A couple points: (1) the two countries have radically different climates, demographics, lifestyles, etc,
That's not true. As David Himmelstein said, the differences between Boston and Toronto are less than the differences between Boston and Jackson, Mississippi.
I'm sitting here waiting for you to have an "aha" moment where you realize that comparing Canada to the northernmost parts of the USA only is silly, and that Jackson, Mississippi is in fact in the USA. Hmmm?
Kudos to you for helping your partner feel accepted for who she is. That is exactly what all of us need to be doing. However, trying to get the government to legislate it by censoring the media is the wrong approach -- not because it's a bad thing to do in itself, but because of the can of worms it opens. If we can get a panel of scientists to agree that (for example) fundamentalist Methodist religion is harmful to society (although not in any obvious illegal way, just more like by promoting bad social attitudes), then can the government censor religious advertising by fundamentalist Methodists? Congratulations, you've lost your freedoms of speech and religion. It's a slippery slope, and it's better to restrict the government than to restrict citizens. Citizens have to (a) regulate their own behavior within a wide zone, (b) accept that other citizens and corporations will behave like stinkers occasionally, and (c) let the government deal with the obvious, overt stuff, like murder and theft.
Hopefully it at least sends a warning to academics in a similar position -- keep your nose clean when spending taxpayer money, and don't conspire to avoid complying with FOIA requests.
Cost per capita -- well, we've got more money than other people do (ha ha, except for being in debt up to our eyeballs), so this is not by itself compelling. And of course, note that socializing medicine is likely to increase our debt even higher than our eyeballs. Infant mortality rate -- I read that most comparisons of the USA's infant mortality rate to that of other countries are unfair and misleading, because we have higher standards and report it differently. For example, when many preemie infants are lost, the USA classifies as an infant death where other countries would classify it as an abortion. That kind of thing. Life expectancy -- I grant the statistics, but I question whether socialized medicine is necessarily the causative factor.
I apologize for being curt with you but I've had it with people like you touting the virtues of a system that is partially responsible for your country being on the verge of circling the drain for the last 5 years
No apology needed, I have consistently found your remarks somewhere between entertaining and hilarious.
A couple points: (1) the two countries have radically different climates, demographics, lifestyles, etc, and (2) many people would disagree that Canada has better healthcare than the USA. And you know what's another thing that's funny? A lot of Canadians come to the USA for treatment. So you can take your correlation/causation and... feed it to a baby seal or something.
OK, but saying that slender is beautiful is not false advertising, because beauty is inherently a subjective judgment. Thus it falls under free speech. To disallow that kind of free speech you'd have to find that it was somehow horribly harming people. That would be a difficult case to make, and probably even with that you still couldn't censor it. You'd have to settle for some kind of Surgeon General warning labels, like with cigarettes.
Universal healthcare is not just the mark of a civilized society
You're certainly entitled to your opinion.
it's cheaper than commercial healthcare, because you don't have to pay for all those claims adjusters and billing administrators.
Yes, in the same way that communism is the most efficient and beneficial of political systems: "in theory", and as long as you ignore how things actually work out every time it's tried in real life. Real world governments are neverending breeders of corruption and incompetence, and the more you strengthen them, the more incompetent they get. It's naive to expect otherwise.
So an optimist might say that maybe the more intelligent and self disciplined of the population have switched to G+, and are spending less time there because they use it intelligently, i.e. a lot less. It turns out that nobody cares that you cleaned the lint from between your toes, and also that Facebook, G+, and other social networking sites are parasitic honeypots designed to turn your private life into an advertising asset. So, good for G+ users!
A pessimist would say that G+ just hasn't caught on much -- and they would probably be right.
Jesus registered disapproval of a lot of stuff, but I don't recall any instance where he spewed hate.
It depends on what you mean by "spewing hate". I expect if you were pushed to the wall, you would admit that you have one definition of that for Jesus and a different one for people today. To many people, saying "the practicing homosexual lifestyle is immoral" is considered to be "spewing hate", so if they were honest, they would have to classify Jesus as spewing hate when he spoke out against what he considered sexual immorality.
For what it's worth, I agree that Fred Phelps spews hate, which I would define as putting out a message that is designed to be offensive, without any subtext of caring for the people you're speaking against, i.e. Phelps is basically just mocking and deriding those who in his opinion are going to hell. This can be contrasted with Jesus, who preached repentance and redemption along with a command to turn away from immoral practices. Both speak against immorality, but one desires the well-being of the "sinner" -- Jesus was called a "friend of sinners".
Fortunately, Fred Phelps and his wacko congregation are in the minority in the Christian world, so I'm still not sure about the fairness of your rant.
It's so bad, I have stopped identifying myself as a christian
Aren't you contradicting yourself above?
Also, when you say...
The "christian" that acts like that and spews hate at Homosexuals and other people that are "immoral" are NOT christians, they are a wierd sect of extremists that seems to have taken hold.
...I wonder if you have considered the likely opinions of Jesus on the subject (I'm loosely interpreting your term "christian" above as "follower of the teachings and example of Jesus Christ", correct me if I'm wrong). Jesus at various times spoke against immorality in various contexts. For example, he said that a man who divorced his wife (except for reasons of immorality) committed adultery, and caused the wife to become an adulteress. There are a couple of passages where it is implied that Jesus gave stern warnings to women who had "operated in the red light district" to cease and desist from that immoral lifestyle. And for the icing on the cake, Jesus endorsed the Mosaic Law very explicitly -- which is not generally considered friendly to homosexuality.
So I realize rants like yours above are really popular these days, but am I the only one who thinks that makes no sense whatsoever, except in sort of a politically correct, touchy-feely, but largely mentally disconnected thought process? In other words, if speaking against "sexual immorality" is your litmus test for who is a real Christian, maybe it will turn out that you are not the real Christian, at least in a historical sense. Maybe you are inventing a new religion.
Presumably this plays nicely with third party keyboards for the iPad, but I'm skeptical of how useful Office would be without a precision pointing device. And even with the keyboard, while that would be great for entering a bunch of text, it's not clear to me whether key combinations would make it across intact (Ctrl+V, Shift+End etc.).
That case would be difficult to make. I agree that the default starting position should be that people have freedom over their own bodies, and there has to be a really good reason for the government to take that freedom away from them -- not that governments usually care.
Thanks. Do you happen to have an argument that justifies the government's intrusion into one's sovereignty over one's own body? Or do you agree with me?
Sure. My example of imprisonment constitutes a violation of a person's sovereignty over their own body in many ways. In prison, you can't move around freely where you want to go. You have to eat and drink what they give you to eat and drink. You are (officially) restricted from normal intimate human activities others are free to engage in, except with permission of your captors if you've been a good boy and they feel like it. All your medical treatment is decided on by your captors, etc.
And the argument that justifies the above? People who commit serious crimes of violence, murder, and theft have to lose their freedoms for the protection of wider human society.
And when felons finally are let out, it is typically on a parole basis with very tight restrictions -- no drugs, no alcohol, etc. The restrictions are calculated to push them way over into the safe side of the spectrum and give them no excuse for a relapse into crime, other than plain old bad judgment. They've lost a measure of sovereignty over their own bodies by their commission of serious crimes (bear with me here, assuming fair justice system for the sake of argument). And it's OK that they no longer have sovereignty over their bodies, because society believes that it knows best for them in regards to substance abuse during the parole period.
Maybe we're talking about different things, which is really to be expected in this case since we're all wildly extrapolating based on early results from one study. I think you are thinking about some kind of powerful, general mind alteration that's forced on an unwilling criminal. I on the other hand am envisioning a vaccine with a very narrow focus that just affects the criminal's future ability to enjoy heroin, and nothing else. He would be exactly the same person in the future, just without any heroin enjoyment.
As far as being comfortable with historical punishment systems, I'm a little torn on that. On the one hand, I definitely have a conservative "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude toward social mores. On the other hand, our remote ancestors have done a terrifically lousy job of implementing criminal justice systems (e.g. capital punishment for thieves).
I still disagree with your main point, which is that it is a lesser violation of their "natural" rights.
I'm interested in the thought process that leads you to that conclusion. If you had to choose between a decade or two in the Big House versus getting a shot that will keep you from enjoying heroin for the rest of your life (with no other side effects), which would you choose? Why do you see the shot as a bigger violation of your natural rights?
I know people who have spent time in prison, and it really messes people up. I'm not saying it isn't necessary, because violence, murder and theft are rightly intolerable to our society -- but it's still sad that it is necessary.
I was careful to qualify my controversial suggestion by restricting it to (a) if the vaccine were known to be safe, and (b) application to criminals under the influence of heroin. By "criminals" I mean people who commit serious offenses, and I'm not just talking about heroin possession, which would be sort of a circular legal argument.
My vices have nothing to do with commission of serious crimes against others, therefore your examination is based on a false equivalence. Conversely, people who commit serious crimes against others forfeit many of their natural human rights -- we lock them in cages and take away their freedom. Safely taking away their heroin addiction could in many cases be a lesser violation of their natural rights than a prison sentence, and in the opinion of probably most of society, would in fact be doing them a favor.
How about for starters, you stop making assumptions. I didn't say anything about the "crime" of possessing heroin, which would end up as sort of a circular legal argument, as you point out. I was actually talking about serious crimes that affect other people.
Slashdot Mirror
A couple points: (1) the two countries have radically different climates, demographics, lifestyles, etc,
That's not true. As David Himmelstein said, the differences between Boston and Toronto are less than the differences between Boston and Jackson, Mississippi.
I'm sitting here waiting for you to have an "aha" moment where you realize that comparing Canada to the northernmost parts of the USA only is silly, and that Jackson, Mississippi is in fact in the USA. Hmmm?
Then I suggest that you set a good example and be the first to shut up, because the rest of us have no intentions of doing so.
Kudos to you for helping your partner feel accepted for who she is. That is exactly what all of us need to be doing. However, trying to get the government to legislate it by censoring the media is the wrong approach -- not because it's a bad thing to do in itself, but because of the can of worms it opens. If we can get a panel of scientists to agree that (for example) fundamentalist Methodist religion is harmful to society (although not in any obvious illegal way, just more like by promoting bad social attitudes), then can the government censor religious advertising by fundamentalist Methodists? Congratulations, you've lost your freedoms of speech and religion. It's a slippery slope, and it's better to restrict the government than to restrict citizens. Citizens have to (a) regulate their own behavior within a wide zone, (b) accept that other citizens and corporations will behave like stinkers occasionally, and (c) let the government deal with the obvious, overt stuff, like murder and theft.
Hopefully it at least sends a warning to academics in a similar position -- keep your nose clean when spending taxpayer money, and don't conspire to avoid complying with FOIA requests.
Cost per capita -- well, we've got more money than other people do (ha ha, except for being in debt up to our eyeballs), so this is not by itself compelling. And of course, note that socializing medicine is likely to increase our debt even higher than our eyeballs.
Infant mortality rate -- I read that most comparisons of the USA's infant mortality rate to that of other countries are unfair and misleading, because we have higher standards and report it differently. For example, when many preemie infants are lost, the USA classifies as an infant death where other countries would classify it as an abortion. That kind of thing.
Life expectancy -- I grant the statistics, but I question whether socialized medicine is necessarily the causative factor.
I apologize for being curt with you but I've had it with people like you touting the virtues of a system that is partially responsible for your country being on the verge of circling the drain for the last 5 years
No apology needed, I have consistently found your remarks somewhere between entertaining and hilarious.
Give me an example of one or two of these metrics.
Give me more government I say (when it's good)
That's the real trick, isn't it? If the "more government" turns out to be bad, you typically don't have opportunity to "give it back". :p
A couple points: (1) the two countries have radically different climates, demographics, lifestyles, etc, and (2) many people would disagree that Canada has better healthcare than the USA. And you know what's another thing that's funny? A lot of Canadians come to the USA for treatment. So you can take your correlation/causation and... feed it to a baby seal or something.
OK, but saying that slender is beautiful is not false advertising, because beauty is inherently a subjective judgment. Thus it falls under free speech. To disallow that kind of free speech you'd have to find that it was somehow horribly harming people. That would be a difficult case to make, and probably even with that you still couldn't censor it. You'd have to settle for some kind of Surgeon General warning labels, like with cigarettes.
Universal healthcare is not just the mark of a civilized society
You're certainly entitled to your opinion.
it's cheaper than commercial healthcare, because you don't have to pay for all those claims adjusters and billing administrators.
Yes, in the same way that communism is the most efficient and beneficial of political systems: "in theory", and as long as you ignore how things actually work out every time it's tried in real life. Real world governments are neverending breeders of corruption and incompetence, and the more you strengthen them, the more incompetent they get. It's naive to expect otherwise.
Oh wait, researchers have freedom of speech. Come to think of it, so do marketing firms.
How are they mimicking iOS? Aside from lots of use of multitouch, I'd describe it as a radically different UI style.
So an optimist might say that maybe the more intelligent and self disciplined of the population have switched to G+, and are spending less time there because they use it intelligently, i.e. a lot less. It turns out that nobody cares that you cleaned the lint from between your toes, and also that Facebook, G+, and other social networking sites are parasitic honeypots designed to turn your private life into an advertising asset. So, good for G+ users!
A pessimist would say that G+ just hasn't caught on much -- and they would probably be right.
Jesus registered disapproval of a lot of stuff, but I don't recall any instance where he spewed hate.
It depends on what you mean by "spewing hate". I expect if you were pushed to the wall, you would admit that you have one definition of that for Jesus and a different one for people today. To many people, saying "the practicing homosexual lifestyle is immoral" is considered to be "spewing hate", so if they were honest, they would have to classify Jesus as spewing hate when he spoke out against what he considered sexual immorality.
For what it's worth, I agree that Fred Phelps spews hate, which I would define as putting out a message that is designed to be offensive, without any subtext of caring for the people you're speaking against, i.e. Phelps is basically just mocking and deriding those who in his opinion are going to hell. This can be contrasted with Jesus, who preached repentance and redemption along with a command to turn away from immoral practices. Both speak against immorality, but one desires the well-being of the "sinner" -- Jesus was called a "friend of sinners".
Fortunately, Fred Phelps and his wacko congregation are in the minority in the Christian world, so I'm still not sure about the fairness of your rant.
Honestly, as a christian
It's so bad, I have stopped identifying myself as a christian
Aren't you contradicting yourself above?
Also, when you say...
The "christian" that acts like that and spews hate at Homosexuals and other people that are "immoral" are NOT christians, they are a wierd sect of extremists that seems to have taken hold.
...I wonder if you have considered the likely opinions of Jesus on the subject (I'm loosely interpreting your term "christian" above as "follower of the teachings and example of Jesus Christ", correct me if I'm wrong). Jesus at various times spoke against immorality in various contexts. For example, he said that a man who divorced his wife (except for reasons of immorality) committed adultery, and caused the wife to become an adulteress. There are a couple of passages where it is implied that Jesus gave stern warnings to women who had "operated in the red light district" to cease and desist from that immoral lifestyle. And for the icing on the cake, Jesus endorsed the Mosaic Law very explicitly -- which is not generally considered friendly to homosexuality.
So I realize rants like yours above are really popular these days, but am I the only one who thinks that makes no sense whatsoever, except in sort of a politically correct, touchy-feely, but largely mentally disconnected thought process? In other words, if speaking against "sexual immorality" is your litmus test for who is a real Christian, maybe it will turn out that you are not the real Christian, at least in a historical sense. Maybe you are inventing a new religion.
Presumably this plays nicely with third party keyboards for the iPad, but I'm skeptical of how useful Office would be without a precision pointing device. And even with the keyboard, while that would be great for entering a bunch of text, it's not clear to me whether key combinations would make it across intact (Ctrl+V, Shift+End etc.).
Totally agree with that concern. Good luck, Fjandr.
That case would be difficult to make. I agree that the default starting position should be that people have freedom over their own bodies, and there has to be a really good reason for the government to take that freedom away from them -- not that governments usually care.
Thanks. Do you happen to have an argument that justifies the government's intrusion into one's sovereignty over one's own body? Or do you agree with me?
Sure. My example of imprisonment constitutes a violation of a person's sovereignty over their own body in many ways. In prison, you can't move around freely where you want to go. You have to eat and drink what they give you to eat and drink. You are (officially) restricted from normal intimate human activities others are free to engage in, except with permission of your captors if you've been a good boy and they feel like it. All your medical treatment is decided on by your captors, etc.
And the argument that justifies the above? People who commit serious crimes of violence, murder, and theft have to lose their freedoms for the protection of wider human society.
And when felons finally are let out, it is typically on a parole basis with very tight restrictions -- no drugs, no alcohol, etc. The restrictions are calculated to push them way over into the safe side of the spectrum and give them no excuse for a relapse into crime, other than plain old bad judgment. They've lost a measure of sovereignty over their own bodies by their commission of serious crimes (bear with me here, assuming fair justice system for the sake of argument). And it's OK that they no longer have sovereignty over their bodies, because society believes that it knows best for them in regards to substance abuse during the parole period.
The temptation to engage in speculative ad hominem in this discussion is really strong. I will, however, not succumb to it. (Pats self on back.)
Maybe we're talking about different things, which is really to be expected in this case since we're all wildly extrapolating based on early results from one study. I think you are thinking about some kind of powerful, general mind alteration that's forced on an unwilling criminal. I on the other hand am envisioning a vaccine with a very narrow focus that just affects the criminal's future ability to enjoy heroin, and nothing else. He would be exactly the same person in the future, just without any heroin enjoyment.
As far as being comfortable with historical punishment systems, I'm a little torn on that. On the one hand, I definitely have a conservative "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude toward social mores. On the other hand, our remote ancestors have done a terrifically lousy job of implementing criminal justice systems (e.g. capital punishment for thieves).
I still disagree with your main point, which is that it is a lesser violation of their "natural" rights.
I'm interested in the thought process that leads you to that conclusion. If you had to choose between a decade or two in the Big House versus getting a shot that will keep you from enjoying heroin for the rest of your life (with no other side effects), which would you choose? Why do you see the shot as a bigger violation of your natural rights?
I know people who have spent time in prison, and it really messes people up. I'm not saying it isn't necessary, because violence, murder and theft are rightly intolerable to our society -- but it's still sad that it is necessary.
I was careful to qualify my controversial suggestion by restricting it to (a) if the vaccine were known to be safe, and (b) application to criminals under the influence of heroin. By "criminals" I mean people who commit serious offenses, and I'm not just talking about heroin possession, which would be sort of a circular legal argument.
My vices have nothing to do with commission of serious crimes against others, therefore your examination is based on a false equivalence. Conversely, people who commit serious crimes against others forfeit many of their natural human rights -- we lock them in cages and take away their freedom. Safely taking away their heroin addiction could in many cases be a lesser violation of their natural rights than a prison sentence, and in the opinion of probably most of society, would in fact be doing them a favor.
Well for starters, stop calling them "criminals".
How about for starters, you stop making assumptions. I didn't say anything about the "crime" of possessing heroin, which would end up as sort of a circular legal argument, as you point out. I was actually talking about serious crimes that affect other people.