I'm afraid that while it's definitely the most damaging one I've ever seen (it seems to go on and on, getting worse by the moment), it was most effective because there was no announcer, no foreboding voice explaining the problem with McCain. The man buried himself here.
It was clever, it sticks in the mind, and the contrast with Obama is startling.
As far as emotional attachment, another person is another person...but a machine is only that, a machine. You might get jealous if your significant other spent most of the day working closely with a member of the opposite sex, but is it the same thing if he/she is working closely with a computer?
Vibrators can be used with a partner, but I would wager that the vast majority are used alone. I can't see a vibrator session being confused with a sexual experience, at least not one worthy of the name.
The partner issue is really individual to each relationship: some people may use extreme scenarios to justify mechanical sexual gratification, but that's only if they feel they need to.
Sex and love are not the same thing. You can have sexual tension without being lonely, and vice versa: any healthy relationship shouldn't have an unspoken fear of solitary sexual experiences or masturbation in it. It boils down to a personal question, maybe: is a sex toy threatening, and if so, why?
The big practical problem with infidelity isn't sexual at all: it's the fact that infidelity can lead to financial entanglements and conflicts of loyalty that destroy existing relationships.
A robot isn't going to get pregnant, or call at 3 AM drunk, or fly into a jealous rage, or coerce its 'user' to run off to Vegas and leave a family behind. It's a sex toy, and until the day when robots have free will, a sense of self and a motivation for self-benefit, that's how it will stay.
Emotionally, it's hard to even imagine someone using a robot prostitute forming a true, infidelic attachment to it. The $25 bathtub spa sure feels nice, but would you want to marry it? What's there to be jealous of?
I waited tables for eight years, and virtually all of my pay came from my customers. I was paid $3.09 an hour, not even close to enough to live on by itself.
This is how it should be, it ensures that your table server is courteous and makes the attempt to be sure you're satisfied: there's much at stake for the servers if they're aiming for a tip.
It also allows a level of recognition and merit pay that doesn't exist in a lot of minimum-wage jobs, which can keep morale higher and lower turnover in good workers for the owner. Bad servicepeople don't make enough, and they move on. Good ones stay and make good money.
Speaking as a waitress, the incentive of the tip also gives the customer an advocate in the kitchen. I know if I bring a plate of food to you and it's cold or not properly prepared, my tip will suffer, so I'm going to lean on the cooks harder to do a good job.
Religion does more to get in the way of governance than to assist it.
An individual's religion is as personal as his sexual preference or his opinion on baseball: and in the end that's pretty much what it amounts to.
Morals and ethics are in no way bound to religion: It is the mark of a weak person indeed who depends on religion to dictate his morality, and weak leaders are not effective leaders.
No, leave the Bibles and Korans and Rig Vedas at home; bring morality and ethics to politics, and leave individual ideas of ultimate reality out of it. Wars would be less common if religion were left in its place: Jesus himself instructed his followers to render unto Caesar what was Caesar's, and unto God what was God's.
Religion will only impress those who share the religion, and will cause alienation and resentment with those who don't. Not a good situation for a leader.
I think that having a stronger sense of community and mutual responsibility, even across nations, will always be a good thing. It wouldn't be perfect and there would no doubt be some tinpot dictators declaring independence...the wealthy wouldn't like this either. But as Stephen King wrote, everything's eventual.
Sooner or later it will be proposed, and possibly implemented, most likely after a bloody war or five.
In the end, though, so long as the government is representative and democratic, I believe it would be for the best.
Let's drop the stuff about the Antichrist. That was written by early Christians about a Roman emperor who's been dead for centuries: it's no excuse to hold up human progress or make decisions about world affairs. The Dark Ages are over, let them be over.
Spite the Republican party? No, not necessarily. The Republican party as an entity doesn't occupy enough of my thought, for example, to be important in the decision.
To spite what the Republicans did with the power they possessed for the last eight years? That might be a bit closer.
It's not personal, it's business. The Republicans abused the power they had, and have done things to American liberties that would make the founding fathers shudder, and that's only what we know about so far.
No, the Republicans did a bad job and will be rightfully tossed, I believe, in November. It's not personal, it's business.
What an incredibly tricky question this is, and what a shame it's an either/or.
There are at least two different conceptual ideas that involve God. There's God the Father, of Christian and Jewish faith: the anthropomorphic 'God' that most people in the Western world mean when they say the word...the 'proper noun' God.
Then there's the concept of 'God': an omnipotent or omnipresent force, the common noun. Shiva is 'a' God, so are Krishna and Takhisis and Odin.
In that sense, the personification is just a 'face', just a picture that makes an abstract idea much easier to understand. Even the God of the Old Testament didn't make any claims to being human in form; he said that man was made 'in his image', but that doesn't tell you much unless you know what the image of God is, or what was intended by the term.
It's a tough question, but this is my opinion: God is neither strictly 'alien', or extraterrestrial, nor is it 'spirit', in the classic sense of a singular existing being with a determined identity, existing on another plane.
God is that force or energy which underlies everything else; it's the machine code that underlies everything we see and interact with in reality. It's the base force, the chaos out of which order comes; the fact that it becomes order, in my opinion, is a good argument for there being something. But to say it's anything in particular doesn't make it untrue....it's just not completely right.
Spirit is as close as I can come.
...what Middle America?
Middle America has now mostly become Foreclosed-Upon America.
Some of them will support McCain, almost certainly. Clinton deliberately made the issue of her nomination a 'personal' issue for many people, from Floridians to white people to women to older people. She couldn't win on policy, so she aimed for the lowest side of human nature, and there's always profit in that, more's the pity.
I would like to believe that they will rise above their disappointment, and I'm sure that by the time we get to November -- God only knows what gas will cost, or how many mothers will have buried children by then -- they will look at McCain, swallow their anger and do what's right for the country by voting Democratic.
Still, what Hillary did was the oldest trick in politics, and it's never failed to work. Those who don't stop and think will probably cast their vote for the entirely wrong guy, for the entirely wrong reason, because of an entirely wrong argument from a campaign that cared more about winning than about being right.
Obama will win the Presidency.
McCain represents everything that Americans are tired and wary of. We've been complaining about 'politics as usual' for generations, because most politicians are like McCain: older white men with an established agenda, at the beck and call of the corporations and special interest groups that finance their campaigns.
That's over now. Obama was nominated in an entirely new way -- with the power of the internet behind him, and everything that entails -- and he isn't a serf of the big-money interests that have kept real change from taking place in Washington.
Additionally, McCain's ties to Bush, his loose relationship with facts, and his age are certain to work against him. Put them up side by side, and it's Nixon and Kennedy all over again.
It's time for a new way of doing things all across the board: the old media is being made obsolete, and so are the old politics that depend upon it. He'll be the first President of a burgeoning American renaissance, and the fact that he has broken so many standing 'facts' about politics already only gives more weight to that.
