea Party amounted to an incitement to violence itself. If you are going to go decades back and count actions of every crazy cultist, white supremacist, religious fundamentalist or a mentally ill person as an example of "right wing" violence should I start mentioning Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot?
And there is a significant opposition to excessive security measures, not least in courts: http://www.google.com/search?q=lawsuits+against+tsa In any case, intrusive security is only the most obvious example of government overreach. In most European countries, taxpayers have delegated the responsibility to the government for everything from healthcare, and education to all encompassing cradle to grave nanny state to even silly things like art. Many of the most important things in an average European's life are decided not by him individually, but by the collective. This includes his life too: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/251988.stm If your life costs the taxpayer more than £44K per year or whatever the amount is today as decided by NICE you are left to die for the good of the collective.
Perhaps if you could give us a list of all that "violence coming from the left" in the US that is somehow being cleverly concealed by all the media of the world (must be some kind of a leftist conspiracy involving all those pinko-commie corporate CEOs!) it would help your points to attain some modicum of credibility.
Ever heard of Allee Bautsch, the woman savagely beaten for attending a Republican fundraiser? Ever heard of Kenneth Gladney, a young black Tea Party activist who was punched and kicked and racially insulted by SEIU members for passing out gadsden flags. Or perhaps you don't include union thugs in your cappuccino sipping leftists. Btw, have you heard of an incident at Rand Paul's event where a leftist protester was briefly held down for about one second by a Tea Party member who placed his foot on her shoulder. I'm sure you have, because it was all over headline news, while the other two incidents were never mentioned at all on MSNBC, and barely so on CNN.
On the other hand gun-totting rednecks on a rampage seem like near daily occurrence.
Ok, since they are such adaily occurrence, can you provide some example of this "rampage". Or perhaps, the rampage is all in your, easily frightened, brain.
Falsely accusing one side of violence, as the above mentioned did throughout 2010 election campaign, despite most of the actual incidents of violence coming from the left, is a 'veiled' invitation to respond in kind. How do you expect more extreme elements on the left to respond when they are constantly being told that about violent fascist and racist right-wingers are taking over in the form of Tea Party (which in reality is a peaceful and law-abiding movement if there ever was one). That is the impression one gets when listening to them and it is a form of incitement to violence.
If the attacker turns out to be a tea party paranoid type, then I honestly believe people like Beck hold indirect responsibility for the attack.
And conversely, if the attacker turns out to be a left wing extremist then people like Olbermann, Matthews, Maddow, and sites like huffingtonpost.com, dailykos.com should absolutely be held responsible for the vicious hatred they had spewed towards everything conservative and for falsely accusing the Tea Party, Palin and pretty much everybody they disagree with of racism and violence, thereby increasing the stakes and implicitly inviting the other site to "respond" in kind. Do you agree with that?
Perhaps if the Republican party looked in the mirror and considered that perhaps encouraging violence for political gain isn't something that is moral or Christian and certainly not patriotic when it's a democratically elected offical.
Will you say the same thing about the Democrat party if the shooter turns out to be a left wing extremist? Giffords was pretty right wing for a Democrat and reportedly one of the people killed was a conservative judge who might have actually been the target. The shooter has been identified as Jared Lee Loughner whose myspace page lists The Communist Manifesto as one of his favorite books.
So a small group who wants some special privileges tries to obtain them by violence and that's a good thing for democracy? No, if you have a case there are plenty of mechanisms for you to express it: voting, courts, peaceful protests. If your case is worthwhile, you will have plenty of other people join you, you will probably even have free legal representation. With a peaceful protest other people who disagree with you have an option to ignore you, which is their right. You don't have any right to smash their property and burn their cars and injure police and bystanders, ever.
It's a trade off really. Europeans statist instincts, that come from a long history of strongly class based societies made up of ruling nobles and subservient rabble, lead to more or less willing subjugation of the individual to the collective, which on the surface seems more civilized because there is less crime and seemingly more sense of community etc. Also, European countries are much more demographically homogeneous than the US which also produces less crime. Recently with more immigration there is more crime as well, even in Sweden. On the other hand, all that power and trust placed in the state is there just waiting for the right person and the right moment to be abused - just look at the bloody European history over the last couple of centuries. That is true even today, it's just a matter of time. In America, the collective tends to be mistrusted and individuals are expected to provide for themselves which means more people who are unable or unwilling to do that legally and turn to violence. It's nothing to do with number of guns per 100 residents.
Semi-automatic handguns are similarly useless for any legitimate use
What do you mean by legitimate use though? In the US, the right to bear arms is protected in the constitution explicitly so they can provide defense from a potentially tyrannical government (not so people can use them for hunting), so semi-automatic weapons are not useless at all.
I wish I had such gullible friends and family. Tell them you can find the ghost but only once they provide you with the hardware components for your ghost detector: . Then just sort of attach them randomly together, wander around the house for a while and say you didn't find any ghosts. It's a win-win situation.
I wish I had such gullible friends and family. Tell them you can find the ghost but only once they provide you with the hardware components for your ghost detector: . Then just sort of attach them randomly together, wander around the house for a while and say you didn't find any ghosts. It's a win-win situation.
If your discussion starter is to propose erasing knowledge of history from people's minds by force (how else?), rewriting countless history books (and who would be the dictator who decides what goes and what stays), burning down all museums and libraries (how else do you get rid of all that pesky physical evidence of what really happened), Soviet style retouching of photographs etc, then the appropriate response is to ridicule your proposal, not to take it seriously. You wouldn't just risk repeating the bad events from history by erasing them, you would already be doing something even worse.
Well the standard libertarian argument is that the government should be limited to protecting citizen's rights. This means protecting them from physical force by others, which can take many forms, including theft, fraud etc. Many legitimate powers of the government then follow: legislature, courts, police, military and various supporting functions such as collecting taxes or finding some other means to fund them. To quote Ayn Rand: "A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objectively defined laws". This is more or less in line with the US constitution (or at least they are both on the same side of the argument - far less government than we currently have). Any powers that we grant our government beyond the above should be viewed with suspicion and avoided if possible.
Well you can argue all day about what would have happened but to me the claim that Allende was planning a coup of his own is reasonably credible, what with a month long visit by Castro, secret Cuban and Soviet weapons caches found in Chile etc. I don't think there was a majority socialist movement in Chile. It was always a heavily divided country politically and Allende only won the election narrowly and could not implement widespread nationalization without imposing some kind of dictatorship. However, although it may have been legitimate for Pinochet to execute a coup if there was an imminent coup from the other side (especially in the cold war context with CIA and KGB involved heavily on either side) I cannot excuse the subsequent excesses, torture, disappearances etc. I thought the widespread leftist apologists for Soviet Union of the "you have to break some eggs" kind (which are easy to make when you are not one of the eggs) were disgusting and so were right wing apologists for Pinochet.
So let me get this straight: if given the choice between a government that tells you to give it money so it can spend it on things that voters have deemed necessary but otherwise leaves you alone
You must be joking. Liberals in the US leave you alone? Just about all nanny state regulation of what is legal and illegal to sell/buy/eat/drink/smoke etc comes from the left. In San Francisco they even banned the happy meal for Christ's sake. Social Security forces me to pay for an awful retirement plan, obamacare forces me to pay for a specific health insurance plan, I work 4 months of the year for the benefit of others due to a variety of welfare schemes. Social conservatives are mostly focused on few things that their bronze age book tells them are bad but it's not really in the same league. They might not like gay marriage (and there are valid arguments on both sides) but they certainly don't want to ban civil unions among gays and that sort of thing. On drugs, again there is a valid argument even for libertarians when it comes to banning heavy drugs (as a person on meth for example is a danger to others, not just themselves) but I don't think there is any valid argument for prohibition of soft drugs. Sure, conservatives frown on things like porn and want to censor bad language and such but that's a lost cause for them as freedom of speech laws are solid as is the separation of church and state. No, I have a lot more to fear from the left when it comes to my personal freedom than from the right.
I presume he was trying to link to a study which is completely bogus yet widely reported in liberal media and slashdot that "showed" that Fox News viewers are misinformed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8KHOgyYyHQ
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about UK but as far as I know in the US if they change the terms you can terminate the contract without any consequences. What's the point of a contract if one side can change it at will after you sign it.
Safety laws covering any particular industry typically get written by that industry itself, or rather by the large players with the biggest pull in Washington. Who else has the knowledge necessary to write that regulation, random civil servants, or the Congressmen? If you were going to have experts on every detail of every industry that the government regulates in Washington you would need couple of more Washingtons to house them all. There are no two opposing sides here, there is only one side. That's why BP will get away with hardly any punishment, and will even get most of the compensation fund that it already paid back with interest. Competition and tort laws are what make companies behave, not the government.
It's a good buy but only if you don't feel bad investing in an evil industry whose 1 oil rig out of 10,000 has leaked thereby covering hundreds of innocent pelicans with oil! Hope you can sleep at night.
It is so obvious where you get your news from. It is so funny to see the lefties call for less vitriol and incitement to violence while at the same time accusing the other side of mass murder without any evidence whatsoever, and thereby keep on validating my original point. What on earth does he have to do with the Tea Party except that you have been manipulated into seeing Tea Party as violent and therefore you associate any incidents of violence with them? Is it his video of burning of the US flag? Or the fact that he lists Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf as his favorite books? Or that he was an atheist? Or that he was described by his classmate as a leftist radical? He couldn't be more different from Tea Party if he tried.
A Tea Party member shoots up a political gathering
This is just evidence of the accuracy of your nickname and I think a possible sign of mental illness as well due to excessively fearful personality susceptible to paranoia. What part of he was not a Tea Party Member do you not understand? If you are afraid of the Tea Party, fine. But the fact that, as I keep repeating, there was not a single incident of violence coming from them means that this irrational fear is all in your head. The sooner you can understand that the sooner you can try dealing with it.
Thank you for a textbook example of unprincipled utilitarian thinking. Perhaps we should send some offerings to the pirates too in the form of a few ships with some free booty and toss in a few virgins too if that would maybe cause them to be less violent? If the result is less violence overall, then sacrificing a few people is justified on utilitarian grounds, right?
Because you generally leave killing as a last resort.
I don't know if that's either smart or moral in this case. Being kind to the pirates = being unkind to the NEXT ship they target after you had a chance to take them out and instead decided to just scare them away with your laser. Now, if you could somehow arrest them or otherwise disable them without killing them, great, but that's not the case here.
You mean after paying £3700/year for the NHS (average cost per taxpayer), which you have no choice but to pay, you can pay for the private insurance as well? How nice. My completely private insurance in the US costs about half of that and I get much better care, non-existent waiting times, and no rationing of drugs I might need based on decisions of a government committee. NICE denies hundreds of important drugs, including latest cancer treatments, based purely on cost.
First of all, the discussion was about the recent election and the false accusations of violence from leftist media outlets towards the Tea Party. I said that there was more violence on the left, which you have done nothing to contest, and the constant false accusations of violence thrown by the leftist media outlets towards the Tea Party amounted to an incitement to violence itself. If you are going to go decades back and count actions of every crazy cultist, white supremacist, religious fundamentalist or a mentally ill person as an example of "right wing" violence should I start mentioning Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot?
And there is a significant opposition to excessive security measures, not least in courts: http://www.google.com/search?q=lawsuits+against+tsa In any case, intrusive security is only the most obvious example of government overreach. In most European countries, taxpayers have delegated the responsibility to the government for everything from healthcare, and education to all encompassing cradle to grave nanny state to even silly things like art. Many of the most important things in an average European's life are decided not by him individually, but by the collective. This includes his life too: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/251988.stm If your life costs the taxpayer more than £44K per year or whatever the amount is today as decided by NICE you are left to die for the good of the collective.
Perhaps if you could give us a list of all that "violence coming from the left" in the US that is somehow being cleverly concealed by all the media of the world (must be some kind of a leftist conspiracy involving all those pinko-commie corporate CEOs!) it would help your points to attain some modicum of credibility.
Ever heard of Allee Bautsch, the woman savagely beaten for attending a Republican fundraiser? Ever heard of Kenneth Gladney, a young black Tea Party activist who was punched and kicked and racially insulted by SEIU members for passing out gadsden flags. Or perhaps you don't include union thugs in your cappuccino sipping leftists. Btw, have you heard of an incident at Rand Paul's event where a leftist protester was briefly held down for about one second by a Tea Party member who placed his foot on her shoulder. I'm sure you have, because it was all over headline news, while the other two incidents were never mentioned at all on MSNBC, and barely so on CNN.
On the other hand gun-totting rednecks on a rampage seem like near daily occurrence.
Ok, since they are such adaily occurrence, can you provide some example of this "rampage". Or perhaps, the rampage is all in your, easily frightened, brain.
Falsely accusing one side of violence, as the above mentioned did throughout 2010 election campaign, despite most of the actual incidents of violence coming from the left, is a 'veiled' invitation to respond in kind. How do you expect more extreme elements on the left to respond when they are constantly being told that about violent fascist and racist right-wingers are taking over in the form of Tea Party (which in reality is a peaceful and law-abiding movement if there ever was one). That is the impression one gets when listening to them and it is a form of incitement to violence.
However, pattern shows that it is the right wing that does this kind of stuff
What pattern?
If the attacker turns out to be a tea party paranoid type, then I honestly believe people like Beck hold indirect responsibility for the attack.
And conversely, if the attacker turns out to be a left wing extremist then people like Olbermann, Matthews, Maddow, and sites like huffingtonpost.com, dailykos.com should absolutely be held responsible for the vicious hatred they had spewed towards everything conservative and for falsely accusing the Tea Party, Palin and pretty much everybody they disagree with of racism and violence, thereby increasing the stakes and implicitly inviting the other site to "respond" in kind. Do you agree with that?
Perhaps if the Republican party looked in the mirror and considered that perhaps encouraging violence for political gain isn't something that is moral or Christian and certainly not patriotic when it's a democratically elected offical.
Will you say the same thing about the Democrat party if the shooter turns out to be a left wing extremist? Giffords was pretty right wing for a Democrat and reportedly one of the people killed was a conservative judge who might have actually been the target. The shooter has been identified as Jared Lee Loughner whose myspace page lists The Communist Manifesto as one of his favorite books.
So a small group who wants some special privileges tries to obtain them by violence and that's a good thing for democracy? No, if you have a case there are plenty of mechanisms for you to express it: voting, courts, peaceful protests. If your case is worthwhile, you will have plenty of other people join you, you will probably even have free legal representation. With a peaceful protest other people who disagree with you have an option to ignore you, which is their right. You don't have any right to smash their property and burn their cars and injure police and bystanders, ever.
It's a trade off really. Europeans statist instincts, that come from a long history of strongly class based societies made up of ruling nobles and subservient rabble, lead to more or less willing subjugation of the individual to the collective, which on the surface seems more civilized because there is less crime and seemingly more sense of community etc. Also, European countries are much more demographically homogeneous than the US which also produces less crime. Recently with more immigration there is more crime as well, even in Sweden. On the other hand, all that power and trust placed in the state is there just waiting for the right person and the right moment to be abused - just look at the bloody European history over the last couple of centuries. That is true even today, it's just a matter of time. In America, the collective tends to be mistrusted and individuals are expected to provide for themselves which means more people who are unable or unwilling to do that legally and turn to violence. It's nothing to do with number of guns per 100 residents.
Semi-automatic handguns are similarly useless for any legitimate use
What do you mean by legitimate use though? In the US, the right to bear arms is protected in the constitution explicitly so they can provide defense from a potentially tyrannical government (not so people can use them for hunting), so semi-automatic weapons are not useless at all.
I wish I had such gullible friends and family. Tell them you can find the ghost but only once they provide you with the hardware components for your ghost detector: . Then just sort of attach them randomly together, wander around the house for a while and say you didn't find any ghosts. It's a win-win situation.
I wish I had such gullible friends and family. Tell them you can find the ghost but only once they provide you with the hardware components for your ghost detector: . Then just sort of attach them randomly together, wander around the house for a while and say you didn't find any ghosts. It's a win-win situation.
Are you pondering what I'm pondering? Perhaps the cell phone boom is causing the magnetic pole shift!
Exactly what I was thinking. An exploding cell phone would definitely cause a charming Pole to shift.
If your discussion starter is to propose erasing knowledge of history from people's minds by force (how else?), rewriting countless history books (and who would be the dictator who decides what goes and what stays), burning down all museums and libraries (how else do you get rid of all that pesky physical evidence of what really happened), Soviet style retouching of photographs etc, then the appropriate response is to ridicule your proposal, not to take it seriously. You wouldn't just risk repeating the bad events from history by erasing them, you would already be doing something even worse.
Well the standard libertarian argument is that the government should be limited to protecting citizen's rights. This means protecting them from physical force by others, which can take many forms, including theft, fraud etc. Many legitimate powers of the government then follow: legislature, courts, police, military and various supporting functions such as collecting taxes or finding some other means to fund them. To quote Ayn Rand: "A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objectively defined laws". This is more or less in line with the US constitution (or at least they are both on the same side of the argument - far less government than we currently have). Any powers that we grant our government beyond the above should be viewed with suspicion and avoided if possible.
Well you can argue all day about what would have happened but to me the claim that Allende was planning a coup of his own is reasonably credible, what with a month long visit by Castro, secret Cuban and Soviet weapons caches found in Chile etc. I don't think there was a majority socialist movement in Chile. It was always a heavily divided country politically and Allende only won the election narrowly and could not implement widespread nationalization without imposing some kind of dictatorship. However, although it may have been legitimate for Pinochet to execute a coup if there was an imminent coup from the other side (especially in the cold war context with CIA and KGB involved heavily on either side) I cannot excuse the subsequent excesses, torture, disappearances etc. I thought the widespread leftist apologists for Soviet Union of the "you have to break some eggs" kind (which are easy to make when you are not one of the eggs) were disgusting and so were right wing apologists for Pinochet.
So let me get this straight: if given the choice between a government that tells you to give it money so it can spend it on things that voters have deemed necessary but otherwise leaves you alone
You must be joking. Liberals in the US leave you alone? Just about all nanny state regulation of what is legal and illegal to sell/buy/eat/drink/smoke etc comes from the left. In San Francisco they even banned the happy meal for Christ's sake. Social Security forces me to pay for an awful retirement plan, obamacare forces me to pay for a specific health insurance plan, I work 4 months of the year for the benefit of others due to a variety of welfare schemes. Social conservatives are mostly focused on few things that their bronze age book tells them are bad but it's not really in the same league. They might not like gay marriage (and there are valid arguments on both sides) but they certainly don't want to ban civil unions among gays and that sort of thing. On drugs, again there is a valid argument even for libertarians when it comes to banning heavy drugs (as a person on meth for example is a danger to others, not just themselves) but I don't think there is any valid argument for prohibition of soft drugs. Sure, conservatives frown on things like porn and want to censor bad language and such but that's a lost cause for them as freedom of speech laws are solid as is the separation of church and state. No, I have a lot more to fear from the left when it comes to my personal freedom than from the right.
I presume he was trying to link to a study which is completely bogus yet widely reported in liberal media and slashdot that "showed" that Fox News viewers are misinformed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8KHOgyYyHQ
If politically correct means way more to the left than even Fox is to the right then sure.