Really? So has the press EVER been objective in this country? Objective enough to report neutrally on the Gulf of Tonkin? The USS Maine? The RMS Lusitania? Hell, bring it closer to nerd home: Operation Sundevil, Kevin Mitnick, PGP, Internet porn. Even in the days of the Fairness Doctrine outright government lies were reported as objective truth (see Vietnam). If the press isn't objective, why be so naive to expect it to be so?
I really really wanted to do CL for the rest of my days as a programmer-turned-engineer (and now have the freedom to code applications just how I like them) but dangit if the libraries just SUCK. How to send email to a SMTP server that requires TLS? How to do threads? How to do a basic GUI? Serve a web page? How to package it up?
And by golly how to write multi-platform code (e.g. Windows/Mac/Unix)? It doesn't help for c.l.l to say "just use the functions in CLTL/HyperSpec" when you need to do HTTP sockets or threads or GUI or... and there isn't a single decent FOSS Lisp implementation that actually runs on Windows/Mac/Unix.
I finally found my answer though: Clojure.
There's something pretty cool with using Lisp to wrap a Java/COM bridge, pulling data into JFreeChart and analyzing it with Commons Math.
What we need are better tools, better understanding of threads and an acceptance that a single application can't always take advantage of threads effectively.
Or we could begin banging away at Clojure with its persistent immutable objects and direct language support for concurrent transactions.
So you just made the case to keep using Windows too.
No, I made the case to keep using OpenOffice.org. The application's interface has far greater impact on the user experience than the underlying operating system. Operating systems have the same general WIMP interface now, and most Linux distros work much closer like Windows than not out of the box.
Is it different? Yes. But so is OpenOffice. All the icons are different in Open Office from Office 2003. All of the menus are different. So I guess nobody should swtich to Oo3 either lest they get lost and confused.
The difference from Office 2003 to Office 2007 isn't just some icons with a new theme. It's "no way to get the menus back (even though 2003 menu keystrokes still work)", "no chart wizard in Excel (so scatterplots are completely wrong every. single. time. you hit the chart icon)", and "no VBA in Office 2008 for Mac". These are deal breakers if you actually used Office 97-2003 for more than the occasional letter or trivial spreadsheet.
I don't want New For The Sake Of New, I want New Because It's Seriously Better, and I'm not seeing much Seriously Better in the ribbon. OOo isn't the best possible interface, but it's decent enough and gets the job done without too much fuss and that lets me focus on the Real Work I'm using it for.
Change happens. Stop being a troglodyte and bitching about it being different.
Office 2007 still recognizes Office 97/etc. keystrokes, but provides no means for you to know what they are. However, if you remember them you can still mitigate some of the problems with the crappy ribbon.
The OP claims that "most users" will find the new MSOffice more intuitive, but that excludes several categories of users that are either really big (the first I listed is basically every office worker in the US over 20 years old, the second is most serious users of Excel) or otherwise important (the third is all Mac users who upgraded to Mac Office 2008 and found no VBA support).
Particularly, the new interface of MSOffice makes it much easier and intuitive to use (for most users) compared to any other office automation software.
If by "most users" you mean:
* People who have never used MSOffice sometime in the last 14 years. * Excel power-users who have never used the chart wizard. * Mac users who have never needed to interoperate with Windows MSOffice users who have VBA macros in their documents/spreadsheets. * People who have never gotten used to applications that use menus to organize major features.
For everyone else, the new MSOffice is very intuitive.
I think a lot of people might be looking at OOo because it is the only still-supported Office workalike that works mostly like MSOffice 97/XP/2003. For those of us forced to use MSOffice 2007 it's a no-brainer. Plus OOo can be installed alongside MSOffice 2007 with no problems.
I've noticed that often happens with applications that use the system default Open/Save dialogs. Those dialogs (in Windows anyway) seem to use any of: the "current working directory", the "application startup directory", the "last saved directory", the "default saved directory" as starting places for the dialog when it comes up. And it's really easy for that dialog to come up with one of those locations the first time and different one the next.
OTOH, users are getting used to that behavior so it's hard to figure out how to change it to something everyone wants. If you're saving 10 Excel sheets you only want to change the destination directory on the first "Save As...", you'd like not to have to do it the remaining nine times.
Some of these features exist, some probably would be resisted, but I like #5 a lot, particularly if it could be customized by the end user such that "filing" translated to "managing a hierarchical file structure with metadata sprinkled throughout in some standardized fashion". So that you could (for example) say "Backup all my stored files to USB drive" and you'll get all the data you have ever worked on that computer.
If I had that feature, I would want an icon on the desktop called "Filing System" that would open up a full-featured interface for searching files in multiple views (all files tagged "Friends", all Documents, etc.) and also gave me a customization UI. On the desktop's right-click menu would be both a "File This Away..." (which would prompt for types and tags and then move the file appropriately) and also a "Filing System" menu which would have operations for archiving/backup, merge, purge, split, etc. Even have a "temporarily use" option so it would use the configuration from some other Filing System and do the right thing in that person's world.
That's really not a bad idea. Make a plug-in system and it could know what to do with iTunes/Amarok libraries, email, contacts, calendars, bookmarks, configuration settings, etc. You could conceivably carry your whole life on a memory stick and just "Temporarily Use" it anywhere you plugged it in.
In a nutshell, I regard government intervention as more of a last resort than you seem to. But that's a difference of pragmatic approach--not values.
But in this case it IS about values rather than pragmatism. If abortion is murder then its prevention (via all those things I listed) is a state function. Pro-life progressives should see that leaving the social safety net to the whims of private charities undermines the argument to criminalize abortion.
That analogy would work if it were the case that every time a child dies, it's involuntary manslaughter on the part of the parents. But that's absurd.
But every time a child dies there is an investigation as to the cause, and there are many ways children can die in which someone goes to jail for manslaughter. Treating pregnancy the same way IS absurd as you say, but it's a necessary outcome to protecting the life of every zygote. It may be that in practice a pro-life regime would treat miscarriages the same as childhood accidents whereby serious negligence would have to occur for someone to go to jail, but nonetheless every failed pregnancy would need to be investigated just the same as every child fatality. To do less undermines the argument that zygotes are children.
My last word: as cold as "it's not murder, but the embryo won't feel it anyway" may sound, how much colder does "we could end all these murders, but it costs too much" sound?
Did you mean to say, "it is murder, but the embryo won't feel it anyway"?
I was referring back to my earlier statement that when a scientist says "the fetus won't feel it anyway" it comes out pretty cold and harsh. By this particular statement I meant: a pro-choice progressive can sound callous when they say "abortion isn't murder, but hey at least the fetus doesn't feel it anyway," but OTOH a pro-life NON-progressive sounds even worse to me when they say "abortion is totally murder, but it would cost way too much for us to fix it."
(Sorry I would respond to the rest, but I've got to get off to bed...)
On miscarriages, we are obviously in agreement: they are a tragedy no one should have to go through. Prosecuting the woman who suffered though it is obviously horribly wrong, but I still maintain that that is precisely the logical conclusion of believing that an embryo is equivalent to a 4 year old child.
My question was more along the lines of, "Where do pro-choice people get off thinking that being progressive implies being pro-choice?"
Progressive is just a label for a rather complex movement and most people who call themselves such can't fully agree on its definition. Some people would say that progressive implies secular humanism, or atheism, etc. Me, I tend to view it as 1) belief in human agency above authoritarianism, 2) belief that all humans are fundamentally similar regardless of sex/race/etc., 3) belief that science is the best way of knowing the world, and 4) focus on positive outcomes over lockstep ideology. These values come into conflict when discussing abortion because women and men ARE NOT the same biologically, and the scientific understanding that a zygote will feel nothing if removed seems very cold and harsh when spoken bluntly. It's an icky issue all around.
I'm not one to kick every pro-lifer out of the progressive tent if they are progressive on essentially every other thing, but in truth I really haven't seen many pro-lifers that ARE progressive about everything else outside of the sex issues. (By pro-life I don't mean people who say "I'm against abortion, but I don't want to outlaw it": that's actually a pro-choice position.) Abortion is a pretty serious litmus test, and most people I've met who actively seek its criminalization don't seem interested in promoting contraception, good sex education, a strong safety net for children, or gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans rights.
When you demonize the opposition by ignoring the premises of their view--as though the pro-life view can't be based on the idea that a child is being killed, whatever other factors are present for the mother--then I don't think you're even attempting rationality. Demonization & straw-man tactics makes things far easier for you. But they're rather inconsistent with your self-image of being a rational progressive.
When one looks at who is funneling the money into the pro-life movement, it's a Who's Who of reactionary theocrats. They set the tone, they fund the think tanks and position papers, they groom the lawyers-become-judges-become-Supreme Court-nominees. Progressives have been telling them for years that if they wanted to end abortion they could do it with good sex education and contraception access, but they have not been interested. That tells us that at that level they really aren't concerned about abortion-as-killing but about abortion-as-something-else. And "punishment for sex" is completely consistent with the standard pro-life arguments.
And BTW: pro-choice people don't believe that a child is punishment for sex, they are only pointing out that pro-life people act as though they do believe so.
Back on topic: Can you be pro-life and a progressive? Sure, why not? If you feel abortion is really murder, but you've got zero hangups on sex between consenting adults, then you should have no problem with the following:
1. Good sex education. (This also means actively being against slut-shaming.) 2. Readily available contraception. 3. Automatic state support for medical bills for pregnant women regardless of means. 4. Automatic state child support for all children regardless of means. 5. Streamlined adoption processes for the adoptive parents. 6. Much stronger family leave laws including paid time off for fathers. 7. Free sterilization for all.
Of course, I'm already in support of all of these items already because I DO want every child born to really be welcomed in this world. If I saw pro-lifers really agitate for these, I'd be willing to listen much more to everything else they had to say. But wh
This doesn't make any sense. The decision is about the fetus, not the mother.
The decision is about both, not one exclusively over the other. That's why in the beginning few weeks the woman has sole right to the decision, but in the last few weeks she has essentially no right to the decision.
If you accept the premise that abortion is murder, then men have just as much right to condemn it as they do the murder of anything else. And the impact on the mother's body (barring life threatening situations) is irrelevant. Morally, it is repugnant for me to kill another human being in order to avoid my own inconvenience, no matter what form that inconvenience takes. If I have to choose between someone else's life and losing a leg, the moral choice is clear. The only real moral question concerning abortion is: "Is a fetus a living individual?"
You're being inconsistent. You bar life threatening situations, then say it's OK to lose a leg to save someone, then talk about inconvenience. What is pregnancy to you? A minor inconvenient? Like losing a leg? The possibility of losing your life? Your whole argument can go any which way depending on how seriously YOU think your pregnancy might be. Which sounds a lot like... choice?
And you can't start right out by ignoring the existence of the pregnant woman and then argue around her; she is the one providing the life to that fetus. If you want the state to compel her to do that, you'd better have a seriously good reason that would be morally equivalent to having a man live though nine months with 10 IVs stuck all over his body. Saying "fetus == 4 year old child" would work, but then you have the consequence that since abortion is murder, then failure of a pregnancy FOR ANY REASON must be one of murder, manslaughter, or self defense. That means compelled investigations of ALL pregnancies to ensure no wrongdoing.
Or you could just acknowledge that we already know that a fetus isn't a 4 year old child. It's an embryo that can BECOME a 4 year old child if everything else works out for it.
And that is just horse-shit. Maybe that is how some view it, but there is a perfectly legitimate view point that a fetus is a human being, so abortion is murder. You want to dispute a fetus as human being, fine. But ascribing these paternalistic, morally repugnant ideals to the entire pro-life movement makes you sound like a shrill demagogue.
There are people in the movement and then there are movements. The people who fund the pro-life movement ARE this repugnant and paternalistic. They spend millions of dollars and their ultimate aim is to roll the clock back a hundred years. The people who show up at rallies and hold signs outside clinics are somewhere on a continuum between "just as morally repugnant as the leaders of the movement" and "pretty decent folks who are involved in their church". I don't blame these "shock troops" of the anti-abortion movement for their role, but that doesn't change the fact that they are in fact working for a system where babies belong to everyone but their mothers. And if I sound like a shill demagogue, maybe that's because the issue really is that simple.
Your straw-man about prosecuting mis-carriage as manslaughter doesn't really help, either. Only willful negligence really qualifies for manslaughter, regardless of whether the "victim" is a fetus or 4 year old. I bet a lot of people in the pro-life movement would love to be able to prosecute for manslaughter a mother that miscarries, for example, b/c she smoked 2 packs/day and drank a fifth/day while she knew she was pregnant.
It's not a straw man argument, it is the logical conclusion of asserting that a barely-implanted zygote is morally and legally equivalent to a 4 year old human being. And FWIW many members of the pro-life movement ARE interested in that level of control over pregnancy for exactly the reasons you stated yourself. Finally, manslaughter doesn't really take willful negligence: you
It's fairly frustrating to read such a long reply, which entirely ignored a fundamental part of the question I asked.
I re-read your question which was "Can someone explain to me just what, in the classical sense of the word, is more "Liberal" about being pro-abortion rights than being anti-abortion rights?"
And then you pre-defined the answer such that it can only come out one way:
"But if a fetus is fundamentally the same--if an abortion is homicide--..."
So what do you what an answer to? Why is a progressive pro choice? Or why -- in a fantasy universe where an implanted embryo is exactly the same as a 4-year-old child -- anyone would choose to kill it?
Sorry if you wanted the second, but I live in the universe where it is widely known that miscarriage isn't exactly the same as involuntary manslaughter.
Not trying to be racist is equivalent to being racist if one acts racist. If there isn't a single racist individual person acting racist there can be no racism, systemic or otherwise.
On one level that's true, but practically speaking it isn't. Practically speaking, everyone who grows up in a racist system is racist whether they "want to be" or not. THAT is the difference between a liberal (who recognizes this) and a libertarian (who truly believes that they can in fact not be racist). Not being racist in a racist system isn't just not lynching a black person when the opportunity arises, it is also working to ensure that EVERY subjective decision is made without regard to race even when the default "normal person way of doing it" is racist to some degree.
A banker can handle every loan application in a professional manner but statistically still favor white borrowers over black borrowers, it would only require them to discriminate in the cases of marginal applications. The only way to really combat this kind of systemic racism is with statistical tools to locate where it occurs and then train people NOT to trust their instincts in those cases. Treating a banker who doesn't realize that when they are making subjective decisions that those decisions are coming out disproportionately in favor of people who resemble them, treating that banker as the moral equivalent of a hooded KKK member won't solve anything.
Neither term has anything to do with with how social the individual should or can be.
I think the GP is trying to say that libertarians don't even acknowledge the existence of social constructs, e.g. the ability for systemic racism to occur even if no individuals are trying to be racist. Libertarians see the entire world as "one individual talking to another" multiplied a billion times, while liberals see it as individuals talking to each but limited by the social framework around them.
Can someone explain to me just what, in the classical sense of the word, is more "Liberal" about being pro-abortion rights than being anti-abortion rights?
I can't answer for "classical Liberal" since that seems to be a codeword for "modern libertarian" in America, but I can answer for "modern progressive". Simply put: abortion describes a continuum of actions between "entirely harmless" and "cold-blooded murder", feminist progressives know this, and America's 3-trimester system isn't all that bad in dividing that continuum into manageable pieces.
Abortion is ethically equivalent to asking someone to allow someone else to medically be "wired into" them for nine months to save their life. (This isn't my idea: psychologists and ethicists have actually proposed this scenario in studies and everyone -- regardless of stance on abortion -- agrees with the rest of this paragraph.) Obviously someone who volunteers to be "wired in" and changes their mind after 8.99 months is a murderer. Similarly coercing someone to be "wired in" at day 1 who didn't agree to be is a crime against them. Further delineation basically gets to this: someone who volunteered early on to do it *in full knowledge of what it entailed* is on the hook to stay wired in, but someone who chose not to should be left to go their own way.
The history of abortion is not a straight line leading to "progressive == pro-choice". In fact, first-wave feminists were largely *against* abortion because it was a dangerous procedure that was mostly forced on would-be mothers by the would-be fathers; the men did this to avoid the public embarrassment from affairs and legal issues from illegitimate children. Yet forced adoption was no better: many pregnant women were forced to give their children up against their wills to provide (mostly white) children to well-to-do childless couples. (Ironically enough, reversing the color of the would-be mother often reversed the desired outcome: many people believed that children of brown women should be aborted as often as possible, yet children of white women should be given to worthy families if they did not want them.) Basically in those days pregnancy was the norm for child-bearing women and both forced abortion and forced adoption were tools used to control them.
Fast-forward several decades and technology has seriously changed the game. Women and men marry more for love and shared values than because of unplanned pregnancies, and women can both be mothers and have careers. These days pregnancy is the exception rather than the rule, and a mother dying in childbirth is a much rarer tragedy. Widespread contraception has also drastically changed the demographics of the children in the adoption programs. Those forced-adoption houses have mostly disappeared (though the Christian "crisis pregnancy centers" are trying to revive the concept), contraception is plentiful, and abortion has become reduced to 1) a medically necessary procedure to save would-be mothers' lives (3rd timester case only), and 2) the ability of women who did not want to be "wired in" to unplug before that embryo has developed a nervous system.
Progressives are pro-choice these days because it is the most ethical way to treat might-be mothers, period. Only those particular women are in the position to know if their bodies are ready to undergo the significant physiological changes of pregnancy, if they are capable of providing a welcoming home for a new child, and if they really WANT to do any of that at all. This is the only consistent ethical position that also recognizes the biological reality of pregnancy: men can't get pregnant, so they don't really have a choice to make regarding another person's body. And pro-choice really IS about choice: we are just as supportive of those women who choose to bear children as those who choose not to. That means good sex education, easy access to contraception, and a social safety net *for the children themselves* like the state WIC programs, school meal programs, etc
They talk about freedom, and yet they want to add even more taxes to my paycheck. I'm already losing 40% of my pay in automatic deductions. We don't need more taxes.
Why do you believe that "freedom" must mean "less taxes".
Maybe you like waiting in line for health care. I don't.
Where do you go for health care then? Cuz it sure as hell isn't the USA. We Americans wait months and then pay out the nose when the doctors finally deign to see us.
*Ahem* First-party integration is the BIGGEST difference between Linux, the OS, and any commercial OS. That's where other OSs win over Linux. I really don't believe calling what Linux vendors do "integration" is very accurate. It's more like "test, patch, and bundle."
I'd like some of what you're smoking, srsly. Have you even seen how many tweaks the Linux distros make to source and build systems to get 3rd party apps to behave? After all is done, nearly all apps have their configuration in/etc, they can be tweaked through the distro's installer system, their man pages and documentation are in the right/usr directories, the GNOME/KDE/etc. menus have both their names and functions, and they tend to do the right thing when multiple users log in to use them.
Compare that to the god awful mess strewn around "C:\Program Files" and the Start menu once you've installed more than a couple apps on Windows, or the mess in/Applications on OS X (where an app is just a directory that can be dragged to the Trash (unless it's Microsoft Office) but there is no standardized way to organize things). Applications don't get to assume shared libraries on Windows or OS X either -- either they dump 12 versions of the same.dll in System32 or they bundle for themselves whatever doesn't ship with the host OS, but in most Linux distros they get to share and benefit from shared security updates. And commercial Unixes are no better: they tend to just stuff all 3rd party applications in/opt and/usr/local and wipe their hands of everything else.
I'd say the commercial OSes do a good job with "make sure everything installs and runs", but they suck big time at "make sure everything fully integrates with the existing system". While Linux distros may have lots of room for improvement, they are still way further along than their commercial counterparts.
Surely OPEC will cut production to match, and when it does, everyone in Texas, Louisiana and Alaska will benefit quite handsomely.
As someone in Texas working in the chemicals industry, let me say BULLSHIT.
All of those plants in east Houston and northeast Texas make shit besides gasoline like LOTS of different kinds of plastics, additives, adhesives, resins, and coatings. All of us pay through the nose for our feedstocks (natural gas and alkanes), even the huge chemical divisions of major oil companies like Exxon/Shell/etc.
Oil prices go up == feedstock prices go up == profit/wages go down.
And even if Texas oil fields suddenly become more profitable, that doesn't help most of us. That oil will be sold on the global market and make essentially no difference in prices at both the consumer gas pump and the commercial feedstock suppliers. This isn't 1980 anymore, you might want to update your mental map.
My religion teaches, and I believe, that every man should be free to believe and worship according to their own conscience. Naturally, I support the second amendment to the Constitution.
"Because as we all know, firearms are critical to many kinds of religious celebrations. Like weddings."
Slashdot Mirror
We hold the press to the ideal of objectivity.
Really? So has the press EVER been objective in this country? Objective enough to report neutrally on the Gulf of Tonkin? The USS Maine? The RMS Lusitania? Hell, bring it closer to nerd home: Operation Sundevil, Kevin Mitnick, PGP, Internet porn. Even in the days of the Fairness Doctrine outright government lies were reported as objective truth (see Vietnam). If the press isn't objective, why be so naive to expect it to be so?
(There's (a best) (part (of LISP)))?!?
(defmacro with-decent-lisp [& forms]
`(with-clojure ~@forms))
Amen.
I really really wanted to do CL for the rest of my days as a programmer-turned-engineer (and now have the freedom to code applications just how I like them) but dangit if the libraries just SUCK. How to send email to a SMTP server that requires TLS? How to do threads? How to do a basic GUI? Serve a web page? How to package it up?
And by golly how to write multi-platform code (e.g. Windows/Mac/Unix)? It doesn't help for c.l.l to say "just use the functions in CLTL/HyperSpec" when you need to do HTTP sockets or threads or GUI or ... and there isn't a single decent FOSS Lisp implementation that actually runs on Windows/Mac/Unix.
I finally found my answer though: Clojure.
There's something pretty cool with using Lisp to wrap a Java/COM bridge, pulling data into JFreeChart and analyzing it with Commons Math.
What we need are better tools, better understanding of threads and an acceptance that a single application can't always take advantage of threads effectively.
Or we could begin banging away at Clojure with its persistent immutable objects and direct language support for concurrent transactions.
So you just made the case to keep using Windows too.
No, I made the case to keep using OpenOffice.org. The application's interface has far greater impact on the user experience than the underlying operating system. Operating systems have the same general WIMP interface now, and most Linux distros work much closer like Windows than not out of the box.
Is it different? Yes. But so is OpenOffice. All the icons are different in Open Office from Office 2003. All of the menus are different. So I guess nobody should swtich to Oo3 either lest they get lost and confused.
The difference from Office 2003 to Office 2007 isn't just some icons with a new theme. It's "no way to get the menus back (even though 2003 menu keystrokes still work)", "no chart wizard in Excel (so scatterplots are completely wrong every. single. time. you hit the chart icon)", and "no VBA in Office 2008 for Mac". These are deal breakers if you actually used Office 97-2003 for more than the occasional letter or trivial spreadsheet.
I don't want New For The Sake Of New, I want New Because It's Seriously Better, and I'm not seeing much Seriously Better in the ribbon. OOo isn't the best possible interface, but it's decent enough and gets the job done without too much fuss and that lets me focus on the Real Work I'm using it for.
Change happens. Stop being a troglodyte and bitching about it being different.
And a "fuck you" right back.
Alt-E S
Office 2007 still recognizes Office 97/etc. keystrokes, but provides no means for you to know what they are. However, if you remember them you can still mitigate some of the problems with the crappy ribbon.
The OP claims that "most users" will find the new MSOffice more intuitive, but that excludes several categories of users that are either really big (the first I listed is basically every office worker in the US over 20 years old, the second is most serious users of Excel) or otherwise important (the third is all Mac users who upgraded to Mac Office 2008 and found no VBA support).
Get it now?
Particularly, the new interface of MSOffice makes it much easier and intuitive to use (for most users) compared to any other office automation software.
If by "most users" you mean:
* People who have never used MSOffice sometime in the last 14 years.
* Excel power-users who have never used the chart wizard.
* Mac users who have never needed to interoperate with Windows MSOffice users who have VBA macros in their documents/spreadsheets.
* People who have never gotten used to applications that use menus to organize major features.
For everyone else, the new MSOffice is very intuitive.
I think a lot of people might be looking at OOo because it is the only still-supported Office workalike that works mostly like MSOffice 97/XP/2003. For those of us forced to use MSOffice 2007 it's a no-brainer. Plus OOo can be installed alongside MSOffice 2007 with no problems.
I've noticed that often happens with applications that use the system default Open/Save dialogs. Those dialogs (in Windows anyway) seem to use any of: the "current working directory", the "application startup directory", the "last saved directory", the "default saved directory" as starting places for the dialog when it comes up. And it's really easy for that dialog to come up with one of those locations the first time and different one the next.
OTOH, users are getting used to that behavior so it's hard to figure out how to change it to something everyone wants. If you're saving 10 Excel sheets you only want to change the destination directory on the first "Save As...", you'd like not to have to do it the remaining nine times.
Some of these features exist, some probably would be resisted, but I like #5 a lot, particularly if it could be customized by the end user such that "filing" translated to "managing a hierarchical file structure with metadata sprinkled throughout in some standardized fashion". So that you could (for example) say "Backup all my stored files to USB drive" and you'll get all the data you have ever worked on that computer.
If I had that feature, I would want an icon on the desktop called "Filing System" that would open up a full-featured interface for searching files in multiple views (all files tagged "Friends", all Documents, etc.) and also gave me a customization UI. On the desktop's right-click menu would be both a "File This Away..." (which would prompt for types and tags and then move the file appropriately) and also a "Filing System" menu which would have operations for archiving/backup, merge, purge, split, etc. Even have a "temporarily use" option so it would use the configuration from some other Filing System and do the right thing in that person's world.
That's really not a bad idea. Make a plug-in system and it could know what to do with iTunes/Amarok libraries, email, contacts, calendars, bookmarks, configuration settings, etc. You could conceivably carry your whole life on a memory stick and just "Temporarily Use" it anywhere you plugged it in.
In a nutshell, I regard government intervention as more of a last resort than you seem to. But that's a difference of pragmatic approach--not values.
But in this case it IS about values rather than pragmatism. If abortion is murder then its prevention (via all those things I listed) is a state function. Pro-life progressives should see that leaving the social safety net to the whims of private charities undermines the argument to criminalize abortion.
That analogy would work if it were the case that every time a child dies, it's involuntary manslaughter on the part of the parents. But that's absurd.
But every time a child dies there is an investigation as to the cause, and there are many ways children can die in which someone goes to jail for manslaughter. Treating pregnancy the same way IS absurd as you say, but it's a necessary outcome to protecting the life of every zygote. It may be that in practice a pro-life regime would treat miscarriages the same as childhood accidents whereby serious negligence would have to occur for someone to go to jail, but nonetheless every failed pregnancy would need to be investigated just the same as every child fatality. To do less undermines the argument that zygotes are children.
My last word: as cold as "it's not murder, but the embryo won't feel it anyway" may sound, how much colder does "we could end all these murders, but it costs too much" sound?
Did you mean to say, "it is murder, but the embryo won't feel it anyway"?
I was referring back to my earlier statement that when a scientist says "the fetus won't feel it anyway" it comes out pretty cold and harsh. By this particular statement I meant: a pro-choice progressive can sound callous when they say "abortion isn't murder, but hey at least the fetus doesn't feel it anyway," but OTOH a pro-life NON-progressive sounds even worse to me when they say "abortion is totally murder, but it would cost way too much for us to fix it."
(Sorry I would respond to the rest, but I've got to get off to bed...)
On miscarriages, we are obviously in agreement: they are a tragedy no one should have to go through. Prosecuting the woman who suffered though it is obviously horribly wrong, but I still maintain that that is precisely the logical conclusion of believing that an embryo is equivalent to a 4 year old child.
My question was more along the lines of, "Where do pro-choice people get off thinking that being progressive implies being pro-choice?"
Progressive is just a label for a rather complex movement and most people who call themselves such can't fully agree on its definition. Some people would say that progressive implies secular humanism, or atheism, etc. Me, I tend to view it as 1) belief in human agency above authoritarianism, 2) belief that all humans are fundamentally similar regardless of sex/race/etc., 3) belief that science is the best way of knowing the world, and 4) focus on positive outcomes over lockstep ideology. These values come into conflict when discussing abortion because women and men ARE NOT the same biologically, and the scientific understanding that a zygote will feel nothing if removed seems very cold and harsh when spoken bluntly. It's an icky issue all around.
I'm not one to kick every pro-lifer out of the progressive tent if they are progressive on essentially every other thing, but in truth I really haven't seen many pro-lifers that ARE progressive about everything else outside of the sex issues. (By pro-life I don't mean people who say "I'm against abortion, but I don't want to outlaw it": that's actually a pro-choice position.) Abortion is a pretty serious litmus test, and most people I've met who actively seek its criminalization don't seem interested in promoting contraception, good sex education, a strong safety net for children, or gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans rights.
When you demonize the opposition by ignoring the premises of their view--as though the pro-life view can't be based on the idea that a child is being killed, whatever other factors are present for the mother--then I don't think you're even attempting rationality. Demonization & straw-man tactics makes things far easier for you. But they're rather inconsistent with your self-image of being a rational progressive.
When one looks at who is funneling the money into the pro-life movement, it's a Who's Who of reactionary theocrats. They set the tone, they fund the think tanks and position papers, they groom the lawyers-become-judges-become-Supreme Court-nominees. Progressives have been telling them for years that if they wanted to end abortion they could do it with good sex education and contraception access, but they have not been interested. That tells us that at that level they really aren't concerned about abortion-as-killing but about abortion-as-something-else. And "punishment for sex" is completely consistent with the standard pro-life arguments.
And BTW: pro-choice people don't believe that a child is punishment for sex, they are only pointing out that pro-life people act as though they do believe so.
Back on topic: Can you be pro-life and a progressive? Sure, why not? If you feel abortion is really murder, but you've got zero hangups on sex between consenting adults, then you should have no problem with the following:
1. Good sex education. (This also means actively being against slut-shaming.)
2. Readily available contraception.
3. Automatic state support for medical bills for pregnant women regardless of means.
4. Automatic state child support for all children regardless of means.
5. Streamlined adoption processes for the adoptive parents.
6. Much stronger family leave laws including paid time off for fathers.
7. Free sterilization for all.
Of course, I'm already in support of all of these items already because I DO want every child born to really be welcomed in this world. If I saw pro-lifers really agitate for these, I'd be willing to listen much more to everything else they had to say. But wh
This doesn't make any sense. The decision is about the fetus, not the mother.
The decision is about both, not one exclusively over the other. That's why in the beginning few weeks the woman has sole right to the decision, but in the last few weeks she has essentially no right to the decision.
If you accept the premise that abortion is murder, then men have just as much right to condemn it as they do the murder of anything else. And the impact on the mother's body (barring life threatening situations) is irrelevant. Morally, it is repugnant for me to kill another human being in order to avoid my own inconvenience, no matter what form that inconvenience takes. If I have to choose between someone else's life and losing a leg, the moral choice is clear. The only real moral question concerning abortion is: "Is a fetus a living individual?"
You're being inconsistent. You bar life threatening situations, then say it's OK to lose a leg to save someone, then talk about inconvenience. What is pregnancy to you? A minor inconvenient? Like losing a leg? The possibility of losing your life? Your whole argument can go any which way depending on how seriously YOU think your pregnancy might be. Which sounds a lot like ... choice?
And you can't start right out by ignoring the existence of the pregnant woman and then argue around her; she is the one providing the life to that fetus. If you want the state to compel her to do that, you'd better have a seriously good reason that would be morally equivalent to having a man live though nine months with 10 IVs stuck all over his body. Saying "fetus == 4 year old child" would work, but then you have the consequence that since abortion is murder, then failure of a pregnancy FOR ANY REASON must be one of murder, manslaughter, or self defense. That means compelled investigations of ALL pregnancies to ensure no wrongdoing.
Or you could just acknowledge that we already know that a fetus isn't a 4 year old child. It's an embryo that can BECOME a 4 year old child if everything else works out for it.
And that is just horse-shit. Maybe that is how some view it, but there is a perfectly legitimate view point that a fetus is a human being, so abortion is murder. You want to dispute a fetus as human being, fine. But ascribing these paternalistic, morally repugnant ideals to the entire pro-life movement makes you sound like a shrill demagogue.
There are people in the movement and then there are movements. The people who fund the pro-life movement ARE this repugnant and paternalistic. They spend millions of dollars and their ultimate aim is to roll the clock back a hundred years. The people who show up at rallies and hold signs outside clinics are somewhere on a continuum between "just as morally repugnant as the leaders of the movement" and "pretty decent folks who are involved in their church". I don't blame these "shock troops" of the anti-abortion movement for their role, but that doesn't change the fact that they are in fact working for a system where babies belong to everyone but their mothers. And if I sound like a shill demagogue, maybe that's because the issue really is that simple.
Your straw-man about prosecuting mis-carriage as manslaughter doesn't really help, either. Only willful negligence really qualifies for manslaughter, regardless of whether the "victim" is a fetus or 4 year old. I bet a lot of people in the pro-life movement would love to be able to prosecute for manslaughter a mother that miscarries, for example, b/c she smoked 2 packs/day and drank a fifth/day while she knew she was pregnant.
It's not a straw man argument, it is the logical conclusion of asserting that a barely-implanted zygote is morally and legally equivalent to a 4 year old human being. And FWIW many members of the pro-life movement ARE interested in that level of control over pregnancy for exactly the reasons you stated yourself. Finally, manslaughter doesn't really take willful negligence: you
It's fairly frustrating to read such a long reply, which entirely ignored a fundamental part of the question I asked.
I re-read your question which was "Can someone explain to me just what, in the classical sense of the word, is more "Liberal" about being pro-abortion rights than being anti-abortion rights?"
And then you pre-defined the answer such that it can only come out one way:
"But if a fetus is fundamentally the same--if an abortion is homicide--..."
So what do you what an answer to? Why is a progressive pro choice? Or why -- in a fantasy universe where an implanted embryo is exactly the same as a 4-year-old child -- anyone would choose to kill it?
Sorry if you wanted the second, but I live in the universe where it is widely known that miscarriage isn't exactly the same as involuntary manslaughter.
Not trying to be racist is equivalent to being racist if one acts racist. If there isn't a single racist individual person acting racist there can be no racism, systemic or otherwise.
On one level that's true, but practically speaking it isn't. Practically speaking, everyone who grows up in a racist system is racist whether they "want to be" or not. THAT is the difference between a liberal (who recognizes this) and a libertarian (who truly believes that they can in fact not be racist). Not being racist in a racist system isn't just not lynching a black person when the opportunity arises, it is also working to ensure that EVERY subjective decision is made without regard to race even when the default "normal person way of doing it" is racist to some degree.
A banker can handle every loan application in a professional manner but statistically still favor white borrowers over black borrowers, it would only require them to discriminate in the cases of marginal applications. The only way to really combat this kind of systemic racism is with statistical tools to locate where it occurs and then train people NOT to trust their instincts in those cases. Treating a banker who doesn't realize that when they are making subjective decisions that those decisions are coming out disproportionately in favor of people who resemble them, treating that banker as the moral equivalent of a hooded KKK member won't solve anything.
It happened in Houston in 1994:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E5D81631F93BA35752C0A962958260
Neither term has anything to do with with how social the individual should or can be.
I think the GP is trying to say that libertarians don't even acknowledge the existence of social constructs, e.g. the ability for systemic racism to occur even if no individuals are trying to be racist. Libertarians see the entire world as "one individual talking to another" multiplied a billion times, while liberals see it as individuals talking to each but limited by the social framework around them.
Can someone explain to me just what, in the classical sense of the word, is more "Liberal" about being pro-abortion rights than being anti-abortion rights?
I can't answer for "classical Liberal" since that seems to be a codeword for "modern libertarian" in America, but I can answer for "modern progressive". Simply put: abortion describes a continuum of actions between "entirely harmless" and "cold-blooded murder", feminist progressives know this, and America's 3-trimester system isn't all that bad in dividing that continuum into manageable pieces.
Abortion is ethically equivalent to asking someone to allow someone else to medically be "wired into" them for nine months to save their life. (This isn't my idea: psychologists and ethicists have actually proposed this scenario in studies and everyone -- regardless of stance on abortion -- agrees with the rest of this paragraph.) Obviously someone who volunteers to be "wired in" and changes their mind after 8.99 months is a murderer. Similarly coercing someone to be "wired in" at day 1 who didn't agree to be is a crime against them. Further delineation basically gets to this: someone who volunteered early on to do it *in full knowledge of what it entailed* is on the hook to stay wired in, but someone who chose not to should be left to go their own way.
The history of abortion is not a straight line leading to "progressive == pro-choice". In fact, first-wave feminists were largely *against* abortion because it was a dangerous procedure that was mostly forced on would-be mothers by the would-be fathers; the men did this to avoid the public embarrassment from affairs and legal issues from illegitimate children. Yet forced adoption was no better: many pregnant women were forced to give their children up against their wills to provide (mostly white) children to well-to-do childless couples. (Ironically enough, reversing the color of the would-be mother often reversed the desired outcome: many people believed that children of brown women should be aborted as often as possible, yet children of white women should be given to worthy families if they did not want them.) Basically in those days pregnancy was the norm for child-bearing women and both forced abortion and forced adoption were tools used to control them.
Fast-forward several decades and technology has seriously changed the game. Women and men marry more for love and shared values than because of unplanned pregnancies, and women can both be mothers and have careers. These days pregnancy is the exception rather than the rule, and a mother dying in childbirth is a much rarer tragedy. Widespread contraception has also drastically changed the demographics of the children in the adoption programs. Those forced-adoption houses have mostly disappeared (though the Christian "crisis pregnancy centers" are trying to revive the concept), contraception is plentiful, and abortion has become reduced to 1) a medically necessary procedure to save would-be mothers' lives (3rd timester case only), and 2) the ability of women who did not want to be "wired in" to unplug before that embryo has developed a nervous system.
Progressives are pro-choice these days because it is the most ethical way to treat might-be mothers, period. Only those particular women are in the position to know if their bodies are ready to undergo the significant physiological changes of pregnancy, if they are capable of providing a welcoming home for a new child, and if they really WANT to do any of that at all. This is the only consistent ethical position that also recognizes the biological reality of pregnancy: men can't get pregnant, so they don't really have a choice to make regarding another person's body. And pro-choice really IS about choice: we are just as supportive of those women who choose to bear children as those who choose not to. That means good sex education, easy access to contraception, and a social safety net *for the children themselves* like the state WIC programs, school meal programs, etc
They talk about freedom, and yet they want to add even more taxes to my paycheck. I'm already losing 40% of my pay in automatic deductions. We don't need more taxes.
Why do you believe that "freedom" must mean "less taxes".
Maybe you like waiting in line for health care. I don't.
Where do you go for health care then? Cuz it sure as hell isn't the USA. We Americans wait months and then pay out the nose when the doctors finally deign to see us.
*Ahem* First-party integration is the BIGGEST difference between Linux, the OS, and any commercial OS. That's where other OSs win over Linux. I really don't believe calling what Linux vendors do "integration" is very accurate. It's more like "test, patch, and bundle."
I'd like some of what you're smoking, srsly. Have you even seen how many tweaks the Linux distros make to source and build systems to get 3rd party apps to behave? After all is done, nearly all apps have their configuration in /etc, they can be tweaked through the distro's installer system, their man pages and documentation are in the right /usr directories, the GNOME/KDE/etc. menus have both their names and functions, and they tend to do the right thing when multiple users log in to use them.
Compare that to the god awful mess strewn around "C:\Program Files" and the Start menu once you've installed more than a couple apps on Windows, or the mess in /Applications on OS X (where an app is just a directory that can be dragged to the Trash (unless it's Microsoft Office) but there is no standardized way to organize things). Applications don't get to assume shared libraries on Windows or OS X either -- either they dump 12 versions of the same .dll in System32 or they bundle for themselves whatever doesn't ship with the host OS, but in most Linux distros they get to share and benefit from shared security updates. And commercial Unixes are no better: they tend to just stuff all 3rd party applications in /opt and /usr/local and wipe their hands of everything else.
I'd say the commercial OSes do a good job with "make sure everything installs and runs", but they suck big time at "make sure everything fully integrates with the existing system". While Linux distros may have lots of room for improvement, they are still way further along than their commercial counterparts.
Surely OPEC will cut production to match, and when it does, everyone in Texas, Louisiana and Alaska will benefit quite handsomely.
As someone in Texas working in the chemicals industry, let me say BULLSHIT.
All of those plants in east Houston and northeast Texas make shit besides gasoline like LOTS of different kinds of plastics, additives, adhesives, resins, and coatings. All of us pay through the nose for our feedstocks (natural gas and alkanes), even the huge chemical divisions of major oil companies like Exxon/Shell/etc.
Oil prices go up == feedstock prices go up == profit/wages go down.
And even if Texas oil fields suddenly become more profitable, that doesn't help most of us. That oil will be sold on the global market and make essentially no difference in prices at both the consumer gas pump and the commercial feedstock suppliers. This isn't 1980 anymore, you might want to update your mental map.
My religion teaches, and I believe, that every man should be free to believe and worship according to their own conscience. Naturally, I support the second amendment to the Constitution.
"Because as we all know, firearms are critical to many kinds of religious celebrations. Like weddings."
I think that everyone in academia has a lot of pressure on them to be liberal.
Clearly you haven't been in many chemical and mechanical engineering departments in Texas.