Remiel

The difference between a person contracting smallpox from another person and them contracting it from a blanket is probably rather more than the difference in probability of an entire village contracting it from another person and of them contracting it from another source; all you need is a single person to get unlucky and contracted it from the source of " slight " risk and you are back in human to human territory, even if the latter difference is itself still substantial.

You know, to my ear, "peasant" does not sound particularly different from "savage". And any argument that makes use of it is not going to be particularly better than the ones that relied on the latter term. If it is no different than theft, just call it theft. Terrorism is a completely distinct term. If you cannot accept that the labour of the European colonists created anything of value, then a ) you are delusional; or b ) you are dishonest. What exactly does First Nations own, really? The land? Then who owns the buildings on the land? Who owns the equipment that does the work? (Edit: Who owns the people who live there? This is not irrelevant to the value of professionals ghettoes.) These are the things that make the land monetarily valuable. It is impossible to separate the contribution of land of the First Nations and the contribution of labour of the colonists anymore. Better to accept it and do the best we can so that this country is one of equal opportunity for every people, which I can admit right now it is not. But if your argument is that that First Nations ought to be superior to the colonists forever, well, then you really have not learned anything from the war and suffering of the 20th century.

This may have escaped you, but if the divide between the rich in the poor in America is growing, the divide between the rich in America and the poor everywhere else is also growing, given that the divide in America has a very large component of the rich getting richer.

This is indeed troubling. There are, however, some relevant differences to E. coli. For one, C. difficile is not the sort of thing that can be completely protected against just with due diligence. It is a growing problem everywhere. Also, how have you come to the conclusion that McGuinty is personally responsible for all 17 deaths? There were 17 deaths, therefore he must be responsible for all 17? At least a couple of those deaths may have occured even under normal conditions.

Presumably this is not an unrelated question to why some weapons are prohibited while others are not: a not entirely unwarranted assumption about the primary use of those weapons. The best example of this would be a jacknife (and a ballistic knife), which is not particularly sharper or deadlier than a good household knife. Though it still annoys me, on principle, that chain weapons like nunchaku, three-section staff, and flail are illegal. I mean, yes, they can be somewhat more dangerous than their non-chain counterparts, but the likelihood of their actually being used for those purposes is not substantially greater than their counterparts (and in the case of the three-section staff, probably substantially less).

Marijuana can have other negative side effects other than poisoning of the lungs, but there is nothing so great I think that it bears prohibition. Prohibition should be saved for things that screw you up badly, like crystal meth and other things which physically warp you. Ideally it would not be illegal to possess the natural, unprocessed parent of some drugs, like coca leaves, though I am not sure that could be done without giving a boost to the cocaine industry. In any case, given that something like 50% of Canadians have tried marijuana, I have to wonder where the other 50% thinks its authority to make the first 50% criminals comes from...

Perhaps I am not the best one to comment, given my potty mouth of late, but how did we go from Bonam's intelligent post about taxes to RNG telling him to fuck off? Is there a joke beyond the insults that I am missing?

How the Hell can it possibly cost ten million to do some lousy renovations? You could build a whole damn subdivision for that much money.

It is perhaps worth noting that Roy Thomson also had to drop his Canadian citizenship, though at the time dual-citizenship did not exist by any means but marriage it seems, so it was in fact necessary by law in order for him to obtain peerage.

The fact that it is against the rules of this board notwithstanding, what exactly is so extra-ordinarily bad about insulted someone in this fashion? If one persons says, " We would all be bettr off if they just killed all the <people in group X>, " and the a second person says, " Fuck you, asshole, " why would one say that what was really wrong with this conversation is that the second person insulted the first person. Also, I do not understand what is so bad about " disingenuos " . If someone were to now point out that it is disingenuous of me to suggest that all manner of insults should be tolerated as a matter of course, I do not think I could fault their analysis. Maybe, however, I misunderstand the word, though I doubt it. jdobbin is actually a good counterpoint to this. Apparently he was either banned or left, but I believe that jdobbin was in fact his name. I looked it up once in a list of professionals in the field he claimed to be a part of once. And yet, he apparently was anything but immune heated rhetoric. Also, I think it would be mistaken to assume that anonymity is always bad. This would be to also assume that people can freely discuss some important topics in real life without having risking the destruction of ones reputation on a missaid word, or a misunderstood topic. Take my earlier example: If you are interested in having a somewhat academic (in the counterfactual use of the word) discussion of " X should die, " and someone else says, " If you want X to die, you are a racist piece of shit, " then you have learned a valuable lesson: Do not talk about the subject " X should die, " with people who may not understand where you are coming from. Of course, on a message board, more often then not people who say, " X should die, " really mean it, though maybe not as strongly as it seems, does not negate the fact that others who approach it more honestly do benefit. To use a more concrete example, it is extraordinarily difficult to speak critically in public of Israel without being called an anti-Semite, and at least as often as not the allegation is simply false. Should only people who do not care about their reputations and people who are brave enough to weather it be entitled to speak with strangers who may have differing opinions? Finally though, I think it is also false, at least for some debaters (of which I would include myself) that anonymity means complete freedom. If you believe " Remiel is a fascist pig, " , then you believe that I am a fascist pig, and the fact that you know me by the name Remiel and not my " real " name is not truly relevant to this belief.

Are you so sure about that? Have you prevented your elected government from buying vehicles from GM, Blackberrys from RIM, and God knows what from Wal-Mart lately?

Do you have a point? Am I supposed to bow in awe of your superior logic, despite the fact that moving across the country and changing occupations is merely the COST of belonging to the Ontario Teachers Union, just like cash is the COST of RIM stock? Do the words " private company " not mean anything to you?

You would think that with the vacations I have been taking from here for eight months of the year that I would have a little more resilience to the crap that goes on here built up. But when people that you do not expect that much of manage to lower the bar that much lower... bleh... It is enough to make me miss (sort of) the intelligent offensiveness of Argus. I mean, there are some good posters left, and even some good newer posters. But I feel we are missing out for not having Black Dog and Rue around very much, and geoffrey and Charles Anthony do not post anymore at all (among others, like jdobbin and FTA Lawyer). I am sure other can think of others they use to appreciate being around as well. Anyone else get the feeling that things have gone downhill?

You should have added ignorant and short-sighted. Dead men don't talk.

Yes, and I feel like I should get to go to RIM shareholder meetings and vote without buying stock. What planet do you live on?

Sure you can. Become a teacher, get a job in Ontario, ad BANG! you're in. Besides, you are completely ignoring private corporations, which makes your example even more useless. In any case, my question was not addressed to you anyway.

"Corporations are responsible to their shareholders" is pretty much exactly the same thing as "unions are only responsible to their members". Union members are shareholders in the union, and corporate shareholders are members of the corporation (as opposed to employees of the corporation).

Do you not think you should, at the very least, be adding corporations to that list? Corporations are basically unions for employers. And they get ridiculous benefits, i.e. limited liability. Would a truly free market not require that everyone be fully responsible for the consequences of their actions? If so, limited liability would be the antithesis of that.

My bad, kimmy. In any case, I would not be surprised if they are trying to save money to do the dragons justice in the next season. Also, even when you discount the highest paid actors on the show, there are a LOT of major characters to shell out for. I mean, while the is rather unscientific, Game of Thrones probably has more characters in one season than Rome had in two. But they also have more variety (and complexity) in locales, costumes, and special effects. How many trained animals did they have in Rome that were not horses?

I would consider it charitable if you interpreted " Israel " as closer to " Land of Israel " than " State of Israel " , though it does not exactly match up to anything either way.

I do not quite get it: Do Conservatives not claim, almost without fail, that when you raise taxes on business it is just the consumers paying at the end of the day? How could both that, and HST shifting burden from business to consumer, be true?

Then I guess we have two different ideas of where political legitimacy derives from that are not going to be reconciled here. You think that it ultimately rests with groups, and I think it ultimately rests with individuals. But how exactly is a Palestinian state an expense to the Jewish state if it is created on land that Arabs have been living on for decades or even centuries? How, exactly, is it a bigger expense to Israel to let Palestinians live where they have been living for all of living memory, than it is go suddenly shunt them off, as it seems you want to, to neighouring Arab states which suddenly would have to find not only land to put them on put houses to put them in, services and food to sustain them with? Does Lebanon not already have precarious political situation that is rapidly deteriorating? Do you drop them in the middle of a war zone in Syria? Do you really want to put them in Egypt, where they would make the situation more volatile when everyone (including Israel) really needs it to cool down? Can you know what will happen if you put them all in Jordan? Even if you could remove them all from Israel, only a fool would think it would be free of charge.

I have heard once before from an officer I knew years ago that it was not, in their opinion, the job of police officers to worry about who did right and who did wrong; that it was a judges job to sort that out. When I think about it, that officer might have well have said, "As far as we are concerned they are all guilty," for that is the sort of effect that attitude creates.

I am still waiting for someone to show me where this fantasy world is where the " free market " had nothing to do with setting the wages of postal workers.

Even if I was blathering his statement is not rational. There is no fantasy land in which the market did not already have a hand in determining what postal workers make, and any suggestion to the contrary is just ignorant of reality.