ScottSA

I love the meandering minds of the left. Most don't seem able to make a distinction between international law and their own emotional state. BC Chick doesn't have the faintest shadow of a clue as to whether the UN sponsored Nato occupation is "legal" (it is of course, given that it is there armed with several UNSC resolutions and an invitation from the recognized head of state), but she has no hesitation in making grand pronouncements about legality, mostly because she doesn't think it ought to legal, and therefore it can't be. She may have heard some pink clad bozo announce that it's illegal too, so that cinches it.

I can't believe I'm even partially agreeing with sweal on something...

And bleating on about Blacks and guns is as relevant as the KKK. Bloviated twits ought to know, if they are going to trot out race as a causal factor for problems, that in this particular case, culture plays a much greater part in creating the cause...in Jamaica unwed pregnancy is pandemic and involved fathers are few and far between. Look it up. In the meantime, thanks for strengthening my case.

First you confused evidence with proof, and now you're confusing evidence with the scientific method. You really have to dig a hole and plant the goalposts once and for all. I know its irritating for you that I have evidence and you have none, but since neither one of us can prove a thing through the scientific method or any other mechanism, you must concede that my evidence trumps your lack of evidence. MM is a supercilious, if not very educated or smart, twit.

I didn't ask for anecdotal or thoughtful evidence of God. I asked for empirical falsifiable evidence of which none exists that i know of. Ill spare the mockery if you van actually show me some real evidence of a god of human culture that exists in reality. Without such evidence it is perfectly rational to be an atheist with respect to the gods we know from human culture. Andrew What you are asking for is proof, even if you're calling it "evidence." You just rejected the evidence on the grounds that it is not proof. I want evidence. Of the empirical falsifiable kind. Can you provide it or not? Andrew You're moving the goalposts now. I have no more empirical proof of the existence of God than you have proof of his non-existence. What I do have is evidence...plenty of it...while you have no evidence of God's non-existence at all. You don't like my evidence, prefering to ask instead for proof, and pointing at a lack of proof to assert a lack of evidence, without realizing that if you do that, it allows me to ask the same of you, and you don't even have hearsay evidence, much less "empirical falsifiable" proof evidence.

I love rebuttals like this. Nothing underscores an abject rout more vividly.

Something like being "all most a virgin" you either are or your not. We are asking our youth to fight and die because our nation has made a commitment. Only it seems now that the only ones living up to that commitment are our soldiers and the minority of Canadians.... I was thinking of " state of war " as meaning more when an entire country must mobilize in order to conduct the business of war, as in World Wars I and II. When industry is converted to producing weapons and vehicles, when hobbies and everyday pleasures are abandoned in order to serve the war effort. I make the distinction mostly to illustrate that there must be a certain level of conflict before the leader of a country can presume to rightly take the mantle of " war leader " and all of the tyrannical powers that comes with it. That would be the distinction between limited and total war, to put the field's fine point on it, but it doesn't make a whit of difference when your people are in danger of being killed. It doesn't matter what "mantle" a leader puts on; what matters is how safe his people are. You will, I suspect, be among the first to be howling for the leader's blood if the enemy DOES succeed in hitting us hard with bio, chemical, or radioactive weapons, and shrilly demanding to know why you weren't protected, so it behooves you to understand that a state of war is qualitative, not quantitative. It can always get bigger and uglier later, but it will always be a state of war. And it's the leader's responsibility to keep it as safe, if not as small, as possible. If that means an outside chance that someone might be listening over your shoulder, it's a far cry better than someone blowing your head off, eh wot? The funny thing about freedom is that it's meaningless to dead people.

If you don't know that, there's no-one here with the expertise to advise you better. Well thank you for offering your services sweal...but you forgot the advice...

With this statement you prove that you don't know much about either Marx or academia. Marx's conception of class analysis is perhaps commonly encountered in 1st year "intro" courses in a variety of social sciences and that's about it. No one pays much attention to it because it is probably the weakest aspect of Marx's critical thought. Marx's greatest influence is his philosophic argument that 'man is a productive animal' - this argument stands as Marx's most enduring legacy in academia (certainly in North America anyway - I'm not competent to speak about European academia which I have no experience or connections to). Bonus question: Can anyone tell me why people who manifestly don't know something seem to make the most emphatic statements about that same topic? Curious phenomena that and notably common in discussion forums. Can anyone tell me why bloviated twits tend to be historical illiterates? Class analysis was not only seminal, it is a profound deviation from the institutional analysis of socio-politics that preceded it. Bloviated twits may want to visit graduate work they may not have encountered to read up on that...it's not usually found in 1st or 2nd year classes. Whether or not said bloviated twits are competent to speak on European Marxism, the fact that they bring it up at all ought to indicate that they have at least a passing familiarity with the Frankfurt school, which happens to involve folks like Lucaks and Gramsci, who took the early Marx and ran with it in various theoretical directions. Oh, and spawned the so-called American school that bloviated twits seem enamoured of. Bloviated twits really ought to learn the origins of the theses they are flogging. Incidently, bloviated twits must also be aware of the distinction between the early Marx in which the rehashed dialectics of Kant and Feuerbach were applied to economics to produce his theory of alienation and...you guessed it...man as a productive species being, and the later less philosophical and more politicized later Marx? Unfortunately most of the early Marx was hardly new ground, even if it was couched in turgid Marxian blither, and while it makes for great debate among stoned undergrads, it's not clear to me why bloviated twits would afford it undue attention. Even the old clarion call of "economic determinism" had at least hand some logic behind its elevation to the status of "Marx's most enduring contribution," even though the deviations of Wallerstein and his ilk into "international Marxism" made a laughing stock out of both he and it. Just a bit of advice for bloviated twits: A bit of surface knowledge, when it lacks depth of any kind, ought not be used to mock one's betters. The mockery has a habit of coming back and biting one in the ass.

Unfortunately the breakup of the heterosexual nuclear family and the resultant absence of fathers...probably the biggest and least attended factor in the development of delinquency, is a minefield of political correctness. The first thing to fired at it is mockery of Ozzie and Harriet and Beaver Cleaver, followed shortly by the assertion that it never existed except as an ideal, and finally by shrill accusations of "mysogyny" and "patriarchy." The ideal family now is...well, there isn't one...everyone and their dog (well, not quite yet the dog, but it's coming) has a different notion of what the "family" is, except kids, who in huge numbers lack father figures. It's really time we started taking honest looks at what kids need. State-sponsored childcare" is not it. Homosexual marriage is not it. They need a real family with a mother figure AND a father figure.

For Media: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporters_Without_Borders I've tried looking for the other one, but I can't remember exactly how I found it. The one I saw had Venezuela at 5/5, instead of 4/4 like the Freedom House one, but it had been updated in the last week of May, I believe. I do not know when Freedom House released theirs. As far as policys go, it seems it is the policy of the U.S. to obfuscate anything and everything. Same here, to a lesser degree. Media freedom is a meaningless gesture without transparency and truth. That is tied to political rights, because what good is the right to participate in decision making without the right to know the truth? Transparency is all very well and good, and has a lovely ring to it, but transparency also means giving the enemy all our secrets. Whatever curb on civil liberties you imagine there to be today, it pales in comparison to the curbs on civil liberties during total wars like WWs I and II, and we are, like it or not, in a state of war.On a side note, be careful what you say. Saying things like "it seems it is the policy of the U.S. to obfuscate anything and everything" devalues your argument. It's so broad as to be indefensible, it's demonstrably untrue, and it pleads for a comparison to beacons of sweetness and light like Zimbabwe, Sudan, and North Korea.

You ever wonder why professionals who study sexual deviancy consider this factoid nonsense? I consider this sort of statistical malarkey about as interesting as reading the 9.11 nonsence from the toaster people..... That's because you gravitate towards the electric kettle people.

I think you're cool

I didn't ask for anecdotal or thoughtful evidence of God. I asked for empirical falsifiable evidence of which none exists that i know of. Ill spare the mockery if you van actually show me some real evidence of a god of human culture that exists in reality. Without such evidence it is perfectly rational to be an atheist with respect to the gods we know from human culture. Andrew What you are asking for is proof, even if you're calling it "evidence." You just rejected the evidence on the grounds that it is not proof.

Ah, so we're hanging our hats on higher per capita happenings, eh? Like the hugely disproportionate rates of pedophilia among homosexuals? Or the hugely disproportionate rate of AIDS among north american homosexuals? Wheee...this is fun! Or are we only talking about the good per capita happenings? Are all the not-so-good things merely "bigoted" when we talk about them? I wonder if we should have a poll to see whether Canadians prefer to keep the few dollars more in tax remittance from homosexuals, or if they'd trade it for the billions upon billions of dollars spent in various lawsuits and medical research fighting AIDS, and a signifigant reduction in pedophilia? Hmmmm...

Unless you believe that the size of the box matters, for what is the atmosphere but a " box " created by gravity? The size of the U.S. box became dramatically smaller during the 2000 Presidential Election. Speaking of the bliss of ignorance, that is exactly why the U.S. public is not more incensed by the crimes committed in their name. They are blissfully unaware of the shadowy side of their own history. Y'know, this sophomoric street-corner philosophy isn't even worthy of some acidhead 60s pontificate, and the attempt to make it sound profound by the clever use of "for" just makes it sound even more first year universityish. Boxes are square , not round, they aren't created by gravity, and the atmosphere over the US is exactly the same as that over Luxembourg or North Korea, just for starters, but the fact is that by any definition of anyone anywhere...even the French Enlightenment thinkers who put very stringent definitions on freedom...the US is right up there. I'm quite sure the nationcentric US education system makes every American very aware of their history...it's just that most of them choose, in spite of the dark side, to be proud of their accomplishments too. And frankly, these alleged "crimes" you speak of have nothing to do with the freedom of the denisens anyway, and pale in comparison to the crimes of most other regimes and all other governmental systems. You are incredibly naive if you somehow imagine that the US has a monopoly on, or is even a frontrunner in the game of "crimes." If I were you, I'd read up a little philosophy before embarking on a teaching tour.

"Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos." Gosh, sorry to hear you're having a bad reading day. It's a shame they don't teach comprehensive reading in schools anymore. You must have missed my very next sentence. Was it hiding from you or were there just too many big confusing words in it?: "The only time I think belief in something is bad is when that belief encourages harm to others. Christian evangelicals don't brandish swords and call for the heads of their enemies, and that makes all the difference between Islam and Christianity."

Hold on. One must define the content of said God first. I am agnostic about the origin of existence in general, aboslutely. But when it comes to the god described by the worlds religions it is very rational to deny their existence 100%. There is simply no compelling reason to think the god of the bible or koran is any way accurate or true, there is a complete lack of empirical evidence that would suggest they do exist in reality. Andrew That's not true. You just reject it as evidence. Irrationally. Oh please, show me the evidence that the dozens of major and minor gods of humanity exist in reality. Would your evidence apply to Zeus and Poseidon as equally as it would to the monotheistic gods of modernity? Or are you just referring to some Francis Collins silliness where he 'sees' the 'language of God' written in our DNA? If there was evidence i could not reject it. Andrew But that's where you're confusing the idea of our conception of God with God itself. Neither Zeus nor Posiedon nor Yahweh need exist in order for God to exist. Your are also confusing the term 'evidence' with 'proof.' There is no proof either way. There are centuries of extremely rich thought and anecdotal evidence for the existence of God. You just choose to reject it in favor of humanistic hubris. And btw, spare us all the strawmen and mockery...it just lowers your argument to the level of comicbooks.

Hold on. One must define the content of said God first. I am agnostic about the origin of existence in general, aboslutely. But when it comes to the god described by the worlds religions it is very rational to deny their existence 100%. There is simply no compelling reason to think the god of the bible or koran is any way accurate or true, there is a complete lack of empirical evidence that would suggest they do exist in reality. Andrew That's not true. You just reject it as evidence. Irrationally.

Well you actually are stating what conventional international law tries to and that is if someone at the tim they engage in an act are fighting invading soldiers to defend their nation, then it would be considered a legitimate act of war and the person when captured is a pow and is supposed to be released at the end of the hostilities when a peace treaty is signed or there is a cessation of hostilities. [snip] Good post. The Geneva Convention attempts to define a combatant, but the trouble is that under its somewhat archaic definition even a suicide bomber can reasonably be considered an enemy combatant. http://usmilitary.about.com/library/milinf...con/blart-4.htm http://www.cfr.org/publication/5312/enemy_combatants.html http://www.cfr.org/publication/5842/findings_report.html

Cute analogy, and if radical libertarianism were the ideal state of being, and if human disorganization were the prototype of freedom, and if we didn't actually have to eat or sleep or live in a state of at least minimal temporal order, and if metaphysical theory were actually praxis, you'd be right. As it is, however, you have just defined every form of government everywhere and always into slavery. That's why I say you are naive. In order for someone to define the US as an unfree nation, one has to be blissfully unaware of history.

How very turgidly Canadian to scoff at the US. How very naive to see the US as unfree. Your enslaved mind blinds you. To whom is my mind enslaved?

I have no problem with evangelicals. They believe what they believe, and at least they believe in something. Far too many today wander around in a haze of nihilism believing in nothing at all. The only time I think belief in something is bad is when that belief encourages harm to others. Christian evangelicals don't brandish swords and call for the heads of their enemies, and that makes all the difference between Islam and Christianity.

No, but humanism does. You're obviously being very selective in your definitions, having excluded the original and only true meaning.

Well, if they don't, I guess the operative questions would be " Why not? " and " What should be done about it? " . If the two-state solution cannot work, I guess there is always the one-state solution. How about nothing? I think I want to start the republic of ScottSA in the Okanagan, but while I have lots of fruit and an increasing number of wineries, there's a real dearth of industry and flat land. Not to mention only one old army base and a couple armouries with Shermans stuck in front of them, gaurenteed to turn any prospective war into the Limp of the Light Brigade. It's not fair, and I'd like the world to fix things for me please. Quick, before I blow up a Jew.