I believe the reasoning. I just don't think that reasoning is a sufficient justification for law.
Creating a fair law is a difficult balancing process. Laws that are too simple will be unfair, because they will invoke punishment disproportionate to the crime. (The simplest criminal punishment system, after all, would be to kill all felons immediately upon conviction). Life is complex, and overly simple laws won't produce justice in complex situations.
But an overly complex law is unfair too, because it's basically guaranteed to be biased in favor of the intelligent, who are smart enough to understand exactly how far they can push it before crossing the line. (Of course, in reality it's actually the intelligence of your lawyer that matters, so complex laws favor the rich, who can afford the best lawyers)
There's no easy answer. Claiming that abortion is murder because it kills a human is reaching for an easy answer to a complex problem. (It seems that even most anti-abortion protestors will make an exception for a 15-year old who was raped by her own brother...)
(For another example of oversimplification, look at how the USA Bush administration tries to categorize everyone as "You're either with us, or against us", ignoring possibilities like "I support your goals, but not your methods")
So for people that cite the PATRIOT USA Act as a reason to vote against Bush they're basically barking mad.
No. The president has a part in making laws; he has to sign it into law. Bush shares blame for PATRIOT, because he signed it. But the president has no formal way to help repealing a law (except for signing the repealing act, which is something Kerry would probably do, although he'll never be president, and the Republican congress would never send it to him)
The facts are pretty simple. We had been saying for years that any WMD programs Saddam did have were moved out of country.
Even if Operation Iraqi Freedom was really about terrorism and WMD, it was still about oil.
The only reason the USA has to fear Iraq WMD is because it went to war against Iraq following their Kuwaiti invasion. The only reason it did that was because of Kuwait's oil. If not for that, Kuwait's problem would've gotten no more attention than Sudan is getting now.
Similarly, the reason Al Quaeda attacked the USA is because of their troops stationing in Saudi Arabia. Which are there because of Iraqi... so it comes back to oil, again.
(The only other reason besides oil that an Islamic terrorist would target the USA is Zionism. And it's hard to guess if the foreign policy would continue to be so pro-Zionist if Israel didn't distract the Arab states from raising oil prices)
This is the little known but infamous interview where he claims that Pakistan is a democracy!
According to the CIA, Pakistan is a republic. Of course, both the USA and USSR were republics, so that word is nearly content-free in terms of describing a government. But it is funny in light of the number of forum trolls who claim "The USA is a republic, not a democracy".
Fedora and Knoppix are more than 3 years younger than Debian stable.
But my hardware is 3-9 years older than Debian stable. And the testing/unstable distributions can't deal with it either.
It's not a matter of old vs new; it's that the kernel configuration choices Debian has made are not compatible with everything. (They've just announced a freeze on their "sarge" installer- I checked, it has the same failures)
Google for Biosphere II. It's tougher than one might think.
Yes, it's very hard. But however tough it may be, terraforming Mars is 10,000 times tougher.
PS. The Biosphere project is irrelevant. It depends on solar energy, which is something that a Mars base would have, but that would be lacking for the 2 years following a major asteroid strike on earth. (That's the whole reasoning behind global extinction events- dust blocks sunlight) An earth-based survivability vault would need only stored food + water supplies for 3 years, and then plenty of tools to restart agriculture topside. A long-termed contained ecosystem isn't what they want.
Meaning that he did and would vote for the illegal occupation of Iraq
You're ignoring all the Kerry quotes I repeated about "seeking UN approval". If a UN mandate doesn't make an operation legal, then what does?
And saying that you're willing to give the President the authority to attack a sovereign foreign nation
The US president has had authority to attack Iraq continuously since 1991. The Gulf War never ended, remember? That authority had been occasionally invoked by Clinton during his tenure.
are just as keen on foreign wars and regime change in other countries as the Republicans
There's nothing to "reveal". That's been their stated platform, for a while. The Democrats are pro-nation building (but against risking US troops). The Republicans are anti-nation building, but lying about it.
He's anti civil rights because either: 1) he's a chickenshit liar as you claim
All Kerry has said is that he opposes gay marriage. But... so do you. It's possible to be anti-gay marriage and pro-civil rights at the same time, by being universally anti-marriage. Kerry hasn't taken that position, because it would be electoral suicide.
(Similar to all the Republican governors that win elections in Democrat states, by convientently forgetting they have opinions on abortion and death penalty)
he's just sneakier than good ol' Dubya
No, Dubya is far sneakier, as are the Republicans in general. (Or maybe it's not really that Bush is wily himself, but his handlers are). Bush ran as a small-government, anti-nation building, pro-Christian candidate, and he's reversed himself on all three, while managing to convince the media that Kerry is the flip-flopper.
Fundamentally, the Democrats are the party that serves the majority of voters, and the Republicans are the party that serves the rich minority. They use that money advantage to convince non-rich voters to support them, voting against their own economic interest by inflating the importance of sexual regulations.
Kerry is going to lose.
True. The USA's voters will get the president they deserve.
I can imagine doing anything else would be a fair hit on performance.
No it wouldn't. In particular, if there ever was an application where zeroing out the first 32 bits of an integer was an obstruction, they could just decide to represent everything in 128 bit all the time, for that application only.
We all know a biosphere-killing rock is headed our way sometime soon
Earth after a global-extinction level asteroid hit is still a more habitable place than Mars right now.
If you're really afraid of an asteroid wiping out humanity, then build a dozen self-sustaining Vaults. The'd be done in 3 years, at a fraction of the cost of "terraforming" Mars.
Presumably, the way to get new lines is to get some sperm and egg donations, perform some invitro fertilization, then harvest the resulting embryos.
You don't even have to go that far- there's no need for researchers to solicit sperm or egg donations. In-vitro fertilization happens thousands of times per year, producing about 0 to 7 embyros each time. Then those are sequentially implanted in the uterus, each having a 20% chance of success.
With luck, the first or second attempt will be successful, often leaving behind 2-5 embryos that aren't needed. They're kept frozen for a while to see if the mother wants any more children, and if not, they're incinerated and thrown out with the biohazardous waste.
All stem-cell researchers would need to do is get permission from some test-tube parents to recycle extra embryos that were slated for destruction anyhow.
in which one of the questions was "What do you think about McCain adopting a black baby?" (or something to that effect, in reference to McCain adopting a child from Bangladesh).
The word "adopt" wasn't in the poll. That would've been a lot less negative. By just saying he "has" a child, they imply he's the biological father, and thus not only betrayed his wife, but fled from child support.
. If Americans start buying price-controlled drugs overseas and importing them, the bottom will fall out of drug research.
No. In that case, the drug companies will simply no longer sell to Canada anymore. If the US starts allowing drug re-importation (in significant quanity), then drugs will no longer be sold to price-controlling nations. If they want them, they've have to wait in line at a USA pharmacy and pay the same as anyone else.
(of course, after a few weeks of that, Canada would be forced to rescind the price controls, and they can start placing orders again)
Basing a decision on the existence/nonexistence of something outside of our universe is foolish.
Theists hold that God exists inside our universe. ("God is everywhere")
Is the embryo a human simply because it has the potential of becoming a human?
By the simplest possible definition, an embryo is a member of the species homo sapien; a human. That follows from Occam's Razor, because assuming a line must be drawn, the least-fuzzy place to draw it is at conception.
Sperm & eggs are organs of humans, not humans themselves. Post-partum babies are undeniably human. In between a change must occur. It can't be birth, since that's a quick physical alteration that can be surgically induced at any time. It can't be some stage of growth, because that's a continuous aggregation. No, it must be when the sperm implanted in the ova.
Someone searching for the simplest possible consistent laws will have to say that murder is the killing of a human, that embryos are human, and thus abortion is murder.
"For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, elegant, and wrong." - H.L. Mencken
the USA PATRIOT Act (he helped write part of it, he voted for it, he won't repeal it)
If he becomes President, then repealing laws is completely outside his power. Only by remaining Senator would he have the chance to start a repeal.
the Occupation and Invasion of Iraq (he voted for it
False. Many newspapers have reported this in their headlines, but they made an inaccurate interpretation of his specific statement. Kerry didn't say he would've voted for the war; he said, "Knowning what we know now, yes, I would have voted for the authority".
Giving the President the authority to attack Iraq is not the same as telling him to attack it, and absolutely not the same as telling him to attack it in the moronically blundering way he did. (There is a distinction between "the war", the specific one which Bush fought, and "a war" which a marginally competent commander might've lead)
Kerry voted for that authority to allow Pres Bush to support a UN ultimatum against Iraq, not to attack in defiance of the international body that had previously been rubber-stamping all US agression towards Iraq for the past 12 years. His own words at that time made this distinction very clear:
In giving the President this authority, I expect him to fulfill the commitments he has made to the American people in recent days--to work with the United Nations Security Council to adopt a new resolution
The only way to fault Kerry on that is for expecting too much of Pres Bush.
Gay-marriage: he's against it
That's actually a place where he's lying to increase electability on the national level. Really, Kerry supports de-facto gay marriage (not with the name "marriage", but with all the legal rights and obligations thereof). He's just not willing to say that on the record, because it would ruin him.
Anyway, Bush is completely and undeniable anti-gay-marriage, so how can you use this position to try picturing Kerry as more Hitler-like?
Yes, "stable" in Debian is exactly what you'd expect. It's solid as a rock,
Actually no. I have 6 pieces of hardware that work fine in Fedora, Knoppix, or most kinds of Linux, but that Debian stable can't cope with at all. (Not all bleeding edge stuff, either). And I don't mean simply doesn't recognize- but recognizes, and operates wrongly.
"Remember the Maine", this is not the first time this sort of thing has happened.
Nor the last. (In fact, the Maine and Tonkin incidents are quite similar to each other, but different from Pearl Harbor- in that at Pearl Harbor, an actual enemy was present)
sig: America has never gone to war against a country that has McDonalds restaurants
That's only true if you consider Japan to be the last country the USA warred against. (Since it was the last time Congress officially declared war). Since then, the USA has attacked Bosnian cities hosting active McDonalds.
Nope. "Rich" means wealthier than average, but it's up to us what group that average is measured against. A poor American may have more money than a rich Chinese...
In particular, if you choose definitions so that the poor aren't really human, then all humans can be rich.
Or, against dead humans from earlier times. It's impossible for a majority of people to be tall, yet it's also true that USA residents have gotten much taller in the past 200 years.
Nothing you wrote refutes the claim that businessmen had it good in Nazi Germany. Yes, the economy was based on war... so what? It was still lucrative! The invasion of France was VERY profitable... it's like the military providing valuable service to business, and for free.
(Compare against how much military spending the USA has used to protect the investments of Exxon & the other petroleum importation firms)
Speer himself, later Minister for Economy under the Nazi-Regime, noted, that this economic policy could only have one goal: war
That's a really good point to consider next to the USA's push to lower taxes and drive up the deficit. So what's the goal of Bush's economic policy?
(Hey, in 50 years, the USA might be 100% in hock to foreign financiers. But with this kind of military, they won't dare collect!)
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you believe the reasoning you used or not
I believe the reasoning. I just don't think that reasoning is a sufficient justification for law.
Creating a fair law is a difficult balancing process. Laws that are too simple will be unfair, because they will invoke punishment disproportionate to the crime. (The simplest criminal punishment system, after all, would be to kill all felons immediately upon conviction). Life is complex, and overly simple laws won't produce justice in complex situations.
But an overly complex law is unfair too, because it's basically guaranteed to be biased in favor of the intelligent, who are smart enough to understand exactly how far they can push it before crossing the line. (Of course, in reality it's actually the intelligence of your lawyer that matters, so complex laws favor the rich, who can afford the best lawyers)
There's no easy answer. Claiming that abortion is murder because it kills a human is reaching for an easy answer to a complex problem. (It seems that even most anti-abortion protestors will make an exception for a 15-year old who was raped by her own brother...)
(For another example of oversimplification, look at how the USA Bush administration tries to categorize everyone as "You're either with us, or against us", ignoring possibilities like "I support your goals, but not your methods")
So for people that cite the PATRIOT USA Act as a reason to vote against Bush they're basically barking mad.
No. The president has a part in making laws; he has to sign it into law. Bush shares blame for PATRIOT, because he signed it. But the president has no formal way to help repealing a law (except for signing the repealing act, which is something Kerry would probably do, although he'll never be president, and the Republican congress would never send it to him)
I'm not certain whether I agree or disagree with you, but the irony of your sig with regards to your reasoning is too interesting to let go.
I have no sig. That was my closing comment. Any irony was intentional.
The facts are pretty simple. We had been saying for years that any WMD programs Saddam did have were moved out of country.
Even if Operation Iraqi Freedom was really about terrorism and WMD, it was still about oil.
The only reason the USA has to fear Iraq WMD is because it went to war against Iraq following their Kuwaiti invasion. The only reason it did that was because of Kuwait's oil. If not for that, Kuwait's problem would've gotten no more attention than Sudan is getting now.
Similarly, the reason Al Quaeda attacked the USA is because of their troops stationing in Saudi Arabia. Which are there because of Iraqi... so it comes back to oil, again.
(The only other reason besides oil that an Islamic terrorist would target the USA is Zionism. And it's hard to guess if the foreign policy would continue to be so pro-Zionist if Israel didn't distract the Arab states from raising oil prices)
This is the little known but infamous interview where he claims that Pakistan is a democracy!
According to the CIA, Pakistan is a republic. Of course, both the USA and USSR were republics, so that word is nearly content-free in terms of describing a government. But it is funny in light of the number of forum trolls who claim "The USA is a republic, not a democracy".
OMG do he look incompetent.
Anyone who likes to giggle at presidential incompetence owes it to herself to watch the infamous "tribal sovereignty" video.
Fedora and Knoppix are more than 3 years younger than Debian stable.
But my hardware is 3-9 years older than Debian stable. And the testing/unstable distributions can't deal with it either.
It's not a matter of old vs new; it's that the kernel configuration choices Debian has made are not compatible with everything. (They've just announced a freeze on their "sarge" installer- I checked, it has the same failures)
I don't suppose I need to point out to
You sure don't.
Google for Biosphere II. It's tougher than one might think.
Yes, it's very hard. But however tough it may be, terraforming Mars is 10,000 times tougher.
PS. The Biosphere project is irrelevant. It depends on solar energy, which is something that a Mars base would have, but that would be lacking for the 2 years following a major asteroid strike on earth. (That's the whole reasoning behind global extinction events- dust blocks sunlight) An earth-based survivability vault would need only stored food + water supplies for 3 years, and then plenty of tools to restart agriculture topside. A long-termed contained ecosystem isn't what they want.
Meaning that he did and would vote for the illegal occupation of Iraq
You're ignoring all the Kerry quotes I repeated about "seeking UN approval". If a UN mandate doesn't make an operation legal, then what does?
And saying that you're willing to give the President the authority to attack a sovereign foreign nation
The US president has had authority to attack Iraq continuously since 1991. The Gulf War never ended, remember? That authority had been occasionally invoked by Clinton during his tenure.
are just as keen on foreign wars and regime change in other countries as the Republicans
There's nothing to "reveal". That's been their stated platform, for a while. The Democrats are pro-nation building (but against risking US troops). The Republicans are anti-nation building, but lying about it.
He's anti civil rights because either: 1) he's a chickenshit liar as you claim
All Kerry has said is that he opposes gay marriage. But... so do you. It's possible to be anti-gay marriage and pro-civil rights at the same time, by being universally anti-marriage. Kerry hasn't taken that position, because it would be electoral suicide.
(Similar to all the Republican governors that win elections in Democrat states, by convientently forgetting they have opinions on abortion and death penalty)
he's just sneakier than good ol' Dubya
No, Dubya is far sneakier, as are the Republicans in general. (Or maybe it's not really that Bush is wily himself, but his handlers are). Bush ran as a small-government, anti-nation building, pro-Christian candidate, and he's reversed himself on all three, while managing to convince the media that Kerry is the flip-flopper.
Fundamentally, the Democrats are the party that serves the majority of voters, and the Republicans are the party that serves the rich minority. They use that money advantage to convince non-rich voters to support them, voting against their own economic interest by inflating the importance of sexual regulations.
Kerry is going to lose.
True. The USA's voters will get the president they deserve.
I can imagine doing anything else would be a fair hit on performance.
No it wouldn't. In particular, if there ever was an application where zeroing out the first 32 bits of an integer was an obstruction, they could just decide to represent everything in 128 bit all the time, for that application only.
We all know a biosphere-killing rock is headed our way sometime soon
Earth after a global-extinction level asteroid hit is still a more habitable place than Mars right now.
If you're really afraid of an asteroid wiping out humanity, then build a dozen self-sustaining Vaults. The'd be done in 3 years, at a fraction of the cost of "terraforming" Mars.
Presumably, the way to get new lines is to get some sperm and egg donations, perform some invitro fertilization, then harvest the resulting embryos.
You don't even have to go that far- there's no need for researchers to solicit sperm or egg donations. In-vitro fertilization happens thousands of times per year, producing about 0 to 7 embyros each time. Then those are sequentially implanted in the uterus, each having a 20% chance of success.
With luck, the first or second attempt will be successful, often leaving behind 2-5 embryos that aren't needed. They're kept frozen for a while to see if the mother wants any more children, and if not, they're incinerated and thrown out with the biohazardous waste.
All stem-cell researchers would need to do is get permission from some test-tube parents to recycle extra embryos that were slated for destruction anyhow.
in which one of the questions was "What do you think about McCain adopting a black baby?" (or something to that effect, in reference to McCain adopting a child from Bangladesh).
The word "adopt" wasn't in the poll. That would've been a lot less negative. By just saying he "has" a child, they imply he's the biological father, and thus not only betrayed his wife, but fled from child support.
. If Americans start buying price-controlled drugs overseas and importing them, the bottom will fall out of drug research.
No. In that case, the drug companies will simply no longer sell to Canada anymore. If the US starts allowing drug re-importation (in significant quanity), then drugs will no longer be sold to price-controlling nations. If they want them, they've have to wait in line at a USA pharmacy and pay the same as anyone else.
(of course, after a few weeks of that, Canada would be forced to rescind the price controls, and they can start placing orders again)
Basing a decision on the existence/nonexistence of something outside of our universe is foolish.
Theists hold that God exists inside our universe. ("God is everywhere")
Is the embryo a human simply because it has the potential of becoming a human?
By the simplest possible definition, an embryo is a member of the species homo sapien; a human. That follows from Occam's Razor, because assuming a line must be drawn, the least-fuzzy place to draw it is at conception.
Sperm & eggs are organs of humans, not humans themselves. Post-partum babies are undeniably human. In between a change must occur. It can't be birth, since that's a quick physical alteration that can be surgically induced at any time. It can't be some stage of growth, because that's a continuous aggregation. No, it must be when the sperm implanted in the ova.
Someone searching for the simplest possible consistent laws will have to say that murder is the killing of a human, that embryos are human, and thus abortion is murder.
"For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, elegant, and wrong." - H.L. Mencken
If he becomes President, then repealing laws is completely outside his power. Only by remaining Senator would he have the chance to start a repeal.
the Occupation and Invasion of Iraq (he voted for it
False. Many newspapers have reported this in their headlines, but they made an inaccurate interpretation of his specific statement. Kerry didn't say he would've voted for the war; he said, "Knowning what we know now, yes, I would have voted for the authority".
Giving the President the authority to attack Iraq is not the same as telling him to attack it, and absolutely not the same as telling him to attack it in the moronically blundering way he did. (There is a distinction between "the war", the specific one which Bush fought, and "a war" which a marginally competent commander might've lead)
Kerry voted for that authority to allow Pres Bush to support a UN ultimatum against Iraq, not to attack in defiance of the international body that had previously been rubber-stamping all US agression towards Iraq for the past 12 years. His own words at that time made this distinction very clear:
The only way to fault Kerry on that is for expecting too much of Pres Bush.
Gay-marriage: he's against it
That's actually a place where he's lying to increase electability on the national level. Really, Kerry supports de-facto gay marriage (not with the name "marriage", but with all the legal rights and obligations thereof). He's just not willing to say that on the record, because it would ruin him.
Anyway, Bush is completely and undeniable anti-gay-marriage, so how can you use this position to try picturing Kerry as more Hitler-like?
Yes, "stable" in Debian is exactly what you'd expect. It's solid as a rock,
Actually no. I have 6 pieces of hardware that work fine in Fedora, Knoppix, or most kinds of Linux, but that Debian stable can't cope with at all. (Not all bleeding edge stuff, either). And I don't mean simply doesn't recognize- but recognizes, and operates wrongly.
germany, in WW2, attacked/invaded had major economic ties with germany
Those "economic ties" were often in the form of unbearable reparations imposed for the damage of the Great War.
Slaves have major economic ties with their masters, which has no bearing on their willingness to revolt.
"Remember the Maine", this is not the first time this sort of thing has happened.
Nor the last. (In fact, the Maine and Tonkin incidents are quite similar to each other, but different from Pearl Harbor- in that at Pearl Harbor, an actual enemy was present)
sig: America has never gone to war against a country that has McDonalds restaurants
That's only true if you consider Japan to be the last country the USA warred against. (Since it was the last time Congress officially declared war). Since then, the USA has attacked Bosnian cities hosting active McDonalds.
I mainly refuted the statement, that the economy was healthy.
But their economy WAS healthy, but every normal metric. Their military defensibility was bad, but that's not "the economy".
You might as well say the US economy is bad, because it depends on environmental pollution.
Also, where do you get off saying the country always bullies everyone? Last I checked we waited until Pearl Harbor to get involved with WW2.
Pearl Harbor was a response to USA bullying Japan and blocking their petroleum importation, which was serious economic warfare.
Why would they want a better search engine since they would be censoring a lot of it anyways.
Better search engine => better classification of page content => automated censorship.
price growth MUST BE at zero or the economy will eventually be unsustainable
"Free-market" does not imply sustainability.
To think that economic growth can continue unabated is autistic.
Yes. Judging a nation's economy by it's "growth" is little better than evaluating a startup business on "burn rate".
Period.
Nope. "Rich" means wealthier than average, but it's up to us what group that average is measured against. A poor American may have more money than a rich Chinese...
In particular, if you choose definitions so that the poor aren't really human, then all humans can be rich.
Or, against dead humans from earlier times. It's impossible for a majority of people to be tall, yet it's also true that USA residents have gotten much taller in the past 200 years.
Actually not.
Nothing you wrote refutes the claim that businessmen had it good in Nazi Germany. Yes, the economy was based on war... so what? It was still lucrative! The invasion of France was VERY profitable... it's like the military providing valuable service to business, and for free.
(Compare against how much military spending the USA has used to protect the investments of Exxon & the other petroleum importation firms)
Speer himself, later Minister for Economy under the Nazi-Regime, noted, that this economic policy could only have one goal: war
That's a really good point to consider next to the USA's push to lower taxes and drive up the deficit. So what's the goal of Bush's economic policy?
(Hey, in 50 years, the USA might be 100% in hock to foreign financiers. But with this kind of military, they won't dare collect!)