I am having a hard time finding that exact story. I'll keep looking for it. This one is easy to find though: https://www.lifesitenews.com/n...
Statutory rape. These are really common. And while in the reverse situation the boys are treated as rapists and often sex offenders... the women are literally given money.
Reverse that... 20 year old man has sex with 14 year old girl... yeah, he's going to jail. And when he gets out, he's going to have to knock on doors to tell people that he's a pedophile.
Woman does the same thing... and not only does none of that happen but the guy she had sex with is being asked to pay child support.
Lets reverse that again so you can understand the depth of the fuckery... Lets say a 20 year old guy had sex with a 14 year old girl... and not only did he not get into any trouble for it, but lets say she was forced to marry the 20 year old guy or otherwise make some serious commitment to him.
Seem reasonable or absurdly fucked up? Rhetorical question of course... its fucked up.
I'll keep looking for the other story. It happened and the courts did ask him to pay for the rape baby despite him filing a police report roughly around the time of conception citing her for rape.
No. Rape is a crime. It is wrong. And anyone that does it should be punished severally.
If a woman rapes a man, has a child without his knowledge or consent, and then demands child support... how does making the man pay child support punish the rapist? You're rewarding the rapist.
Lets reverse this so you can understand how fucked up this is... lets say a dude drugs a woman, and extracts some of her eggs while she sleeps. Then he mixes that with some of his baby batter and implants the embryo into a surrogate, then nine months later without her knowledge he demands that she pay child support.
Sound reasonable or does it sound psychotic? Because it is psychotic.
I'm not pushing a low fat diet either you know. I was talking about exercise. Not fats versus carbs.
Obviously the ratios can matter but for most people that get fat, the issue is the amount of food they eat... PERIOD and the amount of exercise they get PERIOD.
The types of foods or types of exercise will matter but if your goal is merely to keep a healthy weight, the ratios don't matter that much so long as you don't do anything extreme.
... The Vatican. Because of all the places that conversation should be had, lets have it with some guy walking around in an absurd outfit that thinks invisible super beings talk to him.
Why is this relevant? I mean... why does anyone care one way or the other what the Vatican might say? What is the Vatican's influence at this point? South Americans listen to the pope still I think... that's about it.
The American evangelicals that make the left crazy don't give a shit what the pope says... they're protestants... their entire faith is defined by not giving a shit what the pope says.
And as to Catholics outside of south america... most of them are lapse Catholics that don't especially care what the pope says either.
And if we go with the argument that this is all about getting the south americans on board, they're not signing Kyoto. It won't happen. The business interests in south america will pay this religious stuff the lip service it deserves and then go back to doing whatever they wanted to do in the first place.
Lets talk about relevance here. When was the last time the Pope stopped a war? Last time he in fact changed ANYTHING of global significance? I'm thinking no pope has really made much of an impact for about 500 years.
So... Who gives a shit what the pope thinks? I say that with all due respect to the pope and I have no animosity towards his religion. But climate change isn't going to do anything for the catholic faith. No one is converting to Catholicism or donating to the Vatican or supporting Christianity because of the pope's position on climate change.
There are Christians in the middle east and Africa getting genocided as we speak. No one cares about the christians in the middle east getting killed. No one cares about the christians in Egypt and Somalia etc getting killed. No one cares. These people are writing messages in English BEGGING for help and then getting the media to take pictures of them. No one is coming. If no one cares enough to help people getting genocided, then exactly what is the pope's position on climate change going to do?
Nothing. This is a non-issue. Everyone should just ignore it. It is of no relevance.
I see nothing in your comment to justify your position or undermine mine. You merely threw out some insults and then presumed superiority without basis.
You are therefore almost certainly a troll. As you're also an AC, that is all but certain.
As to what is wrong with that, you have a right to choose. In having a right to choose you have responsibility.
The man cannot compel you to have an abortion or compel you to accept his penis. The woman has more control over the situation than the man does and therefore must be responsible unless she has gotten some sort of agreement from the man to provide support.
That is, if you want him to raise your baby... you'd better make sure he is willing to do it and not just cut his condom up and then blind side him 9 months later with a baby picture and a court writ for child support.
As to clarity with my position, it is that if women have a choice they have responsibility. The responsibility COMES with the choice. The choice is not free. You don't get rights without responsibilities.
So riddle me this, in your mind what responsibilities did women get that they didn't have before they obtained the ability to abort their pregnancy at will? Men got no new rights and if anything have lost rights. As such, men must have reduced responsibility.
Think of a child... a child has very few rights and very few responsibilities. Think of a person in a high responsibility job... a doctor or a police officer. Notice how their rights to do things expand with their responsibilities.
This is how everything works. Currently there is a disconnect with these laws in that they are still synced to an earlier time that predates the current status quo. It makes no sense. It would be like applying slavery laws to black people even though they're not slaves anymore.
The legal and logistical status of women has changed. They're not what they were and their options are not what they were. As such the laws should reflect that. That is my position.
It isn't a fantasy... it is just rarely reported. Men don't run to the cops when they get coerced or forced into sex. At least usually not.
The reasons for this are many but it is still rape. And the fact of the matter is that under the law, if she gets pregnant, he's as responsible for the child as if it were not rape.
That's about as fucked up as forcing a woman to marry a man that rapes her. It is the same situation with reversed gender roles.
Were that the case then the woman would not have custody of the child.
If I'm paying for the child then why is the child with someone that can't take care of the child? If I can pay for the child and she can't... then I am obviously more qualified to take care of the child all things being equal. Now maybe I'm a drug addict or a psychopath or something. But lets assume nothing weird is going on and that the guy is a normal guy and the woman is a normal woman. Let us say that she can't support herself and the child. But the man can support himself AND send her child support checks. This suggests that he is capable of raising the child where as she is not.
So why are you subsidizing her failure as a parent if all you care about is the child? Are you suggesting that single mothers do a good job raising children? Because the statistics in the US prison population suggest they're actually terrible at it.
Here is a rule of thumb that I think is pretty bulletproof: Rights are balanced by responsibility.
If you make me responsible for something, then I should inherent rights over whatever it is you're making me responsible for and to the extent that I am responsible for it. Think of anything that anyone can be responsible for and notice that as responsibility increases so do rights over whatever that thing is. This traditionally applied to not only children but women as well.
In gaining independence and freedom, women have gotten a lot more rights... but as those rights increase it is obvious that the responsibility of men to the women reduces proportionally.
If you want me to pay for the child, then I want custody to the extent that I am paying for that child. If I'm paying half, then I want half. etc.
What is more, if she has a child against my will... as in she froze some embryos from when we were dating and then thawed them out ten years later... and then asks me to pay child support when I've moved on with my life... how is that fair to me? Now it sucks for the kid because the kid's mother is a crazy irresponsible person. Because she had a child without arranging for the care and support of the child. Because he had a child without asking the man she would eventually demand money from first. So yeah, that's pretty lame.
And that is why if I were him, I'd make a point of not letting her have those embryos unless she signs something that absolves me of any responsibility. if she does that, then go for it. But if she thinks she can just start pumping out babies and have me pay for them all when I don't even live in the same state as her?... give me a break.
The government can pay for it OR they can show some moral courage and threaten to tie her tubes if she doesn't behave herself. If you actually cared about the children, you wouldn't be comfortable leaving the child in the care of such people in the first place.
I didn't say anything about not taking care of children. The issue is custody, the relevant rights and responsibilities of the parents, and ultimately what is required for either party to have rights or responsibilities or not.
The way the system is currently set up, men have almost no rights. If she gets your seed by any means and gets pregnant then you're responsible for the child. And while being responsible you have no rights over it. That is completely out of balance.
Rights and responsibilities need to be in balance. So for example, if I am providing the majority of the funds to support the child... then I should get custody. If she's not providing support but instead relying upon checks I send her in the mail... then whether or not she even has the child should be my choice.
if we share equal responsibility for the care of the child, then she has equal rights. If she provides more and I provide less, then she has more rights. Only if I provide NOTHING should I have no rights at all. So if she wants total 100 percent custody.... the price for that is no child support from the father.
What I am saying horrifies traditionalists with an old fashioned notion of how maternity should work. However, that view fails to take into consideration the reality of 21st century medical science. Women have the right to choose.
Right? Pro choice. Well, pro choice means pro responsibility as well. If you CHOOSE to have a child possibly against the will of the man, then why is he responsible for the child?
One of my uncle's ex-wives poked holes in his condoms so that she'd get pregnant. And she was secretly on fertility drugs... so she had twins. And this was my uncles second marriage... he didn't even want kids because he already had some. She also had some kids from a prior marriage. Point is, the child support laws are bullshit because they don't take modern medical science into consideration.
Women CHOOSE now if they want to get pregnant or not. And that choice should mean that they assume responsibility.
Now if you get married or something then sure, the husband is responsible. But if you pop some kids out from a one night stand or defrost some embryos from years ago long after everyone has gone their separate ways... then you need to take personal responsibility for your own choices.
Or surrender your right to choose. Do that and men will be obligated to acknowledge intercourse as itself being an acceptance of responsibility. However, because women have the pill and abortion clinics... No. You have a kid, then you made a choice. Right to choose means obligation to take responsibility.
Have you ever been to Italy... seen what they eat? Plenty of carbs my friend.
The Greeks tend to eat more lamb and veg. I assume that's what you're referring to... the Greeks aren't especially thinner than the Italians... and the Italians eat lots of carbs.
But lets have a look at the Chinese and the Japanese. I don't think people think of either society as being especially fat. The japanese I believe are known to be skinny if anything. And what do they eat a lot of ? Rice and noodles (mostly wheat noodles but they eat a lot of rice noodles as well).
Generally, I think the japanese especially eat less meat than most cultures. They eat a lot of veg of course but the rice and noodles are a huge portion of their calories.
Again, this is what kills me with this blanket carb hatred... WE BUILD THE MODERN WORLD ON CARBS!!!
literally every major culture sustained its population's diet to a large or even primary extent on a staple crop that are without exception carbs.
Wheat. Rice. Maze. Potatoes. And Poi.
Find me any sedentary culture of note in the world and I will show you their carb based staple crop.
Now that as a given because you know your history that well... exactly how can you say that carbs are so bad when we built the whole fucking modern world on them.
We are currently going through the information revolution. The carb thing is something we dealt with in the agricultural revolution. This is roughly the period of time when some societies became sedentary and learned to cultivate crops. And once they figured that out, they were able to vastly out compete rival hunter gatherer or nomadic herdsman tribes.
Now, if carbs were so fucking bad... then why did our carb eating ancestors kick the shit out of the palo diet hunter gatherers and whatever we'd call the diet of a nomadic herdsman?
The Pyramids: built by carbs. The Great Wall of China: built by carbs. The Parthenon: built by carbs. The Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan: Built by carbs.
See a pattern here? The Egyptians were POUNDING carbs in their day. They had this very thick heavy beer like drink that was sort of like an ancient energy drink. It was basically slightly fermented liquid bread. Maybe think of it like a liquid sourdough bread? Anyway, they drank that stuff all the time. Were the egyptians fat?
Its exercise.
The people that say "exercise doesn't work" are talking about 15 to 30 minutes of exercise a day. When I say exercise, mean a hard day's work. Manual labor. Spend a day digging ditches, plowing a field without a tractor (using an animal is fine), or any of the millions of things people did way back when.
Now does this mean we need to eat less? Yes and no. The human body doesn't work very well if subjected to an extremely sedentary lifestyle. Simply reducing the food you eat or changing your diet isn't going to make you healthy. We evolved to move around, be out under the sun, etc. You put us inside all the time, not moving... and then you cut our food... the body reads that on an evolutionary level like winter. People huddling in caves because it is cold out and just waiting for better weather.
So the body goes into an energy conservation mode. The body stores as much energy as it can as fat because it thinks you're waiting out bad weather in a cave or something.
This is not a leap here. Every physiological response has a basis in our genetic history.
Try to see our lifestyle through the lens of evolution. It doesn't know why we're sitting around indoors. It just knows we are. And in our genetic past when would humans stay indoors not moving around much for long periods of time? Winter. And what is the appropriate response in that situation? See all those fat people the way that evolution sees them... they're like hibernating bears from the perspective of our genes. Yes, a hibernation that can last your whole life. The system isn't set up to assume cy
A biological father being introduced to adults that were raised entirely apart from him... are unlikely to cause that man any trouble in the 21st century western world. It might be a little weird for his wife but probably there wouldn't be anything negative about it.
The issue is more that when they're growing up he might get a phone call that says something to the effect of "hey, your children need money for college... pay for it."
As to emotional damage to the children... that would only happen if the mother mishandled the situation in which case the blow up would be on her.
If she keeps those eggs on ice for ages and then randomly decides to defrost them and germinate a few in her magic garden... then the guy is responsible child support.
No really.
Child support laws basically assume that birth control and the last 100 years of medical science didn't happen. The concept of them is that if she got pregnant in any fashion by your porn star energy drink... then you've apparently consented to be a daddy.
You go on a one night stand with a girl at a bar... use a condom... she says she's on the pill... she calls you six months 9 months later to tell you that you're a father... Congrats, you're playing child support.
Here some lackwit is going to say I'm not being a chivalrous gentleman. That's because chivalry is dead. Look, responsibilities and rights go hand in hand. When men were responsible for everything they had all the rights. And women didn't have any options. If they got knocked up they couldn't really do anything about it. And the culture of the time put great significance on being "chaste". If she already had some other dude's baby then it was a lot harder for her to get a husband which was a serious problem.
Today none of that applies but the child support laws don't care.
There was a dude that was literally drugged, woke up tied to a bed with a girl on top of him, he ejaculated in her because men really don't have any control over that if you're bouncing on top of them, he told the police about it immediately, the police did nothing, she got pregnant, gave birth, filed for child support, and the courts made him pay for her rape baby.
Yep.
So, the issue with those eggs set aside is child support. If she signs something to the effect that he's not on the hook for any of the child support... I'd see no reason for him to care one way or the other.
As to your ironic statement that I am not contradicting you at any point and this is all due to misreading... actually I have on many points and you could only have missed that due to your own misreading.
As to the parliamentary system reducing the power of the wealthy, that is asinine since the system was literally designed to protect the interests of English Lords. The system concentrates power in fewer hands than what you see in the American system which you assume means the system is less corruptible. Contrary to that point, the more hands the power is distributed amongst the less susceptible to corruption the system becomes.
As to your belief that the Congress has no role in the ratification of treaties... do a fucking google search before you dare contradict me on something like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... ""Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution, includes the Treaty Clause, which empowers the President of the United States to propose and chiefly negotiate agreements, which must be confirmed by the Senate, between the United States and other countries, which become treaties between the United States and other countries after the advice and consent of a supermajority of the United States Senate.""
The senate must ratify the treaty. If you bring this issue up one more time, I'm going to call you a fucktard and just skip over any further references to your fucking delusion.
As to morality, YOU were the one that used the term "hellscape", all I did was give it back to you. Complain and you're a hypocrite.
As to your Canadian references, it isn't making any sense. We've not outlawed the voting of anyone since black slavery and we reversed that.
As to your citation of majority black states outlawing black voting, that's such an absurd reference because blacks had no political agency at the time. Any group in any political system with no agency can have the political powers that be vote against their interests because they have no representation.
This was a big part of why the US broke off from England in the first place. The English Parliament was voting on things that effected the Colonies and the Colonies had no representation in Parliament. And certainly not proportional to our population. Had England extended that to the Colonies, there never would have been a revolution... though quite a few political interests in England might have been forced to horse trade with their Colonial cousins.
As to your continued slander that I am aruging on a moral basis, I am not. This is also a contradictory point you're making because you accused me of being an engineer at one point and now you're saying I'm being some wishywashy moralist.
Which is it? For the record, my positions are not based on morality but on what is optimal.
You somehow have gotten it into your head that concentrating power in the fewest possible hands reduces the possibility of corruption. That's silly. The more power that is distributed around the less extreme any corruption can be because the ability of anyone to do anything really out of control is limited.
A background level of corruption will occur under this system but you'll find a background level of corruption in dictatorships where all power is concentrated in one person. So arguing from the basis of the background level of corruption is not especially credible.
The issue is you want to make it hard for anyone to do anything extreme or anything quickly. If actions are kept moderate and everyone has time to respond to it then they can't really get that out of control.
I'm happy to leave that up to the devs to decide. What is more there is an argument for giving the devs something just so they keep releasing patches for the game, assist the modders in making the game more moddable, and generally keep the community alive.
If the devs get nothing then they have no interest to spend any further time on the game and will abandon it.
If you understand the pros and cons of hydrogen fuel versus hydrocarbon fuel... you know that hydrogen doesn't make any sense.
The issue with hydrocarbon fuel is that we're extracting them from sequestered carbon sources which is increasing atmospheric carbon. However, if we do not create the fuel from sequestered hydrocarbons then there is no net increase in atmospheric carbon.
Biofuels make FAR more sense than hydrogen.
For one thing, hydrocarbon fuels can be obtained from any biomass. You can create hydrocarbon fuel from garbage, saw dust, grass clippings, crop field dross, etc. There is no need for some sort of magical genetically engineered oil producing algae. That would be nice of course, but it is not required. We can make hydrocarbon fuel from ANYTHING that is already made of those compounds.
And if you don't like that for no fucking reason what so ever, then batteries make more sense then hydrogen as well. Tesla's "lets put laptop batteries in cars" idea is better than hydrogen.
My beef with the laptop battery idea is that it is just not as scalable as the biofuel systems. We can have micro refineries across the country. At every landfill, every agricultural area, possibly even small units for rural house holds. And then the fuel can be locally consumed saving transport costs and the differences between what is needed and what is produced needs to either be imported or exported.
It is vastly more efficient and scalable because you can store the fuel in vast fuel tanks just like we currently do for oil. We have vast fuel depots that could literally fill lakes with oil. And those tanks smooth out the distribution of oil throughout the world. It doesn't matter if some region produces a lot or stops producing for awhile because we have reserves in the tanks to handle all our needs for months if not a couple years.
And the point is that we can do the same thing with the biofuel. During the summer months we'll produce more than we need because of the production from agriculture. And in the winter we'll burn those reserves because during those months consumption will exceed production.
Its hard to do that with electric power since we still don't have good means of storing it.
Valve was taking too big of a cut, pressure needs to be put on the developers to take a reasonable cut... and of course, whether or not anyone actually charges for a mod must remain up to the modder.
I think if valve charges more than 10 percent of the gross they're being greedy.
And as to the devs... they should be able to decide precisely how much they charge as a percentage of the sale. People have to know that the reason why dev X charges Y is because dev X decided to charge Y. And Y can be anything from zero percent to one hundred percent. They charge too much and people direct their ire at the dev for being greedy and people don't make mods for that dev. They charge too little and mod makers can kind of make a living maybe?
I actually did take responsibility and I pointed out that they were due to your own vagueness forcing me to infer and guess as to the meaning of your words. I then invited you to correct me specifically.
Until you do offer a falsifiable argument you have not in fact offered any argument or reasoning what so ever. And absent that, your entire presence in this thread is null.
I predict you'll continue to make more empty insults and continue to fail to make a rational argument about anything. Know that until you do, all further comments will be taken merely as whining at your own mental weakness and general inability to form a rational thought.
I find this pitiable though not especially uncommon. Also noteworthy is that you're another AC waste of oxygen. I rarely run into non-ACs that are utter voids of value. But with ACs it appears to be incredibly common. I've never understood why they let you comment at all without at least forcing you to use a fake name. For one thing who can tell you idiots apart? For another, you feel no obligation to represent yourself as anything but a troll because you've literally no reputation to protect.
And yet you're not correcting me by specifically stating your beliefs. Thus rendering your argument non-falsifiable because it is so vague that it could mean almost anything.
I admitted that I could be wrong about your position in the previous post but pointed out that I can't be held accountable for such errors if you make no effort to clarify things.
As we see in your most recent post, you've still made no such effort and are now merely throwing off stupid insults.
Either clarify your position rendering your arguments falsifiable or you will concede by default for failing to offer a coherent and rational position.
Choice is yours. You can either define your position clearly enough that I can rip it to shreds while laughing at you OR you can cowardly refuse to explain yourself at which point you just surrender the field to your superior... me.
Its heads I win and tails you lose. Pick which ever one you want. Insects like you aren't even any fun... you're too stupid to put up a credible fight.
As to hyper intelligent ants, I've seen no compelling argument for why the parliamentary system is superior. You've also contradicted yourself in a few places saying it is both good and bad that something is run by more people.
As to the binding nature of treaties... without ratification you really don't have much. Lets look at Kyoto again and how could that treaty work without congressional ratification? How are you going to limit emissions for example without passing a law internally within the US? And no such law will be binding unless the US congress passes it. So no.
As to Iran, no there are sanctions etc which prohibit US businesses from engaging in business with the Iranians. You can't lift that without the cooperation of congress.
As to dystopian hellscapes, the president is largely in the same position, he just has additional checks on his power. And the US is hardly a distopian hellscape either... so you can jam that bit of hyperbole right back into your shithole.
As to your notion that decentralization makes it easier for the elites to control things, you got that backwards. The more centralized a system is the easier it is for elites to control it. That is why elites like centralization. Those that want to control everything want everything controllable by as few people as possible... aka them. A decentralized system is harder to control because you have to control more people to wield the same power and it is just less effective.
As to your arguments being the same... Your arguments have a bipolar nature to them that is difficult to parse. You switch between two contradictory extremes without any notion or explanation leaving me to try and figure out what the fuck you were thinking.
ehm, depends on what you mean by the rest of the world. Canada, the UK, Australia, and Germany are roughly as fat as we are... so I don't know what kind of superiority you're trying to claim here.
What is more, I'd much rather live in a country full of fat people than one full of skinny people.
We can feed ourselves. We're net food exporters. Come to the US and enjoy a big juicy steak.
What is more, we've eaten very well for a long time. The initial English colonists for example to the Americas generally ate much better than their European cousins. They also had more land... and generally a higher standard of living. And that has mostly not changed.
Our weight is largely a consequence of being well fed and not needing to move around so much. This leads to an increase in weight.
Send Americans back to physical labor instead of having robots do everything and we'll trim up quite quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
I am having a hard time finding that exact story. I'll keep looking for it. This one is easy to find though:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/n...
Statutory rape. These are really common. And while in the reverse situation the boys are treated as rapists and often sex offenders... the women are literally given money.
Reverse that... 20 year old man has sex with 14 year old girl... yeah, he's going to jail. And when he gets out, he's going to have to knock on doors to tell people that he's a pedophile.
Woman does the same thing... and not only does none of that happen but the guy she had sex with is being asked to pay child support.
Lets reverse that again so you can understand the depth of the fuckery... Lets say a 20 year old guy had sex with a 14 year old girl... and not only did he not get into any trouble for it, but lets say she was forced to marry the 20 year old guy or otherwise make some serious commitment to him.
Seem reasonable or absurdly fucked up? Rhetorical question of course... its fucked up.
I'll keep looking for the other story. It happened and the courts did ask him to pay for the rape baby despite him filing a police report roughly around the time of conception citing her for rape.
No. Rape is a crime. It is wrong. And anyone that does it should be punished severally.
If a woman rapes a man, has a child without his knowledge or consent, and then demands child support... how does making the man pay child support punish the rapist? You're rewarding the rapist.
Lets reverse this so you can understand how fucked up this is... lets say a dude drugs a woman, and extracts some of her eggs while she sleeps. Then he mixes that with some of his baby batter and implants the embryo into a surrogate, then nine months later without her knowledge he demands that she pay child support.
Sound reasonable or does it sound psychotic? Because it is psychotic.
I'm not pushing a low fat diet either you know. I was talking about exercise. Not fats versus carbs.
Obviously the ratios can matter but for most people that get fat, the issue is the amount of food they eat... PERIOD and the amount of exercise they get PERIOD.
The types of foods or types of exercise will matter but if your goal is merely to keep a healthy weight, the ratios don't matter that much so long as you don't do anything extreme.
... The Vatican. Because of all the places that conversation should be had, lets have it with some guy walking around in an absurd outfit that thinks invisible super beings talk to him.
Why is this relevant? I mean... why does anyone care one way or the other what the Vatican might say? What is the Vatican's influence at this point? South Americans listen to the pope still I think... that's about it.
The American evangelicals that make the left crazy don't give a shit what the pope says... they're protestants... their entire faith is defined by not giving a shit what the pope says.
And as to Catholics outside of south america... most of them are lapse Catholics that don't especially care what the pope says either.
And if we go with the argument that this is all about getting the south americans on board, they're not signing Kyoto. It won't happen. The business interests in south america will pay this religious stuff the lip service it deserves and then go back to doing whatever they wanted to do in the first place.
Lets talk about relevance here. When was the last time the Pope stopped a war? Last time he in fact changed ANYTHING of global significance? I'm thinking no pope has really made much of an impact for about 500 years.
So... Who gives a shit what the pope thinks? I say that with all due respect to the pope and I have no animosity towards his religion. But climate change isn't going to do anything for the catholic faith. No one is converting to Catholicism or donating to the Vatican or supporting Christianity because of the pope's position on climate change.
There are Christians in the middle east and Africa getting genocided as we speak. No one cares about the christians in the middle east getting killed. No one cares about the christians in Egypt and Somalia etc getting killed. No one cares. These people are writing messages in English BEGGING for help and then getting the media to take pictures of them. No one is coming. If no one cares enough to help people getting genocided, then exactly what is the pope's position on climate change going to do?
Nothing. This is a non-issue. Everyone should just ignore it. It is of no relevance.
I see nothing in your comment to justify your position or undermine mine. You merely threw out some insults and then presumed superiority without basis.
You are therefore almost certainly a troll. As you're also an AC, that is all but certain.
Conclusion: Fuck off and die, shithead. :)
As to what is wrong with that, you have a right to choose. In having a right to choose you have responsibility.
The man cannot compel you to have an abortion or compel you to accept his penis. The woman has more control over the situation than the man does and therefore must be responsible unless she has gotten some sort of agreement from the man to provide support.
That is, if you want him to raise your baby... you'd better make sure he is willing to do it and not just cut his condom up and then blind side him 9 months later with a baby picture and a court writ for child support.
As to clarity with my position, it is that if women have a choice they have responsibility. The responsibility COMES with the choice. The choice is not free. You don't get rights without responsibilities.
So riddle me this, in your mind what responsibilities did women get that they didn't have before they obtained the ability to abort their pregnancy at will? Men got no new rights and if anything have lost rights. As such, men must have reduced responsibility.
Think of a child... a child has very few rights and very few responsibilities. Think of a person in a high responsibility job... a doctor or a police officer. Notice how their rights to do things expand with their responsibilities.
This is how everything works. Currently there is a disconnect with these laws in that they are still synced to an earlier time that predates the current status quo. It makes no sense. It would be like applying slavery laws to black people even though they're not slaves anymore.
The legal and logistical status of women has changed. They're not what they were and their options are not what they were. As such the laws should reflect that. That is my position.
As to citations... There are so many fucking links.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
I mean come on. Learn to google.
http://www.rolereboot.org/sex-...
It isn't a fantasy... it is just rarely reported. Men don't run to the cops when they get coerced or forced into sex. At least usually not.
The reasons for this are many but it is still rape. And the fact of the matter is that under the law, if she gets pregnant, he's as responsible for the child as if it were not rape.
That's about as fucked up as forcing a woman to marry a man that rapes her. It is the same situation with reversed gender roles.
Were that the case then the woman would not have custody of the child.
If I'm paying for the child then why is the child with someone that can't take care of the child? If I can pay for the child and she can't... then I am obviously more qualified to take care of the child all things being equal. Now maybe I'm a drug addict or a psychopath or something. But lets assume nothing weird is going on and that the guy is a normal guy and the woman is a normal woman. Let us say that she can't support herself and the child. But the man can support himself AND send her child support checks. This suggests that he is capable of raising the child where as she is not.
So why are you subsidizing her failure as a parent if all you care about is the child? Are you suggesting that single mothers do a good job raising children? Because the statistics in the US prison population suggest they're actually terrible at it.
Here is a rule of thumb that I think is pretty bulletproof: Rights are balanced by responsibility.
If you make me responsible for something, then I should inherent rights over whatever it is you're making me responsible for and to the extent that I am responsible for it. Think of anything that anyone can be responsible for and notice that as responsibility increases so do rights over whatever that thing is. This traditionally applied to not only children but women as well.
In gaining independence and freedom, women have gotten a lot more rights... but as those rights increase it is obvious that the responsibility of men to the women reduces proportionally.
If you want me to pay for the child, then I want custody to the extent that I am paying for that child. If I'm paying half, then I want half. etc.
What is more, if she has a child against my will... as in she froze some embryos from when we were dating and then thawed them out ten years later... and then asks me to pay child support when I've moved on with my life... how is that fair to me? Now it sucks for the kid because the kid's mother is a crazy irresponsible person. Because she had a child without arranging for the care and support of the child. Because he had a child without asking the man she would eventually demand money from first. So yeah, that's pretty lame.
And that is why if I were him, I'd make a point of not letting her have those embryos unless she signs something that absolves me of any responsibility. if she does that, then go for it. But if she thinks she can just start pumping out babies and have me pay for them all when I don't even live in the same state as her?... give me a break.
The government can pay for it OR they can show some moral courage and threaten to tie her tubes if she doesn't behave herself. If you actually cared about the children, you wouldn't be comfortable leaving the child in the care of such people in the first place.
hyperbole and strawman.
I didn't say anything about not taking care of children. The issue is custody, the relevant rights and responsibilities of the parents, and ultimately what is required for either party to have rights or responsibilities or not.
The way the system is currently set up, men have almost no rights. If she gets your seed by any means and gets pregnant then you're responsible for the child. And while being responsible you have no rights over it. That is completely out of balance.
Rights and responsibilities need to be in balance. So for example, if I am providing the majority of the funds to support the child... then I should get custody. If she's not providing support but instead relying upon checks I send her in the mail... then whether or not she even has the child should be my choice.
if we share equal responsibility for the care of the child, then she has equal rights. If she provides more and I provide less, then she has more rights. Only if I provide NOTHING should I have no rights at all. So if she wants total 100 percent custody.... the price for that is no child support from the father.
What I am saying horrifies traditionalists with an old fashioned notion of how maternity should work. However, that view fails to take into consideration the reality of 21st century medical science. Women have the right to choose.
Right? Pro choice. Well, pro choice means pro responsibility as well. If you CHOOSE to have a child possibly against the will of the man, then why is he responsible for the child?
One of my uncle's ex-wives poked holes in his condoms so that she'd get pregnant. And she was secretly on fertility drugs... so she had twins. And this was my uncles second marriage... he didn't even want kids because he already had some. She also had some kids from a prior marriage. Point is, the child support laws are bullshit because they don't take modern medical science into consideration.
Women CHOOSE now if they want to get pregnant or not. And that choice should mean that they assume responsibility.
Now if you get married or something then sure, the husband is responsible. But if you pop some kids out from a one night stand or defrost some embryos from years ago long after everyone has gone their separate ways... then you need to take personal responsibility for your own choices.
Or surrender your right to choose. Do that and men will be obligated to acknowledge intercourse as itself being an acceptance of responsibility. However, because women have the pill and abortion clinics... No. You have a kid, then you made a choice. Right to choose means obligation to take responsibility.
Mediterranean diet?... you're saying Italians don't eat wheat?
Have you ever been to Italy... seen what they eat? Plenty of carbs my friend.
The Greeks tend to eat more lamb and veg. I assume that's what you're referring to... the Greeks aren't especially thinner than the Italians... and the Italians eat lots of carbs.
But lets have a look at the Chinese and the Japanese. I don't think people think of either society as being especially fat. The japanese I believe are known to be skinny if anything. And what do they eat a lot of ? Rice and noodles (mostly wheat noodles but they eat a lot of rice noodles as well).
Generally, I think the japanese especially eat less meat than most cultures. They eat a lot of veg of course but the rice and noodles are a huge portion of their calories.
Again, this is what kills me with this blanket carb hatred... WE BUILD THE MODERN WORLD ON CARBS!!!
literally every major culture sustained its population's diet to a large or even primary extent on a staple crop that are without exception carbs.
Wheat.
Rice.
Maze.
Potatoes.
And Poi.
Find me any sedentary culture of note in the world and I will show you their carb based staple crop.
Now that as a given because you know your history that well... exactly how can you say that carbs are so bad when we built the whole fucking modern world on them.
We are currently going through the information revolution. The carb thing is something we dealt with in the agricultural revolution. This is roughly the period of time when some societies became sedentary and learned to cultivate crops. And once they figured that out, they were able to vastly out compete rival hunter gatherer or nomadic herdsman tribes.
Now, if carbs were so fucking bad... then why did our carb eating ancestors kick the shit out of the palo diet hunter gatherers and whatever we'd call the diet of a nomadic herdsman?
The Pyramids: built by carbs.
The Great Wall of China: built by carbs.
The Parthenon: built by carbs.
The Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan: Built by carbs.
See a pattern here? The Egyptians were POUNDING carbs in their day. They had this very thick heavy beer like drink that was sort of like an ancient energy drink. It was basically slightly fermented liquid bread. Maybe think of it like a liquid sourdough bread? Anyway, they drank that stuff all the time. Were the egyptians fat?
Its exercise.
The people that say "exercise doesn't work" are talking about 15 to 30 minutes of exercise a day. When I say exercise, mean a hard day's work. Manual labor. Spend a day digging ditches, plowing a field without a tractor (using an animal is fine), or any of the millions of things people did way back when.
Now does this mean we need to eat less? Yes and no. The human body doesn't work very well if subjected to an extremely sedentary lifestyle. Simply reducing the food you eat or changing your diet isn't going to make you healthy. We evolved to move around, be out under the sun, etc. You put us inside all the time, not moving... and then you cut our food... the body reads that on an evolutionary level like winter. People huddling in caves because it is cold out and just waiting for better weather.
So the body goes into an energy conservation mode. The body stores as much energy as it can as fat because it thinks you're waiting out bad weather in a cave or something.
This is not a leap here. Every physiological response has a basis in our genetic history.
Try to see our lifestyle through the lens of evolution. It doesn't know why we're sitting around indoors. It just knows we are. And in our genetic past when would humans stay indoors not moving around much for long periods of time? Winter. And what is the appropriate response in that situation? See all those fat people the way that evolution sees them... they're like hibernating bears from the perspective of our genes. Yes, a hibernation that can last your whole life. The system isn't set up to assume cy
A biological father being introduced to adults that were raised entirely apart from him... are unlikely to cause that man any trouble in the 21st century western world. It might be a little weird for his wife but probably there wouldn't be anything negative about it.
The issue is more that when they're growing up he might get a phone call that says something to the effect of "hey, your children need money for college... pay for it."
As to emotional damage to the children... that would only happen if the mother mishandled the situation in which case the blow up would be on her.
If she keeps those eggs on ice for ages and then randomly decides to defrost them and germinate a few in her magic garden... then the guy is responsible child support.
No really.
Child support laws basically assume that birth control and the last 100 years of medical science didn't happen. The concept of them is that if she got pregnant in any fashion by your porn star energy drink... then you've apparently consented to be a daddy.
You go on a one night stand with a girl at a bar... use a condom... she says she's on the pill... she calls you six months 9 months later to tell you that you're a father... Congrats, you're playing child support.
Here some lackwit is going to say I'm not being a chivalrous gentleman. That's because chivalry is dead. Look, responsibilities and rights go hand in hand. When men were responsible for everything they had all the rights. And women didn't have any options. If they got knocked up they couldn't really do anything about it. And the culture of the time put great significance on being "chaste". If she already had some other dude's baby then it was a lot harder for her to get a husband which was a serious problem.
Today none of that applies but the child support laws don't care.
There was a dude that was literally drugged, woke up tied to a bed with a girl on top of him, he ejaculated in her because men really don't have any control over that if you're bouncing on top of them, he told the police about it immediately, the police did nothing, she got pregnant, gave birth, filed for child support, and the courts made him pay for her rape baby.
Yep.
So, the issue with those eggs set aside is child support. If she signs something to the effect that he's not on the hook for any of the child support... I'd see no reason for him to care one way or the other.
As you haven't elaborated on any of your positions your arguments remain null.
Your concession stands.
Better luck next time. Good day, sir.
As to your ironic statement that I am not contradicting you at any point and this is all due to misreading... actually I have on many points and you could only have missed that due to your own misreading.
As to the parliamentary system reducing the power of the wealthy, that is asinine since the system was literally designed to protect the interests of English Lords. The system concentrates power in fewer hands than what you see in the American system which you assume means the system is less corruptible. Contrary to that point, the more hands the power is distributed amongst the less susceptible to corruption the system becomes.
As to your belief that the Congress has no role in the ratification of treaties... do a fucking google search before you dare contradict me on something like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
""Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution, includes the Treaty Clause, which empowers the President of the United States to propose and chiefly negotiate agreements, which must be confirmed by the Senate, between the United States and other countries, which become treaties between the United States and other countries after the advice and consent of a supermajority of the United States Senate.""
The senate must ratify the treaty. If you bring this issue up one more time, I'm going to call you a fucktard and just skip over any further references to your fucking delusion.
As to morality, YOU were the one that used the term "hellscape", all I did was give it back to you. Complain and you're a hypocrite.
As to your Canadian references, it isn't making any sense. We've not outlawed the voting of anyone since black slavery and we reversed that.
As to your citation of majority black states outlawing black voting, that's such an absurd reference because blacks had no political agency at the time. Any group in any political system with no agency can have the political powers that be vote against their interests because they have no representation.
This was a big part of why the US broke off from England in the first place. The English Parliament was voting on things that effected the Colonies and the Colonies had no representation in Parliament. And certainly not proportional to our population. Had England extended that to the Colonies, there never would have been a revolution... though quite a few political interests in England might have been forced to horse trade with their Colonial cousins.
As to your continued slander that I am aruging on a moral basis, I am not. This is also a contradictory point you're making because you accused me of being an engineer at one point and now you're saying I'm being some wishywashy moralist.
Which is it? For the record, my positions are not based on morality but on what is optimal.
You somehow have gotten it into your head that concentrating power in the fewest possible hands reduces the possibility of corruption. That's silly. The more power that is distributed around the less extreme any corruption can be because the ability of anyone to do anything really out of control is limited.
A background level of corruption will occur under this system but you'll find a background level of corruption in dictatorships where all power is concentrated in one person. So arguing from the basis of the background level of corruption is not especially credible.
The issue is you want to make it hard for anyone to do anything extreme or anything quickly. If actions are kept moderate and everyone has time to respond to it then they can't really get that out of control.
If you don't elaborate then I have no choice but to try and guess what it is that you're actually talking about. So, no.
skimming through the rest to see if you defend argument... and you don't.
Your concession stands.
Better luck next time. Good day, sir.
I'm happy to leave that up to the devs to decide. What is more there is an argument for giving the devs something just so they keep releasing patches for the game, assist the modders in making the game more moddable, and generally keep the community alive.
If the devs get nothing then they have no interest to spend any further time on the game and will abandon it.
If you understand the pros and cons of hydrogen fuel versus hydrocarbon fuel... you know that hydrogen doesn't make any sense.
The issue with hydrocarbon fuel is that we're extracting them from sequestered carbon sources which is increasing atmospheric carbon. However, if we do not create the fuel from sequestered hydrocarbons then there is no net increase in atmospheric carbon.
Biofuels make FAR more sense than hydrogen.
For one thing, hydrocarbon fuels can be obtained from any biomass. You can create hydrocarbon fuel from garbage, saw dust, grass clippings, crop field dross, etc. There is no need for some sort of magical genetically engineered oil producing algae. That would be nice of course, but it is not required. We can make hydrocarbon fuel from ANYTHING that is already made of those compounds.
And if you don't like that for no fucking reason what so ever, then batteries make more sense then hydrogen as well. Tesla's "lets put laptop batteries in cars" idea is better than hydrogen.
My beef with the laptop battery idea is that it is just not as scalable as the biofuel systems. We can have micro refineries across the country. At every landfill, every agricultural area, possibly even small units for rural house holds. And then the fuel can be locally consumed saving transport costs and the differences between what is needed and what is produced needs to either be imported or exported.
It is vastly more efficient and scalable because you can store the fuel in vast fuel tanks just like we currently do for oil. We have vast fuel depots that could literally fill lakes with oil. And those tanks smooth out the distribution of oil throughout the world. It doesn't matter if some region produces a lot or stops producing for awhile because we have reserves in the tanks to handle all our needs for months if not a couple years.
And the point is that we can do the same thing with the biofuel. During the summer months we'll produce more than we need because of the production from agriculture. And in the winter we'll burn those reserves because during those months consumption will exceed production.
Its hard to do that with electric power since we still don't have good means of storing it.
They already do that with DLC.
So... tell me something that hasn't already happened? :D
The idea is good the implementation was terrible.
Valve was taking too big of a cut, pressure needs to be put on the developers to take a reasonable cut... and of course, whether or not anyone actually charges for a mod must remain up to the modder.
I think if valve charges more than 10 percent of the gross they're being greedy.
And as to the devs... they should be able to decide precisely how much they charge as a percentage of the sale. People have to know that the reason why dev X charges Y is because dev X decided to charge Y. And Y can be anything from zero percent to one hundred percent. They charge too much and people direct their ire at the dev for being greedy and people don't make mods for that dev. They charge too little and mod makers can kind of make a living maybe?
Anyway. Very good idea very poorly executed.
I actually did take responsibility and I pointed out that they were due to your own vagueness forcing me to infer and guess as to the meaning of your words. I then invited you to correct me specifically.
Until you do offer a falsifiable argument you have not in fact offered any argument or reasoning what so ever. And absent that, your entire presence in this thread is null.
I predict you'll continue to make more empty insults and continue to fail to make a rational argument about anything. Know that until you do, all further comments will be taken merely as whining at your own mental weakness and general inability to form a rational thought.
I find this pitiable though not especially uncommon. Also noteworthy is that you're another AC waste of oxygen. I rarely run into non-ACs that are utter voids of value. But with ACs it appears to be incredibly common. I've never understood why they let you comment at all without at least forcing you to use a fake name. For one thing who can tell you idiots apart? For another, you feel no obligation to represent yourself as anything but a troll because you've literally no reputation to protect.
You're garbage. Fuck off.
And you decide to conclude with more baseless insults?
Very well. Your devolution into nothing more than another stupid zero contribution troll is your own choice.
You're an AC so that was likely to be expected. Most of the ACs appear to be trolls and sockpuppets. So that's fine.
I showed you respect and invited you to have a rational discussion. You responded with stupid insults.
So be it. Your forfeiture is accepted, fuck off.
And yet you're not correcting me by specifically stating your beliefs. Thus rendering your argument non-falsifiable because it is so vague that it could mean almost anything.
I admitted that I could be wrong about your position in the previous post but pointed out that I can't be held accountable for such errors if you make no effort to clarify things.
As we see in your most recent post, you've still made no such effort and are now merely throwing off stupid insults.
Either clarify your position rendering your arguments falsifiable or you will concede by default for failing to offer a coherent and rational position.
Choice is yours. You can either define your position clearly enough that I can rip it to shreds while laughing at you OR you can cowardly refuse to explain yourself at which point you just surrender the field to your superior... me.
Its heads I win and tails you lose. Pick which ever one you want. Insects like you aren't even any fun... you're too stupid to put up a credible fight.
As to trolling, I'm not trolling you.
As to hyper intelligent ants, I've seen no compelling argument for why the parliamentary system is superior. You've also contradicted yourself in a few places saying it is both good and bad that something is run by more people.
As to the binding nature of treaties... without ratification you really don't have much. Lets look at Kyoto again and how could that treaty work without congressional ratification? How are you going to limit emissions for example without passing a law internally within the US? And no such law will be binding unless the US congress passes it. So no.
As to Iran, no there are sanctions etc which prohibit US businesses from engaging in business with the Iranians. You can't lift that without the cooperation of congress.
As to dystopian hellscapes, the president is largely in the same position, he just has additional checks on his power. And the US is hardly a distopian hellscape either... so you can jam that bit of hyperbole right back into your shithole.
As to your notion that decentralization makes it easier for the elites to control things, you got that backwards. The more centralized a system is the easier it is for elites to control it. That is why elites like centralization. Those that want to control everything want everything controllable by as few people as possible... aka them. A decentralized system is harder to control because you have to control more people to wield the same power and it is just less effective.
As to your arguments being the same... Your arguments have a bipolar nature to them that is difficult to parse. You switch between two contradictory extremes without any notion or explanation leaving me to try and figure out what the fuck you were thinking.
ehm, depends on what you mean by the rest of the world. Canada, the UK, Australia, and Germany are roughly as fat as we are... so I don't know what kind of superiority you're trying to claim here.
What is more, I'd much rather live in a country full of fat people than one full of skinny people.
We can feed ourselves. We're net food exporters. Come to the US and enjoy a big juicy steak.
What is more, we've eaten very well for a long time. The initial English colonists for example to the Americas generally ate much better than their European cousins. They also had more land... and generally a higher standard of living. And that has mostly not changed.
Our weight is largely a consequence of being well fed and not needing to move around so much. This leads to an increase in weight.
Send Americans back to physical labor instead of having robots do everything and we'll trim up quite quickly.
You still have people trying to claim Ted Kennedy was the greatest statesman to have ever lived. No joke. I always get a headache when I hear that.