Dude, Martin Luther was really not Catholic.
However, I agree with your argument. It seems to me that if the school argued: these two girls are spreading views that go against the religious tenets of our institution, and produced some kinds of testimony that they'd been promoting the joys of lesbianism to the world, fair enough: they're disrupting the social climate that the Christian parents've chosen to raise their kids in. But saying they "exhibit a bond charactistic of a lesbian relationship" is no statement of crime. Private schools have the right to be more selective than state-funded ones, but expelling teenagers at a time when confused sexuality will be enough of a problem for them already? Shouldn't be within their rights.
I'd say yes - institutionalised discrimination, resentment against immigrants and hate crimes are all still major problems. Are racist jokes are indicative of strongly held racist beliefs? I'm not sure, but I don't think they're either a new problem or evidence that racism's unimportant nowadays.
Like... what, exactly? Wind turbines are easier to mass produce, but they also take up a larger area of land and are 'unreliable' in that they're dependant on the weather. Hydroelectricity is also arguably difficult to mass produce.
The main problem with nuclear reactors is not only the risk of a meltdown - "when [it] blows up - but the highly radioactive waste they produce. Much of this has a half-life longer than ten thousand years: it will need to be stored securely during this time or it will irradiate living things, causing cancer and other problems.
Nuclear power isn't the only option, but the reasons you put forward are inaccurate.
Portal, and, in fact, everything Valve's made. The Half-Life games and the Source engine they're built on raised standards for games everything, Team Fortress is funny and original, and all their games work well and are interesting and clever. But Portal neatly demonstrated that video games don't need violence to be awesome, so it gets my vote. (Not to mention, it has delicious cake!)
I don't it's at all true that "almost every marriage has had at least one half of the relationship have an affair" - I know a lot of happily married couples who haven't. While there are more and more people who are choosing not to get married because they don't agree with the idea of their relationships being religious contracts, that doesn't affect whether people who are married are monogamous - if anything, it means those who don't want to be tied down don't marry, which leaves those who do marry as the people who will value the sanctity of that marriage.
Your argument rests upon the idea that the FSM is created to be a straw man fallacy and therefore belief in Him is offensive. Why is that belief offensive, though? Why is it a matter of "ultimate reality and importance"?
The creator of the FSM website, Bobby Henderson, says this: "I don’t have a problem with religion. What I have a problem with is religion posing as science." In other words, it's pointing out the absurdity on imposing beliefs on other people as if they were truth. You talk about the offending the "sacred beliefs of others" and ridiculing people, but you're missing the point. FSMism is poking fun at fundamentalism, maybe. But it's not laughing at believers, Christian or otherwise. It's asking for religious freedom and tolerance, and for all believers to be able to believe what they want, without having Creationist dogma thrust upon them.
Why does that make them "a liar, a heretic, and someone insensitive to the sacred beliefs of others"? Using the FSM as an argument to rebut the teaching of Intelligent Design is no different from using any analogy; it's not "lying", it's demonstrating a point. And as to the charge of 'heresy', I can't see how you can call either someone of another faith or an atheist a heretic. That's religious totalitarianism and it's obnoxious.
Diplomatic relations: pretty important. How will you ever find a common ground with someone if you won't meet with them; how will you ever establish peace and make agreements and win them over if there isn't communication.
But I don't understand what you mean by anti-American. That the leader's country has been known to criticise America, or what? I'm not really sure what you're getting at with it. I also don't know what the conditions of a conditional meeting with these anti-American people would be.
However an interesting parallel to this is that Mugabe came to a UN talk about food shortages. Is it OK to meet with leaders who're ruling undemocratically and who've committed human rights violations? When their presence at a summit of that nature is hypocritical? I'd say there's no reason they shouldn't be allowed to come if they're still recognised as leader of their country; if their presence is hypocritical, that'll be noticed and commented on and will highlight the problems that exist with them. So I don't really see a problem with meeting with any foreign leader, unless there's a risk they'll assassinate you or something.
Yeah, I guess limiting people would be counterproductive.
I think, Borme, that the 'report' thing seems more like it should be reserved for spam or offensive stuff, not just "another boring clone debate". Voting on a debate to say "this is good" is would be a feature more people'd use and it'd help point to interesting debates, as well as just getting rid of bad ones.
It's obvious that religious beliefs will cause tension when we're talking about places like the Gaza strip or Northern Ireland, but, as you say, that's for a variety of reasons. The Israeli community would be reluctant to elect a Muslim because there are years of resentment, violence, and hostility between the two cultures. Those cultures have different religious identities, yes, but the conflict is originally about who owns that land, so I don't think you can really compare it with American politics.
You say: "The point is it shouldn't matter what a leader's religious beliefs are even if it does have implications on their leadership ability." I don't agree. I'd say, the leader should be elected for their leadership ability, and anything that affects that does matter. Anything that influences that would also matter: I wouldn't want to vote for a hard-line Catholic who would oppose abortion and teaching people to use contraception. I wouldn't deny their right to be Catholic, I would have no prejudice against their Catholicism, but I'd disagree with their policies and I'd want to know what those policies would be. If knowing their religion gives me that information about their political convictions, I want to know it. Because of that, I want them to be open about their religion.
Getting people to use more considered arguments is a good idea, but I don't think that kind of ranking would work particularly well.
First problem: that hierarchy doesn't apply to arguing FOR a motion. It's about rebutting and counter-arguing, so it'd need to be adapted before you could use it.
It also doesn't let you give points for style, and it considers supporting evidence, which few people use on this site. I know, it'd encourage it, but if you're debating for fun in an informal argument, it puts you off to feel the need to go hunt down evidence (it also encourages the use of wikipedia...).
The other problem I have with that idea is that the general reader/voter doesn't necessarily have the critical ability to decide whether the "central point has been explicitly refuted"; besides, a lot of the voters are partisan. It'd be more appropriate to have someone neutral with recognised authority judge participants in a debate and put them on a level in that hierarchy than to encourage all feedback to be in that form.
I think that ladder ranking is interesting and you could probably make use of it, but I think the Total Points/Total Arguments would be a more practical adjustment to make to the system.
The major problem I see with CD at the moment is that there's too many people posting one knee-jerk reaction to a debate title and not really engaging with the issues behind it or other people's arguments, and I'd like to see what ideas people having in solving this problem.
I think setting up debates that'll get judged 'professionally' and have start and finish times would be a good move. Maybe pick one motion every week or every day, post the title around in advance, and maybe even make it a closed debate that'll have a limited number of people. Judging the debate and evaluating the arguments in it should encourage a better quality of debate, I think. The practicalities of that kind of thing, I'm not so sure about. Still, I'll try and make it to the town hall. So long as I figure out what time 4pm EDT is in GMT... (8pm, counting daylight savings time, right?)
What ever do you mean, corporate leeches? I confess, I'm not quite capable of imagining steampunk aesthetics catching on in the high street, although it would be rather amusing if one were to notice chavs wearing goggles.
You goddamn reactionary; don't think you're coming running back to cyberpunk land after the steampunk fad catches on. Hmph.
(Also, your link brought me much joy and happiness. <3)
I think Google have shown exactly that you don't need to be extremely competitive to win in the world. They're massively popular just because of the good design of their stuff, and because of that they make a huge profit through hosting advertising alone, and don't need to spend any of it on adverts of their own. If Microsoft is diversifying, Google's doing the same: gmail and google maps are actually innovative, too, whereas moving out of the region of PCs makes Microsoft just look desperate. Open source is growing in power, what with Ubuntu being shipped on some laptops, and Firefox is getting to be more popular than Internet Explorer. I think Microsoft is going down.
Feminists try to change people's perception of women, not what people do. They don't say "you can't make porn, girls, even if you love your job", they're saying the objectification of women is a social problem that we need to address. Because, surprise, most women in the sex industry don't want to be there, and social attitudes to the sexualisation of women mean it's hard for these women to avoid being victimised. I don't necessarily think pornography is in itself degrading, but I think in its current state it allows women to be degraded, and I don't think feminists are obstructing anyone's free will in saying so.
I disagree; words can have offensive meanings behind them, and you don't have your development stunted to be hurt by them. "Shutdown speech and thought goes with it"? Well, not all speech has thoughts worth hearing behind it. It would be narrow-minded to not listen to someone because they said 'black' and not 'African-American', but a lot of the time people will be hurt by being called the n word or being a dyke or whatever. It's not taking things personally to be upset by that; that's verbal abuse and it's hurtful to almost everyone.
The definition of existence: that's the real question here. We exist physically as constructs made of molecules that will never be destroyed, and we also exist as beings that have effects on other people and on our world. The former will continue to exist, the latter, the person, will die and not speak or act in the same way ever again. Will this being live on in a spiritual sense? That's the harder question...
This debate could be two different ones - "should we be PC" and "should we have absolute freedom of speech". I'll talk about PC-ness, because there seems to be a general scorn for it.
"Being politically correct" is pretty unimportant for most of us; however, there are people who use 'freedom of speech' to justify racism and advocacy. We have the right to express ourselves, but there are situations in which doing so risks being inappropriate and offensive and in those circumstances, we have a social obligation to be careful about how we present ourselves and our views. If not using epithets that could be seen as derogatory when people who might see them that way are there is being PC, I'm all for it.
The reason political correctness exists is to avoid offence: politicians talk to the media and large groups of people and people look for reasons to condemn what they say; they're also representing their government and country rather than just themselves, so if they say something even slightly inflammatory they're endangering international relations. This is why they need the safety net of political correctness. They may sound silly to you talking about African-Americans instead of black people and same-sex partners instead of gay people or whatever, but given that people from the island of Lesbos took offence at the word lesbian, wouldn't you say better safe than sorry? The majority of people don't care, true, but enough do that I don't think it's frivolous for the media or the government to watch what they say.
Yes, the majority of other people don't need to avoid possible offence so meticulously, but most of us aren't asked to. Being "PC" rarely affects freedom of speech, and if it also stops people all getting offended at each other, that's only a good thing. If you had to stop swearing for a week while you stayed in a house with little kids, would that be a violation of your human right to freedom of speech? No, it would be you making an effort to be polite.
