Anyone using the phrase "global climate change deniers" as a term of opprobrium also thinks that mankind is causing worldwide heating to a significant degree, that everybody should take steps to reduce their pleasure in life in order to reduce global warming, and that global warming is a bad thing.
I cordially invite you anti-industrial slime to go bury yourself so as to limit your contribution to worldwide pollution.
And when it comes to medicine, it is generally very easy to measure: do people get better or not.
Oh, wow, guess again.
Many compounds tested for medical effects act weakly or have dangerous side effects. Tests that give positive results, when retested, have no effect or harmful results. That's why so many studies with very strict controls are required for new medicines, and why nutritional substances can have in excess of 100 studies on their effects and still not have widespread acceptance. Medical testing isn't easy.
You allow yourself to be led?
(My memory of a line from Eric Frank Russell)
Seriously, do you not consider accepting a leader as intellectual cowardice and moral bankruptcy? Can you not think for yourself? Do you not understand that "follow the leader" is a child's game?
Where did you pick up that bit of nonsense? Seriously, where? Your definition does not eliminate oligarchy, anarchy, or any of a host of options.
To summarize the definition in my dictionary, a republic is a state in which sovereignty resides in (a portion of) the people, and certain powers are lodged in elected officials. In 2 words, representative democracy.
The idea that every generation sees its successor as inferior, with the implication that therefor they are wrong, is longstanding. My ninth grade algebra teacher cited Aristotle complaining about how the deficiencies of the younger generation would lead to the destruction of society. What she failed to realize was that one of Aristotle's students was Alexander the Great, whose deficiencies led to the collapse of the Greek empire when Alexander died.
An important part of knowledge about a candidate is his history, and that cannot be made anonymous. Do you want to publicly fund a serial child rapist for school board member? Do you want that information hidden? Do you not want to know about an embezzler running for treasurer?
Mostly good, but public funding has many problems. Here's one that I haven't seen mentioned: Candidates A, B, and C are running for Grand Poobah and all 3 get equal funding. Candidate C is just a blind, and throws all his efforts and funding into a partially disguised effort to get B elected. Result is that B has twice the effective funding as A.
Here's another possibility: candidate X takes all his public funding and flees the country.
Here's another: the Flibbertigibbet Broadcasting Company sees an opportunity and arranges for dozens of nonentities to run for office, provided that they spend all their public funding for advertisements on FBC stations.
There's no end to the fraud and theft possible through public funding of campaigns for candidates for public office, and the perverse incentives that appear. Bad idea.
Slavery was never a significant economic factor in the northern colonies (or northern states) of America; and the northern part industrialized more rapidly than the southern.
And if you don't understand that Democrats are and have always been the party of slavery - from renewed calls for a military draft to building a vast, unemployed welfare class - you are too willfully stupid to be corrected by facts.
This doesn't apply to all of central America, but some areas were devoid of good lumber: deserts, grassy plains. The interior of palms is wet and coarsely fibrous, not good lumber.
There were significant problems with the history texts being rejected by Texas: for example, (IIRC) multiple pages on a single obscure female civil rights leader and less than a page on Jefferson. Texas may have overreacted, but the rejected texts were "politically correct" nonsense.
I'm fed up with the meme that education is all about learning how to learn (how to interpret, how to understand.) If that's all that 12 or 16 years of schooling provided, we'd have a crowd of illiterate young adults all ready to learn SOMETHING, without the ability to do so because they couldn't read or do math. Such young adults would be useless, because they had no practical knowledge.
Education is primarily about learning facts: what things are, how they work, how they're connected, how and why they were developed, how to solve problems, what honor consists of, and so forth and so on. "Learning how to learn" and its relatives, though important, is mostly an implicit part of education and requires some, but not a lot, of explicit effort to teach.
The correct answer is "some airplanes can fly upside down by using a high angle of attack, which overcomes the Bernoulli effect." Note also that even rightside up, most airplanes use some angle of attack.
A government school is not a "capitalist education provider", and it has the overwhelming advantage that the cost of sending your child to government school is negligible. Private schools add expenses of many thousands to many tens of thousands to a parent's budget (and they're still paying for the government school). Government schools destroy an essential aspect of capitalism by decoupling profit from performance. The consumer does not have the opportunity to punish the provider of government education by refusing to pay for the product.
The facts that education is always best in countries with a more socialist education model
Lectures certainly have deficiencies, but a live lecture in front of an audience has one crucial advantage: feedback. Questions, or even informal groans or "huh?" from the audience lead to clarification or correction. The inflexibility of a difficult text can make learning nearly impossible.
Government schools create the perverse incentive that leads publishers to produce a shoddy product. With a free market in education, the consumers would take some care in choosing a quality school, which in turn would take a harder look at textbooks.
What exists in the US today is not capitalism, but a mixed market trending away from capitalism. It is the governmental aspect of the system that causes most of the corruption, because the government has the power.
Food is more of a medical necessity than birth control. Why aren't you paying for my food?
More to the point, using birth control is a volitional activity used to prevent the consequences of another volitional activity (sexual intercourse). Both of these activities are optional. Birth control is used before voluntary activity (usually), it is not used to cure a disease. If you're having an insurance company pay for birth control, then either you're foolishly using the inefficiency of a 3rd party payer, or you're defrauding the insurance company by using a lot more birth control than you're paying for. Having the government force insurance companies to pay for birth control is twice as silly as having the government force insurance companies pay for Nerf bullets so you can safely shoot yourself in the head.
Treatment of diseases brought about by unhealthy behavior, no matter how vile or stupid the activity that brought about the disease, is treatment, not prevention, and should be considered differently than the doubly voluntary prevention that birth control is. In this context I'm just saying that the cases are not comparable.
On a more rational note, government restrictions on insurance and health care make things much more expensive. Condoms aren't expensive, and "the pill" can be quite cheap (in Mexico you don't even need a prescription). But government rules make it difficult or impossible to buy cheap, high deductible insurance for someone who is healthy and takes care of himself. Most health insurance policies don't require a physical, so the morbidly obese are being subsidized by you and me.
Rights apply to humans: humans have them, and the restrictions they entail apply to humans. The right to life is the right not to have your life ended by other humans. In a wilderness, the right to life has no relation to a mountain lion having you for lunch because the mountain lion is not human. Alone in the wilderness my right to life exists, and is protected by default, because there is no human to violate my right.
The right to property is the right not to have things taken from me or damaged by other humans. I have this right alone in the wilderness, and it is protected because there are no humans around to take or damage my property.
It is essential to properly define rights, and to recognize that those rights exist even when they are violated. A right is a subset of "how a person should not be mistreated by other humans", and exists whether or not a person is mistreated, and whether or not there is another person to do the mistreating. Natural rights exist for a man in the absence of other men, even if they are moot.
assume that rights are something that we humans have come up with as our ethics has developed alongside our society.
Rights are something that we humans have identified as our ethics has developed alongside our society. The rights, like hydrogen or the properties of triangles, have been there as long as homo has been sapiens; but it's taken centuries of human thought to properly sort out the many varieties of human action and name some of them "rights".
"Natural rights" are so called because they apply to humans, as a result of the nature of human beings. There is the additional implication that if it weren't for other people (i.e. in a state of nature), there would be neither a need for the help of others to protect those rights, nor would there be others violating those rights. By being able to identify rights as natural, a great barrier is constructed against those who would fabricate "rights" out of thin air: the defender of natural rights says "in a state of nature, who will provide this new thing that you call a right?" If that is not sufficient to reject the fabrication immediately, it does lead into a discussion of costs and whose fundamental rights are being violated to provide the new thing.
Universal healthcare is not just the mark of a civilized society...
"Universal healthcare", to be put into effect, requires either universal theft to pay for that healthcare, or enslaving doctors. Neither is civilized. You can't put your system into practice without pointing a gun at me.
Freedom of speech (and press) does not mean you're not responsible for what you say. You cannot be legally prohibited (except by contract, which covers military secrets and the like) from saying whatever you want; but if your speech causes damage (false advertising, inciting to riot) you are responsible for the damage you cause. The prohibition on health claims is unconstitutional and is being slowly beaten back in the courts (Look for Emord, Pearson, Shaw, et. al.)
Freedom of speech and press means no "prior restraint".
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone using the phrase "global climate change deniers" as a term of opprobrium also thinks that mankind is causing worldwide heating to a significant degree, that everybody should take steps to reduce their pleasure in life in order to reduce global warming, and that global warming is a bad thing.
I cordially invite you anti-industrial slime to go bury yourself so as to limit your contribution to worldwide pollution.
Willow bark. Limes. Saw palmetto. Nettle extract (both leaves and roots, different products for different purposes). Ginseng. Gingko biloba. Red pepper extract. Marijuana. Blueberries. Myrrh. Fish.
All of the above have been heavily tested and are either available raw, or with the active ingredient extracted or synthesized.
Oh, wow, guess again.
Many compounds tested for medical effects act weakly or have dangerous side effects. Tests that give positive results, when retested, have no effect or harmful results. That's why so many studies with very strict controls are required for new medicines, and why nutritional substances can have in excess of 100 studies on their effects and still not have widespread acceptance. Medical testing isn't easy.
Aspirin in acetylsalicylic acid. The active ingredient in willow bark is salicin. They are different, but closely related chemicals.
You allow yourself to be led?
(My memory of a line from Eric Frank Russell)
Seriously, do you not consider accepting a leader as intellectual cowardice and moral bankruptcy? Can you not think for yourself? Do you not understand that "follow the leader" is a child's game?
Be a man. Stand up for yourself.
Where did you pick up that bit of nonsense? Seriously, where? Your definition does not eliminate oligarchy, anarchy, or any of a host of options.
To summarize the definition in my dictionary, a republic is a state in which sovereignty resides in (a portion of) the people, and certain powers are lodged in elected officials. In 2 words, representative democracy.
The idea that every generation sees its successor as inferior, with the implication that therefor they are wrong, is longstanding. My ninth grade algebra teacher cited Aristotle complaining about how the deficiencies of the younger generation would lead to the destruction of society. What she failed to realize was that one of Aristotle's students was Alexander the Great, whose deficiencies led to the collapse of the Greek empire when Alexander died.
An important part of knowledge about a candidate is his history, and that cannot be made anonymous. Do you want to publicly fund a serial child rapist for school board member? Do you want that information hidden? Do you not want to know about an embezzler running for treasurer?
Mostly good, but public funding has many problems. Here's one that I haven't seen mentioned: Candidates A, B, and C are running for Grand Poobah and all 3 get equal funding. Candidate C is just a blind, and throws all his efforts and funding into a partially disguised effort to get B elected. Result is that B has twice the effective funding as A.
Here's another possibility: candidate X takes all his public funding and flees the country.
Here's another: the Flibbertigibbet Broadcasting Company sees an opportunity and arranges for dozens of nonentities to run for office, provided that they spend all their public funding for advertisements on FBC stations.
There's no end to the fraud and theft possible through public funding of campaigns for candidates for public office, and the perverse incentives that appear. Bad idea.
Slavery was never a significant economic factor in the northern colonies (or northern states) of America; and the northern part industrialized more rapidly than the southern.
And if you don't understand that Democrats are and have always been the party of slavery - from renewed calls for a military draft to building a vast, unemployed welfare class - you are too willfully stupid to be corrected by facts.
This doesn't apply to all of central America, but some areas were devoid of good lumber: deserts, grassy plains. The interior of palms is wet and coarsely fibrous, not good lumber.
Cue Tom Lehrer
I can't find sqrt(2) on my yardstick. It's not on my meter stick either.
There were significant problems with the history texts being rejected by Texas: for example, (IIRC) multiple pages on a single obscure female civil rights leader and less than a page on Jefferson. Texas may have overreacted, but the rejected texts were "politically correct" nonsense.
I'm fed up with the meme that education is all about learning how to learn (how to interpret, how to understand.) If that's all that 12 or 16 years of schooling provided, we'd have a crowd of illiterate young adults all ready to learn SOMETHING, without the ability to do so because they couldn't read or do math. Such young adults would be useless, because they had no practical knowledge.
Education is primarily about learning facts: what things are, how they work, how they're connected, how and why they were developed, how to solve problems, what honor consists of, and so forth and so on. "Learning how to learn" and its relatives, though important, is mostly an implicit part of education and requires some, but not a lot, of explicit effort to teach.
The correct answer is "some airplanes can fly upside down by using a high angle of attack, which overcomes the Bernoulli effect." Note also that even rightside up, most airplanes use some angle of attack.
is a lie.
Lectures certainly have deficiencies, but a live lecture in front of an audience has one crucial advantage: feedback. Questions, or even informal groans or "huh?" from the audience lead to clarification or correction. The inflexibility of a difficult text can make learning nearly impossible.
Government schools create the perverse incentive that leads publishers to produce a shoddy product. With a free market in education, the consumers would take some care in choosing a quality school, which in turn would take a harder look at textbooks.
What exists in the US today is not capitalism, but a mixed market trending away from capitalism. It is the governmental aspect of the system that causes most of the corruption, because the government has the power.
Food is more of a medical necessity than birth control. Why aren't you paying for my food?
More to the point, using birth control is a volitional activity used to prevent the consequences of another volitional activity (sexual intercourse). Both of these activities are optional. Birth control is used before voluntary activity (usually), it is not used to cure a disease. If you're having an insurance company pay for birth control, then either you're foolishly using the inefficiency of a 3rd party payer, or you're defrauding the insurance company by using a lot more birth control than you're paying for. Having the government force insurance companies to pay for birth control is twice as silly as having the government force insurance companies pay for Nerf bullets so you can safely shoot yourself in the head.
Treatment of diseases brought about by unhealthy behavior, no matter how vile or stupid the activity that brought about the disease, is treatment, not prevention, and should be considered differently than the doubly voluntary prevention that birth control is. In this context I'm just saying that the cases are not comparable.
On a more rational note, government restrictions on insurance and health care make things much more expensive. Condoms aren't expensive, and "the pill" can be quite cheap (in Mexico you don't even need a prescription). But government rules make it difficult or impossible to buy cheap, high deductible insurance for someone who is healthy and takes care of himself. Most health insurance policies don't require a physical, so the morbidly obese are being subsidized by you and me.
Rights apply to humans: humans have them, and the restrictions they entail apply to humans. The right to life is the right not to have your life ended by other humans. In a wilderness, the right to life has no relation to a mountain lion having you for lunch because the mountain lion is not human. Alone in the wilderness my right to life exists, and is protected by default, because there is no human to violate my right.
The right to property is the right not to have things taken from me or damaged by other humans. I have this right alone in the wilderness, and it is protected because there are no humans around to take or damage my property.
It is essential to properly define rights, and to recognize that those rights exist even when they are violated. A right is a subset of "how a person should not be mistreated by other humans", and exists whether or not a person is mistreated, and whether or not there is another person to do the mistreating. Natural rights exist for a man in the absence of other men, even if they are moot.
Rights are something that we humans have identified as our ethics has developed alongside our society. The rights, like hydrogen or the properties of triangles, have been there as long as homo has been sapiens; but it's taken centuries of human thought to properly sort out the many varieties of human action and name some of them "rights".
"Natural rights" are so called because they apply to humans, as a result of the nature of human beings. There is the additional implication that if it weren't for other people (i.e. in a state of nature), there would be neither a need for the help of others to protect those rights, nor would there be others violating those rights. By being able to identify rights as natural, a great barrier is constructed against those who would fabricate "rights" out of thin air: the defender of natural rights says "in a state of nature, who will provide this new thing that you call a right?" If that is not sufficient to reject the fabrication immediately, it does lead into a discussion of costs and whose fundamental rights are being violated to provide the new thing.
"Universal healthcare", to be put into effect, requires either universal theft to pay for that healthcare, or enslaving doctors. Neither is civilized. You can't put your system into practice without pointing a gun at me.
Correct, and the first harm that's being done is extorting my money to pay for someone else's expenses.
That's just nonsense. The correct word is "sow".
Freedom of speech (and press) does not mean you're not responsible for what you say. You cannot be legally prohibited (except by contract, which covers military secrets and the like) from saying whatever you want; but if your speech causes damage (false advertising, inciting to riot) you are responsible for the damage you cause. The prohibition on health claims is unconstitutional and is being slowly beaten back in the courts (Look for Emord, Pearson, Shaw, et. al.)
Freedom of speech and press means no "prior restraint".