http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=985193&cid=25255769 Whiteox, I'm pointing you to my other post where I point out that we have no protected right to free speech, you can be jailed for refusing to answer questions from the ABCC (which has also been proposed for the CMC to the point of jailing journalists for not revealing sources) and that we have no right to bear arms (for the non-Aussies, you can get firearms licences here but self-defence is not a legal use of a firearm). What makes you say it's better here than the US?
I know you're in the LDP. I'm of the view that the cause of liberty has no chance in Australia at this time. I'd like to be wrong about this and if you can show me that, I'm willing to hear it. I still talk to people about liberty, free speech, the importance of jury trials, jury nullification and the right to bear arms, but what I find is that people don't so much disagree as they don't even understand the concepts. The US at least seems to have a comparatively large portion of the population that understands the concept of liberty, and a constitution that gives you a chance in court, provided you can find judges to follow it. What do we have, other than the ability to emigrate to the states?
All of human history is the story of us finding ways to negate the natural consequences of actions.
Cold weather is a cause.
I had no idea that cold weather was a human action we are trying to negate the consequences of. I stand corrected swami.
Ok, so we'll call pro-life anti-choice and pro-choice baby-killers. Adds nothing to the debate, but who cares. Anti-abortion is not anti-choice, it is not against the act of making a choice itself, it is against that one particular act of having an abortion. I've never seen any pro-life material that claims we should all live our lives completely under compulsion because having a choice is bad. It isn't about choice, it's about abortion. People who want abortions do want an additional choice, so pro-choice is a reasonable label, but anti-choice is not accurate at all. All law restricts choice to some degree, but it would hardly be argued that laws against theft are "anti-choice" because you only have a "subset of choices" on how to acquire goods.
Your religious delusions have no bearing on that.
Since in this thread nobody up till now had mentioned anything about religion, it's hard to see what point you're making here. Oh I see, it's flamebait. I guess it is smart of you to try and distract from the lack of substance in your argument, kudos.
Actually I do still have a point which remains: that pro-life doesn't mean anti-choice as claimed, women still have choice even if they don't have access to abortion. That is not an anti-abortion argument, it's a "anti-incorrect labelling of people who disagree" argument.
All of human history is the story of us finding ways to negate the natural consequences of actions.
No, it is the story of us taking actions so we can have the consequences of those actions. When you perform actions that are in direct conflict with your desired results you will be fighting a losing battle. We have this thing called "causality" you see. It's worth your while finding out about it, being a fundamental of science and all.
Please pull your head out of your ass and learn to think.
For someone who thinks that human history is the story of negating causality rather than discovering and implementing it, you might consider learning to think yourself. Perhaps learning reading comprehension while you're at it.
I just wanted to make it clear that I'm neither unaware of, nor afraid to criticize, the failings of a system that could allow a decision like that to be generated
You could not be so unafraid to criticize a judge in Australia. Just check this response on one of the Brisbane Times blogs http://blogs.brisbanetimes.com.au/bluntinstrument/archives/2008/07/post_1.htmlJB: Actually yr right about me forgetting to unload on the majesty of the Law. I should have. Although, without a First Amendment we are much more constrained in the criticism we can make of the bench. Contempt of Court applies swiftly and mercilessly.
You can also be given jail time here for refusing to answer questions from the Australian Building and Construction Commissioner
If you refuse to attend an ABCC interview, or if you refuse to answer questions, you face six months' jail.
There is no right to silence.
Nor right to bear arms. I do wonder about my fellow Australians, most of whom seem not to notice these things.
... you'll see I wasn't trying to give a definitive position on abortion. I quote myself:Disclaimer: this post should not be taken to reflect my views on abortions in the case of rape, incest, risk of life to the woman or any other circumstance than abortion on demand.
I was giving a response to someone who call pro-lifers anti-choice. It's as stupid as calling pro-choice anti-life or pro-death. I'd appreciate it if you would read my comments in the context of what I was replying to.
Uh, so there's a guaranteed 100% effective means of birth control? Besides not having sex at all?
Anal sex, oral sex, mutual masturbation, hysterectomy. Abstinence is an option. I don't like wasting my time though, so I won't be attempting to impose that on anyone, not being partial to it myself anyway. Some people do seem to take that path though, so let's not pretend it isn't an available choice. Certainly let's not pretend that abortion is the only way a woman can choose whether or not to be pregnant. It may be some women's preferred choice, but it's not the only one. The defining differences of abortion as a choice (in the case of women that become pregnant as a result of consensual sex) are that the decision to not be pregnant can be made after the pregnancy rather than before the sexual activity and that vaginal sex can be had without consequence of full-term pregnancy. So it provides choice in the case of people who lack forethought or want the activity of vaginal sex without any consequence of pregnancy. I've never seen anything that convinced me of that being a fundamental human rights issue. Now people could argue on the right or wrongness of that, fine, right to free speech and all, but the AC accused me of lying which was unjustified.
And what about grey area rape? He pushed the issue; she lacked the will to walk away because she's lonely and fucked up?
She had the ability to choose, that's all I said. If she truly didn't have the ability to choose then that is covered adequately by my statement that you quoted "However, women who aren't raped or some similar circumstance outside their control have the ability to avoid pregnancy even without abortion."
I could spout a hundred other scenarios that reflect on life.
None of which I was giving an opinion on, as I clearly stated.
So, black and white. Gotta love those minimalist reasoning skills.
Ok, let's examine what I said so you can point out the lie:
Anyone who claims the unrestricted right to abortion is claiming that you have a right to engage in activity that you know is likely to result in pregnancy and still have an abortion, negating the natural consequences of that activity.
This is what you claim is a lie. It can be broken down to:
(1) There are people who claim the unrestricted right to abortion. http://www.publicagenda.org/discussion-guides/supporting-abortion-rights
PERSPECTIVE IN DETAIL
compare with other perspectives
What Should be Done?
# Pass laws guaranteeing a woman's unrestricted right to abortion.
It would be trivially easy to find other links supporting this, but there is no need, that part of what I said is demonstrated to be true.
(2) pregnancy is a known consequence of sex.
Obviously true.
(3) It is possible by various methods to eliminate or reduce the possibility of pregnancy (have other than vaginal sex, contraceptives, etc. Some are more certain than others). Therefore a woman has the ability to not be pregnant without having access to abortion
Obviously true.
(4) Abortion is a way of terminating a pregnancy, that is it "negates the natural and preventable consequence of sex".
That's what abortion is, it is the whole point of it. Again, obviously true.
Well, that's the entirety of my statement, I don't see a lie there at all. Now I grant that pro-choicers don't phrase it the way I have, but that is what the "unrestricted right to abortion" amounts to and most pro-choicers wouldn't even really dispute it. What they would contend is that a fetus does not have human rights and therefore it is quite ok to terminate it. I admit there are intelligent arguments in favor of this view, even though I don't agree that we should approach the issue that way in the law. However, women who aren't raped or some similar circumstance outside their control have the ability to avoid pregnancy even without abortion. Every other method requires you to make the decision before sex, abortion enables you to make the decision after.
You made the accusation that I'm lying, you can't back it up, so shut up.
The real root cause of all this was the blind rush to deregulation that congress has engaged in over the last 30 years.
Nonsense, the root cause is the creation of money supply backed only by the debtors promise to pay, ie: fractional reserve lending, meaning that most of the money supply is based on promised future production rather than existing saleable goods. When, for whatever reason, people fail to pay that debt the money supply and the economy that depends on it crash.
If lending money that doesn't exist was prosecuted as fraud the current economic crisis would be impossible.
To claim that people have an inherent right to act without thinking and have no consequences to that defies reality.
That's not what pro-choicers claim, and you know it. Straw man arguments are lies.
Actually, that is exactly what many pro-choicers claim, and you know it. You are the liar. Anyone who claims the unrestricted right to abortion is claiming that you have a right to engage in activity that you know is likely to result in pregnancy and still have an abortion, negating the natural consequences of that activity.
"Surprise pregnancy" is like the concept of "surprise drunkeness". There is in each case an activity that ought to tip you off as to what the likely outcome is. Excepting extraordinary circumstances or being erroneously told you are infertile, for a rational person to have a surprise pregnancy is impossible, it is predominantly the domain of the stupid.
1.1 There is no proof that "alternative" medicine works, which is why it's called alternative
Some people might want to pay for something unproven rather than something proven. That probably seems unreasonable to you, but there's this concept called "liberty" you see, and.... oh nevermind, anyone who sees proof as justification for compulsion probably wouldn't get it.
1.2 The general idea is that the rich will subsidize the poor, the poor shouldn't get much poorer
+5 funny
2.1 When the treatment is free you can both get the treatment and send your children to collage
2.2 in more social contries like sweden collage is free
The treatment/college is not free. It gets paid for by the government with your money. Whether this is a good idea or not is hotly debated, but it is definitely not free.
First issue [what happens to the people whose jobs will then get downsized]: require companies buying up the assets to keep the personnel.
or confiscate the assets of the guilty parties or company for a reasonable redundancy payout, either as part of the criminal proceedings or through civil suits.
Nonsense. To be anti-abortion is simply to require that the choice whether to be pregnant or not take place before the pregnancy.To claim that people have an inherent right to act without thinking and have no consequences to that defies reality. It's a pro-stupid stance, not pro-choice.
Disclaimer: this post should not be taken to reflect my views on abortions in the case of rape, incest, risk of life to the woman or any other circumstance than abortion on demand.
Stealing is a debatable description. Fraud is an accurate description. While "stealing" is commonly used to describe a broad range of things including actual theft, copyright infringement, use of ideas (stole my thunder), fraud, robbery, adultery (stole my wife) that doesn't make it an accurate description. Common != accurate.
The use of the words "stealing" and "theft" are (1) not necessary to convey the idea that a particular action is wrong or the exact nature of that action and (2) well known on/. to cause dispute when used in regard to matters of copyright and patents. To use these words in this context is really flamebait IMO, and ought to be moderated as such. It has gone past the point of merely being a difference of opinion to being deliberate antagonism.
Except in robin hood mythology they fought for basic justice, food, and shelter. Here you are fighting for Mariah Carey mp3s and Wayans Bros movies. Something tells me there's a fundamental difference between these things.
Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
--Thomas Jefferson
To varying degrees the works that come under copyright protection can be considered capital. Certainly the issue has come up regarding the digital copying of books, but there is a lot of educational and political material being released as video as well. It is about basic justice and property rights. Anyone who thinks this is just about entertainment hasn't been paying attention. The Right to Read is a good place to begin informing yourself.
Some of us just aren't wired for monogamy, and telling people "don't be what you are!" is always a piss-poor recommendation.
And some of us are just wired to let people bear the consequences of their own actions. Is telling people "don't be what you are!" still a piss-poor recommendation when it comes to us?
I've seen people argue the right to enforce compulsory schooling on the basis that they don't want to pay unemployment benefits to people who didn't get educated. Compulsory seat belts so we don't have to pay medical expenses for people unnecessarily. Now whatever you think of government schools, welfare, various compulsory safety rules and socialised medicine, the consensus seems to be that if you are footing the bill for the consequences of an action, you get the right to regulate that action.
Freedom to express sexual orientation is based on self-ownership, right? You can do what you like with your own body, consenting adults and all that. But if the product of my labor is forcible taken from me I no longer have self-ownership. If my rewards are taken to pay for the consequences of another's action then that other person has become my master. As far as I'm concerned, do what you like, but pay for it yourself.
Well...people could be paid to plant them. Yeah, I know that trees can do this on their own....but can they do it in nice neat rows?
That's a great idea... we could even employ people to selectively cut the trees down, and others to mill the timber, and others to make things with it. I think it's possible to come up with a viable business model where we sell people products made from converted atmospheric carbon.
Our current governments are no better than organised crime
Or considerably worse perhaps. Live in a rural area, with your family and neighbours armed and organised crime probably won't be able to touch you. Try arming yourself against the government and you will certainly perish.
no chance to alter the systematic abuse of the population.
It can be done, but requires considerable efforts to educate people. For a serious effort at change, I would recommend Ron Paul's strategy of infiltrating a major party rather than a new party like the ldp. I would start with the nationals.
I think another Eureka stockade could work, in that there was a great injustice witnessed by the population and they reacted accordingly.
Start another Eureka now and you will quickly die or spend the rest of your life in prison labelled as a terrorist. The men at Eureka already had widespread support in the population and their had already been unrest at other mine fields. They could not convince a jury to convict and the first acquittal was followed by a victory march of over 10,000 people. If you think you could shoot a cop or another government officer and have 10,000 people cheering for you now, you are very badly mistaken.
You have to consider that they also did not have voting rights then (one of their grievances) and now we do. If you had anything like the public support that the gold miners had, you could determine the outcome of the next election. You need lots of support to win an action like that, if you had it you wouldn't need to start shooting, IMO. I do believe in the right to bear arms, but I also think we should be very reluctant to take up arms against our own government.
The difficulty isn't changing the government, that's the easy part. The hard part, and the most necessary, is waking up the people to liberty and self-reliance. There are a huge amount to people who are demanding systematic abuse from the government. It's needed to diminish that first.
What "free market principles" are there in Linux? Going on strict "free market principles" it wouldn't even exist, as people are being economically irrational giving away their labour (which has amounted to billions of dollars worth now) for free?
The right to use a product you legally acquire in the manner of your choosing.
The right to use that product as a base to make new products. (Subject only to you passing on that same right to others)
Works that have entered the public domain are distributed on strict free market principles, works under copyright are in general distributed in a highly regulated market. Free software licences distribute the software in a way that is significantly more aligned to free market principles than artificial copyright monopolies do. The license still relies on copyright but gives up the distribution monopoly and thus competes in the free market.
In addition, working together for common benefit is quite in line with free market principles. And the sharing of software is significantly more in line with a capitalist system than socialism. In a free market system, you can share your software with whoever you choose. In a socialist system, the government shares your software with whoever they choose whether you like it or not, and that may not include the government sharing your work with you.
As for economic irrationality, some Free software developers write it as work for hire, some to gain experience and/or a way of demonstrating their work to potential employers (ie as a loss leader), some Free software is bundled with hardware as a value addition, or a support contract as the basis of a service. All of these are quite in line with those "strict free market principles" and are not at all irrational.
Similarly, the embryos are already being created and destroyed en masse by fertility clinics. (And yet, for some reason, pro-lifers never complain about that.)
Aborted foetuses... could easily be harvested and cultured.
There is _no_ need to harvest living [embryos] for the stem cell work...
Cultures of such morally harvested single stem cell lines can easily serve hundreds if not millions of recipients.
You have an interesting concept of what it is to "not harvest living embryos". It's a brave new world you propose.
Your ignorance of the biology is exactly why stem cell funding is so difficult to obtain: people hear the phrase and tar it with the brush of harvesting children's bodies, which it can be, in fact, mere recycling of discarded tissue samples.
When your stated intention is to harvest abortions then you're just going on with newspeak to talk of "mere recycling of discarded tissue samples". What you are describing is exactly what people are opposed to. Since those same people are also opposed to abortion, cloning and the production and subsequent destruction of embryos in fertility clinics.
It's one thing to disagree, that's expected. But to pretend you're proposing something completely different in order to deceive? Why would you need to do that if your position is just?
It's strange how Linux gets easily picked up by leftists, who end up upholding free market principles as a side effect, while dyed-in-the-wool capitalist types will staunchly support Microsoft.
Not always. I think I qualify as a "dyed-in-the-wool capitalist type" I support Free software. Not all capitalist types are software vendors. Resources are necessary for wealth creation and the questions "what is a resource?" and "how much wealth can be produced with this resource?" are both determined by technology. The level of technology is determined by the rate at which we share information (so it can be built upon). Therefore, Free software will result in a greater level of wealth being available in the markets I operate in.
Pseudo capitalists want a bigger share of the pie. Real capitalists want to make a bigger pie.
But the truth is that year after year, kids get more stupid.
Not disagreeing, but, why do you think that is?
Two major factors:
1. Compulsory education. Being compulsory removes much of the need for performance in education. Even an exceptionally good teacher does not overcome to any significant degree the natural systemic problems created by compulsion. Even some excellent teachers will admit this.
2. Too much play, not enough work. I mean productive work for profit (even growing vegetables etc) Entertainment being provided to the child rather than by the child produces habits of mental laziness. Excessive entertainment of any nature produces habits of focussing on the inconsequential and frivolous.
The result is people of diminished capabilities who aren't very likely to focus even the capability they have in a meaningful direction. They do respond very well to propaganda though. I am not against either education (obviously) or entertainment, but effort must be taken to instil a love of learning in the child so that the quality of the education system is less relevant, along with providing any learning opportunities lacking in the system. Also to get the child doing profitable work asap, paper route, mowing lawns, whatever. Something so that the cause and effect aspect of work becomes real to them early on. Endless entertainment paid for by someone else's work (parents or anyone else) separates them from the reality of life.
The Privacy Act (1988) specifically mentions that no unique identifier issued by a government agency or corporation can be used by another entity for the purpose of identification. In practice, this means things such as driver's license number, a Tax File Number (equivalent to U.S SSN), or the medicare number can not be used by any corporation or agency other than the one which issued it in the first place, for identification.
Interesting theory, but your TFN is probably known by your employer, your bank, centrelink (social security), your superannuation fund as well as the tax office. Of course, you don't have to give it, you could just pay 46.5% tax instead. Now that's freedom of choice to keep your privacy! With the growth of the Family Tax Benefit and other centrelink payments a very large proportion of the population is on some form of government payment. Since many of them have the government take it from one hand as PAYG tax only to put it back in the other as FTB, there seems to be no purpose to it but to increase government control of the population and to force the people into a position where they are always reporting their activities, income and other personal details to the government.
Don't be fooled by the occasional head rolling and the rhetoric of liberty in this country. The liberty of the people is dependent on being able to thwart government power. We occasionally thwart the power of individual politicians, maybe even a party, but not of the government institutions themselves. The peoples power to thwart government is specific to the branch of government. For the legislative we have the power of elections, but the majority of voters don't seem to be able to understand economic theory, monetary policy, the nature of government and liberty or logic well enough to make a decision based on anything but propaganda. For the judicial we have jury trials but I find few and far between are the people who understand the concept of jury nullification, people think that jury trials are about finding the truth (which is partly right) but don't understand the importance of being able to dismiss unjust prosecutions. For the executive there is the right to bear arms and we gave it up.
All three of these citizen's powers were used in the forming of this country during the events surrounding the Eureka Stockade. The government was resisted by force, couldn't find juries to bring guilty verdicts on the rebels, and the leader was subsequently elected to the Legislative Assembly of Victoria. Can you honestly say you think anything remotely resembling these events could happen today? I think it would be almost impossible to find a jury that would find in favour of people on firearms charges because their cause was just. It seems likely that even the possession of (unlicensed) firearms would be enough to secure convictions, let alone firing of police, regardless of the cause. Even if you could find a jury to release them though, the thought that they could become elected representatives? Preposterous.
Australians in general are not the freedom loving people we once were, and the ones who are here are not present in sufficient numbers to have any real influence on an election. You can look forward to things getting worse. Just look at some of the comments on the linked article in favour of this.
Slashdot Mirror
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=985193&cid=25255769
Whiteox, I'm pointing you to my other post where I point out that we have no protected right to free speech, you can be jailed for refusing to answer questions from the ABCC (which has also been proposed for the CMC to the point of jailing journalists for not revealing sources) and that we have no right to bear arms (for the non-Aussies, you can get firearms licences here but self-defence is not a legal use of a firearm). What makes you say it's better here than the US?
I know you're in the LDP. I'm of the view that the cause of liberty has no chance in Australia at this time. I'd like to be wrong about this and if you can show me that, I'm willing to hear it. I still talk to people about liberty, free speech, the importance of jury trials, jury nullification and the right to bear arms, but what I find is that people don't so much disagree as they don't even understand the concepts. The US at least seems to have a comparatively large portion of the population that understands the concept of liberty, and a constitution that gives you a chance in court, provided you can find judges to follow it. What do we have, other than the ability to emigrate to the states?
All of human history is the story of us finding ways to negate the natural consequences of actions.
Cold weather is a cause.
I had no idea that cold weather was a human action we are trying to negate the consequences of. I stand corrected swami.
Ok, so we'll call pro-life anti-choice and pro-choice baby-killers. Adds nothing to the debate, but who cares. Anti-abortion is not anti-choice, it is not against the act of making a choice itself, it is against that one particular act of having an abortion. I've never seen any pro-life material that claims we should all live our lives completely under compulsion because having a choice is bad. It isn't about choice, it's about abortion. People who want abortions do want an additional choice, so pro-choice is a reasonable label, but anti-choice is not accurate at all. All law restricts choice to some degree, but it would hardly be argued that laws against theft are "anti-choice" because you only have a "subset of choices" on how to acquire goods.
Your religious delusions have no bearing on that.
Since in this thread nobody up till now had mentioned anything about religion, it's hard to see what point you're making here. Oh I see, it's flamebait. I guess it is smart of you to try and distract from the lack of substance in your argument, kudos.
All of human history is the story of us finding ways to negate the natural consequences of actions.
No, it is the story of us taking actions so we can have the consequences of those actions. When you perform actions that are in direct conflict with your desired results you will be fighting a losing battle. We have this thing called "causality" you see. It's worth your while finding out about it, being a fundamental of science and all.
Please pull your head out of your ass and learn to think.
For someone who thinks that human history is the story of negating causality rather than discovering and implementing it, you might consider learning to think yourself. Perhaps learning reading comprehension while you're at it.
I just wanted to make it clear that I'm neither unaware of, nor afraid to criticize, the failings of a system that could allow a decision like that to be generated
You could not be so unafraid to criticize a judge in Australia. Just check this response on one of the Brisbane Times blogs http://blogs.brisbanetimes.com.au/bluntinstrument/archives/2008/07/post_1.html JB: Actually yr right about me forgetting to unload on the majesty of the Law. I should have. Although, without a First Amendment we are much more constrained in the criticism we can make of the bench. Contempt of Court applies swiftly and mercilessly.
You can also be given jail time here for refusing to answer questions from the Australian Building and Construction Commissioner
If you refuse to attend an ABCC interview, or if you refuse to answer questions, you face six months' jail.
There is no right to silence.
Nor right to bear arms. I do wonder about my fellow Australians, most of whom seem not to notice these things.
Uh, so there's a guaranteed 100% effective means of birth control? Besides not having sex at all?
Anal sex, oral sex, mutual masturbation, hysterectomy. Abstinence is an option. I don't like wasting my time though, so I won't be attempting to impose that on anyone, not being partial to it myself anyway. Some people do seem to take that path though, so let's not pretend it isn't an available choice. Certainly let's not pretend that abortion is the only way a woman can choose whether or not to be pregnant. It may be some women's preferred choice, but it's not the only one. The defining differences of abortion as a choice (in the case of women that become pregnant as a result of consensual sex) are that the decision to not be pregnant can be made after the pregnancy rather than before the sexual activity and that vaginal sex can be had without consequence of full-term pregnancy. So it provides choice in the case of people who lack forethought or want the activity of vaginal sex without any consequence of pregnancy. I've never seen anything that convinced me of that being a fundamental human rights issue. Now people could argue on the right or wrongness of that, fine, right to free speech and all, but the AC accused me of lying which was unjustified.
And what about grey area rape? He pushed the issue; she lacked the will to walk away because she's lonely and fucked up?
She had the ability to choose, that's all I said. If she truly didn't have the ability to choose then that is covered adequately by my statement that you quoted "However, women who aren't raped or some similar circumstance outside their control have the ability to avoid pregnancy even without abortion."
I could spout a hundred other scenarios that reflect on life.
None of which I was giving an opinion on, as I clearly stated.
So, black and white. Gotta love those minimalist reasoning skills.
Yes, I've just been so black and white. Like acknowledging circumstances not covered by the points I made [referenced above] and acknowledging there is something to the opposing view. I admit there are intelligent arguments in favor of this view, even though I don't agree that we should approach the issue that way in the law. Is it minimalist reasoning skills, to deal with one particular point of an issue without trying to apply that point to every circumstance? To oppose the labelling of each other? To reason that choice is available without abortion?
I'm tempted to be very rude.
Why? Doesn't that reflect more poorly on you than on me?
This is what you claim is a lie. It can be broken down to:
(1) There are people who claim the unrestricted right to abortion.
http://www.publicagenda.org/discussion-guides/supporting-abortion-rights
PERSPECTIVE IN DETAIL
compare with other perspectives
What Should be Done?
# Pass laws guaranteeing a woman's unrestricted right to abortion.
It would be trivially easy to find other links supporting this, but there is no need, that part of what I said is demonstrated to be true.
(2) pregnancy is a known consequence of sex.
Obviously true.
(3) It is possible by various methods to eliminate or reduce the possibility of pregnancy (have other than vaginal sex, contraceptives, etc. Some are more certain than others). Therefore a woman has the ability to not be pregnant without having access to abortion
Obviously true.
(4) Abortion is a way of terminating a pregnancy, that is it "negates the natural and preventable consequence of sex".
That's what abortion is, it is the whole point of it. Again, obviously true.
Well, that's the entirety of my statement, I don't see a lie there at all. Now I grant that pro-choicers don't phrase it the way I have, but that is what the "unrestricted right to abortion" amounts to and most pro-choicers wouldn't even really dispute it. What they would contend is that a fetus does not have human rights and therefore it is quite ok to terminate it. I admit there are intelligent arguments in favor of this view, even though I don't agree that we should approach the issue that way in the law. However, women who aren't raped or some similar circumstance outside their control have the ability to avoid pregnancy even without abortion. Every other method requires you to make the decision before sex, abortion enables you to make the decision after.
You made the accusation that I'm lying, you can't back it up, so shut up.
The real root cause of all this was the blind rush to deregulation that congress has engaged in over the last 30 years.
Nonsense, the root cause is the creation of money supply backed only by the debtors promise to pay, ie: fractional reserve lending, meaning that most of the money supply is based on promised future production rather than existing saleable goods. When, for whatever reason, people fail to pay that debt the money supply and the economy that depends on it crash.
If lending money that doesn't exist was prosecuted as fraud the current economic crisis would be impossible.
Actually, that is exactly what many pro-choicers claim, and you know it. You are the liar. Anyone who claims the unrestricted right to abortion is claiming that you have a right to engage in activity that you know is likely to result in pregnancy and still have an abortion, negating the natural consequences of that activity.
"Surprise pregnancy" is like the concept of "surprise drunkeness". There is in each case an activity that ought to tip you off as to what the likely outcome is. Excepting extraordinary circumstances or being erroneously told you are infertile, for a rational person to have a surprise pregnancy is impossible, it is predominantly the domain of the stupid.
1.1 There is no proof that "alternative" medicine works, which is why it's called alternative
Some people might want to pay for something unproven rather than something proven. That probably seems unreasonable to you, but there's this concept called "liberty" you see, and .... oh nevermind, anyone who sees proof as justification for compulsion probably wouldn't get it.
1.2 The general idea is that the rich will subsidize the poor, the poor shouldn't get much poorer
+5 funny
2.1 When the treatment is free you can both get the treatment and send your children to collage
2.2 in more social contries like sweden collage is free
The treatment/college is not free. It gets paid for by the government with your money. Whether this is a good idea or not is hotly debated, but it is definitely not free.
First issue [what happens to the people whose jobs will then get downsized]: require companies buying up the assets to keep the personnel.
or confiscate the assets of the guilty parties or company for a reasonable redundancy payout, either as part of the criminal proceedings or through civil suits.
It's anti-choice.
Nonsense. To be anti-abortion is simply to require that the choice whether to be pregnant or not take place before the pregnancy.To claim that people have an inherent right to act without thinking and have no consequences to that defies reality. It's a pro-stupid stance, not pro-choice.
Disclaimer: this post should not be taken to reflect my views on abortions in the case of rape, incest, risk of life to the woman or any other circumstance than abortion on demand.
Stealing is a debatable description. Fraud is an accurate description. While "stealing" is commonly used to describe a broad range of things including actual theft, copyright infringement, use of ideas (stole my thunder), fraud, robbery, adultery (stole my wife) that doesn't make it an accurate description. Common != accurate.
/. to cause dispute when used in regard to matters of copyright and patents. To use these words in this context is really flamebait IMO, and ought to be moderated as such. It has gone past the point of merely being a difference of opinion to being deliberate antagonism.
The use of the words "stealing" and "theft" are (1) not necessary to convey the idea that a particular action is wrong or the exact nature of that action and (2) well known on
Except in robin hood mythology they fought for basic justice, food, and shelter. Here you are fighting for Mariah Carey mp3s and Wayans Bros movies. Something tells me there's a fundamental difference between these things.
Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
--Thomas Jefferson
To varying degrees the works that come under copyright protection can be considered capital. Certainly the issue has come up regarding the digital copying of books, but there is a lot of educational and political material being released as video as well. It is about basic justice and property rights. Anyone who thinks this is just about entertainment hasn't been paying attention. The Right to Read is a good place to begin informing yourself.
Some of us just aren't wired for monogamy, and telling people "don't be what you are!" is always a piss-poor recommendation.
And some of us are just wired to let people bear the consequences of their own actions. Is telling people "don't be what you are!" still a piss-poor recommendation when it comes to us?
I've seen people argue the right to enforce compulsory schooling on the basis that they don't want to pay unemployment benefits to people who didn't get educated. Compulsory seat belts so we don't have to pay medical expenses for people unnecessarily. Now whatever you think of government schools, welfare, various compulsory safety rules and socialised medicine, the consensus seems to be that if you are footing the bill for the consequences of an action, you get the right to regulate that action.
Freedom to express sexual orientation is based on self-ownership, right? You can do what you like with your own body, consenting adults and all that. But if the product of my labor is forcible taken from me I no longer have self-ownership. If my rewards are taken to pay for the consequences of another's action then that other person has become my master. As far as I'm concerned, do what you like, but pay for it yourself.
That's a great idea ... we could even employ people to selectively cut the trees down, and others to mill the timber, and others to make things with it. I think it's possible to come up with a viable business model where we sell people products made from converted atmospheric carbon.
I'm off to the patent office!
Our current governments are no better than organised crime
Or considerably worse perhaps. Live in a rural area, with your family and neighbours armed and organised crime probably won't be able to touch you. Try arming yourself against the government and you will certainly perish.
no chance to alter the systematic abuse of the population.
It can be done, but requires considerable efforts to educate people. For a serious effort at change, I would recommend Ron Paul's strategy of infiltrating a major party rather than a new party like the ldp. I would start with the nationals.
I think another Eureka stockade could work, in that there was a great injustice witnessed by the population and they reacted accordingly.
Start another Eureka now and you will quickly die or spend the rest of your life in prison labelled as a terrorist. The men at Eureka already had widespread support in the population and their had already been unrest at other mine fields. They could not convince a jury to convict and the first acquittal was followed by a victory march of over 10,000 people. If you think you could shoot a cop or another government officer and have 10,000 people cheering for you now, you are very badly mistaken.
You have to consider that they also did not have voting rights then (one of their grievances) and now we do. If you had anything like the public support that the gold miners had, you could determine the outcome of the next election. You need lots of support to win an action like that, if you had it you wouldn't need to start shooting, IMO. I do believe in the right to bear arms, but I also think we should be very reluctant to take up arms against our own government.
The difficulty isn't changing the government, that's the easy part. The hard part, and the most necessary, is waking up the people to liberty and self-reliance. There are a huge amount to people who are demanding systematic abuse from the government. It's needed to diminish that first.
The right to use a product you legally acquire in the manner of your choosing.
The right to use that product as a base to make new products. (Subject only to you passing on that same right to others)
Works that have entered the public domain are distributed on strict free market principles, works under copyright are in general distributed in a highly regulated market. Free software licences distribute the software in a way that is significantly more aligned to free market principles than artificial copyright monopolies do. The license still relies on copyright but gives up the distribution monopoly and thus competes in the free market.
In addition, working together for common benefit is quite in line with free market principles. And the sharing of software is significantly more in line with a capitalist system than socialism. In a free market system, you can share your software with whoever you choose. In a socialist system, the government shares your software with whoever they choose whether you like it or not, and that may not include the government sharing your work with you.
As for economic irrationality, some Free software developers write it as work for hire, some to gain experience and/or a way of demonstrating their work to potential employers (ie as a loss leader), some Free software is bundled with hardware as a value addition, or a support contract as the basis of a service. All of these are quite in line with those "strict free market principles" and are not at all irrational.
You just haven't been paying attention.
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=embryos+destroyed+fertility 3 of the first 4 links are religious type sites that discuss this issue.
http://www.nrlc.org/news/2004/NRL10/Embryo_Adoption.htm Right to life page on embryo adoption as a solution to IVF embryo destruction.
http://www.righttolife.com.au/StemCellResearch.aspx Right to Life Australia states their position on IVF on the same page as stem cell research.
You have an interesting concept of what it is to "not harvest living embryos". It's a brave new world you propose.
When your stated intention is to harvest abortions then you're just going on with newspeak to talk of "mere recycling of discarded tissue samples". What you are describing is exactly what people are opposed to. Since those same people are also opposed to abortion, cloning and the production and subsequent destruction of embryos in fertility clinics.
It's one thing to disagree, that's expected. But to pretend you're proposing something completely different in order to deceive? Why would you need to do that if your position is just?
It's strange how Linux gets easily picked up by leftists, who end up upholding free market principles as a side effect, while dyed-in-the-wool capitalist types will staunchly support Microsoft.
Not always. I think I qualify as a "dyed-in-the-wool capitalist type" I support Free software. Not all capitalist types are software vendors. Resources are necessary for wealth creation and the questions "what is a resource?" and "how much wealth can be produced with this resource?" are both determined by technology. The level of technology is determined by the rate at which we share information (so it can be built upon). Therefore, Free software will result in a greater level of wealth being available in the markets I operate in.
Pseudo capitalists want a bigger share of the pie. Real capitalists want to make a bigger pie.
Two major factors:
1. Compulsory education. Being compulsory removes much of the need for performance in education. Even an exceptionally good teacher does not overcome to any significant degree the natural systemic problems created by compulsion. Even some excellent teachers will admit this.
2. Too much play, not enough work. I mean productive work for profit (even growing vegetables etc) Entertainment being provided to the child rather than by the child produces habits of mental laziness. Excessive entertainment of any nature produces habits of focussing on the inconsequential and frivolous.
The result is people of diminished capabilities who aren't very likely to focus even the capability they have in a meaningful direction. They do respond very well to propaganda though. I am not against either education (obviously) or entertainment, but effort must be taken to instil a love of learning in the child so that the quality of the education system is less relevant, along with providing any learning opportunities lacking in the system. Also to get the child doing profitable work asap, paper route, mowing lawns, whatever. Something so that the cause and effect aspect of work becomes real to them early on. Endless entertainment paid for by someone else's work (parents or anyone else) separates them from the reality of life.
Reasons why you may want to avoid doing this:
The recent classification of various lasers under weapons licensing laws.
The Privacy Act (1988) specifically mentions that no unique identifier issued by a government agency or corporation can be used by another entity for the purpose of identification. In practice, this means things such as driver's license number, a Tax File Number (equivalent to U.S SSN), or the medicare number can not be used by any corporation or agency other than the one which issued it in the first place, for identification.
Interesting theory, but your TFN is probably known by your employer, your bank, centrelink (social security), your superannuation fund as well as the tax office. Of course, you don't have to give it, you could just pay 46.5% tax instead. Now that's freedom of choice to keep your privacy! With the growth of the Family Tax Benefit and other centrelink payments a very large proportion of the population is on some form of government payment. Since many of them have the government take it from one hand as PAYG tax only to put it back in the other as FTB, there seems to be no purpose to it but to increase government control of the population and to force the people into a position where they are always reporting their activities, income and other personal details to the government.
Don't be fooled by the occasional head rolling and the rhetoric of liberty in this country. The liberty of the people is dependent on being able to thwart government power. We occasionally thwart the power of individual politicians, maybe even a party, but not of the government institutions themselves. The peoples power to thwart government is specific to the branch of government. For the legislative we have the power of elections, but the majority of voters don't seem to be able to understand economic theory, monetary policy, the nature of government and liberty or logic well enough to make a decision based on anything but propaganda. For the judicial we have jury trials but I find few and far between are the people who understand the concept of jury nullification, people think that jury trials are about finding the truth (which is partly right) but don't understand the importance of being able to dismiss unjust prosecutions. For the executive there is the right to bear arms and we gave it up.
All three of these citizen's powers were used in the forming of this country during the events surrounding the Eureka Stockade. The government was resisted by force, couldn't find juries to bring guilty verdicts on the rebels, and the leader was subsequently elected to the Legislative Assembly of Victoria. Can you honestly say you think anything remotely resembling these events could happen today? I think it would be almost impossible to find a jury that would find in favour of people on firearms charges because their cause was just. It seems likely that even the possession of (unlicensed) firearms would be enough to secure convictions, let alone firing of police, regardless of the cause. Even if you could find a jury to release them though, the thought that they could become elected representatives? Preposterous.
Australians in general are not the freedom loving people we once were, and the ones who are here are not present in sufficient numbers to have any real influence on an election. You can look forward to things getting worse. Just look at some of the comments on the linked article in favour of this.
Funny? Dammit, it's informative!
:-)
Anyone with ideas on how to educate the general population [on DRM]?
Shut down the Wal-Mart DRM servers.