Hahahaha. Nice post Omni.

Just some nitpicking here, but the "all men are created equal" part there is from the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution

Right.. sorry...

Well, the current concensus by the so-called experts is that a fetus does not constitute a human life. I personally think it might be. It's what seems to make sense to me. But I'm not one of those experts.

Well, maybe the experts you listen to. I don't think there's any sort of consensus out there at this time, I'd say it's pretty split. You'll find experts on both sides of the fence arguing one way or another.

By all scientific accounts, a fetus is a life form. The only question is whether it's human or not, and I don't think you need an expert to see that it is. It's DNA is human.

The only way to say it's not human is by some arbitrary definition of humanity claiming it's not a life because it can't exist on it's own, or something along those lines.

If there's even a slight chance it's human, we shouldn't be killing them.

But even so, are you using the Constitution as the reason that the right exists, or as an expression of the existence of the right?

That's an excellent question. I mean no disrepect to you, but I'm surprised you brought it up. Not many people do.

I believe the constitution is an expression of pre-existing rights, given to us by God. I don't know how other people justify it, and I usually don't bring God into the argument for obvious reasons, but I do believe our rights are God-given, and there is judgement and morality beyond the will of the majority of the people. That said, I also have a deep respect for the law of man.

If marriage were set up exactly as I outlined before, people would learn to write up such information when they are still in school, and the few who would make it to being adult couples without having any sort of will are just plain foolish. They lose the money, plain and simple.

Maybe so, but there would still be issues. Again, the insurance issue for companies, not to mention all the little situations that could arise, and a will could not cover them all.

Insurance companies are private businesses and should be able to run themselves. If they can't figure it out by themselves, then perhaps they shouldn't be in business in the first place. It's easy for me to say because I don't have any insurance at all, but even so...

No offense, but I don't think you understand the insurance issue. How would they decide who gets partnered insurance and who doesn't?

It seems like a self-perpetuating process. You take any two random non-adjacent countries in the world (say.... New Guinea and... Nigeria); they have nothing against each other at all. Because they don't involve themselves in each other at all. When we become involved in the affairs of these countries, we have to assume that there are people in those countries who are not going to like us being there.

I see your point, but I think overall, Israel is much more in line with what the world needs in the middle east. I'm not saying they're innocent, but they're a lot better than Palestine or most of the countries there. We should be supporting that sort of thing.

And now that Iraq and Afghanistan represent places the US can use militarily, the need for Israel is far diminished.

Maybe so, but Israel has their own military, and are more of a partner rather than just a surrogate army for us.

Invested in what way?

Money - supplies, trade deals, imports/exports, etc.

thanks. I just came up with it one day, It wasnt consciously inspired. I got tired of people not understanding what x3r0 said and turbotails/zerotail just didnt make any since =p

Actually, when I said Tenaciously, I mean "Tenacious D". Kyle Gas is one of the guys, and his nickname is RageCage, and that's where I thought you got it from. That's cool anyway, though.

As a side note, you know those Muslim and other religious extremists who truly hate the US, probably are the foundation of terrorist activity, and no doubt contribute to suicide bombings?

Is it not a little amusing that to show their rage at us, they kill their own people on their own holidays? At face value that seems to be the most ridiculous thing you'll ever hear of.

I was mostly responding to you, lore. Thanks for the well thought out/organized posts.

No problem, and thank you. It's wonderful being able to hold rational debates about politics without them turning into flame wars, even if neither of us will probably ever convince the other.

basically Bush has repealed (not sure if thats the right word) a lot of acts that protect the air etc. Like the scrubbers that clean the air coming out of factories for pollution. This is kind of expensive for the factories, so Bush got rid of the acts so they wouldn't have to spend as much money. Profit at the expense of the environment.

Well, I don't know every instance of what he's repealed, but it's really not a concern for me.

When people hear "Bush repealed regulations to keep our air clean", it freaks them out. But, the situation is not that simple.

I do know that numerous regulations and standards put in place by the EPA have been found to be far too strict and in some cases, almost completely unnecessary. And, in some cases, scientifically unfounded. Some where enacted when we just weren't sure what certain chemicals would do, and so we were conservative to be safe. Others, I believe, were enacted by radical left-wing groups (which have a large say and control in the EPA, which is clearly the fault of the conservatives for not giving the environment the focus it needed earlier) who do not give these issues rational thought or consideration. They are reactionary in the strongest sense of the word, and, there is a very strong socialist push connected with these people. I'm not saying the average environmentalist is connected, but higherups in these organizations have an ultimate goal of more than just environmental saftey.

I'm talking about the same sort of people that wear gas masks in the city (because they think the air is so dirty it's going to irreparably harm them) If they want to be that extreme with their own life, that's fine, but these people have had a large influence on our environmental regulations. I do not believe Bush would repeal anything unless it was unfounded or too extreme to begin with.

I'm sure you or RageCage have some specific issue you can give me of something Bush has repealed which allows for actual proven dangerous and damaging levels of some chemical which will actually cause a problem to a large group of people, so please do. I'll do my best to discredit it. :-)

Also, I'm sure you're sick of hearing it, but the oil drilling in Alaska. Basically he wanted to destroy a habitat thats really sensitive, and wouldn't really recover from such large scale drilling.

Thank you for bringing that up. I'm still pissed about that.

Okay, there was two very distinctly different stories coming out about the environment in Alaska. There was the common one, which is what you've said, and then there was reports that there's almost no wildlife in that area in Alaska, and it's winter basically year round.

I've seen pictures and done research and none of it paints the picture you're suggesting. That was pure political propaganda. Of all the places in the world, I would say Alaska would be one of the absolute best to be drilling in, in terms of environmental damage, because of the near lack of wildlife or even trees and plants (really, the place is barren as Moscow)

And, when it comes down to, even if you don't believe that, we were only talking about drilling in a very tiny area. This is hardly the scenario of "destroying a habitat" you're suggesting.

Like the war on Iraq, I find the more reasonable and rational Bush's decisions and ideas, the more outragous and deceptive his opponents become. The greater the lie, the more people believe it.

Well, I find war to by easily avoidable. We were not "standing up for what we believe in" in Iraq, we were forcing our ideals (democracy etc.) on the people. An act of self defense is entirely understandable, but considering that Saddam Hussein had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 and Iraq had as much terrorist activity as Saudi Arabia or our other allies, there was really nothing to defend against there.

Forcing our ideals? Come on, Saddam was a tyrant who killed his own people on a regular basis. Democracy is proven to work. If the UN had fulfilled it's mandate, the rebuilding of Iraq could have been based around a less American vision, but that wasn't the case, so we sort of got stuck with the job.

Regardless, there was plenty of reason to go after Saddam. You know the whole WMD thing? I still stand by what Bush said before the war. We had credible intelligence which said he had WMDs, we had informants saying he did, and so forth.

Most importantly though, and somehow this fact has been lost to most people, Saddam did have WMDs at some point during the 90's (I think it was around 93 or so), and this was documented by the UN. We still don't know where those WMDs are. He won't tell us. A tyrant dictator ruling a country which has invaded another country at one point has WMDs, and now he won't tell us where they are, he just claims he doesn't have them. He won't give our inspectors full access to search for them and try to confirm their lack of existence. You don't need to be a political expert to see the logic of Bush.

Remember, Iraq was just the first of several. North Korea is not as much of an immediate threat because the situation there is drastically different. We do need to deal with them, but unlike Iraq, we have had no intelligence information that would indicate they were trying to do any biological warfare or WMD activity against us.

Saudi Arabia obviously needs to be dealt with soon too, but we're finding out a lot more information about them recently that we just didn't know about early, and, generally speaking, we have a much better relationship with them then Iraq. They at least purport to be our friends. It is arguable that they are a greater threat, but I don't think it's black and white and Bush's decision to start with Iraq made sense given the WMDs.

I have disagree with this, as I think the liberal media bias is waaay overblown. I could just as easily prove that the media has a conservative bias.

I think the liberal bias is less of an issue than it was, and in some cases it has been replaced by a conservative bias, which I find equally offensive, but overall, the liberal bias is still very strong, particularly in print. The New York times has made themselves into a joke, and this was before all the recent self-destructive activities of their employees. I could have told you years ago they were going to get caught for publishing bullshit, because I read it on a daily basis.

Do you realize what it's like for conservatives in America? On a daily basis we read shit thrown so callously against our beliefs, and the obvious ignored and spun to no end. I cannot count the number of times Newsweek has declared the latest Bush "scandal" as going to be worse than the Whitewater and anything Clinton did, but then when the evidence doesn't surface, they just drop the story and move on to another.

The LA Times ran a bunch of BS about Arnold a day or two before the election about his harassment scandals, which directly broke all their own standards. Of course it came out to be false, or at least was never proven, but regardless of this, they did almost no verification of the story. They just ran it, two days before the election. They were trying to kill the guy. Compare this to how they treated Clinton when numerous provable allegations came up. Or Newsweek. If Drudge hadn't run the Newsweek story that they trashed, we might never have known. They love liberal politicians, and they hate conservative politicians, and they are activists purporting to be unbiased journalists.

I won't even get into Fox News, but I wouldn't say they have a conservative bias. I'd say they have a "we want to make money and most of us are assholes, except maybe three or four of us" bias. O'Reilly is just as bad as any of them, even if he's good at forming coherent sentences and arguments. There is a few guys there I like, though.

Fox News really is entertainment-news, but that was something started by CNN, they're just taking the concept to a new level.

As far as the liberal bias goes, let me give you an example. Remember when all the hub-bub was going on about Bill and Monica? What was the number one thing you saw in the media? SEX. SEX. Any time they brought a conservative opinion on, they'd bring up the sex. They'd always argue that SEX is a personal thing, etc and so on.

The thing is, the real argument and reason to impeach Clinton was not the sex. It was the perjury (a serious offense, particularly for a President, particularly over such a stupid issue), and millions of tax payer's money he spent to cover it up. That is a serious crime, and I don't think you'll disagree with me there. The liberal media distorted the conversative argument to make it an easy one to argue against. It made me so angry at the time. If they spent 1/3 of the time discussing the real issue, I don't think Bill would have stayed in office.

By the way, if you would say "they shouldn't have been asking those questions" to Clinton about his sexual activites, I need to remind you that they were asking him while he was on trial for sexual harassment. This is completely standard in sexual harassment trials; proving marital infedality (sp?) is a strong argument for the prosecution. This wasn't just some politicans bringing it up just to do a whack-job on him.

However, I think the jailing/racial profiling was uneccessary, and Bush really didn't handle it perfectly. Addmitedly, it was less of his fault, more of a general hysteria thing, but it still happened, and was bad.

If you can give me some specific examples, I'd appreciate it.

On the whole, I didn't see any evidence of racial profiling. At least, not on the surface. Did you hear any of the stories about how nuns were being strip searched in airports? They've been given specific instructions to disregard skin color and clothing, and a lot of people made a fuss about that, but that's how they've been handling the situation. Very sensitively, and taking all the precautions necessary. I'm sure you disagree, but this is how Bush has gone about things, even if it's been portrayed as otherwise.

If your argument to say there was racial profiling is that all the detainees were middle eastern, like I said before, there's no proof in that. Pretty much all the terrorist activity has come from middle easterners (except for a couple of notable, singular cases), and I'm pretty sure that most of the terrorists are middle eastern. If we're doing any sort of good job picking up the bad guys, it's just going to be that most of them will be middle eastern, because most of them are.

'Fraid I disagree here too. We don't have to "ignore" the problem. But a peaceful solution would be preferable to a warlike one. Why don't we work on reasoning with the terrorist groups, maybe not doing what makes them hate us.

Of course a peaceful solution is always preferable, but this is not the world that we live in. War should never be rushed, unless it's in self-defense or the need is extremely immediate, and we should do whatever possible to avoid it. Bush repeatadly appealing to the UN to support their own mandates (which, ironically, would have given the UN more credibility and helped improve the common view of the UN, but they choose otherwise) Now they accuse Bush of hurting the UN, but he spent many months trying to convince them to help themselves.

The number one reason people claim the terrorists hate us is our support for Israel. I question whether this is really the main reason for the majority of them do hate us, but Israeli support is something we need to continue. They are our ally, and they are just about the sanest country in that whole damn region. We invested too much, and if we dropped our support for them now, they would all be eventually killed. Israel is not innocent, but in the past few years they've curbed most of their destructive actions (even as their opponents would argue otherwise, but the fact is their opponents just don't want them there and will hate and attack them as long as there are any jews there). We cannot just leave our friends to flounder. It's a tough situation, and like I said, noone is innocent, but right now Israel is working towards a peaceful compromise even as their citizens are exploded on a regular basis.

Again, this is not to mention the strategic reasons for having a strong ally in that region.

The only thing that will appease these people is the absolute removal of Israel, and the fall of the freedom of the west and our ideals.

Don't compromise with the devil, so to speak.

Bush's reasoning for not controlling carbon dioxide in his plan was that if we were to regulate carbon dioxide, his administration says that it would lead to significantly higher electricity prices.
So suddenly, the price of electricity in california is more inportant than the depletion of the ozone layer, the disapparance of the polar ice caps, the rise of global temperature, and the havoc caused world-wide by climate changes.

There is a serious lack of evidence to support the claim that carbon dioxide is responsible for the ozone hole. At least, not enough evidence to warrant self destructing our economy.

There is also evidence to support the notion that the ozone hole is a natural thing, and is constantly changing in size. Obviously, we don't know for a fact either way, as we've only recently been able to monitor it, but there is evidence going both ways.

My point was that we shouldn't support things like this that call for drastic action without some reasonable scientific proof and evidence. Those some would like to suggest otherwise, global warming is not a roundly accepted theory by all scientist, and there's still a lot of disagreement.

As for scientific issues that remain unproven, I assume your refering to global warming. If you really believe that it is unproved you have been a victum of spin. There is not a scientist alive who would deny the presence of global warming and not a scientist alive would say that we should not take action. That is unless they are coached and paid to say otherwise. I suggest you take a close look at this link:
http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/fgwscience.asp


Certain scientists like to believe they speak for all and environmental studies, unlike other sciences, tend to be very political. I have seen first-hand accounts of this. The best analogy I can give is the catholic church of old and their perscution of Galileo.

If you really believe that no scientists would deny the presence of global warming on the scale that you're suggesting, then I think you're the victim of the spin.

There is obviously some level of global warming occuring, but there is a very big leap to be made to say it's going to cause all the serious damage and ice caps melting, etc, and that is where the science is lacking.

Though our carbon dioxide emissions have decreased, globally they have increased, and yet the ozone layer was recently noted as getting smaller. I'm sure you're aware of this, as you do seem to have done some of your research, but I haven't heard the argument against this yet, so please fill me in.

Clicky! In particular, this.
I'm just a computer programmer, mind you, but the paper looks quite credible to me.

first off, thank you for providing some actual evidence for me to argue with.

At first glance, the evidence you provided is pretty convincing.
The the easiest thing to compare on this report right now is the graphs.

on the page posted by the speed bump, http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm#Message53 , there's a very convincing graph, shown at http://www.oism.org/pproject/fig11.gif .

Cars became a major commodity in 50s and 60s, this graph starts after cars are already a big thing in '78. You cant see what our atmosphere was like before this which would be a very obvious thing to look at first. Also, this graph is 6 years old.

If you follow a link to a graph, down the page a bit, at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/302/5651/1719?ijkey=V1P2cyRDBN21o&keytype=ref&siteid=sci
it shows a much much larger scale depiction comparing CO2 gasses to temperature. The two graphs contradict each other a lot. It now becomes a question of which one is more creditable... a graph published by science magazine or some lame graph used to support a petition?

I would like to take a more in depth evaluation of the two links but I'm in class and running out of time to write. later

Did I happen to read somewhere that Democracy was proven to work?

I do recall in Government class the idea that Democracy has been proven to fail (take the downfall of Athens, for example). Pure and simple democracy, especially. There must be a balance between the rights given to the people and the powers reserved for the government--otherwise, the government will dissolve as people abuse their rights.

The United States has done well to keep a pretty good balance for near 200+ years. But that doesn't guarantee it will work elsewhere--it fact, it only says that the United States is a very unique, special case. And even in our case, we don't have true democracy, we have a republic/representative demoracy, whatever.

The fact is any form of government has degrees of fragility, and there is no boast among which type of government is superior, especially in regard to how capable the government is to manage a country in its early formative years--even the United States nearly crumbled with the Articles of Confederation. Democracy is not the be all, end of all of government that idealistic citizens believe it to be. It is simply a different type of government.

Now this is from an objective standpoint. Of course, if you get me thinking about Christianity, and the good intentions with which America was founded, and the noble purpose and destiny of American government, then yeah, I'll feel like democracy is one of the best things ever. Still, keep in mind that American democracy has been through years of evolution and favorable circumstances (a successful revolution, concrete national principles of government, a line of mostly successful political leaders). Many of these elements simply are not in place in the foreign governments that are created with the idea of democracy, and thus they fail.

Most of this is food for thought. The thread seems to be focused on the environment right now, however, so please pardon my indirect off-topicness.

Lord this message is long.

No problem, and thank you. It's wonderful being able to hold rational debates about politics without them turning into flame wars, even if neither of us will probably ever convince the other.

My thoughts exactly.

I'm talking about the same sort of people that wear gas masks in the city (because they think the air is so dirty it's going to irreparably harm them)

I'm going to use the particular quote for the whole environment issue. In response to this quote, you know all those adds on TV for allergy medicine, Allegra and the like. I'll tell you right now that its not pollen and mold and other natural things that are causing people to be sick (at least not the extent that you need medicine). Its the polution from fossil fuels etc. Basically what pharmecutical companies are telling us is that the human race evolved with a weakness to air. If everyone needs medicine to be outside, shouldn't that tell you that its not safe to be outside? And if we didn't have houses thousands of years ago, how could we survive? Either everyone in the human race has a disease, or we evolved without an immunity to air. Since neither of these seem plausible, I'll just say that pollution might affect you more than you think.

I've seen pictures and done research and none of it paints the picture you're suggesting. That was pure political propaganda. Of all the places in the world, I would say Alaska would be one of the absolute best to be drilling in, in terms of environmental damage, because of the near lack of wildlife or even trees and plants (really, the place is barren as Moscow)

I think this is a difference of perspective more than anything. The way you see its, its just a bunch of ice. I think we see it as more of an ecosystem. Even if theres not a bunch of vegetation, polar bears, and penguins flopping around, that doesnt mean its devoid of life. There are still tons of organisms that dont leave obvious signs of life that live in or around those areas. And even if there was absolutely NO life, it would still be part of nature. And any time we can avoid screwing up nature, we should. Its just like in caves. Stalactites take thousands (millions?) of years to form, but they arent alive. If a pratical use was found for stalactites, would you allow people to go in and harvest all the stalactites that took ages to form? Don't you have an interest in preserving the earth?

Do you realize what it's like for conservatives in America? On a daily basis we read shit thrown so callously against our beliefs, and the obvious ignored and spun to no end.

Like I said, this is really a topic I try to stay away from. But if you insist, I'll argue it. Honestly, I think this is a very immature argument that conservatives use to victimize themselves. The whole point of being really liberal is finding out things not reported in the media. If anything, I'd say that the media has a HUGE hidden conservative bias. Sure, they may make Bush look like a fool, but then they don't report a plethora of other crap that goes on. Rage and myself have a huge number of books about all the stuff that goes on that the media doesn't report on. The whole thing is just ridiculous, and doesn't further anyone's purpose in my opinion.

And you make good points about Clinton. I wasn't really following that whole thing to closely, however, so I can't really say what the media bias was at that point.

If you can give me some specific examples, I'd appreciate it.

Me and Rage will look for some.

Of course a peaceful solution is always preferable, but this is not the world that we live in.

No, its not. But thats because of our attitude, not "the world we live in". If we are going to be the police of the world, we can't blame them for our actions. And did you ever think the UN didn't agree with us because we were *Gasp* wrong?! Everyone makes the UN out to be the badguy. Hey, wait a minute, I thought we went to war over their resolution! Another conservative I argue with said it was UN resolution 1442 or something that Saddam didnt obey, so we attacked him. Why are we enforcing the UN's resolutions, but ignoring their opinion? Maybe they just really didn't think it was worth going to war over. Its like no one considers that maybe a union of nations with hundreds of times more experience than us (as far as national politics are concerned, we're a young country) was right, and we were wrong.

This may be a little incoherent, I was distracted throughout, and there was a lot to respond to.

Thanks for the clarification. I never said we are against Communism because we are a Democracy, but you're right, it is a more socio-economic system than government system. My bad.