WIP

You and the other rightwingers' slavish devotion to corporate power never ceases to amaze me! If they had to serve five years in a real prison, that would be a start! But, just because Canada has one standard for the rich, and one for everyone else, that makes it okay in your books for bank executives to get away with laundering billions of dollars in narcotics trafficking. “We accept responsibility for our past mistakes,” said HSBC Chief Executive Stuart Gulliver. “We have said we are profoundly sorry for them, and we do so again.” So, should the crime bosses also get away with an apology and paying a fine? How about the average addict, who could spend a life sentence in prison for the crime of being drug-dependent....why not give them the same option?

Why not tell the whole story. Most of those countries with higher per capita murder rates than the U.S., have this result because of your War On Drugs, that provides the drug cartels with the money to buy lots of American guns and use them in their battles with other gangs and government forces.

And they can't do that if they're gay? Or, they can't do that in the U.S. until your country recognizes same-sex marriage rights?

What I know now, but never thought much about during my life as a suburbanite, was how much the real cost of gas is. America should put gas taxes at higher rates to cover the negative external costs of dumping carbon into the atmosphere....as Canada also has gas taxes that are far too low. Gas prices are going to start climbing over the next few years regardless, because of the increased extraction and development costs associated with tar sands and shale deposits for oil. Carbon fuels should be priced at a penalty cost to stop the building of more and more suburbs, the highways to connect them, and cars also! The environmental costs of having everyone motoring around in their own one to two ton iron boxes is not practical from a resource nor an environmental basis. And, the alternatives, like low cost, frequent transit systems need to be put in place now before there is no money left for any infrastructure funding at all.

What a joke! I hope you at least get payed for carrying water for these leeches, like many right wing bloggers are able to cash in on through the web of right wing think tanks. Latest profit numbers from a quick search are at the BBC: 13.8 billion Pounds....which according to the latest pound/U.S. dollar conversion rate of 1.62 = 22.36 billion dollars. So, that fine isn't even 10% of HSBC's annual profits. If that's not a slap on the wrist for crimes that have lesser mortal sitting in solitary with lifetime sentences, I don't know what is!

Like I said before, I have had an easier time being a Canadian-only citizen than as a dual citizen. I haven't been crossing much since moving too far away to shop, but when I lived in Niagara Falls for a number of years and doing a 50 mile commute to work, I was going across late at night on the weekend to fill the tank and a gas can to bring back and get me through till the following weekend....along with a few groceries....never smoked....never bothered bringing back booze since I quit drinking years ago. But, now that I only use the car a little on the weekend, driving across the border would make no sense. I was never asked for more than my driver's license, and only had my car pulled over...one out of 20 crossings at most. But, I hear since Homeland Security arrived, that cross-border shoppers have to put up with a lot more crap now than prior to 9/11.

Explain? How would we determine the root cause of someone gay....or anyone for that matter being unhappy? I haven't known enough gay people during my lifetime to arrive at any conclusions about how they feel affected by being gay, but they seem to fall along the same spectrum of behaviour as everyone else, although it seems that there are more gays in the negative or depressed zone than would be average. I just don't accept the claim that this has anything to do with their innate sexual orientation. Why would anyone feel anguish about being gay or conflicted about it in any way, if someone or the whole society that they are part of, wasn't already shaming them about their attractions?

Your side is not just focused on "the most militant supporters."

First, if anyone's not familiar with what the Luddite Movement was beyond being used as an expression of derision towards anyone questioning the unqualified embrace of new technology....like you are trying to do here, here's the Wikipedia synopsis. Now, I am not going to waste my time defending Nathan Ludd, and the movement he founded, other than to say that was right about most of his conclusions about industrialism and the new technologies developed to make it all possible. The Wikipedia entry focuses on the economic devastation after the Napoleanic Wars and unemployment from industrial efficiency as the primary cause of the troubles that fueled the Luddite Movement, but do not focus on the widespread discomfort and contempt for industrialism in the first place. The factories made towns and cities dirtier places to live and work, even for those not employed in the factories. Before industrial textile mills, the making of cloth and clothing were skilled and semi-skilled professions, carried out by independent craftsmen and women, who pretty much set their own hours and decided how much product to produce each day. Even in the early days, when the textile mills were far from the efficient establishments portrayed by later propaganda, the mill owners pushed to change everyone to the new industrial system, because that gave one man, or a few men, complete control over the lives of people working in this industry. A clothing maker, who had grown up and apprenticed under the assumption that he would some day have his own shop, or work from home as many of the women did, all of a sudden found themselves forced to report at the factory gate six days a week, and spend 12 or more hours doing the same damn repetitive job at a machine, under the whip of a factory foreman demanding that they work as fast as possible.....just like the unfortunate women had to do in that Bangladeshi factory that caught fire. And just like the Bangladesh factory, people stuck working in a lousy textile mill are out of sight and out of mind of the consumer who buys the end products. It's easy to see how and why the owners of capital preferred the industrial system, and why...if you read down the Wiki entry to the Government Response subheading, you see how ruthless and bloody the government acted towards their own people to force them back into the factory sweatshops. So, three cheers for Nathan Ludd...and may the spirit of his movement live on and push back at the owners of capital and whatever machines they create to control our lives with.

Problem with going strictly by utilitarian happiness principles is where is the demarcation between doing the greatest good for the greatest number, and causing the least amount of harm to the fewest? It seems to work in theory, but look what happens when a simple moral puzzle is presented to utilitarians like (if I get this roughly correct) imagine if someone is in the hospital and due to be released, but it is discovered that he is a perfect match for five terminally ill patients in desperate need of transplant organs. Do they have the right to kill this man and harvest his organs to keep the other five alive? It's a five vs. one loss. In numbers alone, that would pass the basic utilitarian calculation....similar to that trolley car example of sending the train down the sidetrack to kill one man to save the five on the main track! But, just as when the trolley car dilemma is adjusted to ask whether it's okay to just throw someone off a bridge to stop the train, a red flag goes up in our unconscious processing that is a little difficult to rationalize away. I'm not saying that the hospital example would likely become part of public policy, but I notice that strict utilitarian philosophers have to start creating qualifiers and making adjustments when the utilitarian principle faces even this simple problem. And then we have to ask if creating the greatest good for the greatest number, includes those generations of people who come after us? Because it quite clearly appears now that too many people are doing the greatest good for their immediate needs and desires, and not showing any concern for those who will have to follow after us.

No, you are arguing against your own straw man! Because I don't know of any pro-CHOICE advocates who take the position that abortion should be allowed, at least under most circumstances, as arriving at that position lightly. I think you watch and listen to so much right wing bullshit media that the ubiquitous pro-life messaging that gets cycled in on a constant basis, has even taken hold in your brain, along with the other doctrines on economics and world affairs that you listen for. The first principle to pro-choice is WHO has the right to decide? So called pro-lifers, who invariably complain about government interference on every other issue, all of a sudden switch polarity, and want not only want the government in the bedrooms of citizens, they want them right in a woman's uterus...as we seen with Republican governors who go so far as to demand that any woman seeking an abortion for any reason, subject herself to an invasive (and we're told sometimes painful) probing device...even though it serves no purpose under those circumstances. The only contentious issue, and the one that cannot be properly addressed in public policy in the present political climate, is when or if a fetus's right to continue living should override the rights of privacy and freedom of the pregnant woman who is doing all the work and has the most at stake in the issue. In the last 30 years, improved knowledge through modern neuroscience has revealed that all of the things we consider hallmarks of a person: consciousness, capacity to feel pain, although the level of awareness of even a late term fetus is hotly disputed by neuroscientists. The developing brain of the fetus does take away the magic cutoff point that was felt to exist in earlier times. Many secular thinkers were acting under the presumption that a fetus comes alive at birth, and even religiously-minded thinkers did not use that conception bullshit more than a couple of centuries ago. The old standard used to be that God implanted a soul into the newborn at the 'quickening.' This was the point when the baby first starts testing out its motor nervous system - felt by the mother as kicking, and begins involuntary movements. Now, we know that quickening is as bogus as any other magical demarcation in the fetal development process, just like conception. And with the problem of having a long, slow, gradually development of human personhood, that is still not complete even after birth, it's easy to see how this issue becomes the bloody flag for patriarchal conservatives to attack women's rights, under a sham concern for 'babies.' But, enough about abortion; abortion isn't the only moral issue today; neither is private personal morality! I want to see an honest study of morality and moral theories include what our social obligations are, and deal honestly with the question of whether we have moral obligations to people who are far away, and even to the generations that will come after us. I'm surprised that such moral obligations are considered new and radical now, because many people who lived close to the land, and were more dependent on nature than human societies since civilization, actually did express the point that deciding how much to hunt in a certain area, how much to fish the rivers and streams, and those that had started growing grains - how long to work the land before allowing it to allow fallow and rebuild, did all this with the understanding that there would be generations following them, and they had a special obligation not to despoil the land. It's too bad that this moral principle was so badly devalued and ignored during our enchantment with technological progress. Guess what the only lifeform in nature that keeps growing exponentially is: Cancer! That should tell us all we need to know about our present sick, materialistic, self-absorbed culture that is stuck on overdrive right now and can't slow down. If you think that's melodrama, let's see your economic "God" tell us how continuous, unending growth, can go on in spite of the law of diminishing returns, that everyone studying resources is well aware of. You seem to think that living under some sort of plausible deniability frees you from moral obligations to the future generations. You are only fooling yourself!

What a lot of people don't figure on when they think dual citizenship only has an upside, is that if it is U.S./Canada, you are actually under more scrutiny and more likely to have your car flagged for inspection if you're holding dual citizenship than if you are just a regular cross-border shopper without it. When I was in my early 20's, driving across to the U.S. with my drinking buddies, unless I was lucky enough to see the same face behind the booth, they wanted to pull me over to check the trunk...obviously assuming that I was a drug dealer or smuggler of some sort. And it was the same thing when crossing back into Canada afterwards. And this was long before 9/11, Homeland Security, body scanners etc. Even treaty status Aboriginals who have the equivalent right to cross the U.S./Canada border, often complain about all of the hassles they get when doing so. One Six-Nations Indian I know, who lived right on the border in Niagara Falls, told me he rarely went across to go shopping or to buy gas because he always gets pulled aside, even though he's never had a criminal record in his lifetime.

Well, let them have their own referendums on these issues! If they are moral issues...no matter how egregious, that do not impact on life in the rest of the world, it should not be up to Team America to imposed new and improved morality upon them. The biggest problem with western supremacism - usually packaged these days as 'Enlightenment values' is that we are presenting our societies and our cultures as the models for Africa and the rest of the Third World to emulate. Let's look at the downside to them if they scrap their cultures and just adopt everything western: our modern capitalist system has promoting and is still promoting a culture of promiscuous consumption, where everything is for sale. And the values of ever-growing consumption are now pushing the world to the brink of extinction. How does that stack up in comparison with public stonings and child marriage, and whatever backward practices they still engage in? It should be more up to them to work through their problems and make the adjustments that can be provided with improved knowledge and education. Trying to impose culture from the outside....especially when it is imposed by an outside force that is trying to subvert their culture and control their economies, is more likely to fuel the reactionary forces than bring any society into modernity.

Well, since the subject is about what principles and guides we use to make decisions about morality and ethics, I expect even trolls to be consistent in the application of their moral rules.

I suspect that almost every, if not every attempt by man to try to solve this problem through mitigation rather than actually reducing carbon contributions, is going to be doomed to failure. The problem is that engineers are linear thinkers; as long as there are a limited number of variables, they can concoct a techno-fix for a problem that was created by technology in the first place, if we're completely honest about why we are in this mess right now. But, when it comes to a complex system...and what can be more complex than our planet's biosphere -- it's a self-regulating system that is still poorly understood...these attempts at techno-fixes end up creating unexpected results that are worse than the problem that they were designed to solve. If an iron oxide-dumping scheme was applied on a wide scale, the most likely result, according to some oceanographers who added their comments, was that they would just create algae blooms that would starve the local area of nutrients - kill the fish - and end up adding more carbon as a net result. As for the first techno-fix advocated in the OP, blocking sunlight...no matter how it is tried, will do nothing about global warming's twin sister, and possibly more catastrophic crisis - the increasing acidity of the world's oceans. Some major past extinctions like The Great Dying of 250 million years ago, are now believed to have caused between 95 and 99% of the existing species to become extinct, not because of the warming, but because the world's oceans became anoxic because of acidification, and killed off almost all of the marine life, including oxygen-producing planktons. So, let's not try to bullshit our way to the future with the empty promise of technology fixing what technology causes to go wrong in the first place! If future generations survive the mess we are making of this world, it will be because they managed to pull the plug on an economy of constant, increased growth, and found a way to reconcile human society with living within the means of what nature is able to provide on a sustainable basis.

First heard this story yesterday, and I can't say I was surprised by it: HSBC receives get-out-of-jail-free card in a real-life game of Monopoly. The New York Times reports this week that megabank HSBC has escaped criminal prosecution for money laundering that probably funded terrorists and narcotics traffickers. Why? Because regulators and prosecutors were petrified that an indictment would undermine the entire financial system. The Times quotes anonymous government sources who confessed fears about bringing formal charges because doing so would be a "death sentence" for the bank. So they let it off the hook. That’s right, HSBC is officially above the law. Too-big-to-fail has become too-big-to-prosecute. So, there you have it! What many of us have suspected for years has finally been confirmed: under a fractional reserve currency system, banks are the creators of money, and as they become larger and more consolidated, governments will do nothing to stop them. And, many observers of the discreet, privileged banking system of anonymous numbered accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands, have long been suspected of holding billions of dollars in profits from the narcotics trade that has created the War On Drugs and led to small time drug dealers and addicts spending their lives in prison. Should we have any remaining doubts that the other major banks are not in the money laundering business also? And so what if they are? They're too big to fail!

Maybe you can explain to me why you are so concerned about whether or not pregnant women have abortions, while showing a complete disregard for the wanton killing of the living today and express a total lack of concern for the likelihood that modern human civilization is paving the way towards extinction? Is killing a fetus immoral, but causing the deaths of everyone in a few generations perfectly acceptable by whatever sort of moral standard you adhere to?

Thanks for adding the subject of bullying, because I was going to mention this before but never got around to it. I first became aware of schools in some areas of the U.S. giving tacit approval to bullying by their lack of interest or determination to do anything about it when I first heard this NPR discussion on the subject on the show - All Things Considered. From the postnotes, check out the quote from self-proclaimed Christian leader - Tony Perkins: "There's no correlation between inacceptance of homosexuality and depression and suicide," he says. Rather, Perkins says, there is another factor that leads kids to kill themselves. "These young people who identify as gay or lesbian, we know from the social science that they have a higher propensity to depression or suicide because of that internal conflict," he says. Homosexuality is "abnormal," he says, and kids know it, which leads them to despair. That's why he wants to confront gay activism in public schools. For example, his group supports the Day of Truth, when Christian high-schoolers make their case that homosexuality is a sin. He's literally holding the smoking gun in his hand....even if he is too stupid to realize it, because he first denies an obvious connection between bullying and social ostracism with suicide and depression! Get the 2nd paragraph where he says in so many words, this is just the way queers are! They're naturally suicidal and depressed because of their own internal issues. And then he caps it off by motivating youth to proclaim the homosexuality = sin message in the schools. So, is there anyone here to stupid to connect the dots between that message and what happens to the kids at school who are gay, or even suspected of being gay? And, FWIW, we only have to go back 40 or 50 years to the time when the parents of the likes of Tony Perkins et al. would want their children to proclaim that negroes were the descendents of Noah's cursed son - Ham, and make the case against race mixing forced on them by the Civil Rights Act. I like to throw that back in the faces of any clown who comes at me waving their Bibles on gays or other social issues, that I am old enough to remember when Klan-supporting preachers pulled quotes from their Bibles to support anti-miscegenation laws down south. Now, they pretend that they were on MLK's side all along! That story from NPR would be sad and sordid enough if it wasn't for the fact that Tennessee, Louisiana and maybe even a few other states since then, have passed state laws directly conflicting with the federal courts, striking gays from the list of groups that are provided legal protection from bullying; all thanks to the lobbying of "Christians" like the Family Research Council. I understand that: "by their fruits ye shall know them." I guess that's all that needs to be said!

My point is that we are hardwired to distinguish between those close to us and outsiders. It doesn't mean that indiscriminate killing of outsiders is sanctioned by a group, and it's an unfounded and poorly sourced extrapolation for some, like evolutionary psychologist - Stephen Pinker to try to claim in his latest book (bent on framing a case that civilization is making us act better) to assume that the default position of hunter/gatherers is one of hostility and contempt for others. Sometimes it happens...I would say that most of the books of the Old Testament follow the dictum that is fair game to do whatever you want to enemy tribes like the Caananites. But, one archaeologist I heard interviewed, who also had a PHD in psychology, noted that there are many cases of people suffering PTSD from causing great harm to others, even if they did not know them or have a close interaction with them. Whereas no one has suffered from giving or doing something out of kindness to strangers. So, our default position might show that there is hope for humanity if we can break down the barriers that cause divisions. But, for your blank slate interpretation of human behaviour to be correct, the Spartan tossing babies off a cliff would have to do more than be willing to carry out the action -- he would have to carry it out without any remorse. In modern day polite society, the only way this can be done without any psychological damage to the aggressor is if he is someone who could be categorized as a psychopath or sociopath by clinical definition. And there is some evidence that constant conflict and need for aggression over long periods of time encourage the increase in psychopathy. So, a warrior society like the Spartans would likely be populated with more emotionally disabled men than would normally be average. It's worth noting that scriptural sources like the Bible or the Quran, which contain passages exhorting the believers to go off to war without fear or remorse, seem to feel the need to include a few verses of condemnation towards those who do or would be trouble by having to slaughter enemies. Maybe that's because this is not the most natural way for humans to behave during the longest history of our species - during the long Pleistocene Epoch. This is why I am leery of both the religious and the atheistic trumpeters of the Enlightenment. The West's and especially England's ban on slavery was just sheer hypocrisy and total BS, since they enslaved their own citizens in debt bondage during the Industrial Revolution, and natives in colonized territories. They just switched labels and refrained from calling it slavery. But it was still slavery and oppression none the less. We could, and maybe should open the topic of Rwanda, since the massacres that have occurred began through deliberate strategy of the colonists to divide the native population, and even today, a major story that will not be seen in American media is that this so called rebellion in eastern Congo is nothing but the American use of Ugandan and Rwandan proxy forces to invade the Congo and either permanently occupy mineral-rich territories or give it back to the Congo Government after they have aquiesced to the terms demanded by foreign mining companies. I still wonder about the veracity of this story because of my personal experiences, which are largely that poor people are more generous than those with more available to them. Most of the people that I've seen when I've volunteered at a local downtown Anglican Church mission are women on welfar or drug addicts. I don't see a lot of foreigners looking for free food and clothes. I see them at the thrift shops where 2nd hand clothes are sold, but that's a different matter entirely.

Yer probably right! I wonder if that stereotype leaves some gays with the expectation that they should be able to pick out the right clothes or know how to decorate a home.

And you didn't answer my question: are you, by any chance a closeted lesbian denied by her community and her own dogmas the capacity to express your sexual arousal towards women? Is that the reason for your obsession with what or what not homosexuals are doing? My "tirades" go way beyond the gay/straight issues to how your kind of religion gives tacit approval for our sexually obsessed, materialistic culture, but responds by shaming and denying all unfortunate people with some sort of sexual obsession that is damaging their personal lives and their own sense of worth. Your kind of Christianity makes people act worse than they otherwise would to others, and allows itself to be used to justify greed, materialism, nationalism and lauds the powerful who oppress the weak and impoverished. There is nothing of merit to your Christianity, because rather than doing what religion is supposed to -- provide people hope and relief from their troubles in this world, and challenge the rich and the powerful, your Christianity does the exact opposite! Your Christianity is the equivalent to the Judaism of the Scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees of Jesus's day....who made public displays of their holiness through their rigid observance of the Law and application of it to others - including executing those charged with breaking the Law, but used their superficial holiness to curry favour with the wealthy and the Roman overlords of Judea. Is that any different than the modern right wing Christian following the Prosperity Gospel to varying degrees? If Jesus were to come back and judge this world, who would face his wrath? Would it be those who lost faith, those who broke sexual codes and moral rules, or those who enriched themselves at the expense of everyone else? Well...obviously it depends on which of the Gospels you want to use for your authority....but the Jesus of the Gospel of John forced the crowd bent on following the Law, who were about to stone the prostitute on strict, legal grounds to back down. In that parable, it wasn't the woman who broke the Law...who likely had been forced into a life of prostitution out of necessity who was the sinner -- instead, it was those self-righteous men who surrounded her with rocks in hand, bent on carrying out the Law, with no consideration of context or underlying motives of people. So, I'm guessing that Jesus coming back would be extremely bad news for Pat Robertson and his ilk, and Republican politicians like Scott Walker, who somehow can harmonize fundamentalist Christianity with their most important religion- worshiping the market.

Interesting! If I got changed to become gay would I finally have a sense of fashion and an ability to match colours and textures?

I made that point too, early on and with a couple of reference links, indicating that viewing human sexuality as a spectrum of preferences is the preferred explanatory model today for clinicians. And I also tried to stress the point....which didn't seem to take hold as well....that the perceived differences between male and female sexuality are more than just superficial perceptions. It's not just imagination and male fantasies...women really are more open to bisexual behaviour than men are; and may change preferences between men and women during their lifetimes. But, I don't believe that this is happening very often in men. One of the reasons one of my links observed that female sexuality is less well understood than male sexual behaviour is because male sexual arousal becomes very fixed, at least by the time we reach adulthood. That's why my source noted that most of the talk about homosexuality focuses on male homosexuality, and leaves lesbianism in a void where it is largely ignored as a serious topic for research. So, in this argument about the merits of so called "reparative" therapies, the main problem I have with this is that we still live in a society that does not regard homosexuality as completely normal for those people who are inclined towards it. I'm not even happy with the scenario of a fundamentalist Christian family putting their teenage daughter into some kind of reparative therapy if she declares herself attracted and interested in girls, even if it is more likely that she will change her sexual interests than a teenage boy. It is still coercive mind control. And when it is applied to boys, I can't see any sort of upside to this; it should be declared child abuse if it's forced on a minor, case closed!

That's exactly what I was thinking! From the limited info that I bothered to absorb, this station was promoting these assholes as the main reason to listen to the station, and were still running a highlight reel of past prank calls even after this nurse committed suicide. It wasn't any sort of moral concern, either from the station owners, nor the assholes, that sent them into damage-control mode. It was pure, unadulterated self-interest. But, what more can we expect these days with so many people sharing the libertarian ideal and anything done to others as long as it doesn't violate the law, is fair game? Would the assholes, or the station owners be expressing any remorse or regrets if this woman didn't kill herself, but merely lived on, psychologically damaged from being publicly shamed? I doubt it! They are only concerned in regards to how the woman's extreme reaction has rebounded at themselves. As for other loud, obnoxious morning radio shock jocks and their fans......I guess this is one of the reasons I have lots of podcast subscriptions so I never have to listen to the radio again...except for traffic and weather reports. Tosh.O....same thing...pure garbage. But, I would watch the episode where the episode where an irate victim of a video posted on his stupid show arrives at the studio to beat the shit out of that misery pimp....Tosh fans, keep me posted for that one....that's one Tosh video I wouldn't mind watching! Here's where punking and prank calling is warranted and should be encouraged: when it is applied against the people with monetary and/or political power to control the lives of others; especially when the prank involves a politician slavishly trying to curry favour with financial overlord. Exhibit A

Here, you are shifting the subject from whether adults who want their relationships recognized and receive the same respect that everyone else in society should have the same rights - to - whether young men need therapy after being sexually violated when they were children. Need I remind you that your side is the one that feeds the abuse! Because it's your side that shames homosexuals and drives them into the closet in the first place, where they may act out in unacceptable ways. And when abuse occurs, some churches respond with damage control, rather than dealing with the problem honestly: Catholic Church Paying to Defend Convicted Child Molesters