Good questions all.
1. As I understand it, as a practical matter the President has always been able to push laws aside in extreme situations. It's just that no President has ever tried to make it legal, nor has any President ever done it without accepting responsibility for the consequences -- trying to square things afterwards, as you put it. The difference here is that Shifty George is not in an extreme situation, and he has no intention of being called to account.
2. I don't have a clue as to what you could do afterward. The vital thing is to act ahead of time: vote by mail if you possibly can, volunteer for vote watch efforts (moblogging anti-thug committees standing watch over voting booths), drive people to polls if you have a car, and so on. It would also be a good idea to find out exactly what kind of ballots you'll be using in November, and if they are the Diebold kind, start screaming blue bloody murder right now.
Here's a further question: how does one become one of the people doing the actual counting, in those instances where there are still physical ballots to be counted?
3. The problem here seems to be related to a disconnect between a+b and c: that is, the experts were ignored. I still don't know whether stupidity or malice is more to blame for the actions of this administration, but in this instance I am leaning away from conspiracy theories of the "first the POWs, then our own citizens, then I'm dictator for life" variety. My guess is that Shifty and Rummy and company are simply so inept and amateurish and arrogant that they failed to understand what a fundamentally useless set of tools (torture, unlimited detention, etc) they were trying to use. They actually buy into their own B-grade "gettin' tough on terra" rhetoric, is what I'm saying. For me, that is still (marginally) easier to believe than the conspiracy theory.
feel free to write me a note explaining how you got through school.
Without cheating, that's how. I never imagined you were defending him, but I still don't see where a free three years' tuition is a punishment rather than a reward. Why should he be allowed to take up resources someone else could make use of? It seems that the university was lax, maybe even negligent, but I don't see why he should benefit from that. The idea that he is somehow being hard done by seems absurd to me; he cheated, he got caught, now he faces the consequences. The timing makes no difference, unless it (the timing) was somehow deliberate, someone's idea of teaching him a lesson.
How about meeting half-way: let him re-enrol and do the degree over, at his own expense and under the intense scrutiny that his history will naturally engender. That avoids handing him anything for free while at the same time not crushing him like a bug.
Count me as one who laughed aloud at "I never dreamt it was a problem". I admire chutzpah, but that's just bald-faced cheek and a dirty lie besides.
And I agree with Jill and (I think it was) Xopher: he should get nothing, because he's already had his money's worth of education if he's learned an aversion to cheating (it seems too much to hope that he will ever understand why it's a bad idea apart from what can happen if you get caught).
Tip o' the hat also to those commenters (too lazy to scroll back up) who pointed out the link between widespread plagiarism and teaching-to-the-exam. When the whole bloody exercise is a sham, and you're just doing it to get the piece of paper that everyone says you must get, little things like integrity and self respect tend to be left out of considerations.
I guess I am just stunned at the idea that anyone could respond to Kos's statement with something other than revulsion.
What stuns me is the number of conspicuous-compassion assholes falling all over themselves to express their revulsion. Kos made me wince with his ill-phrased opinion; the resulting plague of whited sepulchres is making me sick to my stomach.
There's another little something here, on which Body and Soul recently touched: why is the nation that wields the single greatest, the most overwhelmingly unopposable military force in the world hiring itself a bunch of Myrmidons? I can think of no clean reason not to do military jobs with military personnel, but I can think of plenty of dirty ones. Much the same goes for requiring civilian contractors to provide their own security.
Participants in this thread might like to read Nathan Newman's essay defending Sharpton.
FWIW, I think Patrick's shot at Xopher was well below the belt. I only mention this because Xopher might like to hear it; in everything else he said, I agree with Patrick.
Thanks, Claude. Got any good suggestions for egg substitutes?
My view of Xopher's questionsIf we can raise and kill animals without making them suffer, does that make it OK to eat them? If not, why not? And if not, why is it OK to kill plants even if they don't suffer?hinges on the idea of equal consideration of interests. That does not mean that a human, a cow and a carrot get identical treatment, because they don't have identical interests. I have decided not to weigh my (relatively trivial) interest in eating beef over the cow's (entirely vital) interest in not being eaten. The carrot has no interests in any meaningful sense, so I'll happily eat it.
Incidentally, this discussion spurred me to do some digging into eggs and dairy. It appears that a great deal of the beef that gets eaten comes from dairy cows (and their male calves). A cow can live 20-30 years, but is slaughtered before 10 because milk production has peaked. I suspect that the same thing applies to chickens and male chicks. While it would be possible to provide an old cow's/old chicken's home and pass the costs on to the consumer (and while I would pay those costs), I don't see how a dairy or egg farmer who did that could remain competitive. So, hello soy milk and egg substitutes.
Any gate, the ways to kill rodents that I know of that seem to be generally approved of all appear to involve suddenly broken necks. I knew a lab tech who swore by a method by which the rodent's head was slammed in a drawer such that the neck was instantly broken. Too fast and too thorough to hurt was the theory. The third, which I've heard discussed extensively in theory but most people don't end up using, is to grab the rodent by the base of the tail and the base of the skull, and then pull the tail fast and sharp. This method seems to have a high failure rate due to squeamishness.
[warning: the link might squick some people]
Cervical dislocation works well for small animals (although I've never heard of using a drawer), but you do have to be very definite and determined. There's no room for hesitation. Many labs use CO2 asphyxiation, which is ridiculous -- it causes visible distress. The best system I've seen, and the one I adopted many years ago when I was killing mice for lab work, is a mixture of oxygen and CO2 to induce sleep -- there are no signs of distress, just a sleepy rodent -- followed by skillful cervical dislocation. (I wouldn't do that project now, but my views on animal work were not well formed at the time.)
Graydon --
the question wasn't 'how is vegitarianism worse than animal husbandry, ecologically'; it was 'is vegitarianism bad, ecologically'.
But given that we have to eat, I think the former question far more interesting (not that my dietary decisions depend on environmental considerations alone).
There is no meaningful distinction between 'people food' and 'animal food' and 'animals fed to people' anywhere that uses mechanized agriculture.
This is what I just don't buy. When we eat an animal, we are at the end of an inefficient chain of production: at the very least, all the energy that animal spent doing anything but growing the bits of it that we eat is wasted. All of the concerns that apply to modern agriculture (monoculture impact on diversity, chemical dependence of the industry, centralised production relying on fossil fuels for distribution of product, and so on) also apply to animal husbandry. Mechanised agriculture is not going anywhere, although I quite agree that the energy source involved is going to have to change radically.
Indian/Pakistani vegitarianism includes lots of dairy by default; this is more efficient than eating beef (factor of about four more protein over the productive life of a cow) but they do something with the surplus bull calves, as far as their agriculture is structured. There isn't any obvious inherent difference other than that protein between dairy farming and beef farming.
This is relevant to me, because I still eat eggs and dairy at home. When I eat out, and cannot verify the source of the produce, I eat vegan, but for cooking at home we buy eggs and dairy from local organic cruelty-free producers. (For the sake of full disclosure, I note that I have not yet visited these farms, and I don't know what the dairy does with bull calves.) The difference, as I see it, between dairy and beef farming, is that the former can be viewed as a partnership. This does, though, depend on such factors as how to deal with bull calves. I may yet have to give up dairy, or at least work out just how much of that protein I need. (I further note that protein requirements in childhood are different, and I do not know whether it would be advisable to cut all meat out of a child's diet.)
I will note that the probable reason for it being a multi-generational thing is economic and social -- eating habits don't necessarily change all that quickly.
Yes, that occurred to me after I posted. I agree. I'd be interested to see what happens to families who gain access to affluence, good health care, etc without starting to eat meat; are Buddhists also getting taller in Japan, since the end of WWII?
Of course being veggie is harmful; it involves intensive agriculture, which is by definition ecologically harmful
More harmful than animal husbandry? Bearing in mind that I buy all my produce from the smallest and most local organic farms I can find, I'm going to take some convincing on that point. Huge monoculture farming is a blight, on that we agree; and I confess that I don't have a detailed plan to move from monoculture to small, local and organic while keeping the supply at current levels. I don't see how eating meat is the answer, though.
it -- at current world population levels -- presupposes the indefinite continuation of a petroleum based agriculture
Again, how does this differ from current animal husbandry practices?
It also involves the incorrect assumption that everyone can live healthily on a vegetable diet.
Nearly everyone can, as far as I know; and the reasons for vegetarianism that I outlined are entirely consistent with consumption of whatever meat is necessary.
Primarily vegetarian diets, as a historical trend, produce small people, hunched and bent in their age.
Got any data I could look at? Your assertion does not match any of my anecdotes, which all involve Indian/Pakistani friends and their families. As for the height increase, I think improved medical care and overall quality/quantity of food might have something to do with that. There seems to be another factor at work, too, because if what we are seeing in these intergenerational increases in size is phenotype matching genotypic potential when developmental and growth needs are met, why does it not max out in the first generation to whom all of the advantages are available? Why the lag? I cannot think of a reason off the top of my head, unless it is a function of averaging across the population.
I can't eat bugs, diverse grass seeds, grubs, and worms
Yes you can. You just don't want to. I take your point about increasing the amount of the ecosystem included in our menus, but raising meat in the quantities our society currently consumes has, as far as I can tell, at least the same impact as agriculture -- not least because we do, in many instances, feed the stock plant products that we could eat ourselves.
A quick left turn here (and probably one that I will regret mentioning): How do people feel about animal testing? I mean for scientific purposes.
I feel I should say something about this, since I'm yammering about ethics and I do medical research for a living. I spent four years in HIV research, which field I chose initially because I could do good work without animal models. When I moved to Portland, I reluctantly left the field (that's one fascinating virus!) because most of the really strong HIV labs here make use of a local primate research facility. It makes sense: such facilities are few and far between, being enormously expensive (each chimp costs about a quarter of a million dollars a year, IIRC), so labs in the vicinity tend to focus on work they can do that labs without such access cannot. Being weak in immunology, I don't have much to offer a vaccine lab (which is what the primate models are mostly used for), so I've switched fields. Again I chose work in which I could largely avoid the use of experimental animals -- human iron metabolism, with a specific focus on haemochromatosis. None of this is to say that I'm against all use of animal models, or that my work does not involve animal death. Cell culture media are supplemented with foetal bovine serum, a number of proteins are still purified from tissue rather than recombinant sources, and antibodies are still raised in mice and rabbits -- to name just the first instances that come to mind. I try to minimise the use of animal products (one current example that has me very excited is a method for making recombinant antibodies in yeast), and I would only use an animal model if I had no other way to answer the question at hand and was convinced that the question was worth answering.
So, why will I do this work when I won't eat the same animals? It's a question of weighing interests. If a rabbit has an interest in living, and I have an interest in eating him (because he tastes good, although I can be perfectly healthy as a vegetarian), I do not believe I should consider my relatively trivial interest more important than the rabbit's vital one. On the other hand, if the rabbit does not want a series of injections followed by regular blood withdrawal, but I can use the antibodies thus generated to answer important questions about haemochromatosis, then it's sorry mister rabbit but here comes the needle.
Singer also argued that the severely disabled should be killed
This is simply not true, as far as I can tell. I've read Practical Ethics and Writings on an Ethical Life, and nowhere in those books does Singer take the position you describe; neither have I ever seen any of his detractors quote such a position from any of his writing.
and that all household income above $30,000 should be donated to the poor
He is definitely inconsistent here. But hell, 20% (where'd you get that figure, by the way? I've never seen him put a number on it) is pretty good.
he spent huge sums caring for his Altzheimers-afflicted mother
He has a pretty good defense for this, too, in that he has to take into account the wishes of the rest of his family.
perhaps that's not what you were looking for
Well no, it wasn't. I don't agree with Singer on all issues, but I found I couldn't fault him on the specific positions I listed. You bring up an important point, though, which is that Singer is often dismissed by reference to "he wants to kill the disabled" and "he's a hypocrite". The first is a misreading of his arguments, and the second irrelevant to his arguments. One might think less of him for not living in accordance with his own reasoning, but that does not make said reasoning automatically invalid.
Xopher: apology unreservedly accepted. Also, I'm sorry I got all pissy. You have a track record here that says "polite and reasonable", and I should have made proper allowance for that.
Keith: There's some evidence that suggests broccoli has a rudementary nervous system, and let's not forget that there have been scientific studies done for more than fifty years now on the emotional resonses of plants and not all of them are just crackpot new agey nonsense.
I'd be very interested in references to this information.
I'm unlikely to go back to eating meat, just because the herbivorous lifestyle seems to suit my physiology, but I'd also be very interested in arguments contra Singer on this issue. Specifically: utilitarianism as a kind of minimal ethics, the only meaningful way to interpret "all X are equal" statements is "the like interests of all X should be given equal weight", and the relative unimportance of the species barrier in making ethical decisions. These positions together constitute my original reason for giving up meat.
Xopher: I think "ethical" vegetarians are silly.
I don't usually feel compelled to defend my dietary choices, but then I'm not usually insulted for them either. I stopped eating meat because I couldn't fault Peter Singer's argument for ethical vegetarianism.
[long post explaining my position deleted]
You know what, Xopher? I can't be bothered. I am tired of online arguments. I want discussion and conversation, and your dismissive tone does not encourage me. Consider me "silly" all you want.
I get pictures, too. They are moving pictures, but they're not exactly movies -- the perspective is different, and hard to describe. It's a bit like being able to watch all the rushes simultaneously, superimposed into the view from one best-possible vantage point. Like Graydon's, my imagery stays with me and feels much the same as something I actually saw in meatspace -- viz, my fiction memories are just like real-world memories.
donkify
Don Quixote's lesser known cousin. Tilted at pinball machines, rode a horse called Uptheante.
According to my highly scientific poll of 32 published authors (a statistically significant sample if ever there was one):
Sci-Fi: 5
SF: 8
speculative fiction: 1
doesn't matter: 18
Two responses in particular seem worth noting. Lazette Gifford said "The term SF is not going to turn anyone away. The term sci fi will" and James D. MacDonald said "SF. It matters to the people who care, and why should we go out of our way to offend people who care?".
David, I think what Lydia is saying in the sentence you quoted is that the pro-"sci-fi" faction have no more claim to represent the whole of fandom than the anti-"sci-fi" folks. After that, though, I got lost too. I am not sure, but I may have just been called a butthead. :-)
Lydia, I'm not really pro or anti (and I've never been part of fandom per se, although I'm a lifelong fan of the genre, whatever we call it). I just like the sound of "sci-fi", and Ellisonoids who call me an idiot without explaining howandwhy the term fell out of favour get up my nose. I am sorry, though, if I got up yours.
Melisa Michaels of the SFWA has an article on this issue here, and Google allows one to take a poll from Eternal Night interviews. I'm tallying that up right now...
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