Hugo

It used to be that any university degree was worth something. If universities were truly reserved for the academic elite, the fact is that even a Liberal Arts graduate would be guaranteed an income and good work because his degree guarantees a high level of literacy, numeracy, initiative and motivation - qualities an employer is looking for. Now, I appreciate your point that degrees are often not valued unless they provide a means to a job. However, this modus was always so. Even Rembrandt had serious financial problems and left vast debts, and the great philosophers and thinkers of history were all men of independent means. The fact is that human existence depends upon work far more than upon thought. Not to say that art and philosophy have no value, however, how much resources and money is society going to divert to these pursuits? Bearing in mind that a lot of talented artists do actually achieve widespread recognition and wealth from the very capitalist system that you suppose stifles them? The basic fact is that it's more important to eat than to read good poetry. This is the only mode of human existence yet discovered. All societies at all technological levels require people to work. Unfortunately, people in socialist and communist societies tend to work even harder (longer work days, worse conditions, less vacation, less pay) than people in capitalist societies, and people in more primitive modes of existence must work even harder (farmers in developing countries have very long work days and do a lot of hard physical labour). The truth is that the best relief from the 'rat race' is, ironically, in free-market capitalism.

Yes, and once that was said of abolitionism and the emancipation of women. Thankfully, the people fighting for those causes didn't give up despite the widespread belief that those changes would tear our society apart and cause economic collapse, and now we have a better world because of it. Stop saying that it is a solution. It is not any kind of a solution, it obscures problems by sweeping them under the carpet. If you have a social problem, killing millions of people who may suffer from it is not a solution, any more than genocide and mass killing have ever been solutions to problems. Was the Great Terror the solution to a problem? How about the Holocaust? And if not, why is abortion the solution to a problem? I am sick of people trying to put a nice face on abortion. Abortion looks like this. (Be advised before you click that the site is extremely graphic). Webster's defines genocide as "The deliberate and systematic destruction of a national, racial, religious, political, cultural, ethnic, or other group defined by the exterminators as undesirable." The "national/political group" is unborn children and 1 out of every 3 is now being put to death in North America. Pol Pot killed 1 out of every 4 Cambodians, and that was viewed as genocide. We are committing genocide against our own children. 46 million children are put to death each year, which is almost double the number that Hitler and Stalin combined killed, in total. It does not matter a tinker's cuss what social problems we have. Killing our children is unacceptable.

Did you know, Farrius, that black people are much more likely than whites to be victims of crime, die young or become addicted to drugs? Seeing as that is the case, would it not be "more humane" just to round up black people, especially those below the poverty line and living in bad neighbourhoods, and have them euthanised? After all, they'll probably end up getting shot or doing drugs anyway. We could do it quite simply - just get some crop-dusting aircraft and have them spray nerve gas over black neighbourhoods and ghettoes. You see, if you apply this logic to other problems you find that your advocacy is straight from Hitler's playbook.

If we're going to say this, we establish that abortion is bad. What we are looking at here is the "hard cases" and I think you can agree, Riff, that abortion for convenience or birth control is not ethical. Even the loudest of the pro-abort movement view abortion as a "necessary evil". What we have, then, is an ethical weighing on the scales of justice. On the one hand, we can force a woman to bear the child of a rape for 9 months. On the other, we can force her child to die, which is obviously permanent. It's my opinion that forcing a woman to bear a child is a lesser moral outrage than killing her child. Of all the crimes we recognise, the worst is homicide, and the worst homicides are those committed against children. This position is reinforced by the fact that abortion cannot undo the rape and frequently makes the trauma of it even worse. But you are weighing their sensitivity against human life. This is not a question of providing wheelchair ramps or using non-offensive terminology. In order to spare the feelings of these women you are advocating murdering innocent human beings, and I'm sorry, but in my book the right of one human to live takes precedent over the desire of another to avoid "shock" or "trauma". --Mr. Farrius --Joseph Stalin That's basically the crux of this argument. Like Stalin, you believe that a valid solution to a problem is to murder those who suffer from the problem or 'cause' the problem.

Who cares? He's a rapist. As a society we will strip him of his civil rights and liberties after he is convicted, and that would probably include any parental rights to the offspring of his crime. Morally he should probably also be financially obligated to his victim, however, no such compensation exists in law and the criminal code would have to be overhauled to put such a scheme into place. But it is interesting that you raise the point of 'the man'. A father has no choice. If he wants the baby and his girlfriend or wife does not, that baby will be aborted against his wishes. If he does not want the baby and his partner does, he will be forced in a court of law to pay paternity benefits for a child he did not want. Basically, as far as men are concerned, you play, you pay. But women have a "get out of jail free card" in legal abortion. Notwithstanding the fact that this is institutionalised sexual discrimination, this is also a big step backward for the emancipation of women, because it basically assumes that while a man is responsible and mature enough to be held accountable for his actions, a woman is far too hysterical and idiotic to be held accountable for hers. This is basically a continuation of the Victorian idea of "silly little women", and the great irony is that modern feminists are the ones shouting loudest for a return to that kind of view of women. It should be noted that the Suffragettes and virtually all founders of the women's rights and emancipation movement were pro-life. Another point regarding the abuse and neglect of children that you have brought up is that abortion has given us a society where children are throwaway and unimportant, where the idea of their rights being totally subverted to those of adults is not only countenanced and seriously discussed, it's actually law. Therefore it is not surprising that a society of this kind has eroded respect for children to produce such a mind-boggling increase in child abuse. To sum up in a single sentence: abortion does not prevent child abuse and neglect, it causes it.

My proposal for rape is that aborting the child does not undo the rape and is likely to traumatise the rape victim even more. Let the woman bear the child and be compensated for the pregnancy and if, after her birth, she does not want her baby, let the baby be adopted. Rape accounts for 1% of abortions, Farrius. Trying to make a judgement on abortion based upon rape cases is utterly ridiculous. Either make a decent argument, or stop flailing around.

I already answered that. Rape and incest account for 1% of all abortions according to the Guttmacher Institute (run by Planned Parenthood, who has a vested interest in exaggerating that figure), and nevertheless, it remains that it is not moral to kill a child because of the crime of her father. As I said before, Edward Lenoski of SoCal University discovered that 91% of abused children were, in fact, planned pregnancies. When abortion was legalised in the US in 1973, there were 167,000 reported cases of child abuse. In 1982, that number had climbed to 929,000 and in 1991, to 2.5 million. If abortion is a "cure" for child abuse, neglect and misery, it's an absolute failure. Since it's known that children who were abused or neglected are more likely to become criminals, it's easy to see that, from the figures above, the problems Farrius is talking about have actually gotten worse since abortion was legalised.

So what you are saying is that the solution to a given problem (e.g. parental neglect and child abuse) is to kill those who might suffer from it? You mentioned the problem of traffic accidents earlier. Would your solution to that be to execute every motorist? Death can never be an answer because we don't know what death is. Nobody can ask for death and nobody can be presumed to desire death. Anyone requesting death is actually requesting something else. Therefore, death can never, ever be proposed as the "solution" to any problem. Why not? We have done it with a vast array of other crimes. Our whole justice system is based on "politically incorrect" terms such as "judgement" and "moral absolutism". If you wish to destroy that then you will destroy democracy and freedom. Yes, or people could just stop jumping into bed with people they don't actually want to breed with. Every woman has a choice. She has the choice to keep her legs closed. If she decides against that, and the consequences turn out to be a baby, how can you say she did not have choice?

Not at all. Currently, the lists of couples waiting to adopt babies is far longer than the list of babies waiting to be adopted. That is why so many couples are paying thousands of dollars to import babies from the third world. But furthermore, if one does not want a child, perhaps one could exercise a little discretion? The pro-abort mindset basically seems to be that everybody should be able to have sex with anyone and everyone without thought to the consequences or even being in a meaningful relationship first. What that basically amounts to is making innocent babies pay for their parents irresponsibility with their lives. I think it's wholly ridiculous to say that "democracy" and "freedom" depend upon the ability of one group of people in society to be able to murder another group in society - the group least able to defend itself - without even the slightest threat of repercussion.

C. Everett Koop, former surgeon-general of the USA, stated that in 38 years in pediatric medicine he had never, ever seen a pregnancy that truthfully threatened the life of the mother. According to the Guttmacher Institute, approximately 1% of abortions are perfomed because of birth defects. However, those birth defects include minor and treatable conditions such as cleft palate and club foot. Moreover, the Mayo Clinic states that the amniocentesis procedure used to detect congenital deformity or abnormality has about a 2% chance of causing a miscarriage or other serious complication. Not that being handicapped is a good reason to abort anyway - John Merick (aka the Elephant Man) said that "my life is full because I know that I am loved", and handicapped people are generally well-adjusted and happy. I used to work with a man without forearms or feet, who was very happy in his life and just as competent at his job as I was. Killing people because they are handicapped was exactly what Adolf Hitler did. Not that this is any surprise, given the pro-abortion connection to Nazism. Rape and incest account for another 1% of abortions. Of course, the fact here is that one does not hold a child responsible for the crimes of its parents, except in this case, where the child of a rapist is given the death penalty without trial for the crime committed by his father. Feminists for Life America reports that a lot of women are more traumatised by their abortions than by their rapes. It's also interesting that Morgan brought up the topic of ultrasound. Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a founder of NARAL and key figure of the pro-abort movement, became staunchly pro-life and now strongly campaigns against abortion after seeing ultrasound video of his own child in utero. He said that he is now certain that he presided over tens of thousands of murders. RB's point that anti-abortion is anti-choice is simply incorrect. After all, abortion is the removal of an entire lifetime of choices from a human being, because you are killing it. I believe RB inferred that she had an abortion and if so, I do not wish to be harsh but RB's baby is now dead and will never, ever make any choices of her own, because she was inconvenient to her mother. Furthermore, it's also arguable that abortion has removed choices from women too. The reason why there are not more daycares in universities and workplaces is because abortion is viewed as the right and responsible choice and nobody is going to subsidise "irresponsibility." In this way, "pro-choice" has become "no-choice" because it has succeeded in removing options for women who actually want to bear their children to term and raise them. Abortion is about the "liberation of women" about as much as the Holocaust was about the "liberation of Germans".

Nothing. What's to stop me going to your house with a loaded shotgun and blowing your head off? Nothing. What's to stop me going to an elementary school and giving away crack to the students? Nothing. What's to stop me grabbing a woman as she walks to her car late at night, raping her and slitting her throat? Nothing. Does that mean it should be legal?

72% of women who procured an abortion would not have done so had it been illegal, according to David C. Reardon in Aborted Women: Silent No More. But even if that were not true, the fact is that "it will happen anyway" is no justification. Murders still happen - should we legalise murder? Why is it a credibility issue? You have not explained this point. This is a ridiculous argument - it's akin to arguing that we should take absolutely no action to prevent the sale and abuse of hard drugs while people die from smoking. Basically, because our action cannot be 100% effective, we should make it 0% effective by doing nothing.

What you are basically saying, Farrius, is that because we cannot prevent all loss of life, we should not try to prevent any loss of life? That the fact that some avoidable deaths happen is justification for doing nothing to prevent other avoidable deaths?

The issue is more difficult than that. I agree that Japan should be held accountable for her war crimes in the same way that Germany was, however if Japan were to apologise, that would strengthen the Chinese case for restitution and compensation. That is a problem because until 1950, China was wracked by civil war and even if Japan had been in an economic position to make reparations, any such reparations would probably have lined the pockets of Chiang Kai-shek or Mao Zedong. After the Communist victory, of course, you have much the same problem. While the survivors of Japanese war crimes and the families of victims often languish in poverty, any money that the Japanese paid would most likely go into the Chinese nuclear weapons programme, cattle prods for torturing political dissidents, or jackboots for the PLA so that they can continue to march through Lhasa where they have absolutely no legitimate business. Until China either has a regime change, or can offer a solid guarantee that the true recipients of compensation would be the victims and their families, the sad fact is that any apology or compensation from Japan would not fulfill its intended purpose. As to Japan deliberately vetting history for its students, I agree that that is a problem that should be addressed on the general principle that you're on shaky ground when you start cooking the history books and making stuff up.

It does not say "Thou shalt not kill." The original Hebrew uses a different word in that sentence compared to other instances of "kill" in the Old Testament. It does not mean "Thou shalt not kill", it means "Thou shalt do no murder." Regardless, the Bible is very open to interpretation. The teachings of Christ are often in conflict with the more violent Old Testament teachings. That's why Christians subscribe to the New Covenant. Anyway, the point is that while the Bible is evasive, it is very difficult to interpret the Koran in a non-violent way. There are some passages whose meaning can be stretched to preach restraint from violence in certain circumstances, but that is about as pacifist as Islam gets.

If you feel I, or anyone else, has made a personal attack, report it to Greg. Otherwise, either contribute to the discussion, or stop wasting bandwidth.

d) none of the above, and yes, you are mistaken. That's all I will tell you in public, so you might as well forget any further needling. Now, do you have a point?

That's all you have to say in response? What a disappointment.

I think it's crueler to give kids false impressions of themselves and then send them into an academic environment where they are unable to compete. It's crueler still (to all graduates) to then lower the bar for graduation to the point that degrees are essentially worthless. My comments on English grammar were not meant for Crusader. Compared to what I've seen, he is a positive erudite. I wish him luck in his studies and his life, however, I also wish that people his age have a realistic idea of their capabilities and choose their educational and career paths accordingly. My point is that universities are no longer faculties of learning, they are becoming faculties of stupidity where people who'd have struggled to pass an 8th-grade exam a few decades ago are now indulged with high marks in meaningless courses such as "Women's Studies" or "Liberal Arts." And what is "wasting youth and adulthood"? You may think that not to attend university is a waste, but I say it's far less of a waste to attend a trade school or serve an apprenticeship and then to start out earning $35-45k (with the potential to earn six figures) as a car mechanic, a pipe fitter, or an electrician, rather than to get a Liberal Arts degree and then wind up managing a McDonald's franchise (for life) after discovering that no decent employer is interested in a Liberal Arts graduate.

"Oh you who believe, fight the unbelievers who are near to you." -- Koran 9:125

Great. We can cram even more colleges with dimwitted students who can't even string a coherent sentence together, at taxpayer's expense. In my judgement, most college and university students currently studying have no right to be there. They just don't have the brains. Now, of course, we have a glut of IT people and lawyers, none of them terribly intelligent, while car mechanics and plumbers take home six-figure salaries. We need to raise the educational bar again. Reserve university and college for those who truly have the intelligence to be there, and for those who don't, go learn a trade skill and do something useful. The last thing Canada needs is more idiots with Liberal Arts degrees.

Cameron, RT - I agree wholeheartedly. The NDP, as Craig would say, are clowns. As I said before, it baffles me how, after the abysmal failure of socialism and communism (not to mention almost 100 million dead from forcible imposition of socialism and the consequences of its failings as a system), people can still espouse a socialist viewpoint, and what's worse, that others will listen! Socialism has failed, utterly. The NDP is like the Flat Earth Society - myopic half-wits with blinders on to reality and history. You don't even have to go that far back - just look at what they "achieved" in their term of office in Ontario.

Plus, of course, what if you get caught conspiring? The more complex the plan, the more people have to be involved, and the higher the chance becomes that somebody will become loose-lipped in a bar or just rat out his fellow conspirators. There was a conspiracy in England, centuries ago, to blow up the houses of Parliament. It was uncovered, and Guido Fawkes was apprehended in the basement of Westminster surrounded by barrels of gunpowder. Under torture so severe he could barely sign his confession, he named his accomplices, all of whom were tortured, hung, drawn and quartered (a very nasty method of execution involving partial strangulation, disembowelment, burning of the entrails in front of the convict and finally, being torn limb from limb). Basically, it's hard to keep a conspiracy under wraps, and if you are caught plotting to kill the President or start a war for Machiavellian reasons, you would probably go down for high treason, which still carries the death penalty even in democratic countries.

Just a sidenote here: Can you imagine what would happen if the NDP and the Liberals tried to merge? I know Orchard is upset, but really, he is conducting himself honourably and is doing what he believes is best for his party and his country. However, based on past experience of both parties, I believe a Liberal-NDP merger would quickly descend into petty insults. Dissenting NDP MPs would attend meetings in order to boo and hiss (as Svend Robinson and others like to do), and the Liberals would probably respond by calling them all "morons" and "bastards", as they famously have done to other politicans in the past. I don't know what's wrong with left-of-centre politicians in this country. Since when did petty insults, foul language and booing become an acceptable substitute for rational discourse? It should be very telling to people how the PCs and the Alliance have remained dignified and rational throughout these talks.

If you start curtailing political expression or scientific fact you are in trouble. This bill does both of those things. FastNed (a lawyer) has already confirmed that what I have said in this forum could be used against me under C-250 and have me sentenced to up to 5 years in prison - and why? Because I have a genuinely held belief about homosexuality and I choose to back it up with facts? Does it not worry you that C-250 makes many papers in psychiatric and medical journals illegal documents? Does it not bother you that any study of homosexuality can only have one answer, or it will be banned as hate speech, and the author imprisoned? The Papacy used the same tactics to muzzle the findings of Galileo. Preconcieved ideas should not stand in the way of scientific investigation, but C-250 makes sure that they do. So it also began in Nazi Germany. Don't say you weren't warned.