Hugo

I just wanted to come back to this. According to Canadian law as it currently stands, at conception you are entitled to own property, to be a plaintiff in a civil suit, or to inherit property. This was established in Giddings vs. Canadian Northern Railway, In Re Charlton Estate, Montreal Tramways vs. Leveille, Watt vs. Rama, and Duval et al. vs. Seguin et al. It has been upheld in courts of law even after the 1969 decision to legalise therapeutic abortion in Canada. Basically, Canadian law since the 18th Century has upheld the right of the unborn to own property, to inherit property, and to be considered a person for the purposes of damages or injury. However, Canadian law does not recognise the right of the unborn to live.

"I will maintain the utmost respect for human life, from the time of conception; even under threat, I will not use my medical knowledge contrary to the laws of humanity." World Medical Association adoption of the Declaration of Geneva "A doctor must always bear in mind the importance of preserving human life from the time of conception until death." World Medical Association adoption of the International Code of Medical Ethics "I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art." The Hippocratic Oath: Text, Translation, and Interpretation, by Ludwig Edelstein. "A living person's designation to a species is determined not by the stage of development but by the sum total or its biological characteristics - actual and potential - which are genetically determined... If we say that [the fetus] is not human, e.g. a member of Homo Sapiens, we must say it is a member of another species. But this cannot be." Roland M. Nardone, "The Nexus of Biology and the Abortion Issue" To be a person, you need to be a member of Homo Sapiens. To argue that the unborn is not a person, you are arguing that it is not a member of Homo Sapiens, that it is not human. All humans are persons.

Is the threat of imprisonment as punishment for criminal action an attempt to condition behaviour? Have you ever been discouraged from doing something because it was illegal, and if so, was your behaviour being conditioned? Regardless, if knowing the truth about homosexuality will "condition behaviour" in some people, fine, then it will "condition" them. The truth shall set you free.

By the way, Riff, Regarding the study of homosexual lifespan, I did some further research and found out that the FRI figures have four sources: 6,714 obituaries from 16 homosexual newspapers over 12 years as compared to a sampling of obituaries from regular newspapers, said research being complete in 1993, two later random and anonymous sexuality surveys, and a comparison of tests on IV drug users and homosexuals. For those involved in homosexuality, the median age of death was less than 50 years. One of those later studies, from Colorado, found that both IV drug use and homosexuality make you 10 times as likely to die before retirement age. In the original 1993 obituary survey, median age of death for homosexuals was found to be less than 45, and only 2% died after age 65. The median age for those obituaries surveyed in the regular press was over 70, with 60% living to over 65. This would seem to validate the study, as that tallies with the general mortality figures. Causes of early death included murder, accidents and drug abuse, but most of them involved STDs. Homosexuals were 116 times more likely to be murdered, 24 times more likely to commit suicide, and 18 times more apt to die in traffic accidents. Why that latter, I have no idea. Maybe homosexuals drive more recklessly.

Incorrect. There is a world of difference between the two. 28% of homosexuals have had over 1000 lifetime sexual partners. Most of them will have had more than 500. Less than 2% of homosexuals can be considered even semi-monogamous (10 lifetime partners or less). Whatever the reason, there is no comparison between heterosexual and homosexual promiscuity - they are on different scales. A straight girl who'd slept with 50 men would probably be considered "easy", and that being generous, but a homosexual man who'd slept with 50 men would be considered almost chaste. "Homosexual relationships last 1-1/2 years on average... Among heterosexuals, by contrast, 67 percent of first marriages in the United States last at least 10 years." -- Dr. Maria Xiridou, Amsterdam Municipal Health Service "67 percent of [heterosexual] first marriages last 10 years, and 50 percent last 20 years." -- National Center for Health Statistics, 2001 "Of 156 males in homosexual relationships lasting anywhere from one to 37 years, all couples with relationships more than five years had incorporated some provision for outside sexual activity." (emphasis mine) -- David P. McWhirter and Andrew M. Mattison, "The Male Couple" (themselves homosexual) "77 percent of married men and 88 percent of married women had remained faithful to their marriage vows" -- Journal of Sex Research, 1997 As to why they aren't rushing to marry, if they have too much respect for the institution (which I doubt) then that's basically an admission that their behaviour is unacceptable for married people - they cannot maintain so much as a facade of commitment or monogamy.

Chretien probably isn't worried about this. "Me lose brain? Ha ha ha! Why'd I laugh?" -- Homer Simpson

I cited a study in another thread, done in Holland, that showed that as social acceptance for gays grew, the problems of disease and extreme promiscuity grew progressively worse. Think about what you've said. When homosexuals were repressed, it makes more sense to be monogamous. If you were a Jew hiding in Nazi Germany, would you a) have just one person know about it, a person you could trust, or go to a public place and tell a series of anonymous strangers? What if the guy that the oppressed homosexual picks up in a bath house turns out to be a vice cop? That's why, as social tolerance has increased, homosexual behaviour has grown ever more extreme. Now that gays are more free, they are more free to be uninhibited and do as they will, and apparently, that includes sleeping with over 1000 men in almost 1/3 of cases.

As I've said, homosexuals are much akin to addicts. They suffer from a condition that they can ultimately control, albeit with a varying level of difficulty. Their behaviour is harmful to themselves and to others, to varying degrees. I would think that a reasonable accomodation to make with homosexuals would be similar to the one we make with smokers. Nobody wants to beat, imprison or murder smokers, or take away their basic rights, and we are prepared to tolerate their habit if done in private. However, we are still going to take great pains to explain their problem to them, to encourage them to seek help and to try and ensure that that help is readily available. We will also take steps to keep their behaviour away from children and to prevent it from causing harm to unwilling third parties, and we will commit never to glamorise or promote their habit in public and to ensure that we educate as many people as we can in as effective a way as we can as to the risks and dangers of their habit.

What if the unborn child is female? Does that woman have the right to choose for herself?

I really must disagree. Homosexuality is very akin to smoking or alcoholism, and while these pursuits are tolerated, they are not endorsed. Nobody wants to accomodate smokers, or promote their habit as equal and safe. The fact is that homosexuality is a phenomenon over which the sufferer has some degree of control, like substance addiction, but unlike eye colour. It's also strongly linked to child abuse, pedophilia, extremes of promiscuity, suicidal tendencies, substance abuse and other antisocial behaviours that are intensely self-destructive for the sufferer and often harmful for others as well. I think that homosexuals are sufferers and need help. It does not help an alcoholic to tell him that his "choice" is "equal" and to encourage him to drink more, and it does not help a homosexual to tell him that his "choice" is "equal" and to encourage him to visit the bath-house, where his chances of contracting AIDS will be multiplied 5,000 times. There's no reason to outlaw homosexuality or to punish homosexuals any more than there's a good reason to outlaw or punish alcoholics. But there is no good reason to endorse and praise their behaviour either, and rather than encouraging homosexuals to continue in a lifestyle which leads to early death, disease and emotional trauma, perhaps society should be encouraging homosexuals to seek help for their disorders and return to a normal life.

Whatever. The original point was that abortion as a cure for social ills smacks of genocide, ethnic cleansing, eugenics and all sorts of other extremely egregious concepts. The fact that abortion shares so many concepts with some of the darkest and most evil periods of human history should be a warning for you. This is borne out, as I said, by the fact that abortion's biggest proponent was a bona fide racist and white supremacist. By the way: eugenics: The study of hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding. genocide: The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group. genetics: (used with a sing. verb) The branch of biology that deals with heredity, especially the mechanisms of hereditary transmission and the variation of inherited characteristics among similar or related organisms. (used with a pl. verb) The genetic constitution of an individual, group, or class. Eugenics is not the "for runner" [sic] of genetics. You're pretty confused on these concepts. The definitions above should help you.

What are you on about? First you say: and then you start talking about eugenics, which is a very different concept to genocide, and start talking about the English origins of it? Are you confused on the terminology, the concepts, or are you confused as to what point you're trying to make?

OK, if every 2 people are birthing, on average, 0.2 more people, that means your population is shrinking very fast. If every 2 people are birthing 2 people, as it is today, that means that the population is shrinking since this does not account for infant mortality and adults who will not reproduce. But let's assume that you're right. We know that overall the world population is increasing, and we'll make a great and unjustified leap of thought and assume that population growth actually makes the world's problems worse. Is it then acceptable to kill large numbers of human beings in order to alleviate those problems? That's because it isn't. There were pogroms before America was even discovered. Do you have a source for this claptrap? Or do you think Thomas Malthus was American? When you quote excerpts that are utterly self-contradictory and nonsensical and then write garbage like this, you can't expect to be taken seriously. She does. She can choose not to have sex. She can also wonder whether it's fair to kill an innocent human being because she doesn't like the consequences of her own actions. In the case of rapes, these account for 1% of abortions. Furthermore, to abort the child of a rape just means that there were two victims of that crime instead of one - one who was raped, one who was murdered.

The article Whistler posted is fairly hilarious. It proudly states that the American birth rate has risen to 2.0 children per woman, up from 1.8 (where it has been ever since abortion was legalised). That's 0.1 below what is required to maintain the population level, as opposed to 0.3 - basically, the first and second paragraphs of that excerpt contradict each other. Population growth is not to blame for any of the world's problems anyway. Poverty, poor quality of life, pollution and so forth can be laid at the door of corrupt government, war, natural disaster, misuse of resources, lack of technology or education etc. Population increase has nothing to do with it, otherwise the standard of living in the West would have dropped with the increasing population in the first half of the 20th Century, rather than the radical increase in quality of life we saw in that period instead. Furthermore, even if population growth was causing problems, killing a percentage of the population in order to solve or lessen them is an extremely barbaric and inhumane idea. Hitler put 275,000 handicapped people to death before he even started on the Jews in order to raise the quality of life for the German people, and legalised abortion in order to solve social problems is basically that very same idea. That's not particularly surprising given who some of the pro-abort founders are. Consider Margaret Sanger, first president of Planned Parenthood and world's largest abortion promoter, who believed that abortion was an ideal way to reduce the population of "feeble-minded human weeds" such as "Negroes, Southern Europeans and Jews." She believed in creating a "master race" and "segregating and sterilizing" those who she deemed "genetically inferior." It should be noted that Planned Parenthood has never publicly apologised for or disowned these remarks. Abortion has solved none of the problems it promised to solve anyway. Teen pregnancy and teen births are skyrocketing and are still within a mere fraction of a percentile of their highest peak in history. Child abuse has failed to drop, and despite what the ghoulish Morgenthaler promised abortion has not made every child a wanted child.

That's world population. I'm talking about first-world population, which is dropping. So, is it your position that the unborn is not human or does not have rights until born? Just want to get clarity on this.

The population is dropping because women are having fewer and fewer children per capita. You need 2.1 children per woman to sustain population growth. I believe Canada's birth-rate is around 1.8 children per woman now. This is going to cause a huge problem in a generation or so. If you thought about it, you'd realise that if the birthrate stayed constant, the baby boom would cause a swelling of the population at all subsequent generations and not just a brief expansion. Pollution isn't caused by over-population. We had a far worse pollution problem in the 19th Century, but the population was a lot smaller. Oh, and you never answered my question, did you? When does the "unborn" become a "baby" in your view, and at what point can it be considered human and given rights?

Soldiers are trained to be aggressive and violent. It's pretty much inevitable. The British army makes soldiers participate in "milling" which is basically stepping into a ring with a pair of oversized boxing gloves and trying to beat your opponent into submission by any means possible. The purpose of this is both to build physical endurance and hardiness, and to cultivate an aggressive mindset. A soldier who cannot be aggressive is pretty useless. This is a similar phenomenon to the fact that servicemen usually have more than their fair share of marital difficulties and domestic violence. This, too, is a byproduct of a culture that emphasises aggression and accepts violence as a valid solution to a problem. Unfortunately, if one compromises on that, one compromises on these soldiers' ability to perform as soldiers. This is why officers don't take incidents of brawling terribly seriously. Furthermore, I think KK's idea that Americans are involved in more friendly-fire incidents because there are simply more of them is true. These incidents happen to any army and are inevitable. For instance, in Gulf I some British soldiers were killed by American fire. While both sides viewed this as regrettable, the British did not press for any charges or prosecutions because they know that these incidents are pretty inevitable. You put 200,000 men with rifles together and tell them to shoot at something and some kind of accident is inevitable. It doesn't even necessarily have to reflect upon their training. For instance, the Lee-Enfield rifle has a notorious problem with an over-sensitive trigger. If the weapon is dropped with the safety off and a round chambered, odds are it'll go off. Now, you have a thousand men running at the enemy, coming under fire, and obviously each of them is carrying a rifle with a round chambered and the safety off in case they see a target of opportunity. Let's say one man in the bunch gets shot or hit by shrapnel or whatever and goes down. He drops his rifle, which discharges and shoots the guy in front of him in the back. That's a friendly-fire incident, to be shot in the back with one of your own weapons, but it's not really the soldier's fault, is it?

Whistler, Just to let you know, I was actually pro-choice until my wife educated me on the truth of abortion and changed my mind. My wife is probably even more pro-life than I am. The idea that all or most women are pro-abort is a myth. More women than men are pro-life. Feminists for Life

Sorry, but this is crap. Firstly, you could put every human alive in the state of Texas and each one of them would have around 1200 square feet of living space. Just for comparison, my house has 1100 square feet and I live in it with my wife and three children. Secondly, the problem of famine is not because of lack of food but because of its poor distribution. Just look at the difference in caloric intakes in North America and in the Third World. Then add all the food that farmers don't grow to keep prices up, add the food that we throw away... Thirdly, even if abortion were an acceptable solution, it is having the most impact in Western countries. In Canada, the USA and Britain the population is actually dropping now and only immigration is sustaining population growth. In the third world, where the population is growing fastest, abortion is having little to no effect. The earth is not becoming over-populated. Abortion, like Kyoto, is a bad solution to a problem that doesn't even exist, in that regard.

I don't disagree that Canadian and also British servicemen are somewhat better trained than their American counterparts, but I don't think for a second that this makes the Canadian soldier the equal of 5 Americans. All other things being equal, better training gives a slight edge - but that's one that is easily nullified by technology and equipment. I've known American servicemen, and although most of them were Marines and thus a cut above most American soldiers, their weapons handling, fieldcraft and initiative were excellent - comparable to or better than other well-trained, Western, all-volunteer forces and certainly a lot better than any conscript army. I've also known USAF pilots and their skills and training might not have been quite as finely honed as other pilots, but nevertheless they were fully capable of carrying out any mission they were assigned. If they were golfers, we would be comparing Tiger Woods to Jack Nicklaus, not Jack Nicklaus to some nitwit just joining the country club. Actually, American special forces have been largely influenced and trained by British special forces, particularly in anti-terrorist roles. America does like to develop her own solutions, though. Sometimes this is a bad thing, for instance, the use of fast patrols instead of escorts in WWII until the lesson was learnt the hard way, but sometimes it is a good thing, such as the development of the nuclear-powered submarine. Finally, regarding blue-on-blue incidents, the fact is that they occur in any war. America has more of them because America pretty much sends more troops to more wars than anyone else. Thelonius thinks they were the worst culprits in WWII, but I guarantee that the Red Army was far worse - their troops were frequently completely untrained, morale was often terrible, and due to the Soviet censorship machine no mention was really made of these incidents. During Gulf I, after the initial phase of the ground attack, the 1st Infantry division was due to be rotated out of combat and replaced by a fresh division. Unfortunately, it could not really disengage and do this easily. In the middle of the night, in darkness, the 1st Infantry slowed and allowed the replacement unit to pass through it and continue fighting seamlessly. This is a difficult maneuver and the potential for a friendly-fire incident is high, but there were no incidents at all. My point is that American troops are competent and no more likely to suffer a friendly fire incident than any other Western army - and certainly a lot less likely to suffer one than an incompetent conscript army such as the Red Army or the Iraqi Army.

This is very naive. Firstly, China is an economic pygmy and simply can't afford to buy all the oil the Arabs want to sell. If they want to cut off the Americans and sell to China, the Sheikhs had better be prepared to take a significant pay cut - and they are too materialistic and selfish to do that. Secondly, there is oil in Alaska, Texas, the North Sea and plenty in Russia. If the Arabs stop selling oil to the Americans, there's a long queue of other suppliers behind them. Prices might go up slightly, but that's about all. Certainly America will not be brought to her knees by this method. China's only option for war with the USA is nuclear, and while the Chinese/NK nuclear force could do significant damage to the US (mostly on the west coast), the USA could utterly obliterate China and NK in a few minutes. This is not something that the Chinese leadership will be keen upon - I hurt you, you kill me is not a good trade unless you have a death wish. Furthermore, a large portion of the Chinese economy depends upon American business. If America withdraws this, China can look forward to a recession. America uses China as a cheap labour source, but as with the oil, if China cuts America off there are plenty more queueing up - India, Mexico et al. Not even after he appeared on Al-Jazeera and said "I did it"?

Scotch, It's perfectly possible for what you have cited to be true and for my point to be correct. As I've said, and as Riff has confirmed, virtually any complex human behaviour has a partially genetic cause. As Riff kindly explained at length, the genes that cause a certain behaviour may not even have that purpose in the first place due to the fact that human society has evolved faster than human physiology - for instance, road rage is a biologically incorrect reaction to a given situation. So in this way, it's entirely possible for lesbians to have this blinking gene or whatever - maybe it's one of the many that will interact to produce a predisposition towards lesbianism, which when "activated" with the right environmental stimuli will produce a lesbian. My wife's cousin began life strictly heterosexual. While in college she became a lesbian and told everyone that it was really the way she had always been. When she got out of college she became heterosexual again, showed no interest in women, and is now engaged to be married. I wonder what her blinking is like? My basic premise here is that homosexuality is the interaction of a "vulnerable" genetic sequence and environmental influence, which is the same as any other demonstrable human behaviour. For instance, to be an alcoholic you would have to have a genetic makeup that makes you vulnerable to substance addiction, and then in your environment you would need to be both exposed to alcohol and given life circumstances which would lead you to turn to alcoholism. That, however, does not make alcoholism "right" or "natural". And that's the basic point here. This explanation of homosexuality basically means it is like any other measurable human behaviour, and if you use this argument to justify homosexuality you must also use it to justify pedophilia, psychosis, substance abuse, suicidal tendencies, and so forth. This explanation of homosexual behaviour also means it is incorrect to compare homosexuals to oppressed women, for instance, because being a woman is purely genetic and cannot be altered by any kind of environmental influence.

The Canadian crewman knows probably the same as the American crewman: how to perform very minor repairs. Tanks are extremely complex, unreliable and expensive pieces of machinery and repairs are difficult and time-consuming. You can't do them on the battlefield, therefore, it makes little sense to train a crewman to change a track, for instance.

Actually, American troops are taught a very high degree of redundancy when required. For instance, an M1 Abrams tank has a crew of four. Each crewman has to be able to do his own job and the jobs of his three comrades. This is simple redundancy, in case of battle casualties. No, American tank crews don't learn about airborne insertion or anything like that, but they'll never need to. I don't believe Canadian servicemen have any greater breadth of knowledge than Americans.

When does the "unborn" become a "baby", exactly?