I think they were thinking, "This should be fine, assuming people don't start pvping 14 hours a day, hahahaha."
A lot of the problems Bliz has had have stemmed from the fact that they keep underestimating the amount of interest people will have in the new features.
No need to go that far. Having the media in your possession should clear you of any charges stemming from possessing a copy on your harddrive, through the doctrine of fair use.
Now, if they're after you for sharing copies with the world, you're s.o.l.
You don't see how being forcably deported to an undeveloped country and denied re-entry to your home country for having committed a crime that would be defined as petty theft today, is barbaric?
It's the fucking puritans, still haunting us after hundreds of years. I guarantee you there are more prudish reactionaries than you can even imagine, especially we you're talking about sex and nudity. Did the superbowl flap a few years ago cross the pond? One nipple at half time and there are still ripples being felt, lawsuits being settled, and fingers being pointed. And that's just a nipple! Think about the reaction toward sex ed?!?
It's all well and good to talk about compromise, but where do you compromise with people who say "Abstinence only, and no provided birth control." There's no compromise there, they won that issue already! They got it they way they want it because the prude population is high enough that even moderately liberal representatives are unwilling to push the "teach kids about sex" angle.
The thing is, I don't really care. It's not important to me at this stage in my life, and I'm a firm enough believer in having ALL the facts that I'll sit down with my kids and explain it to them, and run through the risks and the problems, provide them some reading material for anything I miss, tell the family doctor that they're allowed to have birth control, and then go drink a few litres of scotch.
But I think it's sick that people oppose sex ed just out of principle, then complain about all the goddamn issues we have with teen pregnancy and abortions.
I thought Jesus was big on giving people fish? I bet he'd have even sprung for bug spray for the 5000, because he was that kinda guy.
This is the exact attitude I've been talking about through this whole thread...Religious groups putting huge protests together about abortion, but when you ask 'em to shell out for a box of condoms, it's all "Hey, we don't do welfare, we work for a living."
Make up your goddamn mind. Either you help people make smart choices with regards to contraception and family planning, or stop bitching when the bad choices they made because they couldn't afford birth control or didn't know how to use birth control, lead to them getting an abortion.
So, you're saying that 74% of churches are willing to provide contraception to parishoners who are in need?
While the bulk of protestant churches do not ban contraception, they do not, by any stretch of the imagination, promote the use of contraception. They do not educate about contraception. They do not provide free contraception.
There is basically no possibility of getting a solid sex ed program at any local school where I live because religious groups go absolutely apeshit when it's even suggested, because they believe that they should be completely in charge of the sex education that their children get...Which would be fine if everyone did a good job of educating their kids, but that is not the case.
I do not see how "atheists" getting pissed off because they're not allowed to have secular sex ed without it being hijacked by the religious "abstinence only" crowd, is in any way causing the problem. And for the record, I'm not an atheist, and most people who want the damn church to back off on sex ed are not atheists, and it is very typical of a certain type of religious thinker to think that only an atheist could want sex ed.
The problem is, religious sex ed is all about the morality of sex, and that is useless to people who decide to have sex anyway. Practical, secular education about the physcial issues regarding sex is useful to anyone who might one day have sex. Practical instruction in different types of birth control will help anyone who ever uses birth control. Practical talk about STDs and the real upsides and downsides of sex is useful and needed.
And the thing that stands between that useful and needed knowledge and our kids, is religious groups who think that knowing actual facts is the same as being brainwashed into sexual deviance. If you want to call that finger pointing, by all means, feel free.
Why would masturbation be unethical? Is spitting unethical? Masturbation has nothing to do with potential life, because it is impossible for masturbation to create potential life. Sperm + egg brought together in a hospitable environment is potential life. A fertilized embryo in a freezer is not potential life, because without some serious intervention, it will never become a life. If you think I'm arguing that stored embryos shouldn't be used for medical research you're out of your mind.
Sentience means nothing. Consciousness means nothing. And no, it ain't murder. You're trying to prove it's a person, and I'm not, because it's not. But if it will grow into a human life without intervention/accident, it is undeniably a potential human life. Not a parasite or a fungus or any number of other things which will never ever become a human life.
Chickens and cows are beyond the scope of this argument, but, for the sake of argument, are you saying that the life of a chicken or a cow should weigh against a human life? I don't argue with vegans in the same way I don't argue with drunks.
I have a very narrow and defined range for potential human life. Implanted embryos only. If you can provide a proof that a viable implanted human embryo is not a potential human life, I would be glad to hear it. Until they find a way to bring a baby to term without a woman, this definition is extremely specific. This is a boundary condition. It is not a class. It is a definition for the sake of argument, which you completely ignored.
Within that very strict definition of "potential human life" which coincidentally covers all of the cases where abortion is necessary, and assuming human life is valuable, the termination of that potential is an act with a negative moral component. End of story.
Preaching abstinence is not the answer. It doesn't work. They already know they're not supposed to be having sex...hell, that's probably one of the reasons they're doing it! And if you don't tell them anything besides "Don't have sex" you haven't taught them anything about how to be safe when they actually do have sex. And they will! It's a sad specimen that goes through life with no sex, and very few people wait until after marriage these days.
And economics? To minors who think that money is something you ask your dad for more of? I don't think that'll be a compelling argument.
I don't have problems with those things being taught, but they should be only a small part of the total lesson. Those kids should be taught about sex, they should be taught about rape, they should be taught about many different kinds of birth control AND HOW TO USE THEM. They should be taught about abortions, and how to make sure you don't need one. STDs, abuse, health issues, legal issues, the works, all the stuff that we had to learn the hard way.
Personally, I think his baby arguments were pretty crappy. Mine are all over this thread, so I won't repeat them, but the parasite and lack of consciouness arguments are pretty weak. Parasite doesn't wash...many people agonize over having an abortion, no one agonizes over having a tapeworm removed. Likewise, consciouness is way too nebulous to use as a standard for life...no way to prove anyone is conscious but yourself.
I think I hold with the Catholics on the vegatative state issue...Sure you can hope for an eventual recovery, but there is no sin in allowing them to go peacefully if recovery is unlikely. I've put my money where my mouth is on that one, and I feel pretty strongly about it, but it's just an opinion.
Same with the father issue. The woman has to bear the burdens, risks, and responsibilites of pregnancy/childbirth...It's not something she can avoid. If she feels wholly unequal to that, she should not be forced to go through with it just because the father is keen on the idea of having a baby. Again, just an opinion.
The problem is when disapproval makes it into legislation, and budget allocations. On campus housing with daycare for young mothers who still want to go to college? Don't bet on it. Financial assistance to help you make it through what should not be (but is) the difficult of having a child? Not much.
It's hard in this country to have a child out of wedlock, especially if you're young. No one makes it easy, and you take a lot of crap from holier-than-thou types who see that child as proof that you're some sort of moral faliure, and not as proof that you took the hard road and didn't have an abortion.
Point your ire somewhere else. I am firmly pro-choice.
I'm also a recovering philosophy major, and once upon a time I sat down and tried to work my belief in a woman's right to an abortion into a moral framework, and it doesn't fit.
Toss all the rhetoric, okay. Here's my logic:
If a human life has value, then, logically, a potential human life has value...You can't really get value from something that has no value. That doesn't make sense. Something may become more valuable, but there had to be something there to begin with (The pro-lifers would say God puts the value there...I think this is why they don't mind killing people from other religions).
But aren't sperm cells potential life? Can sperm cells ever become life without intervention (e.g. an egg)? No, so no. By the same token an egg is also not potential life, because, left to its own devices, it's nothing.
But sperm plus egg equals a mass of cells, that, left to its own devices (barring accident, intervention, etc), will become a human life. Therefore, if human life has value, then that little wad of cells must have value, and to take an active step to abort those cells is to destroy something of value.
Therefore abortion has a negative moral component.
The only weakness in the argument is that human life has value. I just assume that, and a number of atheistic materialists would say, "Life is just meat that moves, with no intrinsic value." I don't agree with this (I value being alive, therefore life has value q.e.d) but I can understand how my argument isn't really compelling if you hold that point of view.
I'm sure, by this point, all the non-objectivists out there are losing their shit. Before you start composing irate replies, allow me to continue.
I believe this, and I still think women should be allowed to have abortions if they so choose. It is not the governments role to protect the rights of potential citizens. It is not the governments role to make moral judgements in cases where there is no conflict between actual citizens. And this act, while having a clear moral component, is directed at a potential human life, and the concerns of a potential life are not sufficient to warrant any restriction of personal freedom.
So, in a nutshell, the hard core pro-choicers comfortable assertion that abortion is without a moral element is questionable (assuming human life has value), and the pro-lifers view that potential life is the same as actual life is unsupported by practice, legal precident, or any actual evidence.
In the end, both sides are trying to gain an ethical/moral high ground, and both sides are willfully distorting the issue in an attempt to make the other side into monsters. Abortion is not a good thing, but in our society, as it stands, it's a necessary evil, and we should all work toward a time when the only abortions are abortions of medical necessity.
There is always another exception to the rule. Frankly, I'm not into their being a rule at all. I think abortions are a bad thing and I think they're a symptom of a problem in our society that we need to deal with. I would like to see the symptom go away, but I don't think that's going to happen until we deal with the problem.
Trying to stop the symptom, without adressing the problem is madness. Let people get abortions, but try to reduce the need for them...Trying to reduce it to moral and immoral abortions is absurd.
However, I do believe that the bulk of our societies sex issues have a religious root, and I don't think that adding more religion is the answer, especially since their method of dealing with the problem is basically to deny it exists until a child is born.
The first step is to slow down the number of unwanted pregnancies, and that takes education, and that takes contraception, and since the church is anti-sex ed, and opposed to providing any form of contraception, and only promotes the use of abstinence/"Please god don't let me get pregnant", I don't see how getting them more involved is going to help in any way.
You have to have available birth control because a percentage of young people will gleefully start having sex as soon as their hormones kick into gear...No amount of education will stop this. This will also help adults make intelligent decisions about reproduction.
And when I say education, I mean education. I don't mean "teach abstinence". I mean "this is sex, this is what goes on, this is what you can catch, and this is how you can do it safely." I'm talking a significant course here, not just a day out of gym class.
The only way to help people make the right descision, is to make sure they have access to all the information. They may go through the whole class and not learn a damn thing, but they have a much better chance than if you'd tried to keep them in ignorance all along.
Nice rhetoric, but church-funded social services are not the answer, they are part of the problem.
This is an area where secular services are needed...We know the churches views on contraception ("Abstinence is good enough for anyone"), sex education ("Don't have sex until you're married, and don't enjoy it or you'll go to hell"), and on adoption ("Even though you're a slut and a whore for having this baby, we'll be willing to take it away from you and raise it to be the sort of kid that you're not").
Frankly, what this issue needs more than anything else is for the goddamn moralists to take a step back. This is a practical problem: women are getting pregant who don't want to be pregnant. There are practical solutions: help women not to get pregnant unless they want to be pregnant. This means education, and healthcare, and a whole bunch of things that the chruch cannot and will not provide.
If we provide these things, the numbers of abortions will decline, and isn't that the fricking point?
What part of "pro-choice" was unclear to you? I'm not in the business of telling anyone what to do with their body. I think abortions have a negative moral component, but I think a lot of things have a negative moral component, and I'm generally not in favor of frivolous laws governing behavior that is not detrimental to society.
And, for the record, screaming "Rape and Incest" in a discussion about abortion, is like screaming "Nazis" whenever you're talking about war. You're not adding anything to the discussion.
I call bullshit. You clearly have never had a kid, because the absolute first instinct is to go for the kids. Rationality never even enters into the picture.
And frankly, it's much easier to carry two kids than one adult.
So you guys are stepping up and adopting all the unwanted babies? And you're working to reduce the social/societal consequences on young unwed mothers who carry children to term?
I'm pro-choice, but I do think there is a negative moral angle on abortion. I don't think any truly advanced society should have a place for abortion; education, contraception, and societal support for young mothers should completely remove the need for any such thing.
But you know what? The same right wing that preaches so hard against abortion, also preaches against practical sex ed, available contraception for minors, and social services for unwed mothers...not to mention the moral stigma they attach to young unwed mothers.
So don't talk about how you're adopting some of the babies who actually got born...That's the smallest part of what you need to be doing.
Worked at a place where they monitored my internet usage really strictly. Got called up to the HR directors office, because I was, "On the internet every 15 minutes for a week".
Same week I was running a long and really boring set of database reports. Bring up the report, change a few things, set up the distribution list, start the report, check slashdot while waiting for the report to finish, make sure the report ran correctly, put report in distribution queue, rinse, repeat. The reports all built on each other, so there was no way I could move on until I was sure the previous one had finished correctly.
I did two departments worth of reports, and ended up having to wait to do the last few reports because I finished second and fifth out of ten damn departments, and I know for a fact those jokers who finished sixth through tenth never got talked to for their damn "excessive" internet usage.
Little mental breaks during compile/run time are beneficial for the overall quality of my work. Goddamn smokers get 3 breaks an hour when they're not even doing something where a break is dictated by the workflow. If there is a problem with my productivity, fine, say so, but if I'm as productive or more than the bulk of my coworkers, then shut the hell up.
Yea, I've seen a lot of that stuff in my life...I had pretty much the opposite situation, which meant, of course, that I dicked around, got mediocre grades, got in trouble, ran amok, etc.
Then I hit a point where I got concerned about the rest of my life, got my crap together, and started making an effort...I was around 16 or 17 (I understand this is not common).
So I go to college, and I do fine, because I'd always had to motivate myself, and I'd always had to prioritize my time, and I'd always had freedom so it didn't go to my head, and I understood how to balance life and work...Whereas all the "good" kids who people had been held up to me as a positive example didn't perform half as well when they were out of range of supervision for the first time in their lives.
There is definitely a happy medium. You need to give your kid enough freedom so that they understand how to make their own descisions, and how to accept the consequences for those descisions, but they also need rules.
On the one side, I can see making the argument, "Hey, I only did what my boss told me to do" and he may even be able to win in court with that argument.
However, I think that a technical person should have damn well known better than to do something like that, and I think that if such an individual was working under me, I very well might can him right along with his boss just for making a seriously poor judgement call.
Slashdot Mirror
I think they were thinking, "This should be fine, assuming people don't start pvping 14 hours a day, hahahaha."
A lot of the problems Bliz has had have stemmed from the fact that they keep underestimating the amount of interest people will have in the new features.
No need to go that far. Having the media in your possession should clear you of any charges stemming from possessing a copy on your harddrive, through the doctrine of fair use.
Now, if they're after you for sharing copies with the world, you're s.o.l.
I can only assume this is a troll.
You don't see how being forcably deported to an undeveloped country and denied re-entry to your home country for having committed a crime that would be defined as petty theft today, is barbaric?
It's the fucking puritans, still haunting us after hundreds of years. I guarantee you there are more prudish reactionaries than you can even imagine, especially we you're talking about sex and nudity. Did the superbowl flap a few years ago cross the pond? One nipple at half time and there are still ripples being felt, lawsuits being settled, and fingers being pointed. And that's just a nipple! Think about the reaction toward sex ed?!?
It's all well and good to talk about compromise, but where do you compromise with people who say "Abstinence only, and no provided birth control." There's no compromise there, they won that issue already! They got it they way they want it because the prude population is high enough that even moderately liberal representatives are unwilling to push the "teach kids about sex" angle.
The thing is, I don't really care. It's not important to me at this stage in my life, and I'm a firm enough believer in having ALL the facts that I'll sit down with my kids and explain it to them, and run through the risks and the problems, provide them some reading material for anything I miss, tell the family doctor that they're allowed to have birth control, and then go drink a few litres of scotch.
But I think it's sick that people oppose sex ed just out of principle, then complain about all the goddamn issues we have with teen pregnancy and abortions.
And then the imprudent have abortions. Enjoy the outcome you so clearly desire.
I thought Jesus was big on giving people fish? I bet he'd have even sprung for bug spray for the 5000, because he was that kinda guy.
This is the exact attitude I've been talking about through this whole thread...Religious groups putting huge protests together about abortion, but when you ask 'em to shell out for a box of condoms, it's all "Hey, we don't do welfare, we work for a living."
Make up your goddamn mind. Either you help people make smart choices with regards to contraception and family planning, or stop bitching when the bad choices they made because they couldn't afford birth control or didn't know how to use birth control, lead to them getting an abortion.
So, you're saying that 74% of churches are willing to provide contraception to parishoners who are in need?
While the bulk of protestant churches do not ban contraception, they do not, by any stretch of the imagination, promote the use of contraception. They do not educate about contraception. They do not provide free contraception.
There is basically no possibility of getting a solid sex ed program at any local school where I live because religious groups go absolutely apeshit when it's even suggested, because they believe that they should be completely in charge of the sex education that their children get...Which would be fine if everyone did a good job of educating their kids, but that is not the case.
I do not see how "atheists" getting pissed off because they're not allowed to have secular sex ed without it being hijacked by the religious "abstinence only" crowd, is in any way causing the problem. And for the record, I'm not an atheist, and most people who want the damn church to back off on sex ed are not atheists, and it is very typical of a certain type of religious thinker to think that only an atheist could want sex ed.
The problem is, religious sex ed is all about the morality of sex, and that is useless to people who decide to have sex anyway. Practical, secular education about the physcial issues regarding sex is useful to anyone who might one day have sex. Practical instruction in different types of birth control will help anyone who ever uses birth control. Practical talk about STDs and the real upsides and downsides of sex is useful and needed.
And the thing that stands between that useful and needed knowledge and our kids, is religious groups who think that knowing actual facts is the same as being brainwashed into sexual deviance. If you want to call that finger pointing, by all means, feel free.
Why would masturbation be unethical? Is spitting unethical? Masturbation has nothing to do with potential life, because it is impossible for masturbation to create potential life. Sperm + egg brought together in a hospitable environment is potential life. A fertilized embryo in a freezer is not potential life, because without some serious intervention, it will never become a life. If you think I'm arguing that stored embryos shouldn't be used for medical research you're out of your mind.
Sentience means nothing. Consciousness means nothing. And no, it ain't murder. You're trying to prove it's a person, and I'm not, because it's not. But if it will grow into a human life without intervention/accident, it is undeniably a potential human life. Not a parasite or a fungus or any number of other things which will never ever become a human life.
Chickens and cows are beyond the scope of this argument, but, for the sake of argument, are you saying that the life of a chicken or a cow should weigh against a human life? I don't argue with vegans in the same way I don't argue with drunks.
I have a very narrow and defined range for potential human life. Implanted embryos only. If you can provide a proof that a viable implanted human embryo is not a potential human life, I would be glad to hear it. Until they find a way to bring a baby to term without a woman, this definition is extremely specific. This is a boundary condition. It is not a class. It is a definition for the sake of argument, which you completely ignored.
Within that very strict definition of "potential human life" which coincidentally covers all of the cases where abortion is necessary, and assuming human life is valuable, the termination of that potential is an act with a negative moral component. End of story.
Lol. Excellent counterpoint. I guess what I'm trying to say is, "Government should stay out of peoples uteruses."
Preaching abstinence is not the answer. It doesn't work. They already know they're not supposed to be having sex...hell, that's probably one of the reasons they're doing it! And if you don't tell them anything besides "Don't have sex" you haven't taught them anything about how to be safe when they actually do have sex. And they will! It's a sad specimen that goes through life with no sex, and very few people wait until after marriage these days.
And economics? To minors who think that money is something you ask your dad for more of? I don't think that'll be a compelling argument.
I don't have problems with those things being taught, but they should be only a small part of the total lesson. Those kids should be taught about sex, they should be taught about rape, they should be taught about many different kinds of birth control AND HOW TO USE THEM. They should be taught about abortions, and how to make sure you don't need one. STDs, abuse, health issues, legal issues, the works, all the stuff that we had to learn the hard way.
Personally, I think his baby arguments were pretty crappy. Mine are all over this thread, so I won't repeat them, but the parasite and lack of consciouness arguments are pretty weak. Parasite doesn't wash...many people agonize over having an abortion, no one agonizes over having a tapeworm removed. Likewise, consciouness is way too nebulous to use as a standard for life...no way to prove anyone is conscious but yourself.
I think I hold with the Catholics on the vegatative state issue...Sure you can hope for an eventual recovery, but there is no sin in allowing them to go peacefully if recovery is unlikely. I've put my money where my mouth is on that one, and I feel pretty strongly about it, but it's just an opinion.
Same with the father issue. The woman has to bear the burdens, risks, and responsibilites of pregnancy/childbirth...It's not something she can avoid. If she feels wholly unequal to that, she should not be forced to go through with it just because the father is keen on the idea of having a baby. Again, just an opinion.
The problem is when disapproval makes it into legislation, and budget allocations. On campus housing with daycare for young mothers who still want to go to college? Don't bet on it. Financial assistance to help you make it through what should not be (but is) the difficult of having a child? Not much.
It's hard in this country to have a child out of wedlock, especially if you're young. No one makes it easy, and you take a lot of crap from holier-than-thou types who see that child as proof that you're some sort of moral faliure, and not as proof that you took the hard road and didn't have an abortion.
My opinions:
1)Permanently vegetative people are no longer people...They are corpses being kept alive by technology.
2)Fathers should have say in abortion when they can carry the baby to term (I am a father)
Point your ire somewhere else. I am firmly pro-choice.
I'm also a recovering philosophy major, and once upon a time I sat down and tried to work my belief in a woman's right to an abortion into a moral framework, and it doesn't fit.
Toss all the rhetoric, okay. Here's my logic:
If a human life has value, then, logically, a potential human life has value...You can't really get value from something that has no value. That doesn't make sense. Something may become more valuable, but there had to be something there to begin with (The pro-lifers would say God puts the value there...I think this is why they don't mind killing people from other religions).
But aren't sperm cells potential life? Can sperm cells ever become life without intervention (e.g. an egg)? No, so no. By the same token an egg is also not potential life, because, left to its own devices, it's nothing.
But sperm plus egg equals a mass of cells, that, left to its own devices (barring accident, intervention, etc), will become a human life. Therefore, if human life has value, then that little wad of cells must have value, and to take an active step to abort those cells is to destroy something of value.
Therefore abortion has a negative moral component.
The only weakness in the argument is that human life has value. I just assume that, and a number of atheistic materialists would say, "Life is just meat that moves, with no intrinsic value." I don't agree with this (I value being alive, therefore life has value q.e.d) but I can understand how my argument isn't really compelling if you hold that point of view.
I'm sure, by this point, all the non-objectivists out there are losing their shit. Before you start composing irate replies, allow me to continue.
I believe this, and I still think women should be allowed to have abortions if they so choose. It is not the governments role to protect the rights of potential citizens. It is not the governments role to make moral judgements in cases where there is no conflict between actual citizens. And this act, while having a clear moral component, is directed at a potential human life, and the concerns of a potential life are not sufficient to warrant any restriction of personal freedom.
So, in a nutshell, the hard core pro-choicers comfortable assertion that abortion is without a moral element is questionable (assuming human life has value), and the pro-lifers view that potential life is the same as actual life is unsupported by practice, legal precident, or any actual evidence.
In the end, both sides are trying to gain an ethical/moral high ground, and both sides are willfully distorting the issue in an attempt to make the other side into monsters. Abortion is not a good thing, but in our society, as it stands, it's a necessary evil, and we should all work toward a time when the only abortions are abortions of medical necessity.
There is always another exception to the rule. Frankly, I'm not into their being a rule at all. I think abortions are a bad thing and I think they're a symptom of a problem in our society that we need to deal with. I would like to see the symptom go away, but I don't think that's going to happen until we deal with the problem.
Trying to stop the symptom, without adressing the problem is madness. Let people get abortions, but try to reduce the need for them...Trying to reduce it to moral and immoral abortions is absurd.
I'm not demonizing anyone.
However, I do believe that the bulk of our societies sex issues have a religious root, and I don't think that adding more religion is the answer, especially since their method of dealing with the problem is basically to deny it exists until a child is born.
The first step is to slow down the number of unwanted pregnancies, and that takes education, and that takes contraception, and since the church is anti-sex ed, and opposed to providing any form of contraception, and only promotes the use of abstinence/"Please god don't let me get pregnant", I don't see how getting them more involved is going to help in any way.
You have to have available birth control because a percentage of young people will gleefully start having sex as soon as their hormones kick into gear...No amount of education will stop this. This will also help adults make intelligent decisions about reproduction.
And when I say education, I mean education. I don't mean "teach abstinence". I mean "this is sex, this is what goes on, this is what you can catch, and this is how you can do it safely." I'm talking a significant course here, not just a day out of gym class.
The only way to help people make the right descision, is to make sure they have access to all the information. They may go through the whole class and not learn a damn thing, but they have a much better chance than if you'd tried to keep them in ignorance all along.
Nice rhetoric, but church-funded social services are not the answer, they are part of the problem.
This is an area where secular services are needed...We know the churches views on contraception ("Abstinence is good enough for anyone"), sex education ("Don't have sex until you're married, and don't enjoy it or you'll go to hell"), and on adoption ("Even though you're a slut and a whore for having this baby, we'll be willing to take it away from you and raise it to be the sort of kid that you're not").
Frankly, what this issue needs more than anything else is for the goddamn moralists to take a step back. This is a practical problem: women are getting pregant who don't want to be pregnant. There are practical solutions: help women not to get pregnant unless they want to be pregnant. This means education, and healthcare, and a whole bunch of things that the chruch cannot and will not provide.
If we provide these things, the numbers of abortions will decline, and isn't that the fricking point?
What part of "pro-choice" was unclear to you? I'm not in the business of telling anyone what to do with their body. I think abortions have a negative moral component, but I think a lot of things have a negative moral component, and I'm generally not in favor of frivolous laws governing behavior that is not detrimental to society.
And, for the record, screaming "Rape and Incest" in a discussion about abortion, is like screaming "Nazis" whenever you're talking about war. You're not adding anything to the discussion.
I call bullshit. You clearly have never had a kid, because the absolute first instinct is to go for the kids. Rationality never even enters into the picture.
And frankly, it's much easier to carry two kids than one adult.
So you guys are stepping up and adopting all the unwanted babies? And you're working to reduce the social/societal consequences on young unwed mothers who carry children to term?
I'm pro-choice, but I do think there is a negative moral angle on abortion. I don't think any truly advanced society should have a place for abortion; education, contraception, and societal support for young mothers should completely remove the need for any such thing.
But you know what? The same right wing that preaches so hard against abortion, also preaches against practical sex ed, available contraception for minors, and social services for unwed mothers...not to mention the moral stigma they attach to young unwed mothers.
So don't talk about how you're adopting some of the babies who actually got born...That's the smallest part of what you need to be doing.
Worked at a place where they monitored my internet usage really strictly. Got called up to the HR directors office, because I was, "On the internet every 15 minutes for a week".
Same week I was running a long and really boring set of database reports. Bring up the report, change a few things, set up the distribution list, start the report, check slashdot while waiting for the report to finish, make sure the report ran correctly, put report in distribution queue, rinse, repeat. The reports all built on each other, so there was no way I could move on until I was sure the previous one had finished correctly.
I did two departments worth of reports, and ended up having to wait to do the last few reports because I finished second and fifth out of ten damn departments, and I know for a fact those jokers who finished sixth through tenth never got talked to for their damn "excessive" internet usage.
Little mental breaks during compile/run time are beneficial for the overall quality of my work. Goddamn smokers get 3 breaks an hour when they're not even doing something where a break is dictated by the workflow. If there is a problem with my productivity, fine, say so, but if I'm as productive or more than the bulk of my coworkers, then shut the hell up.
Yea, I've seen a lot of that stuff in my life...I had pretty much the opposite situation, which meant, of course, that I dicked around, got mediocre grades, got in trouble, ran amok, etc.
Then I hit a point where I got concerned about the rest of my life, got my crap together, and started making an effort...I was around 16 or 17 (I understand this is not common).
So I go to college, and I do fine, because I'd always had to motivate myself, and I'd always had to prioritize my time, and I'd always had freedom so it didn't go to my head, and I understood how to balance life and work...Whereas all the "good" kids who people had been held up to me as a positive example didn't perform half as well when they were out of range of supervision for the first time in their lives.
There is definitely a happy medium. You need to give your kid enough freedom so that they understand how to make their own descisions, and how to accept the consequences for those descisions, but they also need rules.
On the one side, I can see making the argument, "Hey, I only did what my boss told me to do" and he may even be able to win in court with that argument.
However, I think that a technical person should have damn well known better than to do something like that, and I think that if such an individual was working under me, I very well might can him right along with his boss just for making a seriously poor judgement call.