WIP

Now that all of you conservatives have your own source of carefully screened news propaganda to watch every night, there should be no reason to complain about CBC's bland, expansive liberalism. Nevertheless, I know that conservatives like Harper, are never satisfied with half-measures...so I expect that, now that Harper has the dictatorial power of a majority government, one of his chief objectives will be to do to public broadcasting what his Republican idols have done to U.S. public broadcasting. Regardless of the CBC's personal stake in the Liberal Party, the majority of credible political analysts also agree that the collapse of Canada's centrist party is a sign that the political polarization that Harper and rightwing conservatives have created, is leading us towards a sharply divided political system, where you're either on one side or the other, and there is no room for anyone in the middle. Harper's first goal was to destroy the Liberal Party, and there's no doubt that destroying non-corporate controlled media will be the next step.

Right! The real story is that rising disparity in incomes and the gutting of public education and cost of health care have made America one of the lowest ranking OECD countries regarding social mobility. England isn't much better, and Canada is getting worse thanks to following supply side economic policies of cutting corporate taxes and high end personal income taxes, while raising college and university tuition fees.

That hasn't stopped a whole lot of new names showing up here and posting dozens of campaign adds for their parties. I wonder how many will still be here post-election!

Non-conservatives aren't Christians...so they shouldn't be allowed to vote!

Good thing there has never been fantasy in Liberal and Conservative campaign promises!

I listen to podcasts of the Current and some of the other CBC shows every day. You can argue that they're biased towards Liberals, but you're pulling it out of your ass if you're claiming that they don't have Conservatives on panel discussion shows! But, have no fear! Canadian Conservatives who want anti-liberal, daily pro-corporate, conservative brainwashing, now have SunTV -- where we can watch Charles Adler to his radio show, and Sun columnists read their editorials, instead of making us go through the effort of reading them in a Sun newspaper ourselves.

And who supplied the buses for Tea Party express's cross country caravan to stop the health care plan two years ago? Tea Party patriots was started by the Freedomworks front group, which fronts the money for pro-corporate groups and propaganda campaigns all across America. Freedomworks was concocted by the "Citizens for a sound economy" so-called "think tank" and is run by former Republican politicians and corporate lobbyists...so anyone who ignores their Foxnews mouthpieces can follow the money trail of these mighty rivers back to their billionaire sources....and that's why they are called astroturf groups! They get a handful of mindnumbingly stupid followers to show up for small rallies, usually of less than a hundred people, and this is what Republicans call grassroots movements! Real grassroots movements are not created by corporate donors who provide free luxury coaches. Real grassroots movements start from the ground up, like the public service employees who occupied the capital building in Madison, Wisconsin. As usual, he doesn't bother to read anything to know what he's talking about, so he answered nothing! He thought the studies were taken from opinion poll data. Yeah, that's a good excuse for opposing progressive taxation! All the Ayn Rand disciples think the billionaires are going to close all of their operations and move out of their mansions, if they have to pay a higher percentage of income tax (which Obama didn't even have the guts to allow expire, I might add), and pay higher than the ridiculously low taxation rates on investment income. When Warren Buffet's secretary pays a higher percentage tax rate than her billionaire employer, something's wrong with your system....and it's a shame that Buffet is one of the very few super-rich to recognize the full repercussions of reverse-robin hood economic strategies. Yeah, I think Ayn Rand was the first to come up with that bullshit premise when all of the hard-working businessmen go on strike in Atlas Shrugged....which seems to stink even worse as a movie, than it does as a novel, according to the box office numbers reported on Rotten Tomatoes.

Judging from the bump in the polls this gave the NDP, I'm figuring that this last, desperate rightwing smear attack has boomeranged on Harper! And SunTV is goddawful television from what I've seen so far. Like the Sun newspapers really need a TV station so that Ezra Levant can read his editorial to us on television...or we have to look at Charles Adler, as he does the same thing he does on radio....work as a payed propagandist for the oil companies!

I'm more than happy to malign your kind of christianity. Your brand of Christianity is at war with science, with social progress, with the environment, with every nation that the U.S. has branded an enemy....conservative Christianity wants to make this world an even worse place to live, so that everyone keeps their eyes focused towards heaven, like the poor, miserable souls who are living on less than a dollar per day. And, you think your interpretations are the only correct ones. I don't take sides between people who are arguing about what the Bible means, because there are more than 33,000 different Christian sects who all claim to be following what the Bible says....and to me, that proves it's one big Rohrshack ink blot test. Dana Carvey's "The Church Lady" used to say:"I'm going to have to say a little prayer against you for that last remark." It more accurately expressed the real sentiments of the self-righteously religious....and I don't want mercy from a vengeful god who condemns most of the world's people to hell for not recognizing a hidden god. It's a religion that excuses all the worst things that nasty, selfish people want to do

It's not based on polling data! It's been gathered from meta-analysis of thousands of quality of life statistics that have been gathered, and comparing them by differentials in wealth and income levels.

The reluctance to inflate executive salaries in Japan isn't explained, but it doesn't matter how it's done, since the authors point out that the end result is a society with greater income equality -- which results in less negative effects of social status competition that afflicts the societies with high inequality. And the numbers back it up, whether comparing nations or states within the U.S. such as Vermont and New Hampshire with states with high inequality. Maybe because Japan has a long history of a large population living on a series of small islands, they don't have this lunatic libertarian mindset that cooperation is bad, and all economic and social activity must be based on competition! If you're a "winner" in Japan, like some of the CEO's of major corporations like Toyota -- you still live in a relatively modest 3 bedroom house instead of mansion, or carrying on showing off your money like Donald Trump and similar assholes! And some statistics like physical health, are not materialistic concepts, but are about personal wellbeing. From Kate Pickett, co-author of The Spirit Level: over 170 studies of income inequality in relation to various aspects of health. Life expectancy, infant mortality, low birth weight and self-rated health have repeatedly been shown to be worse in more unequal societies. These studies have been reviewed in the journal Social Science and Medicine. Researchers sometimes disagree about the pathways leading from inequality to worse population health. The most consistent interpretation of all the evidence is that the main route hinges on the way inequality makes life more stressful. Chronic stress is known to affect the cardiovascular and immune systems and to lead to more rapid aging. Inequality makes social relations more stressful (see section on Trust and Community Life), by increasing status differences and status competition. These effects are important: Americans living in more equal states live around 4 years longer than those living in more unequal states. Take a look at the national rankings by suicide rates and there is an obvious indicator that there are more factors than mental illness regarding suicide! Some of the most miserable hell-holes like squalid Mid-East countries, or the poorest countries in Latin America, have the lowest suicide rates (Haiti has the lowest suicide rate for God's sakes!), clearly indicating that religiosity has made suicide taboo in these places; while some of the wealthier, developed nations like Korea, Japan, Baltic states like Lithuania, and Eastern European nations including Russia, have the highest suicide rates. That is a clear indication that cultural acceptance or rejection of suicide is a strong determining factor.....I'd rather live in Sweden than in Haiti. No, what happens is that societies with high inequality have greater anxiety over social status, and turn to consumerism to raise their self-perceived status where they live. People who feel less social pressure to keep-up-with-the-Jones's are not going to feel the same pressure to raise their status through consumption. The Tea Party groups are fraudulent front groups working on behalf of powerful interests. Why is all of their talk about downsizing government and cutting spending just focused on the spending that benefits the sick, the elderly, visible minorities, the poor etc.? Where are the tea party activists calling for cuts to the Empire? Specifically, the more than half of the Federal Budget that gets spent on military, weapons, and military contractors (mercenaries)? Why aren't they calling for cuts in that spending, or oil development subsidies, and farm bill subsidies that go to big agribusiness conglomerates like Archer-Daniels Midland?

You see, this is why I could care less about what people's metaphysical beliefs are, but am over how much they believe everyone else should be adopting their way of thinking. There are a lot of Christians who would not be trying to divide everyone between Christian and non-Christian, and would just examine each argument based on its merits.

Since this thread was established to celebrate the fact that climate change has largely been pushed off as an issue during this campaign....not in small part due to the successful marginalizing of the Green Party...I want to add that I see this as a failing of our democratic system, and a reason why I can't get all that excited about the campaign, even though Harper is floundering in his quest for a majority government.

I don't see how anyone over 40 can't recognize that something is different over the last few years! I don't work outdoors, but even I can see the difference with how I have to check the thermometer out on my front porch and the latest weather forecast before I can figure out how to dress to go out for a run. It doesn't matter whether it's spring, summer, fall or winter, every day is different than the day before, as the temperatures go up and down without any stable day-to-day trends.

It's a point I've heard historians toss around that is based on memoirs of the people who were supposedly in the know during the War years. I don't know if it is based on fact or mostly hear-say, so I'm not going to plant a flag on it. The point was that the rivalry among the Allies wasn't just U.S. & England vs. Soviet Union, but that for all of the things that united England and America, there was still an issue over whether England would resume its position as the world military and economic superpower after the War, or whether the U.S. would - discreetly as possible - make sure that England was permanently saddled with enough debt so that they would be forced to divest themselves of their colonial empire...which was the source of England's power. I don't know where the line between fact and conspiracy theory could be drawn here, but I am inclined to believe that the U.S. wanted England to be strong enough after the War to help counter the sudden emergence of the Soviet Union, but not powerful enough to resume their position of Number 1. My personal education on U.S. foreign policy began about 20 years ago when I struck up a friendship with new neighbours in our old neighbourhood, who were originally from Guatemala. It was our kids that brought us together; but after some time when small talk discussions with the old man went on to more serious topics, I learned about his personal experience of growing up in a northern Guatemala Mayan village, until soldiers and mercenaries of the Reagan-backed government of Ephraim Rios Montt started a campaign of genocide to clear out the villages for refusing to help the Government fight the rebels against the land-owners they labeled as the "Communists." Like many of the Mayans, they were forced to flee across the border into Mexico and become permanent refugees. In our media, the whole drama was portrayed by the Reagan Administration and State Dept. officials as just one more front on the war against Communism. In short, the whole thing...like many other Latin American wars...was a fraud. Your Government, which...through Republican and Democratic leadership...continually claims to be spreading democracy throughout the world, was once again supporting the aristocrats and landed gentry of a typical third world nation against the will of the majority of people...and that is at the heart of why so much of the rest-of-the-world has a negative view of America. It is not as simple as "jealousy" or "they hate us for our freedom", and similar blather. Here in Canada, those may be the sources of whatever anti-Americanism pops up; since most of it is tied with insecurity over identity by Canadian nationalist wannabees....but that's not what's at the heart of anti-Americanism in most of the world. The U.S. economic colonial empire operates in exactly the same way that the British, French, Italians and Portuguese operated in their colonies....except for actually planting the flag on their soil, the pattern is to take local despots and potentates under their wing, and wherever possible, make it possible for one minority group in the colony to control the majority population. So, in Guatemala, they supported the small Spanish mestizo land owners against the Mayan majority, just as the French selected the Alawite minority in Syria to run their colony...which is still clinging to power, or the Belgians put the minority Tutsi tribes in control of the majority Hutus in their central African colonies, England put the Sunni's in charge of the Shias in Iraq and used the Maharajas to carry out their agendas in India etc. Democracies can be unpredicable, and the U.S. has, and is STILL following the pattern of preferring the reliable dictator and the local aristocrats over the will of the majorities.

No, I have been a critic of Memetics since first discovering his essay "Viruses Of The Mind" written about 15 years ago, in a collection of Dawkins essays I bought a few years back - "The Devil's Chaplain." Maybe you put everyone you consider anti-Jesus in the same pot....and Richard Dawkins is supposed to be who we take orders from!

Yikes! You're comparing vestigial organs to souls? My point about souls is that...besides the lack of proof for their existence....there is no role for them to perform. Mental functions correlate with physical brain activity...which certainly is too complex to be fully understood any time soon, but there are no black boxes -- mental functions -- that are not correlated with subsystems of the human brain. Now, when it comes to vestigial organs -- these don't even qualify as proofs against evolution! I refer you to the bane of creationists -- Talk Origins, which has a page that does an exhaustive deconstruction of how they are misused by creationists. Answers in Genesis claims that scientists define them as "useless" organs, which the Talkorigins article demonstrates as a falsehood, since even Chuck Darwin himself didn't claim that vestigial organs were without purpose! Your example of the appendix is an example of an organ which has limited, if anything of value for us, since its importance is tied with our pre-ape herbivore ancestors which consumed a lot more vegetation.

Maybe overcrowding is affecting people (at least the female portion) at an unconscious level, because even conservative societies that make birth control a priority are able to bring down birth rates.....if Iran can do it, there's no excuse for the lunatic Republican reactionaries south of the border that are trying to ban access to abortion and birth control. Unless you're talking about the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, there are no large, untapped oil fields in the continental U.S.A.. And, on the topic of oil -- since there have been so many oil-based polymers created, which have become necessities, wouldn't it make more sense to put the brakes on using oil for fuel and fertilizers for meat production, and keep the remaining oil reserves for essentials before it all get sucked out of the ground? Yeah, those are stupid wars too! But, a world that cannot feed its populations is soon wracked by wars and mass migrations...which also lead to new wars. Many of these Mid-East dictatorships that are suddenly convulsed in revolution, are not in this situation because of Wikileaks, Al Jazeera or Facebook as some superficial analysts would like to believe; the key factor that caused widespread uprisings is the food shortages, rising food prices, and removal of basic food subsidies in most of these countries. In Syria for example, most people were living on less than $2.00 per day, and food purchases took half of their income. Ten, 20%, or 30% increases in grain prices have much more impact in a place like that then they do here.....so far at least!

There were rapid spikes up and down after the last ice age, judging from ice core samples, and it was not a time which would have supported the type of civilization we have now -- extremely large populations dependent on high yield agriculture...so what's your point? Over the last century, the changes we have made to the environment, especially the increase in ocean acidification and the 3% increase in atmospheric CO2 have started the transition from the Holocene Epoch of stable climate into a brave new world of rapid climate change that's called the Anthropocene. It's a roll of the dice whether future generations will survive the world we've created for them, because unlike most previous temperature spikes caused by the Sun, or orbital cycles -- this one is being created by continued, relentless increases to greenhouse gas emissions. What we are doing is more akin to long term climate forcing changes like the 100,000 to one million year long flow of volcanic flood basalts that caused the Permian - Triassic Extinction. The earth never created an animal like us before... that is capable of dominating the entire planet and changing ecosystems. The Great Dying at the end of the Permian, caused warming and ocean acidification because the prolonged period of volcanic activity could not be absorbed by the normal bio and geologic processes; and now we have already started positive feedback cycles that will continue on for decades at least, even if we immediately stopped adding to greenhouse gas levels! The melting sea ice, melting permafrost, increased water vapour levels, the reduced CO2 absorption ability of the oceans, will continue the trend we started 150 years ago....and if we continue business as usual, and keep adding more and more to greenhouse gas levels, then we are approaching the worst case - nightmare scenarios of 1000 ppm+ CO2 levels.

Do you make a habit of sticking your fingers into light sockets to see how bad that will be? A warmer Arctic means melting permafrost...and melting permafrost means large quantities of methane and CO2 in the atmosphere...a positive feedback loop that apparently has already started...because of a warmer Arctic! http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/14/arctic-permafrost-methane

YOu have to do more than slow population growth, since world population is already past the carrying capacity of our natural environment. The global population needs to be dropping...and the faster it goes down, the greater the permanent carrying capacity of the planet will be.

I think there has obviously been a well funded disinformation campaign to drive these issue from public attention, because back in the 70's we were hearing about overpopulation and that the oceans were going to start dying. Now we are living in an age when there are already too many people on Earth, and ocean acidification, and dying coral reefs and collapsing commercial fish stocks have become a reality....and yet there seems to be fewer people who are aware of these problems today than there was back in 1970. Yeah, I almost fell out of my chair when I read that one about how peaceful our world is now! There was a trend in that direction up till 10 years ago, but we are entering a new era of conflict...hell, the U.S. is in three wars at the same time now...I don't think that's ever happened before! And, it's happening for reasons that you have outlined here -- some of these conflicts in Africa now are all about dwindling water resources, and if we look at the Iraq War and how the U.S., China and Russia are positioning themselves to try to secure remaining oil reserves, it's easy to figure out how that will turn into a shooting war.

And, we don't have unconstrained free will either, because we are physical beings that are part of a physical causal chain of events in this universe. Our mental states are determined by physical events that go on inside our brain. It's something that most people seem to understand perfectly when dealing with people with mental illness or dementia, but fail to recognize that everyone who is "normal" is likewise constrained by the interactions of 100 billion or so neurons.

Put it this way: if souls and spirits are supernatural...or something other than a natural phenomena, then you, or anyone else who believes in them, has the burden of proof to prove their existence, since everything we see, touch and know about, fits into the world of natural phenomena. When it comes to souls, we have lots of evidence to demonstrate how mental states correlate with brain function, and how specific brain activity precedes awareness of simple decision-making tasks. There is no room for an immaterial soul to perform some mental function, nor has there ever been an explanation for how something that is immaterial would interface with the brain or the body, or any other natural force in our world. So, maybe it's my definition of truth that souls don't exist. But, I have the preponderance of evidence on my side. The other side just has tradition, longing and wishful thinking.

When the first Jesuits engaged the Hurons and other tribes, they took advantage of these similarities, to spread Catholic doctrine in the New World. It wasn't until afterward that they tried to stamp out the Wyandot and other native religions. I'm not sure what you're getting at here. I don't see the problem comes from Betsy belonging to a packaged, organized religion, but the fact that she has no tolerance for all of the thousands of other versions of Christianity, or non-Christian religions. The survey that inspired this thread....and the one that has Betsy twisted in knots...informs us that a lot of people, especially younger people, are resisting the notion that only the followers of one particular religious tradition have God on their side. Now this is total fantasy!