So rather than invoke supernatural entities, scientists invoke naturalistic explanations.
Except that this begs the question: what if demons actually made the person sick? By his a priori rejection of the possibility, the scientist misses what really happened in such a case. I'm not saying that demons actually cause illness, mind you; I'm simply addressing your example.
The existence and operations of the cosmos and of man must be explainable in purely naturalistic terms because only naturalistic explanations are actually testable.
But your conclusion in no way follows from your premise. The fact that only naturalistic explanations are testable in no way implies that the cosmos and man have purely naturalistic explanations. This reminds me of that old joke/cliché, "To a man with only a hammer, everything's a nail." Well, Mr. Hammer-man may only have a hammer, but that doesn't make everything a nail; and the scientist may only be able to test certain kinds of things, but that doesn't mean that those things can explain everything else.
If he really knew his stuff he'd not have had to fit the results to his conclusion.
That sort of thing happens far more than you may know. Multiple fields operate on the assumptions that the existence and operations of the cosmos and of man must be explainable on purely naturalistic terms, and that no other potential explanation of these things will be tolerated - never mind given a moment's serious consideration.
The consequence of this is that in those fields the results are always tailored to fit the assumptions. There's no reason to suppose it doesn't happen in other fields, either. It's a truism, perhaps, but it's still true: sometimes one only sees what one is looking for.
NO HE WAS NOT. It was something like "not being 100% forthcoming" or "being evasive". It was not for perjury.
It is not a felony.
Now, since a) you can't keep straight when the Lewinsky scandal happened, and b) you can't get straight whether or not Clinton lied under oath (which is a primary definition of "perjury"), and c) you can't even keep straight what you have said yourself, I really don't see the point of continuing to bother with you.
Guilty implies there were charges and a trial.
There you go again, resorting to preposterous hairsplitting just like Clinton! Amazingly, guilt and innocence are more than simple decisions by a jury. You yourself say Bush broke international law - well, where's the court that said so? People get away with crimes everyday - does that mean that they're "innocent"??? Ha! The fact that the clowns running Congress couldn't be bothered to deal with Clinton's felonious behavior doesn't change the fact that Clinton's behavior was felonious. It just means that we have lousy leaders.
I don't know why I'm doing this, since you have already repeatedly demonstrated a disregard for historical fact. Call me crazy.
It was something like "not being 100% forthcoming" or "being evasive". It was not for perjury.
According to this CNN report, "The Arkansas Supreme Court's Committee on Professional Conduct initially called for Clinton's disbarment last year, saying he lied about his affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky."
This is not simple "misleading" or "evasive" testimony. They recommended it because they said that he lied.
Here you will find that the Committee described Clinton's behavior "as involving dishonesty, deceit, fraud and misrepresentation."
Clinton is, as others have said, "an unusually good liar," and that is quite obvious here, where he admits "...my responses to questions about Ms. Lewinsky were false". These questions were answered under oath.
In short, he lied, and he has admitted it (or as close to it as that weasel will ever come).
If you continue reading in that last article, you will find that Clinton agreed to a settlement that involved him admitting to something less than perjury, but it's wholly disingenuous on your part to even fantasize that the real question was anything different. The fact that he was allowed to resort to legalese weasel words to avoid actually admitting the fact that he committed perjury doesn't change the reality that Clinton lied under oath.
You also claim that perjury is not a felony. A little googling shows that in many or most cases it is always or only a felony, but in some places it can under certain circumstances be a misdemeanor. However, in Arkansas it's a felony, and ditto for DC.
Lastly, given your ceaseless appeals to the former president's anatomy, I would have to conclude that it is you who is obsessed about it. As for me, I'm concerned with people telling the truth under oath. Clinton did not have the right to decide for himself what questions he would answer truthfully; he was under oath. It's the job of his attorney to object to a question in the deposition, but even if he does object that wouldn't give Clinton the right to lie. It's pretty pathetic when the best Clinton's allies can do is resort to name calling, or to suggesting that because he lied about sex it doesn't matter. Personally, I'd say that this shows how incredibly shoddy their "defense" of him actually is.
The man was guilty. Just admit it, and move along.
The disbarment was a civil proceeding not a criminal one.
You can say the sky isn't blue, but that doesn't change the facts, dude. He wasn't disbarred for jaywalking. He wasn't disbarred for picking his nose. He was disbarred for committing perjury. The fact that he never faced criminal penalties is completely irrelevant to the question of why he was disbarred, and it also doesn't change the fact that perjury is a felony, which fact you are also conveniently ignoring.
Are you ignorant of the fact that there can be civil and criminal penalties for committing a felony? The fact that one never faces criminal charges for committing a felony doesn't mean that he haven't committed one. Clinton lied under oath. It doesn't matter if the subject of the lie was sex or drugs or rock and roll. He lied under oath. That, my evasive friend, is a felony, and it also happens to be the reason why he was disbarred/had his law license suspended.
It always astonishes me how Bill's Brigade can stare facts like this in the face and then deny them. It's like Algore's Army, who can't face the fact that on national TV Al tried to take credit for creating the Internet. It would be much easier to admit your guy's fault than go to the epistemological extremes of disingenuous, hairsplitting arguments over what the meaning of "is" is, or what the meaning of "create" is. Nobody's perfect - especially the philandering perjurer Bill Clinton.
He was never tried for nor found guilty of perjury.
Oh please. Describe for us then exactly what it was that induced the supreme court of Clinton's home state to recommend his disbarment if it wasn't for perjury. When you're done making up that fairy tale, you can come up with one that explains why the US Supreme Court disbarred him. And when you're done making up those fantasies, maybe you can dream up one involving unicorns, flying horses, and magic sea dust.
Most people would be fined and that would be end of that.
But you see, Clinton was not "most people". He was the President, sworn to uphold the law of the land. He was also a lawyer - a sworn officer of the court. He was also a law professor. Arguably the bar must be higher for people in such positions of responsibility. It's one thing for Clinton to go on the TV and lie to the entire world about his abominable behavior toward his wife; it's another thing entirely for him to lie under oath. If you can't see the difference, then I pity you.
In a civilized society the question would not be asked in the first place.
You have a perverse notion of "civilized", if it doesn't include even a basic commitment to standards of truthfulness, decency, and marital fidelity (another form of truthfulness).
Of course none of this is an impeachable ofense
Perjury and suborning perjury are felonies. You don't think a felony is impeachable? You're adding to the reasons why I scoff at the idea that I should accept your ideas of what constitutes a "civilized" society!
Bush should be impeached for waging an illegal war
Nice evasion, but I'll bite. In the first place, I happen to agree that because Congress did not declare war, Bush's war in Iraq is unconstitutiional. But if it comes to that, so were Bill's excellent adventures in Kosovo, and in Somalia, and in Afghanistan, for which military actions Congress never declared war. You can't have it both ways: either Bush and Clinton are wrong in the wars that they have waged - which happens to be my position - or neither of them are wrong.
lying to the UN
Assuming for the moment both that Bush knew what he was saying was untrue and that he deliberately misled the UN, I still don't care, because the UN has not a scintilla of legal or judicial authority in this country. Bush is bound by the Constitution, which is the supreme law of this country. He's not bound to tell the UN anything at all. (But - as I said - I still totally oppose what he has been doing in Iraq).
History shows that the impeachment distracted the president enough for al quada to plan and execute attacks against the US.
Given your miserable inability to remember that the Lewinsky scandal broke two years after Clinton's re-election, it'll take a lot more than your word for me to believe anything.
In what way was getting a blowjob from an intern relevant.
It establishes a pattern of Clinton seeking sex with other subordinates.
In the end of course it did not work. Clinton got re-elected.
In the end, of course, the Lewinsky scandal arose in 1998, so clearly you not only don't understand the details of the subject, you're disqualified from discussing the "purpose".
silly impeachment process
So "silly" that the Arkansas Supreme Court recommended that he be disbarred, and which recommendation eventually led to his being disbarred by the US Supreme Court, and to his law license being suspended for five years. Face it: Clinton was guilty of a felony, and paid a professional penalty for it. Now perhaps you don't think that lying under oath in a court of law is a big deal, but happily enough our courts seem to disagree. The only pity is that the gutless, spineless, useless Republicans in the Senate refused to address the problem.
being able to properly identify people is essential to financial transactions
...and, if you RTFA, you'd know that ID cards present absolutely no guarantees about this - even if you have a single standard - because a) they can always be forged, and b) crooks can get legitimate IDs through illegitimate (or even legitimate) means, and c) sometimes the idiots checking the IDs don't even bother to do their job.
You can't prevent fraud with an ID card. You can't prevent illegal immigration with an ID card. You can't prevent terrorism with an ID card. Setting aside for the moment the question of whether an ID card can be useful, the Powers That Be are presenting arguments in favor of the cards that are demonstrably bogus. If these are the best arguments that they have for the things, then I'd say we might as well scrap the whole thing now. If there's a valid reason, what is it?
A reply to a post like this is probably a no-win scenario, but I'll have a go at it anyway.
In the first place, I'm not sure that 477 (478 counting this one) posts over the several years I've been visiting Slash constitutes "addiction".
In the second place, I spent time on the auto-censor thread in three bursts - one of which was during lunch. During the others I had major SQL queries running and had time for a post or two. Big deal. If you've got a subscription, you can do the history check and see that there are huge blocks of time where I never post at all.
In the third place, I don't own a TV, and in my posts on the auto-censor thread, I was discussing others' right to use that product, and homeschooling. Big deal.
In the fourth place, we *do* own a DVD drive, and we do occasionally watch DVDs on the computer - like maybe once a week. Again - big deal.
So your post, while initially humorous, really doesn't amount to much once the facts are known.
What did people do when they got sick before modern medicine and hospitals?
Are you saying that entertainment cannot be distinguished from healthcare? If you're comparing the hypochondriac who can't stay out of the doctor's office to the bread-and-circuses American who can't get off his couch, then I suppose you have a point. But otherwise, this is bizarre.
Fact is, people want entertainment.
No. Really?
No kidding. There's nothing "luddite" about suggesting that the modern obsession with entertainment is actually a bad thing, which was - quite obviously - the point of my post. There is something disingenuous about defenses of entertainment that equate addiction to it with taking advantage of technological advances, however.
People get bored, and people want something to do.
Incredible. So what exactly did people do before they had television? Did they just not get bored? Or did they have other things to do? Or did they find other ways to entertain themselves?
Don't you think that addiction to entertainment is harmful? It seems not. Unfortunately, it appears that most of the country agrees with you.
As for me and my family? We don't own a TV. We gave it up over a decade ago. Frankly, we don't know how TV slaves get anything done, because we still don't have enough time to do the things we want to do.
I guess I'm different then. I find different viewpoints illuminating and thought-provoking.
...and I'll bet you don't spend much time with people who don't share that sentiment when you can help it;-) (that's a joke, son)
It's certainly true that most homeschoolers are Christians, and that they are generally of conservative bent - but that doesn't mean that they simply tell their kids what to believe without at the same time explaining why they believe it, and what is wrong with the alternatives. Frankly, I don't see what's wrong with that. There comes a time when children get older that they need to be able to do more than merely puppet what their parents say, but if your friend's children are young, I'll hazard a guess that he probably won't treat them quite the same way when they're older. Young children (3, 4, 5, 6 years old) don't need to know the whys of much of anything. They're not capable of that sort of synthesis. They need facts. The old notion of the trivium - grammar, logic, rhetoric - seems to fit well with the development of children, and with the way that we acquire knowledge. You're not equipped to speak intelligently about a topic until you understand the facts of the topic and how they are related. Otherwise, you sometimes end up looking silly. I think that this is a useful perspective when considering the development of children: they have a lot of facts to learn about a lot of things before they can ever get around to understanding "why".
Bear in mind, too, that the Bible-believing Christian doesn't accept the idea that multiple points of view are equally valid: if the Bible is what your friend says it is, then relativism is ruled out. You may disagree with the idea of moral (or other) absolutes, but that disagreement doesn't ipso facto demonstrate that belief in absolute truths is erroneous.
The other two posts that challenged the moderation of that crap have been modded down. Yours has been left alone - so far. The lesson should be learned: the moderators will not tolerate challenges to their authority when some troll flames away ignorantly at Christianity.
Now let's see how long it takes for this to suffer a similar fate;-)
The purpose of education is to provide assistance to society as a whole as well as give the person, not just child the tools to be successful. By successful, I mean happy.
This is precisely the sort of thing I expected, and I completely and totally disagree.
In the first place, if you educate for the good of society, then you are educating for the sake of the collective. This is perfectly in keeping with Marx (who advocated public education), but nothing about it necessarily has anything to do with providing something beneficial to the student - except as he is related to society. So is man defined by his relation to the state, or is he defined by something else? It's pretty clear how we think about the matter: you're defined by what you do. The first thing we ask someone when we meet him is "So, what do you do for a living?" We mentally define him based upon his answer.
But this is a grossly truncated view of man. I am not what I do. If that were so, what kind of conclusions shall we draw from the fact that at different times in my adult life I have been a printer, security guard, proofreader, tech support geek, and programmer?
You say that success == happiness. So if I'm constantly high on crack, am I successful? Are you saying that the purpose of human life is to be happy, so that you are successful as a human being if you are happy? This is better than measuring success in terms of possessions, but is mere happiness really the meaning of success??
No moral lessons are learned because it is simply a presentation of a collection of facts.
But there's no such thing as a brute fact. Facts are always interpreted. Presenting "the facts" about human reproductive biology in a context devoid of any comment about the proper use of the equipment sends a clear moral message: viz., that you can use the equipment however you want. This is undeniably a moral implication, whatever you may think about traditional Judeo-Christian views of sexual morality.
They are not allowed to say whether it acceptable behavior or not.
Which is itself a moral position. The schools go overboard telling kids how evil drugs are, for instance, which only demonstrates that school policy makers are perfectly willing to take a moral stance with respect to drugs, and so it is simply absurd to say that they cannot or should not or do not take a moral position on sex. To present the mechanics with no moral context is itself a moral context.
If you were home-schooled, then chances are that there's only been one point of view for your whole life:
I went to public schools.
I actually only think there's one caveat to home-schooling, and that is how a home-schooled child is probably not going to be exposed to people with different opinions.
...except that this would, of course, only happen if the family had zero interaction with other families, never watched TV, never watched movies, never listened to the radio, never went anywhere, never did anything, and never read anything. In short, you'd have to live in a cave. In other words, your concern is completely baseless. Homeschooled children spend a great deal more time interacting with children of all ages and having actual conversations with adults, because they learn that it is normal to do so. They aren't dumped into a completely artificial environment where they are age-segregated.
Are you out of school? How much of your time do you spend interacting exclusively with people who are the same age as you, or who are in the same "season of life" (ugh, how I hate that noxious term) as you? You work with people of all ages, right? So exactly how does the age-segregation of school prepare you for that? It doesn't.
I think that the reaction of a home-schooled kid in that case is going to be to close themselves off from other points of view, and then seek out other like-minded (probably home-schooled) individuals to protect themselves from the ambiguity.
But this is precisely what public school kids do all the time! Why do you think that there are cliques on campus? Why do you think that some kids are outcasts? In the first place, people naturally gravitate towards people of similar mindset and shared experience. In the second place, the public school actually encourages this behavior because kids are kept with other kids (all of the same age) all day, everyday. In contrast, as I've already pointed out, the homeschool child spends much more time interacting with adults and with children of all ages.
Aren't parents the ones supposed to be teaching morals? Public schools obviously don't have this luxury
You don't think schools teach morals? It is to laugh, friend.
Education is intrinsically moral. It's inevitable. It's never a question of whether or not morals will be taught; it's always a question of what or whose morals will be taught.
Trivial example: When schools teach kids not to use drugs - that is a moral lesson. But there are more subtle ones, too. Kids learn that if they don't go along with the crowd, they will be the subject of humiliation, scorn, mockery, and various other forms of abuse. There are obvious moral consequences to this lesson.
You don't think that there is a moral dimension to the way that sex education is presented in the schools?
Indeed, it's precisely because of the morals being taught in the government's schools that the homeschooling movement got started. There are precious few parents - at least initially - who pull their kids out of schools (or never put them in to start with) who do so because they're convinced that they can educate their children better than the schools can (even though they absolutely can in almost every case). We are all still addicted to the completely false notion that only the "professional educator" can teach kids successfully, and it's unnerving to take upon yourself the burden of providing for your child's education.
But the fact is that you don't have to be a professional in order to teach. The idea is ludicrous.
Here's a question for you: what's the purpose of education?
It's pretty laughable that anyone would claim that government standards ought to be applied to homeschoolers, who consistently outperform the hapless victims of the government's schools.
Strikingly, you suggest that sometimes homeschooling doesn't work - which for the sake of argument I'll grant, though such cases would be extraordinarily rare and I've never seen one myself - while blithely ignoring the facts that government-run education is no panacea and that it has been characterized for decades by ever-declining academic and moral standards.
The government's schools are an unmitigated disaster for education, with the single exception of their unqualified success in producing drones who are ready to fill their places in society as useful cogs in the machine. But that's not what education is supposed to produce. It's supposed to produce individuals who are able to learn and think for themselves. Instead, the schools churn out people who are so addicted to groupthink that they really believe that they're expressing their individuality when they get tattooed and pierced - just like all of their friends. Brilliant.
Lastly, I would point out that any homeschooler who sends his kids back into the schools obviously was not approaching it properly in the first place, unless they felt compelled by family circumstances (e.g., single parent) to do so. I've never known a homeschooler who threw in the towel in this way. Yes, I suppose it happens - but that has nothing to do with whether or not homeschooling works. It's simply preposterous to pretend that a government agent is going to care about your kids more than you do. It's absurd to even suggest that they will be able to tailor your child's education to suit his particular needs. Ha! What they do is force square peg kids into round holes, and when they don't fit - well, those brats are obviously "learning disabled".
If I put my son in a government school, you know what would happen? They would try to get him on Ritalin so fast that your head would spin. They would claim that he obviously is defective because he can't sit still for boring lectures (or even his favorite movies), etc - even though he can sit and read his favorite books for hours on end. But my boy taught himself to read at age 4. At age five he could read high school level material (and would frequently choose to do so). He taught himself to count up to at least 99,999 when he was 2, using a calculator. So should I send him to the local government school, where he'll sit twiddling his thumbs while everyone else's kids are reading Dick and Jane and trying to learn that 1 + 1 = 2? Ha.
Personally I don't like the idea of people trusting other people's judgment on what their kids should or shouldn't see in a movie.
But they already do this with their children's education, unless they homeschool: they are trusting other people's judgment on what their kids should or shouldn't learn. How is this any different?
Sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about.
I know homeschoolers. I've associated with them for the last 14 years at least. I've watched their kids grow up, go to good schools, get jobs, and become productive members of society.
Executive summary: homeschooled kids are some of the most well-adjusted people I know.
I know two guys who were pulled out of the schools to be homeschooled when they were in early elementary school. At that time, they were "typical" kids: that is, they were surly, sullen, and wouldn't look an adult in the eye, let alone engage in conversation with one. Oh, and the quality of their education sucked up to that point (I know that's terribly shocking).
Within a year, these same boys were cheerful, outgoing, and were completely capable of carrying on meaningful conversations with adults - and would look you in the eye while doing it. And they were learning a whole lot more, too.
I've yet to see an implementation that has resulted in a stable child
I don't ever remember meeting an "unstable" homeschooled child. What do you call "stable"? Do you mean "Knows how to roll a joint and put on a condom"? Well, you've got them there, I'll bet.
Just this past Sunday, a perfect stranger in a video store walked up and told me how well-behaved and "innocent" (her word) my homeschooled son is, and how it was obvious that he is homeschooled. And she was a teacher in a public school.
as long as they aren't made to believe its correct
Do you think that religious people have some sort of raygun that they use to zap kids, and all of a sudden the kids become religious? How can anyone "make" another believe anything?
Why was there ever a time on tv when you couldn't say "pregnant?"
Blame Queen Victoria the prude, not Christianity. The Bible is not prudish.
What is "Insightful" about this flamebait from an anonymous troll?
Please identify, for the sake of the home viewer, a single terrorist act committed by fundamentalist Christians in the United States in the last 100 years. If by some miracle you manage to pull that off, please continue doing so until you have identified as many terrorist acts as have been committed by radical Muslims in the last 3 months.
Good luck.
Hint: No, you may *not* point at Eric Rudolph or any idiot murderers of abortionists, since fundamentalist Christians uniformly condemn the acts of these thugs.
Incredibly, the sale of a product such as this will have... absolutely no impact on the life of anyone who doesn't want to buy it. Leftists are constantly prattling at others with actual moral standards, saying rubbish like "If you don't like it, change the channel." Well, here's a product that no Leftist (or right-winger, for that matter) thinking with his crotch ever has to buy. If you don't like it...don't buy it. I think we can confidently state that this product isn't designed for you anyway.
I can't remember the title but there was a Niven novel set in a future arcology in LA
That would be Oath of Fealty, and while I don't think that it was as bad as all that, I agree it doesn't measure up to other stuff by Niven that I've read.
Should it be like water and power? I think it would be a very bad idea myself.
So do I. The government has no business promising goodies to anyone at the expense of other taxpayers.
But with respect to Internet access being treated like a utility: if you're going to grant someone a government-protected monopoly, then you absolutely need to regulate them. There's no way around the fact that prices will be higher than in a free market, but without regulation the monopoly holders will treat customers like trash, because the customers have nowhere else to go.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that this begs the question: what if demons actually made the person sick? By his a priori rejection of the possibility, the scientist misses what really happened in such a case. I'm not saying that demons actually cause illness, mind you; I'm simply addressing your example.
The existence and operations of the cosmos and of man must be explainable in purely naturalistic terms because only naturalistic explanations are actually testable.
But your conclusion in no way follows from your premise. The fact that only naturalistic explanations are testable in no way implies that the cosmos and man have purely naturalistic explanations. This reminds me of that old joke/cliché, "To a man with only a hammer, everything's a nail." Well, Mr. Hammer-man may only have a hammer, but that doesn't make everything a nail; and the scientist may only be able to test certain kinds of things, but that doesn't mean that those things can explain everything else.
That sort of thing happens far more than you may know. Multiple fields operate on the assumptions that the existence and operations of the cosmos and of man must be explainable on purely naturalistic terms, and that no other potential explanation of these things will be tolerated - never mind given a moment's serious consideration.
The consequence of this is that in those fields the results are always tailored to fit the assumptions. There's no reason to suppose it doesn't happen in other fields, either. It's a truism, perhaps, but it's still true: sometimes one only sees what one is looking for.
In my book, I'd say that there would have to be some pretty impressive "effort" exerted to build that bridge.
I've been there, and it's breathtaking. They actually have a sign in the exact middle that says "No Fishing From Bridge"!
To which you replied:
I never said that.
But what you said is this:
NO HE WAS NOT. It was something like "not being 100% forthcoming" or "being evasive". It was not for perjury.
It is not a felony.
Now, since a) you can't keep straight when the Lewinsky scandal happened, and b) you can't get straight whether or not Clinton lied under oath (which is a primary definition of "perjury"), and c) you can't even keep straight what you have said yourself, I really don't see the point of continuing to bother with you.
Guilty implies there were charges and a trial.
There you go again, resorting to preposterous hairsplitting just like Clinton! Amazingly, guilt and innocence are more than simple decisions by a jury. You yourself say Bush broke international law - well, where's the court that said so? People get away with crimes everyday - does that mean that they're "innocent"??? Ha! The fact that the clowns running Congress couldn't be bothered to deal with Clinton's felonious behavior doesn't change the fact that Clinton's behavior was felonious. It just means that we have lousy leaders.
It was something like "not being 100% forthcoming" or "being evasive". It was not for perjury.
According to this CNN report, "The Arkansas Supreme Court's Committee on Professional Conduct initially called for Clinton's disbarment last year, saying he lied about his affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky."
This is not simple "misleading" or "evasive" testimony. They recommended it because they said that he lied.
Here you will find that the Committee described Clinton's behavior "as involving dishonesty, deceit, fraud and misrepresentation."
Clinton is, as others have said, "an unusually good liar," and that is quite obvious here, where he admits "...my responses to questions about Ms. Lewinsky were false". These questions were answered under oath.
In short, he lied, and he has admitted it (or as close to it as that weasel will ever come).
If you continue reading in that last article, you will find that Clinton agreed to a settlement that involved him admitting to something less than perjury, but it's wholly disingenuous on your part to even fantasize that the real question was anything different. The fact that he was allowed to resort to legalese weasel words to avoid actually admitting the fact that he committed perjury doesn't change the reality that Clinton lied under oath.
You also claim that perjury is not a felony. A little googling shows that in many or most cases it is always or only a felony, but in some places it can under certain circumstances be a misdemeanor. However, in Arkansas it's a felony, and ditto for DC.
Lastly, given your ceaseless appeals to the former president's anatomy, I would have to conclude that it is you who is obsessed about it. As for me, I'm concerned with people telling the truth under oath. Clinton did not have the right to decide for himself what questions he would answer truthfully; he was under oath. It's the job of his attorney to object to a question in the deposition, but even if he does object that wouldn't give Clinton the right to lie. It's pretty pathetic when the best Clinton's allies can do is resort to name calling, or to suggesting that because he lied about sex it doesn't matter. Personally, I'd say that this shows how incredibly shoddy their "defense" of him actually is.
The man was guilty. Just admit it, and move along.
You can say the sky isn't blue, but that doesn't change the facts, dude. He wasn't disbarred for jaywalking. He wasn't disbarred for picking his nose. He was disbarred for committing perjury. The fact that he never faced criminal penalties is completely irrelevant to the question of why he was disbarred, and it also doesn't change the fact that perjury is a felony, which fact you are also conveniently ignoring.
Are you ignorant of the fact that there can be civil and criminal penalties for committing a felony? The fact that one never faces criminal charges for committing a felony doesn't mean that he haven't committed one. Clinton lied under oath. It doesn't matter if the subject of the lie was sex or drugs or rock and roll. He lied under oath. That, my evasive friend, is a felony, and it also happens to be the reason why he was disbarred/had his law license suspended.
It always astonishes me how Bill's Brigade can stare facts like this in the face and then deny them. It's like Algore's Army, who can't face the fact that on national TV Al tried to take credit for creating the Internet. It would be much easier to admit your guy's fault than go to the epistemological extremes of disingenuous, hairsplitting arguments over what the meaning of "is" is, or what the meaning of "create" is. Nobody's perfect - especially the philandering perjurer Bill Clinton.
Oh please. Describe for us then exactly what it was that induced the supreme court of Clinton's home state to recommend his disbarment if it wasn't for perjury. When you're done making up that fairy tale, you can come up with one that explains why the US Supreme Court disbarred him. And when you're done making up those fantasies, maybe you can dream up one involving unicorns, flying horses, and magic sea dust.
Most people would be fined and that would be end of that.
But you see, Clinton was not "most people". He was the President, sworn to uphold the law of the land. He was also a lawyer - a sworn officer of the court. He was also a law professor. Arguably the bar must be higher for people in such positions of responsibility. It's one thing for Clinton to go on the TV and lie to the entire world about his abominable behavior toward his wife; it's another thing entirely for him to lie under oath. If you can't see the difference, then I pity you.
In a civilized society the question would not be asked in the first place.
You have a perverse notion of "civilized", if it doesn't include even a basic commitment to standards of truthfulness, decency, and marital fidelity (another form of truthfulness).
Of course none of this is an impeachable ofense
Perjury and suborning perjury are felonies. You don't think a felony is impeachable? You're adding to the reasons why I scoff at the idea that I should accept your ideas of what constitutes a "civilized" society!
Bush should be impeached for waging an illegal war
Nice evasion, but I'll bite. In the first place, I happen to agree that because Congress did not declare war, Bush's war in Iraq is unconstitutiional. But if it comes to that, so were Bill's excellent adventures in Kosovo, and in Somalia, and in Afghanistan, for which military actions Congress never declared war. You can't have it both ways: either Bush and Clinton are wrong in the wars that they have waged - which happens to be my position - or neither of them are wrong.
lying to the UN
Assuming for the moment both that Bush knew what he was saying was untrue and that he deliberately misled the UN, I still don't care, because the UN has not a scintilla of legal or judicial authority in this country. Bush is bound by the Constitution, which is the supreme law of this country. He's not bound to tell the UN anything at all. (But - as I said - I still totally oppose what he has been doing in Iraq).
History shows that the impeachment distracted the president enough for al quada to plan and execute attacks against the US.
Given your miserable inability to remember that the Lewinsky scandal broke two years after Clinton's re-election, it'll take a lot more than your word for me to believe anything.
It establishes a pattern of Clinton seeking sex with other subordinates.
In the end of course it did not work. Clinton got re-elected.
In the end, of course, the Lewinsky scandal arose in 1998, so clearly you not only don't understand the details of the subject, you're disqualified from discussing the "purpose".
silly impeachment process
So "silly" that the Arkansas Supreme Court recommended that he be disbarred, and which recommendation eventually led to his being disbarred by the US Supreme Court, and to his law license being suspended for five years. Face it: Clinton was guilty of a felony, and paid a professional penalty for it. Now perhaps you don't think that lying under oath in a court of law is a big deal, but happily enough our courts seem to disagree. The only pity is that the gutless, spineless, useless Republicans in the Senate refused to address the problem.
...and, if you RTFA, you'd know that ID cards present absolutely no guarantees about this - even if you have a single standard - because a) they can always be forged, and b) crooks can get legitimate IDs through illegitimate (or even legitimate) means, and c) sometimes the idiots checking the IDs don't even bother to do their job.
You can't prevent fraud with an ID card. You can't prevent illegal immigration with an ID card. You can't prevent terrorism with an ID card. Setting aside for the moment the question of whether an ID card can be useful, the Powers That Be are presenting arguments in favor of the cards that are demonstrably bogus. If these are the best arguments that they have for the things, then I'd say we might as well scrap the whole thing now. If there's a valid reason, what is it?
In the first place, I'm not sure that 477 (478 counting this one) posts over the several years I've been visiting Slash constitutes "addiction".
In the second place, I spent time on the auto-censor thread in three bursts - one of which was during lunch. During the others I had major SQL queries running and had time for a post or two. Big deal. If you've got a subscription, you can do the history check and see that there are huge blocks of time where I never post at all.
In the third place, I don't own a TV, and in my posts on the auto-censor thread, I was discussing others' right to use that product, and homeschooling. Big deal.
In the fourth place, we *do* own a DVD drive, and we do occasionally watch DVDs on the computer - like maybe once a week. Again - big deal.
So your post, while initially humorous, really doesn't amount to much once the facts are known.
Are you saying that entertainment cannot be distinguished from healthcare? If you're comparing the hypochondriac who can't stay out of the doctor's office to the bread-and-circuses American who can't get off his couch, then I suppose you have a point. But otherwise, this is bizarre.
Fact is, people want entertainment.
No. Really?
No kidding. There's nothing "luddite" about suggesting that the modern obsession with entertainment is actually a bad thing, which was - quite obviously - the point of my post. There is something disingenuous about defenses of entertainment that equate addiction to it with taking advantage of technological advances, however.
Incredible. So what exactly did people do before they had television? Did they just not get bored? Or did they have other things to do? Or did they find other ways to entertain themselves?
Don't you think that addiction to entertainment is harmful? It seems not. Unfortunately, it appears that most of the country agrees with you.
As for me and my family? We don't own a TV. We gave it up over a decade ago. Frankly, we don't know how TV slaves get anything done, because we still don't have enough time to do the things we want to do.
...and I'll bet you don't spend much time with people who don't share that sentiment when you can help it ;-) (that's a joke, son)
It's certainly true that most homeschoolers are Christians, and that they are generally of conservative bent - but that doesn't mean that they simply tell their kids what to believe without at the same time explaining why they believe it, and what is wrong with the alternatives. Frankly, I don't see what's wrong with that. There comes a time when children get older that they need to be able to do more than merely puppet what their parents say, but if your friend's children are young, I'll hazard a guess that he probably won't treat them quite the same way when they're older. Young children (3, 4, 5, 6 years old) don't need to know the whys of much of anything. They're not capable of that sort of synthesis. They need facts. The old notion of the trivium - grammar, logic, rhetoric - seems to fit well with the development of children, and with the way that we acquire knowledge. You're not equipped to speak intelligently about a topic until you understand the facts of the topic and how they are related. Otherwise, you sometimes end up looking silly. I think that this is a useful perspective when considering the development of children: they have a lot of facts to learn about a lot of things before they can ever get around to understanding "why".
Bear in mind, too, that the Bible-believing Christian doesn't accept the idea that multiple points of view are equally valid: if the Bible is what your friend says it is, then relativism is ruled out. You may disagree with the idea of moral (or other) absolutes, but that disagreement doesn't ipso facto demonstrate that belief in absolute truths is erroneous.
Now let's see how long it takes for this to suffer a similar fate ;-)
...which is a moral context. So I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing here ;-)
This is precisely the sort of thing I expected, and I completely and totally disagree.
In the first place, if you educate for the good of society, then you are educating for the sake of the collective. This is perfectly in keeping with Marx (who advocated public education), but nothing about it necessarily has anything to do with providing something beneficial to the student - except as he is related to society. So is man defined by his relation to the state, or is he defined by something else? It's pretty clear how we think about the matter: you're defined by what you do. The first thing we ask someone when we meet him is "So, what do you do for a living?" We mentally define him based upon his answer.
But this is a grossly truncated view of man. I am not what I do. If that were so, what kind of conclusions shall we draw from the fact that at different times in my adult life I have been a printer, security guard, proofreader, tech support geek, and programmer?
You say that success == happiness. So if I'm constantly high on crack, am I successful? Are you saying that the purpose of human life is to be happy, so that you are successful as a human being if you are happy? This is better than measuring success in terms of possessions, but is mere happiness really the meaning of success??
No moral lessons are learned because it is simply a presentation of a collection of facts.
But there's no such thing as a brute fact. Facts are always interpreted. Presenting "the facts" about human reproductive biology in a context devoid of any comment about the proper use of the equipment sends a clear moral message: viz., that you can use the equipment however you want. This is undeniably a moral implication, whatever you may think about traditional Judeo-Christian views of sexual morality.
They are not allowed to say whether it acceptable behavior or not.
Which is itself a moral position. The schools go overboard telling kids how evil drugs are, for instance, which only demonstrates that school policy makers are perfectly willing to take a moral stance with respect to drugs, and so it is simply absurd to say that they cannot or should not or do not take a moral position on sex. To present the mechanics with no moral context is itself a moral context.
I went to public schools.
I actually only think there's one caveat to home-schooling, and that is how a home-schooled child is probably not going to be exposed to people with different opinions.
...except that this would, of course, only happen if the family had zero interaction with other families, never watched TV, never watched movies, never listened to the radio, never went anywhere, never did anything, and never read anything. In short, you'd have to live in a cave. In other words, your concern is completely baseless. Homeschooled children spend a great deal more time interacting with children of all ages and having actual conversations with adults, because they learn that it is normal to do so. They aren't dumped into a completely artificial environment where they are age-segregated.
Are you out of school? How much of your time do you spend interacting exclusively with people who are the same age as you, or who are in the same "season of life" (ugh, how I hate that noxious term) as you? You work with people of all ages, right? So exactly how does the age-segregation of school prepare you for that? It doesn't.
I think that the reaction of a home-schooled kid in that case is going to be to close themselves off from other points of view, and then seek out other like-minded (probably home-schooled) individuals to protect themselves from the ambiguity.
But this is precisely what public school kids do all the time! Why do you think that there are cliques on campus? Why do you think that some kids are outcasts? In the first place, people naturally gravitate towards people of similar mindset and shared experience. In the second place, the public school actually encourages this behavior because kids are kept with other kids (all of the same age) all day, everyday. In contrast, as I've already pointed out, the homeschool child spends much more time interacting with adults and with children of all ages.
You don't think schools teach morals? It is to laugh, friend.
Education is intrinsically moral. It's inevitable. It's never a question of whether or not morals will be taught; it's always a question of what or whose morals will be taught.
Trivial example: When schools teach kids not to use drugs - that is a moral lesson. But there are more subtle ones, too. Kids learn that if they don't go along with the crowd, they will be the subject of humiliation, scorn, mockery, and various other forms of abuse. There are obvious moral consequences to this lesson.
You don't think that there is a moral dimension to the way that sex education is presented in the schools?
Indeed, it's precisely because of the morals being taught in the government's schools that the homeschooling movement got started. There are precious few parents - at least initially - who pull their kids out of schools (or never put them in to start with) who do so because they're convinced that they can educate their children better than the schools can (even though they absolutely can in almost every case). We are all still addicted to the completely false notion that only the "professional educator" can teach kids successfully, and it's unnerving to take upon yourself the burden of providing for your child's education.
But the fact is that you don't have to be a professional in order to teach. The idea is ludicrous.
Here's a question for you: what's the purpose of education?
Strikingly, you suggest that sometimes homeschooling doesn't work - which for the sake of argument I'll grant, though such cases would be extraordinarily rare and I've never seen one myself - while blithely ignoring the facts that government-run education is no panacea and that it has been characterized for decades by ever-declining academic and moral standards.
The government's schools are an unmitigated disaster for education, with the single exception of their unqualified success in producing drones who are ready to fill their places in society as useful cogs in the machine. But that's not what education is supposed to produce. It's supposed to produce individuals who are able to learn and think for themselves. Instead, the schools churn out people who are so addicted to groupthink that they really believe that they're expressing their individuality when they get tattooed and pierced - just like all of their friends. Brilliant.
Lastly, I would point out that any homeschooler who sends his kids back into the schools obviously was not approaching it properly in the first place, unless they felt compelled by family circumstances (e.g., single parent) to do so. I've never known a homeschooler who threw in the towel in this way. Yes, I suppose it happens - but that has nothing to do with whether or not homeschooling works. It's simply preposterous to pretend that a government agent is going to care about your kids more than you do. It's absurd to even suggest that they will be able to tailor your child's education to suit his particular needs. Ha! What they do is force square peg kids into round holes, and when they don't fit - well, those brats are obviously "learning disabled".
If I put my son in a government school, you know what would happen? They would try to get him on Ritalin so fast that your head would spin. They would claim that he obviously is defective because he can't sit still for boring lectures (or even his favorite movies), etc - even though he can sit and read his favorite books for hours on end. But my boy taught himself to read at age 4. At age five he could read high school level material (and would frequently choose to do so). He taught himself to count up to at least 99,999 when he was 2, using a calculator. So should I send him to the local government school, where he'll sit twiddling his thumbs while everyone else's kids are reading Dick and Jane and trying to learn that 1 + 1 = 2? Ha.
But they already do this with their children's education, unless they homeschool: they are trusting other people's judgment on what their kids should or shouldn't learn. How is this any different?
I know homeschoolers. I've associated with them for the last 14 years at least. I've watched their kids grow up, go to good schools, get jobs, and become productive members of society.
Executive summary: homeschooled kids are some of the most well-adjusted people I know.
I know two guys who were pulled out of the schools to be homeschooled when they were in early elementary school. At that time, they were "typical" kids: that is, they were surly, sullen, and wouldn't look an adult in the eye, let alone engage in conversation with one. Oh, and the quality of their education sucked up to that point (I know that's terribly shocking).
Within a year, these same boys were cheerful, outgoing, and were completely capable of carrying on meaningful conversations with adults - and would look you in the eye while doing it. And they were learning a whole lot more, too.
I've yet to see an implementation that has resulted in a stable child
I don't ever remember meeting an "unstable" homeschooled child. What do you call "stable"? Do you mean "Knows how to roll a joint and put on a condom"? Well, you've got them there, I'll bet.
Just this past Sunday, a perfect stranger in a video store walked up and told me how well-behaved and "innocent" (her word) my homeschooled son is, and how it was obvious that he is homeschooled. And she was a teacher in a public school.
as long as they aren't made to believe its correct
Do you think that religious people have some sort of raygun that they use to zap kids, and all of a sudden the kids become religious? How can anyone "make" another believe anything?
Why was there ever a time on tv when you couldn't say "pregnant?"
Blame Queen Victoria the prude, not Christianity. The Bible is not prudish.
What is "Insightful" about this flamebait from an anonymous troll?
Please identify, for the sake of the home viewer, a single terrorist act committed by fundamentalist Christians in the United States in the last 100 years. If by some miracle you manage to pull that off, please continue doing so until you have identified as many terrorist acts as have been committed by radical Muslims in the last 3 months.
Good luck.
Hint: No, you may *not* point at Eric Rudolph or any idiot murderers of abortionists, since fundamentalist Christians uniformly condemn the acts of these thugs.
Incredibly, the sale of a product such as this will have ... absolutely no impact on the life of anyone who doesn't want to buy it. Leftists are constantly prattling at others with actual moral standards, saying rubbish like "If you don't like it, change the channel." Well, here's a product that no Leftist (or right-winger, for that matter) thinking with his crotch ever has to buy. If you don't like it...don't buy it. I think we can confidently state that this product isn't designed for you anyway.
You might want to have a look at Inferno, which is quite different from any of his and Pournelle's other stuff, and quite good IMO
That would be Oath of Fealty, and while I don't think that it was as bad as all that, I agree it doesn't measure up to other stuff by Niven that I've read.
So do I. The government has no business promising goodies to anyone at the expense of other taxpayers.
But with respect to Internet access being treated like a utility: if you're going to grant someone a government-protected monopoly, then you absolutely need to regulate them. There's no way around the fact that prices will be higher than in a free market, but without regulation the monopoly holders will treat customers like trash, because the customers have nowhere else to go.