If there aren't jobs on the Rez, why not move away?
It's easy for you to say that -- you can move to any other town or state, and still remain in your own culture. Imagine if the situation was reversed, and you lived in a little pocket of European American culture, and 99.9% of the rest of the country was Native American. Would you still find moving away to be such an easy option?
As far as they are concerned, humanity is the thing causing an impact on the environment.
Yes, and isn't that the truth?
Their protests that we're destroying the environment is a basis for them to derive power from so that they can demand change to our way of life.
Correct. They want us to change our way of life so that the environment does not get destroyed.
So, seriously, no matter what happens, they're going to complain.
Incorrect. They will only complain as long as the environment is still being destroyed. Stop destroying the environment, and they will stop complaining.
You can either acknowledge that there is a problem, or you can continue attempting to dodge the issue, by accusing all environmentalists of having ulterior motives. Either way, the environmental problems will be solved -- if not by us proactively solving the problems ourselves, then by massive human die-offs because the planet can no longer support us. The first scenario will be much more pleasant, I suggest we stop whining and aim for it.
There's no free source of energy, you've gotta take it from somewhere!
If you had an orbiting solar power satellite, you'd be taking energy that otherwise would have simply left the solar system, so that's pretty close. Of course we would still have to deal with the effects of sending that energy to Earth; now Earth would have more energy in it than it would otherwise have. But the only way to have no impact on the Earth's energy patterns is to stop using energy -- i.e. die out.
You don't have the right to do whatever you want to your body.
Actually, you do. The laws may say differently, but then the laws also say you don't have the right to watch DVDs under Linux. The thing about natural rights is that they are yours naturally -- they are not privelges granted to you by the government.
You also can't kill another person legally. Why should there be an exception for a baby?
There shouldn't be, and there isn't. Now for a fetus, on the other hand... killing one of those is legal.
That logic only follows if you consider the fetus to be a person. If you don't consider it a person, then killing it is not murder, any more than stepping on an ant is murder.
So is a fetus a person? I think it is safe to say there is a rough consensus that a just-born baby is a person, and killing that baby would be murder. Furthermore, I think there is a consensus that a human egg, one second before it is fertilized, is not a person. So the only thing we need to figure out is where between those two points in the gestation sequence does the fetus gain its personhood?... and of course this is the battle that the two sides have been fighting back and forth for decades now.
The reason we can't come to an agreed-upon answer to this question is because the question itself is flawed -- it assumes that personhood is an all-or-nothing deal, a binary decision. In fact, life is more complicated than that. A fetus doesn't go to sleep one day as non-human, and wake up the next day as human. Rather, its humanity develops continuously over time. To oversimplify a bit, you might say that on day X the fetus is 10% human, and then on day Y it is 20% human, and so on until it reaches the stage of its development where it should be considered 100% human. Of course there is still the question of the shape of that curve -- i.e. what values should we plug in for X and Y and so on -- I won't attempt to answer that here. But I do think that the abortion debate would be more productive if people got past their oversimplified view of what it means to be human.
Well, see, marriage is between a man and a woman, it's been like that for thousands of years.
That's not the relevant issue though. The relevant question is not "what was marriage in the past", it is "what should marriage be in the future?" If tradition were our sole criterion, then inter-racial marriage would still be against the law, and wives would still be considered the property of their husbands. The argument that marriage must be heterosexual because that's the best way to produce more children is obsolete -- more children is exactly what our planet doesn't need these days. We aren't able to feed the children that exist already! I submit that the true reason for marriage in the modern world is to bind people (and therefore society) together emotionally, which makes for happier, more secure people and thus a more peaceful and stable society. By this measure, gay marriage is every bit as desirable as straight marriage. And yes, the raising of children in families is another good reason for marriage -- but every serious, unbiased study on that subject has shown that gay couples do just as good a job at that task as straight ones do.
As far as getting government out of the "marriage" business and having them do only civil unions instead, I'm completely in agreement with you. Not that I see that happening in my lifetime... too much of this country thinks that separation of church and state only applies to minority religions.
(Additionally, people who stay to the end of the credits to see the extra funny bit might be disappointed, as there doesn't seem to be anything beyond static credits.)
I did think the static credits were very cool though... they had a 3D fan-fold look to them that was very appealing. I instantly thought to myself "Awesome! Why haven't other movies done this?"
Would I deny my kids the right to take the same fun risks? Nope. But the safety nazis and their lawyers have already spoken
Consider the possibility that the safety nazis may have a point -- it is easy to complain about lost fun as long as it wasn't your kid that was sentenced to a wheelchair for the rest of his life...
I think a big part of what happened last week is that redneck bible-thumper-type voters are a little tired of preachy lilly-livered naive pacifist liberal elite types telling them what to do
.... and so they deliberately slit their country's own throat, just to show everybody that they won't be pushed around by people trying to help them. Brilliant!
Frankly, at this point I've got no more sympathy for the US. We deserve everything that's coming to us. An inflamed sense of grievance, whether merited or not, is no reason to abandon basic common sense.
Only the Soviets were uncaring enough about their own people to design a...
And who is to say that some other country won't be just as uncaring? Or that the people running the reactor couldn't be bribed or coerced into "accidentally" allowing some of the nuclear fuel to be transferred to terrorists? What is to keep the spent nuclear fuel from being released into the environment, either intentionally or unintentionally? Nuclear power might be workable in trusted environments, but what the world really needs is a power source that can be safely used anywhere, by anyone, with little or no potential for disaster.
I think a good rule of thumb is: if you wouldn't be comfortable with them using solution X in Iran or Afghanistan, then solution X is not an adequate solution.
No one has said the US would not do its part to limit pollution
I don't think anyone has to say that, do you? It's pretty obvious. Look at who just won the election. Look at his environmental record over the last four years. Look at what the markets say.
Everyone seems to forget that the US has three governing bodies, each with their own piece of the political power pie.
You seem to forget that all three are now under the control of a single party, which is itself under the control of the polluters. Basically, the current US government couldn't give any less of a fuck about the environment. They might give it some lip service, but in any decision where money is on the line, you can pretty much predict what side they will support.
Is Samantha Bennett by any chance a pseudonym for the Daily Show's Samantha Bee? The names are similar, and the article's content sounds a lot like Samantha Bee's schtick....
I never understood that either. How is voting for someone I don't want *not* throwing my vote away?
Because your vote will still have some beneficial effect (from your point of view) on the election. If you dislike candidate A more than candidate B, then a vote for B will at least make it less likely that A gets elected. A vote for non-competitive third-party candidate C, on the other hand, is for all intents and purposes the same as not voting for any candidate at all -- your vote will have absolutely no effect on who gets elected.
It sucks, but until we can get a better electoral system installed, that is the way it is.
If Kerry wins it tomorrow, he'd better have those unnamed countries who supposedly have divisions of combat-ready troops they're eager to throw into the Iraq meat grinder. In two days, he's going to be on the hook to actually do all the stuff he's been promising
Actually, Kerry wouldn't take office until January, so he'd have at least a couple of months to come through with all that stuff.
We have an ocean between us - what goes on in Europe has very little effect on us anymore.
Are you really this stupid, or are you trolling? You do realize that the September 11th terrorists spent a good deal of time preparing their attack in Germany, right? And why wasn't the mighty US military able to stop them there? Oh yeah, because we don't have any jurisdiction in foreign countries, and even if we did, we don't have enough manpower to send our own police to every country in the world. As much as it might contradict your comforting fantasy of an omnipotent USA that doesn't need the rest of the world for anything, we rely on the co-operation of foreign governments to find and catch these terrorists before they get to us. So why don't you shut your ignorant yap and think a little before telling the rest of the world to go fuck itself? It might just save your life.
They aren't against deposing Saddam per se... they are against the US running roughshod over world opinion (and even that of our own experts!) and pre-emptively invading another nation based on shoddy (and now completely discredited) evidence. Surely you can see what kind of precedent that sets? Now any nation that gets a bug up its ass can feel free to invade any other nation for any reason it cares to dream up, because the USA has shown that even it believes that is an okay thing to do. You couldn't ask for a better recipe for global chaos.
I hope that the Europeans discover independent thought one of these days
Our nation followed Bush to war in order to seize WMDs that didn't exist and cut aid to Al Quaeda that wasn't happening, and here you are lecturing the Europeans about independent thought??? We need to get the log out of our own eye first, man. The fact is that we let Bush lead our country into this debacle like a flock of frightened, unquestioning little lambs. It's truly a pathetic and dispiriting chapter of our nation's history.
It would be nice. It's even likely. Problem is, what do you replace it with, without disinfrachising half the country?
If it were up to me, I'd replace it with a simple nation-wide ranked-choice vote -- I leave the exact method of ranked-choice vote (IRV, Borda Count, Condorcet, etc) as an exercise for the poster.
And to address the inevitable complaint that small states would not get enough attention in such a scenario, let me say this: I don't think democracy should be about giving representation to territory, it should be about giving representation to people. Therefore, the system that best represents the "one man, one vote" ideal is the best system.
Kerry wins. Thank god. I don't care if he wins fairly.
The best case would be for Kerry to (fairly) win the electoral college, but lose the popular vote. That way not only would we get rid of Bush and his insane neocon administration, but we'd also have both major parties pissed off about electoral college results, which might (just maybe) get us started down the path towards getting rid of the stupid thing.
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I look forward to Anna Nicole Smith's cameo appearance!
It's easy for you to say that -- you can move to any other town or state, and still remain in your own culture. Imagine if the situation was reversed, and you lived in a little pocket of European American culture, and 99.9% of the rest of the country was Native American. Would you still find moving away to be such an easy option?
Because every government with nuclear fuel is a government that can make nuclear weapons.
The more governments with nuclear weapons, the greater the likelihood of them being used to take out a city.
Having cities get nuked is peoples' #1 fear (or if it isn't, it should be!)
Yes, and isn't that the truth?
Their protests that we're destroying the environment is a basis for them to derive power from so that they can demand change to our way of life.
Correct. They want us to change our way of life so that the environment does not get destroyed.
So, seriously, no matter what happens, they're going to complain.
Incorrect. They will only complain as long as the environment is still being destroyed. Stop destroying the environment, and they will stop complaining.
You can either acknowledge that there is a problem, or you can continue attempting to dodge the issue, by accusing all environmentalists of having ulterior motives. Either way, the environmental problems will be solved -- if not by us proactively solving the problems ourselves, then by massive human die-offs because the planet can no longer support us. The first scenario will be much more pleasant, I suggest we stop whining and aim for it.
If you had an orbiting solar power satellite, you'd be taking energy that otherwise would have simply left the solar system, so that's pretty close. Of course we would still have to deal with the effects of sending that energy to Earth; now Earth would have more energy in it than it would otherwise have. But the only way to have no impact on the Earth's energy patterns is to stop using energy -- i.e. die out.
Actually, you do. The laws may say differently, but then the laws also say you don't have the right to watch DVDs under Linux. The thing about natural rights is that they are yours naturally -- they are not privelges granted to you by the government.
You also can't kill another person legally. Why should there be an exception for a baby?
There shouldn't be, and there isn't. Now for a fetus, on the other hand... killing one of those is legal.
Are you referring to polygamy, or sexual slavery? In most harems I've read about, it didn't seem like the women were very free to leave...
That logic only follows if you consider the fetus to be a person. If you don't consider it a person, then killing it is not murder, any more than stepping on an ant is murder.
So is a fetus a person? I think it is safe to say there is a rough consensus that a just-born baby is a person, and killing that baby would be murder. Furthermore, I think there is a consensus that a human egg, one second before it is fertilized, is not a person. So the only thing we need to figure out is where between those two points in the gestation sequence does the fetus gain its personhood?
The reason we can't come to an agreed-upon answer to this question is because the question itself is flawed -- it assumes that personhood is an all-or-nothing deal, a binary decision. In fact, life is more complicated than that. A fetus doesn't go to sleep one day as non-human, and wake up the next day as human. Rather, its humanity develops continuously over time. To oversimplify a bit, you might say that on day X the fetus is 10% human, and then on day Y it is 20% human, and so on until it reaches the stage of its development where it should be considered 100% human. Of course there is still the question of the shape of that curve -- i.e. what values should we plug in for X and Y and so on -- I won't attempt to answer that here. But I do think that the abortion debate would be more productive if people got past their oversimplified view of what it means to be human.
Well, see, marriage is between a man and a woman, it's been like that for thousands of years.
That's not the relevant issue though. The relevant question is not "what was marriage in the past", it is "what should marriage be in the future?" If tradition were our sole criterion, then inter-racial marriage would still be against the law, and wives would still be considered the property of their husbands. The argument that marriage must be heterosexual because that's the best way to produce more children is obsolete -- more children is exactly what our planet doesn't need these days. We aren't able to feed the children that exist already! I submit that the true reason for marriage in the modern world is to bind people (and therefore society) together emotionally, which makes for happier, more secure people and thus a more peaceful and stable society. By this measure, gay marriage is every bit as desirable as straight marriage. And yes, the raising of children in families is another good reason for marriage -- but every serious, unbiased study on that subject has shown that gay couples do just as good a job at that task as straight ones do.
As far as getting government out of the "marriage" business and having them do only civil unions instead, I'm completely in agreement with you. Not that I see that happening in my lifetime... too much of this country thinks that separation of church and state only applies to minority religions.
Interestingly enough, this was probably the most politically savvy move of Bush's entire career. He's still coasting on the gravy from that one.
Dick Cheney has spent the last two years saying exactly that. Feel free to pull your head out of your ass any time you're ready to return to reality.
So that is what the introductory short was all about? It was Steve Jobs' rant about Disney shearing away all of Pixar's beautiful profits every year?
Kind of makes sense, except that the moral seemed to be "enjoy the shearing as best you can"... which is not exactly how Jobs seems to be reacting...
see the extra funny bit might be disappointed, as there doesn't seem to be anything beyond static credits.)
I did think the static credits were very cool though... they had a 3D fan-fold look to them that was very appealing. I instantly thought to myself "Awesome! Why haven't other movies done this?"
Consider the possibility that the safety nazis may have a point -- it is easy to complain about lost fun as long as it wasn't your kid that was sentenced to a wheelchair for the rest of his life...
Frankly, at this point I've got no more sympathy for the US. We deserve everything that's coming to us. An inflamed sense of grievance, whether merited or not, is no reason to abandon basic common sense.
And who is to say that some other country won't be just as uncaring? Or that the people running the reactor couldn't be bribed or coerced into "accidentally" allowing some of the nuclear fuel to be transferred to terrorists? What is to keep the spent nuclear fuel from being released into the environment, either intentionally or unintentionally? Nuclear power might be workable in trusted environments, but what the world really needs is a power source that can be safely used anywhere, by anyone, with little or no potential for disaster.
I think a good rule of thumb is: if you wouldn't be comfortable with them using solution X in Iran or Afghanistan, then solution X is not an adequate solution.
I don't think anyone has to say that, do you? It's pretty obvious. Look at who just won the election. Look at his environmental record over the last four years. Look at what the markets say.
Everyone seems to forget that the US has three governing bodies, each with their own piece of the political power pie.
You seem to forget that all three are now under the control of a single party, which is itself under the control of the polluters. Basically, the current US government couldn't give any less of a fuck about the environment. They might give it some lip service, but in any decision where money is on the line, you can pretty much predict what side they will support.
Will somebody please tell Dubya that? He keeps trying to push "Democracy" down everyone's throat at gunpoint...
Is Samantha Bennett by any chance a pseudonym for the Daily Show's Samantha Bee? The names are similar, and the article's content sounds a lot like Samantha Bee's schtick....
I'm sure that will be of great comfort to the thousands of additional casualties from the next few "invasions of choice".
Because your vote will still have some beneficial effect (from your point of view) on the election. If you dislike candidate A more than candidate B, then a vote for B will at least make it less likely that A gets elected. A vote for non-competitive third-party candidate C, on the other hand, is for all intents and purposes the same as not voting for any candidate at all -- your vote will have absolutely no effect on who gets elected.
It sucks, but until we can get a better electoral system installed, that is the way it is.
Actually, Kerry wouldn't take office until January, so he'd have at least a couple of months to come through with all that stuff.
Are you really this stupid, or are you trolling? You do realize that the September 11th terrorists spent a good deal of time preparing their attack in Germany, right? And why wasn't the mighty US military able to stop them there? Oh yeah, because we don't have any jurisdiction in foreign countries, and even if we did, we don't have enough manpower to send our own police to every country in the world. As much as it might contradict your comforting fantasy of an omnipotent USA that doesn't need the rest of the world for anything, we rely on the co-operation of foreign governments to find and catch these terrorists before they get to us. So why don't you shut your ignorant yap and think a little before telling the rest of the world to go fuck itself? It might just save your life.
They aren't against deposing Saddam per se
I hope that the Europeans discover independent thought one of these days
Our nation followed Bush to war in order to seize WMDs that didn't exist and cut aid to Al Quaeda that wasn't happening, and here you are lecturing the Europeans about independent thought??? We need to get the log out of our own eye first, man. The fact is that we let Bush lead our country into this debacle like a flock of frightened, unquestioning little lambs. It's truly a pathetic and dispiriting chapter of our nation's history.
If it were up to me, I'd replace it with a simple nation-wide ranked-choice vote -- I leave the exact method of ranked-choice vote (IRV, Borda Count, Condorcet, etc) as an exercise for the poster.
And to address the inevitable complaint that small states would not get enough attention in such a scenario, let me say this: I don't think democracy should be about giving representation to territory, it should be about giving representation to people. Therefore, the system that best represents the "one man, one vote" ideal is the best system.
The best case would be for Kerry to (fairly) win the electoral college, but lose the popular vote. That way not only would we get rid of Bush and his insane neocon administration, but we'd also have both major parties pissed off about electoral college results, which might (just maybe) get us started down the path towards getting rid of the stupid thing.