Both Canada and Britain have 3rd parties and have had them for a long time, they're not viable governing threats but they do influence the political dialogue (they also occasionally let a non-plurality candidate come up the middle). They don't go away because despite the fact that everyone generally has a preference on the 2 big parties the 3rd party is the only one that really represents them. And if your riding can deliver an MP of your preferred party that serves you better than delivering an MP of one of the big parties.
Countries are diverse, if you have a party system with strong party discipline you simply have no way to accommodate all those views, the same party with the same policies can't represent rural Alabama or Texas and rural Idaho. If they did, and the Republicans actually enforced a single message with strong discipline, the party would fracture and you'd get an actual Tea Party in the south and a moderate Republican party in the north.
Mob justice has a process. The claim isn't that state execution is a valid justification for mob justice, it's that it's a justification at all.
Potential killers look for ways to justify their actions, even if they're poor justifications they'll still use them. Say execution is only just when done under due process by the state they'll rationalize that it means some deliberate killings are just and moral, therefore their murder is as well. State that deliberate killing is never just, that justification becomes much harder, killing is less normalized, and a few lives may be saved.
Well I just gave the argument, that justification is a sliding slope that can very easily lead to a cycle of violence. That's why I think it's wise to ban capital punishment.
When someone asks under what circumstances of revenge, justice, or punishment it's appropriate to take a life, we can simply answer none.
I'm just not sure the current system can accommodate a 3rd party. The current parties are too amorphous, if Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum can be members of the same party I'm not sure how a 3rd party is supposed to find a platform sufficiently diverse from whatever the closest main party can be.
If you want space for a 3rd party get the current parties to adopt an actual platform, have them vote a party line determined by the leadership, once people understand that D and R stand for something than there's room for a party that stands for something else. But in the current system where D can stand for anyone from a gun-toting pro-life conservative to a gun-control pro-choice socialist I'm not sure where a 3rd party can find open ground.
Maybe if a 3rd party starts with a very defined platform and runs on that platform they've got a chance at changing the system.
So once Bob kills Frank is Joe from gang B justified in killing Bob? You've basically just endorsed gang wars not dissimilar to the ones destroying some inner cities.
That was Constantine's plan, that doesn't mean it aided the long term stability of the empire. And the empire wasn't as disintegrated as it seemed, the downside of having four emperors in the Tetrarchy was there were suddenly a lot more places for a claimant to pop up.
I could be wrong, I'm certainly not an expert in the subject, but I just remember religious persecution becoming a theme post-Christianity.
As I said I think the current problem is the lack of party discipline.
Why did that become a problem? Maybe two legislative houses meant people thought it was supposed to work that way. Maybe the early government was small enough to operate through responsible debate, and while the idea of parties eventually emerged they never grew powerful enough to control the dialogue.
I assume in Switzerland, like Canada, the parties are stronger and are able to resist the influence of external lobbyists.
According to the argument I presented more parties would make it easier to buy politicians.
Voters have limited attention, each additional party (particularly if you have no party discipline), brings a new set of policies and arguments that people are supposed to process.
As a result voters and media pay less attention to each individual argument, making it easier for big money to swoop in and drown out the conversation.
But if you introduce strong party discipline you'll get more parties. The Tea Party can live in the Republican party precisely because they can make whatever crazy statements or votes they want. But if the Republican party wouldn't budge, or went full Tea Party, another party would have popped up to embrace the losing side. A similar thing happened in Canada when the Progressive Conservatives lost Western Canada to the upstart Reform party.
Similarly with the Democrats, if the party has only one consistent platform than the other viewpoints might decide they need a new party to be heard. A lack of party discipline kills 3rd parties because they're big tents where dissenting voices get lost in the din.
Everyone mythologizes the idea of individual legislators standing up for their constituents against the will of the party but I suspect we want the exact opposite.
I'm a Canadian, there are three or four significant parties (four or five in Quebec). Next election I'll have four platforms to choose from, the entire country will be debating those same four platforms. We can have a relatively thorough conversation about them. When it comes time to vote the MP matters if they're a star candidate or going to be in cabinet, but I mostly choose the party.
You're an American, two legislative bodies and an executive, and two significant candidates for each. The presidency is discussed nationally. The house and senate? For each of those you have the party's platform but the candidates have their own records and policies so you better know those. So how many platforms are you evaluating? Eight (six candidates + two parties)? The four legislators won't be discussed outside your state, and the congressfolk are irrelevant outside your district. Nationally you have 639 elected politicians, each with their own platform. Good luck discussing that. Look at the cacophony over the ACA, which one of the Republicans' alternatives do you want to discuss? Remember the shutdown? Do you think a Republican party with strong discipline would have made a faceplant like that?
Money isn't as big an issue in Canada partially because when everyone is talking about the same four platforms its hard to drown that out with cash. And you can't influence the individual MPs with a big cheque because the voters vote on party lines and the MP would just vote the party line anyway. Get the parties to enforce strong party discipline and parties will start pushing good policy because voters will be able to watch what they're doing.
It doesn't fix everything, but the current system doesn't work. Simplify things so that voters can actually understand and regulate what's going on.
If we want real change, we'll stop voting for the lesser of 2 evils, and break out of this democrat vs. republican false dichotomy. Surely this is easier than a constitutional amendment to stop people from spending their own money how they see fit.
Or just make a big point about choosing the lesser evil. If it were clear that voters wanted the lesser evil than parties would choose candidates that weren't evil because they want to win.
This was the lesson of the Tea Party. Many said they wanted a very right wing strongly ideological 3rd party, they succeeded by making a very right wing strongly ideological Republican party. They wanted something and the party changed to deliver it, convince enough people of your vision for what a party should be. If you're big enough the closest party will accommodate, or if they don't you might even start a 3rd party. But simply stating there should be a 3rd party whose only description is less evil won't do much.
Which logical fallacy was it where you stand up a situation and then silently remove a piece of that situation? You've claimed "appropriate situations", and then removed the concept.
It *is* appropriate to kill in self-defense where other alternatives are significantly less profitable. If you have a 90% likelihood of death in self-defense by non-lethal means and a 90% likelihood of survival by applying lethal self-defense, it is more profitable to apply lethal self-defense. You are not morally obligated to take a severe risk of death to avoid harming a man who is trying to kill you and has damn good chance of succeeding.
I should have been more specific, war, self-defence, and apprehension of felons are sanction methods of state killing, but execution is a new category entirely. Execution is killing for punishment, justice, or revenge, surely there's a non-trivial category of murders where the killer feels wronged by the victim and is seeking punishment, justice, or revenge. I've no doubt that the state declaring those are valid motives for killing helps provides moral justification for some murders.
"if the state murders an innocent member of your family than the entire justice system, and by extension society, is guilty of the crime."
If the state executes a man according to the law and in a case where due process has been served, this is not murder. I suggest you look up the word, it does not mean what you think it means.
The definition is irrelevant to my point. If the state killed a friend or relative you believed to be innocent you would have a major grievance with the state. If you realize the state would punish you more harshly because of your background or the colour of your skin you would again have a big problem.
"Don't you think a lot of African Americans realize that the government is executing a lot of innocent black people? Surely that plays some small part in their adversarial relationship with police."
This is a complex question. No doubt there are more cases of innocent black people suffering punishment at the hands of the state, I find this abhorrent in every way, and truth be told race has fuck all to do with it; if an innocent man is being punished for a crime he did not commit this is a "bad thing". That said, we still, as a society, need to investigate, try, convict and punish those who would do evil, and in doing so we will sometimes make mistakes as we are men. We can of course strive to make these systems better.
That said, black people commit more crimes per capita as compared to other groups. This isn't right or wrong on its face, and I am not speaking to the cause of this condition, but it is a fact.
That blacks generally receive harsher punishments for the same crimes, including execution, is generally accepted, and research indicates race does play into it.
Are you saying this is all caused at root by society wrongfully convicting some men? That's absurd. The one really has nothing to do with the other at all.
I'd think I answered that question when I stated "Surely that plays some small part in their adversarial relationship with police."
"murderers aren't bizarre aliens"
Of course they are not aliens. But they are murderers. And the crimes some men commit are so terrible, so inhuman, so bad that we as a society have decided that the men who commit these crimes need to be executed. Not all societies make this decision, but in this case they have. If you don't like this you are certainly free to voice that opinion, attempt to convince others of your view, or even move to a place where this isn't done. You may not like this, but it is what it is.
You miss my point entirely. By normalizing and justifying killing you make society as a whole more violent, as as murderers come from society you are likely to create more murderers. And I do live in a place where executions are not done, and I'm quite happy to live there.
People take cues from society, when society says that deliberate killing isn't taboo, but something that's justified in appropriate circumstances, people are going to take the cue. You're normalizing killing and providing rationalizations to potential killers, it would be a hard effect to measure but I'm sure it exists.
Of course I do consider that. I repeat, no system is perfect. There is far far more chance that someone who murders me or my family is brought to justice and put to death than the chance I or someone I love is wrongfully punished as you describe. Far greater.
Yes, I can live with that.
Killing is a moral outrage, particularly killing an innocent. If an individual murders an innocent member of your family than that one person is guilty of the crime, if the state murders an innocent member of your family than the entire justice system, and by extension society, is guilty of the crime.
The guilt is obviously much more dispersed, but I think it's an important point regardless. A government that commits unjust acts is a government that loses moral authority and destabilizes the underlying society. Don't you think a lot of African Americans realize that the government is executing a lot of innocent black people? Surely that plays some small part in their adversarial relationship with police.
What about the message executions send to society? "Killing is wrong" becomes "killing is good if the person really deserves it", murderers aren't bizarre aliens, they're the tail end of a normal distribution of violence. Anytime you shift the mean you're going to see an effect at the tails.
Am I the only one who finds a lot of the big action CGI stuff really boring? I mean a lot of the Marvel stuff has been good, Gravity was amazing, and there's other stuff that really makes good use of special effects. But it seems like there's a lot of movies that seem to live on long drawn out action sequences, 300, the new Star Trek films, the Star Wars prequels, the Hobbit. I just end up disinterested because I don't actually care about the characters.
I maintain that it isn't the ignorance of youth, the original Star Wars is good, maybe it was the melodrama or the simple story but I actually did care about the characters, that's why those simple action sequences are still riveting. I don't see a basic difference between the new Star Trek and the old new old Star Wars, sure the Star Wars had some cringe-worthy writing but a lot of good things do as well, the problem was they used spectacle to distract from the fact the story and characters weren't that interesting. They need less spectacle and bigger story, I'm just not sure Abrams is the one to save the franchise.
5. Site is hosted on a compromised server in the first place -- fixing this by recompiling the server would alert the host admin.
This is my favourite explanation. I can just envision some incompetent sysadmin sleeping at his desk while hackers are frantically securing his system.
The LCHF Paleo Primal Banting community, the people who have been reading Taubes' review of the literature going back pre-war, and so on, and who have tried this stuff for themselves, the basic insight is that it is the carbohydrates that are the problem.
Taubes is a bit of a crank who claims vegitarians are fat because they have to be for his theory to be the answer to everything. His principals work, but he's a highly unreliable conduit of the truth.
Low-carb diets do work, as do vegetarian diets, Mediterranean diets, potato diets, paleo diets, and a bunch of other diets that have some contradictory principals. Hell, there's a dude who ate nothing but twinkies and lost weight. Human appetite is complex and there's a lot of causes of obesity, if there weren't we'd all have six-packs.
This whole article is bullshit. I first tried dieting by avoiding processed foods (namely, the kinds that tend to be higher in sodium, carbs, fats, etc) and it didn't work for shit. Know what did work? Just watching the caloric intake. Already lost 60 pounds over the last year, and it mainly just involved getting proper perspective on what an actual serving is. I still eat fast food, indeed all kinds of junk foods.
Your anecdote doesn't disprove the article. Humans are extremely diverse and there are a lot of causes for obesity, maybe the cause of your obesity had nothing do to with processed foods.
There's a ton of reasons people overeat, process foods are one of them, but another big one is mental cues. Ever notice how you can not feel hungry a moment before supper then feel ravenous the moment you start eating? You didn't burn a bunch of calories walking up to the table, it's just your mind realizing its time to start eating and acting accordingly. Sometimes if I'm particularly busy I can miss an entire meal and finish the day with a healthy calorie deficit without feelings side effects, when backpacking I routinely lose 0.5 kg / day or more because I'm too preoccupied to feel hungry, the mental portion of the game is huge.
Similarly if you leave a box of doughnuts on your desk all day you're probably going to get really hungry and eat a bunch of extra doughnuts every day. The doughnuts didn't rewire your digestive system, they just sat there looking really yummy and your brain decided it wanted some.
I'm not saying you did anything like that, but it watching caloric intake consistent of preparing slightly smaller plates and moving snacks out of sight, you were probably successful in removing some of those mental stimulus to hunger. It could even be that processed foods are a contributor to whatever weight you have left, but they weren't the biggest ones.
My issue with the paper is with the second part of the abstract:
But this approach misses a fundamental point. The obesity problem is best understood not as the result of the overconsumption of a single macronutrient, but from a skewing of the proportion of each macronutrient in our diet — notably the dwindling quantity of protein in processed food products. The paucity of protein relative to fats and carbohydrates in processed foods drives the overconsumption of total energy as our bodies seek to maintain a target level of protein intake.
They basically say the macronutrient ratio is a big part of the problem, but I know there's a bunch of ancestral populations with macronutrient ratios all over the map and they're all pretty thin. It might be a bit of the problem, and processed foods might be a bigger part, but I doubt they're the primary problem as they seem to imply.
I don't think Christianity was exclusively to blame by any means, you don't attempt the tetrarchy if things are going well. But I suspect it was an underrated contributing factor, there was a huge amount of religious infighting that never really went away.
Personally I've always suspected Christianity played a role as well. It seemed to me that pre-Christianity religion wasn't that big a deal in Rome, when the Roman's encountered a population with a different god the Roman's basically said a) everyone had to follow the Roman state religion, and b) your god is part of the big Roman pantheon, congrats you're following the Roman state religion!
Emperor Elagabalus even got away with replacing Jupiter with his god at the top of the pantheon and marrying the head of the vestal virgins. His own grandmother eventually helped arrange his assassination due to that and many other issues, but the Romans must have been pretty relaxed in their religious attitudes to even let it go that far.
Contrast to the post Constantine Christian empire and things get very intolerant, religion suddenly seems to have a much bigger impact on the politics and empire unity seems to diminish. I think it may be a feature of monotheism vs polytheism. A monotheistic faith says there's one god with one plan and presumably one way of following, with polytheism if you want to follow a different set of ethics and beliefs just say your particular god likes it that way.
If you're ruling a massive diverse empire forcing everyone to follow an inflexible faith written in Rome is probably a bad idea. The Byzantium Empire probably latest precisely because it ruled over a much more homogeneous population (in this case the monotheism may have been an advantage).
That is an invalid premise. While certainly certain people could be found to fit that criteria, the majority of doctors questioning the current vaccine policy never started on the anti-vaccine campaign. I can't poll them all, neither can you, but from the articles I have read most started on the pro vaccine campaign and changed their thinking reviewing results.
Seems like you are fitting the bill I mentioned earlier of owning both sides of the debate to distract from the middle pretty well, so no further need to discuss this.
I'd have to see these scientists to know what you think a rational middle is.
Carbon tax does not fix the problem, so again you are choosing to ignore facts and camp on a side of the fence. If you wished to discuss how regulation may help I'd be right there with you. Pundits of business campaign exactly for carbon tax because it does not address the problem yet increases profits.
The vast majority of the science doesn't talk about a carbon tax, it just says the CO2 is going to cause big problems and we need to reduce massively or climate engineer with nasty side effects. I don't know the proper studies that have gone into a carbon tax and for the most part I don't think that scientists even discuss policy positions aside from saying we need to do something as they try to stick to science.
You have not provided any science, you have provided an opinion. Nothing more, nothing less. I brought up arguments against your opinion which are fact based and easy to research.
How do you not point at those sources, when those sources are nationally syndicated shows manipulating public opinion? Joe's science rag may be more accurate, but if people don't know about that source then they are lost. A lost public works to benefit big business, but not humanity as a whole. Which was and is the 2nd point I have been debating, and you continue to sit on the business side of the debate.
Check out scienceblogs, or realclimate.org, both accessible versions of the science that are based on the scientific consensus.
If you're arguing that nationally syndicated shows are showing extreme versions of the science and misinforming the public than I'll enthusiastically agree, but those shows are not the science nor do they have much of anything to do with the scientific consensus. The science is what's going on in the scientific journals and in the halls of academia, that's where our best guess of the truth lies.
Ah, you've been listening to the advertising people again haven't you? Remember : a swift kick in the nuts to get them onto the floor, then a really thorough kicking when they're down is the only sensible response to meeting such professional liars.
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I'm not sure I agree with that conclusion.
Both Canada and Britain have 3rd parties and have had them for a long time, they're not viable governing threats but they do influence the political dialogue (they also occasionally let a non-plurality candidate come up the middle). They don't go away because despite the fact that everyone generally has a preference on the 2 big parties the 3rd party is the only one that really represents them. And if your riding can deliver an MP of your preferred party that serves you better than delivering an MP of one of the big parties.
Countries are diverse, if you have a party system with strong party discipline you simply have no way to accommodate all those views, the same party with the same policies can't represent rural Alabama or Texas and rural Idaho. If they did, and the Republicans actually enforced a single message with strong discipline, the party would fracture and you'd get an actual Tea Party in the south and a moderate Republican party in the north.
Mob justice has a process. The claim isn't that state execution is a valid justification for mob justice, it's that it's a justification at all.
Potential killers look for ways to justify their actions, even if they're poor justifications they'll still use them. Say execution is only just when done under due process by the state they'll rationalize that it means some deliberate killings are just and moral, therefore their murder is as well. State that deliberate killing is never just, that justification becomes much harder, killing is less normalized, and a few lives may be saved.
Well I just gave the argument, that justification is a sliding slope that can very easily lead to a cycle of violence. That's why I think it's wise to ban capital punishment.
When someone asks under what circumstances of revenge, justice, or punishment it's appropriate to take a life, we can simply answer none.
I'm just not sure the current system can accommodate a 3rd party. The current parties are too amorphous, if Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum can be members of the same party I'm not sure how a 3rd party is supposed to find a platform sufficiently diverse from whatever the closest main party can be.
If you want space for a 3rd party get the current parties to adopt an actual platform, have them vote a party line determined by the leadership, once people understand that D and R stand for something than there's room for a party that stands for something else. But in the current system where D can stand for anyone from a gun-toting pro-life conservative to a gun-control pro-choice socialist I'm not sure where a 3rd party can find open ground.
Maybe if a 3rd party starts with a very defined platform and runs on that platform they've got a chance at changing the system.
So once Bob kills Frank is Joe from gang B justified in killing Bob? You've basically just endorsed gang wars not dissimilar to the ones destroying some inner cities.
That was Constantine's plan, that doesn't mean it aided the long term stability of the empire. And the empire wasn't as disintegrated as it seemed, the downside of having four emperors in the Tetrarchy was there were suddenly a lot more places for a claimant to pop up.
I could be wrong, I'm certainly not an expert in the subject, but I just remember religious persecution becoming a theme post-Christianity.
As I said I think the current problem is the lack of party discipline.
Why did that become a problem? Maybe two legislative houses meant people thought it was supposed to work that way. Maybe the early government was small enough to operate through responsible debate, and while the idea of parties eventually emerged they never grew powerful enough to control the dialogue.
I assume in Switzerland, like Canada, the parties are stronger and are able to resist the influence of external lobbyists.
According to the argument I presented more parties would make it easier to buy politicians.
Voters have limited attention, each additional party (particularly if you have no party discipline), brings a new set of policies and arguments that people are supposed to process.
As a result voters and media pay less attention to each individual argument, making it easier for big money to swoop in and drown out the conversation.
But if you introduce strong party discipline you'll get more parties. The Tea Party can live in the Republican party precisely because they can make whatever crazy statements or votes they want. But if the Republican party wouldn't budge, or went full Tea Party, another party would have popped up to embrace the losing side. A similar thing happened in Canada when the Progressive Conservatives lost Western Canada to the upstart Reform party.
Similarly with the Democrats, if the party has only one consistent platform than the other viewpoints might decide they need a new party to be heard. A lack of party discipline kills 3rd parties because they're big tents where dissenting voices get lost in the din.
Everyone mythologizes the idea of individual legislators standing up for their constituents against the will of the party but I suspect we want the exact opposite.
I'm a Canadian, there are three or four significant parties (four or five in Quebec). Next election I'll have four platforms to choose from, the entire country will be debating those same four platforms. We can have a relatively thorough conversation about them. When it comes time to vote the MP matters if they're a star candidate or going to be in cabinet, but I mostly choose the party.
You're an American, two legislative bodies and an executive, and two significant candidates for each. The presidency is discussed nationally. The house and senate? For each of those you have the party's platform but the candidates have their own records and policies so you better know those. So how many platforms are you evaluating? Eight (six candidates + two parties)? The four legislators won't be discussed outside your state, and the congressfolk are irrelevant outside your district. Nationally you have 639 elected politicians, each with their own platform. Good luck discussing that. Look at the cacophony over the ACA, which one of the Republicans' alternatives do you want to discuss? Remember the shutdown? Do you think a Republican party with strong discipline would have made a faceplant like that?
Money isn't as big an issue in Canada partially because when everyone is talking about the same four platforms its hard to drown that out with cash. And you can't influence the individual MPs with a big cheque because the voters vote on party lines and the MP would just vote the party line anyway. Get the parties to enforce strong party discipline and parties will start pushing good policy because voters will be able to watch what they're doing.
It doesn't fix everything, but the current system doesn't work. Simplify things so that voters can actually understand and regulate what's going on.
If we want real change, we'll stop voting for the lesser of 2 evils, and break out of this democrat vs. republican false dichotomy. Surely this is easier than a constitutional amendment to stop people from spending their own money how they see fit.
Or just make a big point about choosing the lesser evil. If it were clear that voters wanted the lesser evil than parties would choose candidates that weren't evil because they want to win.
This was the lesson of the Tea Party. Many said they wanted a very right wing strongly ideological 3rd party, they succeeded by making a very right wing strongly ideological Republican party. They wanted something and the party changed to deliver it, convince enough people of your vision for what a party should be. If you're big enough the closest party will accommodate, or if they don't you might even start a 3rd party. But simply stating there should be a 3rd party whose only description is less evil won't do much.
Say Phil from gang A is murdered, and his friend Bob is certain that Frank from gang B did it. Do you think that Bob is justified in killing Frank?
Which logical fallacy was it where you stand up a situation and then silently remove a piece of that situation? You've claimed "appropriate situations", and then removed the concept.
It *is* appropriate to kill in self-defense where other alternatives are significantly less profitable. If you have a 90% likelihood of death in self-defense by non-lethal means and a 90% likelihood of survival by applying lethal self-defense, it is more profitable to apply lethal self-defense. You are not morally obligated to take a severe risk of death to avoid harming a man who is trying to kill you and has damn good chance of succeeding.
I should have been more specific, war, self-defence, and apprehension of felons are sanction methods of state killing, but execution is a new category entirely. Execution is killing for punishment, justice, or revenge, surely there's a non-trivial category of murders where the killer feels wronged by the victim and is seeking punishment, justice, or revenge. I've no doubt that the state declaring those are valid motives for killing helps provides moral justification for some murders.
"if the state murders an innocent member of your family than the entire justice system, and by extension society, is guilty of the crime."
If the state executes a man according to the law and in a case where due process has been served, this is not murder. I suggest you look up the word, it does not mean what you think it means.
The definition is irrelevant to my point. If the state killed a friend or relative you believed to be innocent you would have a major grievance with the state. If you realize the state would punish you more harshly because of your background or the colour of your skin you would again have a big problem.
"Don't you think a lot of African Americans realize that the government is executing a lot of innocent black people? Surely that plays some small part in their adversarial relationship with police."
This is a complex question. No doubt there are more cases of innocent black people suffering punishment at the hands of the state, I find this abhorrent in every way, and truth be told race has fuck all to do with it; if an innocent man is being punished for a crime he did not commit this is a "bad thing". That said, we still, as a society, need to investigate, try, convict and punish those who would do evil, and in doing so we will sometimes make mistakes as we are men. We can of course strive to make these systems better.
That said, black people commit more crimes per capita as compared to other groups. This isn't right or wrong on its face, and I am not speaking to the cause of this condition, but it is a fact.
That blacks generally receive harsher punishments for the same crimes, including execution, is generally accepted, and research indicates race does play into it.
Are you saying this is all caused at root by society wrongfully convicting some men? That's absurd. The one really has nothing to do with the other at all.
I'd think I answered that question when I stated "Surely that plays some small part in their adversarial relationship with police."
"murderers aren't bizarre aliens"
Of course they are not aliens. But they are murderers. And the crimes some men commit are so terrible, so inhuman, so bad that we as a society have decided that the men who commit these crimes need to be executed. Not all societies make this decision, but in this case they have. If you don't like this you are certainly free to voice that opinion, attempt to convince others of your view, or even move to a place where this isn't done. You may not like this, but it is what it is.
You miss my point entirely. By normalizing and justifying killing you make society as a whole more violent, as as murderers come from society you are likely to create more murderers. And I do live in a place where executions are not done, and I'm quite happy to live there.
You miss a critical factor in your analysis.
People take cues from society, when society says that deliberate killing isn't taboo, but something that's justified in appropriate circumstances, people are going to take the cue. You're normalizing killing and providing rationalizations to potential killers, it would be a hard effect to measure but I'm sure it exists.
Of course I do consider that. I repeat, no system is perfect. There is far far more chance that someone who murders me or my family is brought to justice and put to death than the chance I or someone I love is wrongfully punished as you describe. Far greater.
Yes, I can live with that.
Killing is a moral outrage, particularly killing an innocent. If an individual murders an innocent member of your family than that one person is guilty of the crime, if the state murders an innocent member of your family than the entire justice system, and by extension society, is guilty of the crime.
The guilt is obviously much more dispersed, but I think it's an important point regardless. A government that commits unjust acts is a government that loses moral authority and destabilizes the underlying society. Don't you think a lot of African Americans realize that the government is executing a lot of innocent black people? Surely that plays some small part in their adversarial relationship with police.
What about the message executions send to society? "Killing is wrong" becomes "killing is good if the person really deserves it", murderers aren't bizarre aliens, they're the tail end of a normal distribution of violence. Anytime you shift the mean you're going to see an effect at the tails.
Am I the only one who finds a lot of the big action CGI stuff really boring? I mean a lot of the Marvel stuff has been good, Gravity was amazing, and there's other stuff that really makes good use of special effects. But it seems like there's a lot of movies that seem to live on long drawn out action sequences, 300, the new Star Trek films, the Star Wars prequels, the Hobbit. I just end up disinterested because I don't actually care about the characters.
I maintain that it isn't the ignorance of youth, the original Star Wars is good, maybe it was the melodrama or the simple story but I actually did care about the characters, that's why those simple action sequences are still riveting. I don't see a basic difference between the new Star Trek and the old new old Star Wars, sure the Star Wars had some cringe-worthy writing but a lot of good things do as well, the problem was they used spectacle to distract from the fact the story and characters weren't that interesting. They need less spectacle and bigger story, I'm just not sure Abrams is the one to save the franchise.
5. Site is hosted on a compromised server in the first place -- fixing this by recompiling the server would alert the host admin.
This is my favourite explanation. I can just envision some incompetent sysadmin sleeping at his desk while hackers are frantically securing his system.
At the neighbourhood kids running around on his lawn.
The LCHF Paleo Primal Banting community, the people who have been reading Taubes' review of the literature going back pre-war, and so on, and who have tried this stuff for themselves, the basic insight is that it is the carbohydrates that are the problem.
Taubes is a bit of a crank who claims vegitarians are fat because they have to be for his theory to be the answer to everything. His principals work, but he's a highly unreliable conduit of the truth.
Low-carb diets do work, as do vegetarian diets, Mediterranean diets, potato diets, paleo diets, and a bunch of other diets that have some contradictory principals. Hell, there's a dude who ate nothing but twinkies and lost weight. Human appetite is complex and there's a lot of causes of obesity, if there weren't we'd all have six-packs.
This whole article is bullshit. I first tried dieting by avoiding processed foods (namely, the kinds that tend to be higher in sodium, carbs, fats, etc) and it didn't work for shit. Know what did work? Just watching the caloric intake. Already lost 60 pounds over the last year, and it mainly just involved getting proper perspective on what an actual serving is. I still eat fast food, indeed all kinds of junk foods.
Your anecdote doesn't disprove the article. Humans are extremely diverse and there are a lot of causes for obesity, maybe the cause of your obesity had nothing do to with processed foods.
There's a ton of reasons people overeat, process foods are one of them, but another big one is mental cues. Ever notice how you can not feel hungry a moment before supper then feel ravenous the moment you start eating? You didn't burn a bunch of calories walking up to the table, it's just your mind realizing its time to start eating and acting accordingly. Sometimes if I'm particularly busy I can miss an entire meal and finish the day with a healthy calorie deficit without feelings side effects, when backpacking I routinely lose 0.5 kg / day or more because I'm too preoccupied to feel hungry, the mental portion of the game is huge.
Similarly if you leave a box of doughnuts on your desk all day you're probably going to get really hungry and eat a bunch of extra doughnuts every day. The doughnuts didn't rewire your digestive system, they just sat there looking really yummy and your brain decided it wanted some.
I'm not saying you did anything like that, but it watching caloric intake consistent of preparing slightly smaller plates and moving snacks out of sight, you were probably successful in removing some of those mental stimulus to hunger. It could even be that processed foods are a contributor to whatever weight you have left, but they weren't the biggest ones.
My issue with the paper is with the second part of the abstract:
But this approach misses a fundamental point. The obesity problem is best understood not as the result of the overconsumption of a single macronutrient, but from a skewing of the proportion of each macronutrient in our diet — notably the dwindling quantity of protein in processed food products. The paucity of protein relative to fats and carbohydrates in processed foods drives the overconsumption of total energy as our bodies seek to maintain a target level of protein intake.
They basically say the macronutrient ratio is a big part of the problem, but I know there's a bunch of ancestral populations with macronutrient ratios all over the map and they're all pretty thin. It might be a bit of the problem, and processed foods might be a bigger part, but I doubt they're the primary problem as they seem to imply.
I don't think Christianity was exclusively to blame by any means, you don't attempt the tetrarchy if things are going well. But I suspect it was an underrated contributing factor, there was a huge amount of religious infighting that never really went away.
Personally I've always suspected Christianity played a role as well. It seemed to me that pre-Christianity religion wasn't that big a deal in Rome, when the Roman's encountered a population with a different god the Roman's basically said a) everyone had to follow the Roman state religion, and b) your god is part of the big Roman pantheon, congrats you're following the Roman state religion!
Emperor Elagabalus even got away with replacing Jupiter with his god at the top of the pantheon and marrying the head of the vestal virgins. His own grandmother eventually helped arrange his assassination due to that and many other issues, but the Romans must have been pretty relaxed in their religious attitudes to even let it go that far.
Contrast to the post Constantine Christian empire and things get very intolerant, religion suddenly seems to have a much bigger impact on the politics and empire unity seems to diminish. I think it may be a feature of monotheism vs polytheism. A monotheistic faith says there's one god with one plan and presumably one way of following, with polytheism if you want to follow a different set of ethics and beliefs just say your particular god likes it that way.
If you're ruling a massive diverse empire forcing everyone to follow an inflexible faith written in Rome is probably a bad idea. The Byzantium Empire probably latest precisely because it ruled over a much more homogeneous population (in this case the monotheism may have been an advantage).
That is an invalid premise. While certainly certain people could be found to fit that criteria, the majority of doctors questioning the current vaccine policy never started on the anti-vaccine campaign. I can't poll them all, neither can you, but from the articles I have read most started on the pro vaccine campaign and changed their thinking reviewing results.
Seems like you are fitting the bill I mentioned earlier of owning both sides of the debate to distract from the middle pretty well, so no further need to discuss this.
I'd have to see these scientists to know what you think a rational middle is.
Carbon tax does not fix the problem, so again you are choosing to ignore facts and camp on a side of the fence. If you wished to discuss how regulation may help I'd be right there with you. Pundits of business campaign exactly for carbon tax because it does not address the problem yet increases profits.
The vast majority of the science doesn't talk about a carbon tax, it just says the CO2 is going to cause big problems and we need to reduce massively or climate engineer with nasty side effects. I don't know the proper studies that have gone into a carbon tax and for the most part I don't think that scientists even discuss policy positions aside from saying we need to do something as they try to stick to science.
You have not provided any science, you have provided an opinion. Nothing more, nothing less. I brought up arguments against your opinion which are fact based and easy to research.
How do you not point at those sources, when those sources are nationally syndicated shows manipulating public opinion? Joe's science rag may be more accurate, but if people don't know about that source then they are lost. A lost public works to benefit big business, but not humanity as a whole. Which was and is the 2nd point I have been debating, and you continue to sit on the business side of the debate.
Check out scienceblogs, or realclimate.org, both accessible versions of the science that are based on the scientific consensus.
If you're arguing that nationally syndicated shows are showing extreme versions of the science and misinforming the public than I'll enthusiastically agree, but those shows are not the science nor do they have much of anything to do with the scientific consensus. The science is what's going on in the scientific journals and in the halls of academia, that's where our best guess of the truth lies.
Ah, you've been listening to the advertising people again haven't you? Remember : a swift kick in the nuts to get them onto the floor, then a really thorough kicking when they're down is the only sensible response to meeting such professional liars.
Well that would make for a memorable funeral.
That's an argument for making a funeral memorable. That doesn't necessarily mean making it expensive.
True but one of the ways to make something memorable is to add a bit of money.