Here’s my premise. Obama wants the Republican Party to nominate anyone but Romney and if he can’t stop Romney from being the nominee, he wants to ensure there is as much damage to him as possible between now and the convention.
You may have noticed the other day that Obama called on a fight over abortion that really came from out of the blue. He put forward a proposal that even religious organisations will have to provide health care with contraception and abortion included which led to a dust up and then partial retreat. The religious wing of the Republican Party rose up en mass whose net effect amongst other things has been to encourage support for Rick Santorum and to diminish support for Romney for whom such issues are peripheral both to his campaign and in his appeal for votes.
For myself, a candidate’s views on abortion and contraception must be as far from a personal concern when I vote as it could possibly be. It’s not that I have no view; it is that when I think of what I want from an American President, no position taken by any likely Republican candidate is ever going to influence my decision. Would that were true for everyone else.
Abortion for the Democrats is the gift that keeps on giving. There is an Alinskyite Marxist in the White House who has undoubtedly pulled punches in his first term to maximise the likelihood of winning a second term. He is possibly the worst economic manager in American history and is overseeing a series of foreign policy disasters that have left the US in an incomparably weakened position in relation to every major issue in the world today.
Yet for all that Obama is still the favourite to win in November. I have been astonished at the ability of the Obama administration to manipulate the electorate almost at will. I have quoted the following passage from Peggy Noonan before and will have reason to do so no doubt from now till November. Put everything Obama does and has done into the context of this kind of analytical ability:
The other day a Republican political veteran forwarded me a hiring notice from the Obama 2012 campaign. It read like politics as done by Martians. The ‘Analytics Department’ is looking for ‘predictive Modeling/Data Mining’ specialists to join the campaign’s ‘multi-disciplinary team of statisticians,’ which will use ‘predictive modeling’ to anticipate the behavior of the electorate. ‘We will analyze millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical decisions.’
It is this kind of data mining that in my view almost certainly guides every action taken by this administration. Add to that a media totally sewn up, and you must wonder how Romney manages even to stay in the race.
Here’s my premise. Obama wants the Republican Party to nominate anyone but Romney
Of course. Romney’s got the best chance.
You may have noticed the other day that Obama called on a fight over abortion that really came from out of the blue.
No it didn’t.
Given Romney has expressed the views of PJ O’Rourke type conservatives (‘I may kill the baby, I will kill the boy’) in the past and given that this is a litmus test for the wrecks of car salesmen who have become a major factor in American politics it is entirely predictable that Obama would play it. What’s interesting is he’s playing it now.
Mayhaps attempting a provocation for the GOP faction that descends in spirit from those who prosecuted John Scopes? Wedge tactics to split the Right?
The religious wing of the Republican Party rose up en mass whose net effect amongst other things has been to encourage support for Rick Santorum
Yep.
For myself, a candidate’s views on abortion and contraception must be as far from a personal concern when I vote as it could possibly be.
Exactly! But for others it’s paramount.
Adrien
14 Feb 12 at 8:34 pm
Steve, I hate to break this to you, but the idea that Obama brilliantly provoked the contraception/abortion fight to bolster Santorum is precisely the Obama Fan Club nonsense coming out of the Daily Kos.
Obama did what he did to bolster his own base and give vent to his own wacko prejudices.
It had nothing to do with Santorum. Obama and his team know that Santorum won’t come close to being nominated. All that’s left later this year is advertising gold for Romney when he reminds voters of Obama’s extremism. Barry has actually strengthened Romney because his one problem with Christian Republicans is his Mormonism but that will be forgotten completely, so eager will evangelicals and Catholics be to get rid of the hatemongering loon in the White House.
Epic own goal.
C.L.
14 Feb 12 at 8:41 pm
And the current controversy has nothing to do with anyone’s personal views of contraception.
That’s another Obama love media distraction.
It has to do with whether you believe the state has the power to shut down religious organisations and trample on people’s freedoms.
C.L.
14 Feb 12 at 8:44 pm
Jeez!
Talk about twisting into a theoretical pretzel of intrigue
There is no question it was done with malice aforethought.
But Obummer is alienating a quarter to a third of the electorate in some key swing states and possibly the whole country on a First Amendment rights issue – who broke for him 54% in the last presidential elections – to win young single wimmin who already poll 80% for him and to cause the whole GOP movenemnt catholic and non-catholic, religious and atheist alike to unify in opposition to him and Steve Kates thinks it’s all part of some cunning plan?
And not just a unified Republican opposition but a sizeable number of liberal catholics as well?
The pastor Obama chose for his inaugural – no catholic needless to say – said he’s willing to go to jail in opposition to Obama’s mandate for God’s sake.
There is not a single employed person in America working for religious institutions that are deprived of abortifacient pills or contraception that Obama is gonna rescue.
In a country of 320 million.
Nary a one.
JamesK
14 Feb 12 at 8:45 pm
There is no question it was done with malice aforethought
Oh you’re so brilliant.
Adrien
14 Feb 12 at 8:47 pm
Policy and Politics of Contraception Rule Fiercely Debated Within White House
There really is no need to repeatedly demonstrate your small-mindedness as well as your foolishness Adrien.
We know
JamesK
14 Feb 12 at 8:56 pm
wedge politics is about packaging a bundle of policies that are popular with those that might change their vote. the views of the majority are secondary.
why obama wants to turn-off catholic democrats is odd. even those that a pro-choice would be annoyed on church and state grounds.
Jim Rose
14 Feb 12 at 8:59 pm
Not really. He’s true to his beliefs. He’s a far left wing radical who wouldn’t know how to compromise.
JC
14 Feb 12 at 9:02 pm
Adrien wants desperately to believe that Obama The Great Leader And Political Genius did this on purpose to anger Catholics, boost Rick Santorum, get rid of Mitt Romney and beat Rick and his slutty wife.
If you believe this, my advice to you is to lay off the drug abuse ASAP.
Here’s the simplest and most accurate cartoon on the subject.
C.L.
14 Feb 12 at 9:02 pm
“ONLY IN AMERICA”
Arguement about some compulsory contraception insurance. Please correct me if I am wrong with any of my points. Insurance is for an unforseen circumstance. This would mean that only single people and females of child bearing age are at risk of this possible event. So first point is how can it be insurance if it is compulsory for example for a 55 year old lady to take it out or a man who has had a vesectomy. So we can assume that based on statistics at least 50% of the population should not get this insurance because they already are married or too old etc. Second point a condom costs about $1 so unless they do it 20 times a day it is not a significant cost and therefore no need for insurance.
But for me it gets even more weird. What is the arguement against it? Is the arguement that it is just absolutely stupid and make no sense, no the arguement is about some religious freedom issue. If this arguement is taken to the enth degree then nobody should pay tax because the government is secular and will spend money on something you dissagree with.
kelly liddle
14 Feb 12 at 9:03 pm
Lol.. Odumbo the genius.
Imagine Bill Clinton falling for that one? He would have fired the adviser on the spot if they came up with that idea.
JC
14 Feb 12 at 9:04 pm
Contraception Tweet of the Day.
Gab
14 Feb 12 at 9:20 pm
Ouch.
Iowahawk is brilliant.
C.L.
14 Feb 12 at 9:25 pm
Obama knows about the Surber Rule.
Bruce
14 Feb 12 at 9:26 pm
Since steve Kates has a heroine in Noonan, perhaps he should read her a little more:
Here’s a segment from her most recent WSJ op-ed :
“An update on the furor surrounding ObamaCare and the Catholic Church. The Obama White House was surprised by the pushback but hopes it will blow over. Their thinking: The Catholics had their little eruption, letters were read from pulpits, the pundits came out, and then the pols. But life goes on, new issues arise, we’ll hunker down, it’ll go away. Meanwhile, play for time. Send David Axelrod out to purr about possible new negotiations.
That would be a trap for the church. Any new talks would no doubt go past Election Day, at which time, if the president wins, he’ll be able to give the church the back of his hand.
The short-term White House strategy is to confuse and obfuscate, to spread a thick web of untruths about the decision and let opponents exhaust themselves trying to fight from under the web.
The church must be resolute and press harder. Now is the time to keep pounding—from the pulpit, in all Catholic publications and media, in statements and meetings. For how long? As long as it takes. The president and the more radical part of his base clearly thought the church was a paper tiger, a hollow shell, an entity demoralized and finished by the scandals of the past 20 years.
Now is the time for the church to show it’s alive. How?
• Educate. Unconfuse the issues. Take a different aspect of the ruling and its deeper meanings every week, and pound away.
• Reach out. This is bigger than the Catholic Church. Go to the mainline Protestant churches, evangelicals, synagogues and mosques. Plead for vocal, public and immediate support: “If the church is forced to go against its conscience, religious liberty in America is not safe. If religious liberty is not safe, you are not safe.”
• Know your people. Mr. Obama carried secular Catholics overwhelmingly in 2008. But churchgoing Catholics were evenly split, 51% to 49% for John McCain. These are the voters the president could lose by huge margins over the ruling. And he will, if they fully understand it. Such a loss could determine the 2012 outcome. He knows it, you know it. Have faith in the people in the pews. Give it to them straight, week after week, and they’ll back the church overwhelmingly. The White House is watching. Pound away.
• Call for Democratic support. Religious liberty should not be a partisan issue. Republicans have come to the fore, but it’s better for the church if Democrats do too. They’re starting to come over. Make clear from the pulpit that members of both parties are absolutely essential in this fight. “All hands on deck.”
You can win. Keep the faith. Literally: Keep it”
JamesK
14 Feb 12 at 9:33 pm
JamesK is on the money. This is a First Amendment issue. To argue about access to contraception is nonsensical. This is about Government trying to force a religious institution to do, and pay for, something it finds abhorrent. Not just Catholics have objected to this.
JC’s point (9:04pm) is also well made. This is an act of political naivety. The Supreme Court has just ruled 9-0 against the federal government after it intervened into a dispute over a church’s ability to fire an employee. This would have no chance even in the current Supreme Court – another two justice picks for Obama and that probably won’t be the case. Then you can kiss the Republic goodbye.
Sea Wolf
14 Feb 12 at 9:34 pm
Steve,
Your premise about Romney and Obama being worried about him doesn’t match with history. Since the 1960′s the candidates who have won elections are those who inspire their base. The “movement” then captures independent voters in a wave of enthusiasm. Obama is the perfect example, but Clinton in ’92 and Reagan in ’80 were basically considered incapable of swaying indies at this stage of the cycle.
There are exceptions of candidates who fired their base but failed to ignite independents. Goldwater in ’64 and McGovern in ’72 come to mind. However, I can’t think of a successful candidate who failed to ignite the base but won enough independents to get over the line. Maybe Bush Snr in 1988, but he was running on the vapors of the Reagan legacy which kept the base energized.
When I look at the Romney / Santorum / Gingrich field I would honestly say Romney would be the very weakest candidate v Obama. If he can’t inspire his own side to get out to vote for him he won’t get anyone else out to vote for him either
Republican Watcher
14 Feb 12 at 10:13 pm
sea wolf,
what is freedom of religion? Although states have the power to accommodate otherwise illegal acts done in pursuit of religious beliefs, they are not constitutionally required to do so.
the U.S. supreme court has held that First Amendment’s protection of the “free exercise” of religion does not allow a person to use a religious motivation as a reason not to obey such generally applicable laws:
The Court had held that religious beliefs do not excuse people from complying with laws forbidding polygamy, child labor laws, Sunday closing laws, laws requiring citizens to register for the draft, and pay of Social Security taxes.
an individual’s religious beliefs does not excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the State is free to regulate, and the law is not specifically directed at religious practice.
the religious seeking accommodations for their faith and practices can take their chances in democratic politics just like the rest of us.
It may fairly be said that leaving the granting of religious accommodations to the political process will place at a relative disadvantage those religious practices are not widely engaged.
that unavoidable consequence of democratic government must be preferred to a system in which each conscience is a law unto itself or in which judges weigh the social importance of all laws against the centrality of all religious beliefs.
Jim Rose
14 Feb 12 at 10:57 pm
sea world, the right to fire minister issue is more than you think:
according to Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion for a unanimous Court: “The purpose of the exception is not to safeguard a church’s decision to fire a minister only when it is made for a religious reason.
The exception instead ensures that the authority to select and control who will minister to the faithful—a matter ‘strictly ecclesiastical,’—is the church’s alone.”
many decisions of the Court confirm that it is impermissible for the government to contradict a church’s determination of who can act as its ministers.
Requiring a church to accept or retain an unwanted minister, or punishing a church for failing to do so, interferes with the internal governance of the church, depriving the church of control over the selection of those who will personify its beliefs.
By imposing an unwanted minister, the state infringes on a religious group’s right to shape its own faith and mission through its appointments.
Jim Rose
14 Feb 12 at 11:05 pm
So it’s the fault of Barry and the lamestream media that the GOP put forward a pack of bellends as candidates?
Les Majesty
14 Feb 12 at 11:20 pm
To back up Republican Watcher, the turn-out in the state primaries that Romney has won so far are ~20% down on 2008.
Romney needs to change his tune.
Going negative on Santorum would be the exactly wrong decision to take
JamesK
14 Feb 12 at 11:40 pm
Same here.
Their views on protecting and upholding the Constitution of the United States, however…
spot
14 Feb 12 at 11:45 pm
Funny thing is that in terms of his tone, his humourless paranoia, his lack of perspective, his naïveté, and his underlying revulsion for the democratic process whenever it produces an outcome he doesn’t prefer, Kates always reminds me of daily kos circa 2004, except they had Bush Derangement Syndrome and he has Barry Derangement Syndrome.
Les Majesty
14 Feb 12 at 11:48 pm
Cruel but fair Les
JamesK
14 Feb 12 at 11:50 pm
I doubt if Barry actually workshopped this entire thing beforehand – i.e. he didn’t actually think I’ll pick a fight and then back off.
But you do make your own luck. Even if he didn’t have it all planned out ahead, I think the Pres might have known instinctively that this was not going to be viewed by most voters as a fight over religious freedom but rather a fight over access to contraception, and that is a winning argument for the Dems every single time.
It isn’t a religious freedom point, unless you think “religious freedom” means that the corrupt and petulant institution of the Roman Catholic Church should be able to force its wacky views regarding contraception on the public at large, including non-believers, in contravention of duly enacted and manifestly reasonable laws for the protection of public health.
If you do think, you weren’t going to vote for Obama anyway so he knew he could win this fight.
If, on the other hand, you are a woman aged 18-35 who wasn’t sure who she would vote for, or if she was even going to vote at all, then you think this issue is about restricting women’s access to birth control.
Which will get you out and voting.
And puts Romney on the spot in the debates.
I absolutely guarantee that Romney will get a question in the presidential debates about contraception and Griswold v Conn and appointment of supreme court justices.
Thanks to Santorum and the current debate about “religious freedom”, Griswold is a legitimate debate item now.
Santorum thinks it was wrongly decided.
How does Romney come out either for, against or indifferent overturning Griswold without losing somebody’s vote?
Les Majesty
14 Feb 12 at 11:58 pm
Gloriously mad.
Anonymous
14 Feb 12 at 11:58 pm
The GOP have just gotta pray that the woeful catholic church who were ‘hot’ for Obummercare follow Peggy Noonan’s advice.
Otherwise if it does simply become a contraceptive issue Obummer will win tho’ it will be nowhere near as valuable as Kates fears it is.
Access to contaception is a non-issue in the punters’ minds.
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 12:10 am
The Catholic Church isn’t trying to get condoms and abortion pills banned, mate.
It just doesn’t want to be forced to hand them out “for free”, in contravention of the conscience clause of the US Constitution.
You can still have your condoms, and you can still throw your “girlfriend” an abortion pill if y’all couldn’t work out how to use contraception and a few days after “the act” she wants to kill any babies y’all might have created.
Just don’t expect the Catholic Church to foot the bill.
spot
15 Feb 12 at 12:12 am
Since the time of the Civil War, birthright Friends have been granted “conscientious objector” status when it comes to wars. Anabaptists are exempt from paying Social Security taxes and, more lately, from participating in Obamacare, because both violate their religious dictates.
Why is it only Catholics that Obama chooses to piss on?
spot
15 Feb 12 at 12:16 am
Really Les. Is that because they disagree with the Administration?
So you think they should be forced to provide abortions for staff even though they disagree with it.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 12:17 am
Les
Griswald is totally and completely irrelevant in this case. There is absolutely no infringement to marital privacy or otherwise.
The church is not instructing people how they can spend their income.
However the Administration is attempting to mandate products or procedures in private insurance contracts which go right against the religious beliefs of the Catholic Church.
There isn’t a leg to stand on here.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 12:24 am
We’re the ones the leftists love to hate.
Jews think they are different cos they’re a religion and a race but catholics are tribal and we won’t see some leftist Leviathan piss on our scheming clandestine elite.
They’re ours.
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 12:28 am
I hate to say it but it’s not Obama’s fault that the religious whackos of the republican party go nuts over abortion. They lost that fight decades ago and it’s time to let it go.
Yobbo
15 Feb 12 at 1:19 am
Bullshit. They’re not asking to not pay healthcare costs, they’re asking to be permitted to pay for health insurance that doesn’t bundle abortions or contraceptives.
Let me spell this out. There is no way whatsoever that buying a health insurance that doesn’t bundle contraceptives and abortions should ever be made illegal.
If anyone can tell me why it should be illegal to buy healthcare that doesn’t bundle contraceptives and/or abortions, please go ahead.
Remember, you don’t have to make a case for contraceptives, or for abortions. Let’s take for granted that they’re awesome. You have to make a case for health insurance that excludes them being illegal.
wreckage
15 Feb 12 at 1:20 am
Why?
wreckage
15 Feb 12 at 1:21 am
I hate to say it but it’s not Obama’s fault that the religious whackos of the republican party go nuts over abortion. They lost that fight decades ago and it’s time to let it go.
One could say the same thing about lower taxes, legalising drugs, etc. and yet libertarians whackos…
dover_beach
15 Feb 12 at 1:23 am
The only religious whacko is you Yobbo.
You can’t stop sharing your pig-ignorant radical secularist views of religion particularly christians at every turn and everything you do write on the topic is deranged.
When I say ‘write’, I mean the nasty ignorant and vitriolic one or two line comments typical of your effortless contributions.
You obviously have ‘issues’ with the Catholic Church whilst the Church is blissfully unaware of your pig-ignorantly lived existence.
I wish I was as fortunate
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 1:29 am
Can’t see a problem with that opinion. Romney does quite well in polls against Odumbo and would likely beat him.
Odumbo did pick a fight. It is also true it came from nowhere and it also true it may have galvanized support for Santorum over this issue prompting people that would not have voted to go out and vote.
Fair enough comment.
Perhaps, perhaps not.I’m not so sure but the opinion isn’t outrageous.
Well of course he is an Alinsky marxist twerp, Everyone knows that. He even did the same job, if you call it that, as a community organ grinder that had before he stole the white house from Hillary.
That part is true. What is also true is that he hung around with Rev Wright for 20 years and even was married by him.
Pretty much true. He is perhaps the worst prez in the history of the Republic although I think FDR was bad.
That much is true. The betting markets certainly skew that way.
It certainly is true that this Class A clown has gotten away with it.
Nothing wrong with that.
It’s an okay opinion. I don’t agree with it, but it doesnt mean it can’t hold valid.
I don’t quite see your problem Les.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 1:45 am
You’re absolutely right DB. The US libertarian party has a history of the same sort of infighting over issues that only libertarians care about. The nomination of Gary Johnson is the most sensible thing they have ever done.
Yobbo
15 Feb 12 at 1:47 am
Wow…. nominating Gary Johnson is the most “sensible thing” the Libertarian Paty has ever done according to contemplative heavyweight Yobbo.
How dumb can ya get…..
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 1:55 am
Actually, they’ve won it.
Handily.
Dick Morris is now claiming that the Democrats realise that the pro-abortion argument is a complete loser for the party because all national polls now show majorities against abortion on demand. (By up to 10 points). He says team Obama is deliberately shifting the culture warfare to contraception because they think they can make hay on that. He also claims that George Stephanopoulos was briefed on the strategy – which explains his bizarre contraception questions at the New Hampshire Republican debate.
C.L.
15 Feb 12 at 1:55 am
I don’t have any issues with any church James. I just fail to understand why people think it’s a good idea to make government policies based on a fairy story written 2000 years ago.
Yobbo
15 Feb 12 at 1:56 am
I thought you’d oppose gubbermint forcing private businesses to provide free stuff, Yobbo.
Would you be OK with compulsory Chevy Volts?
C.L.
15 Feb 12 at 1:59 am
Your previous post and your regular contributions make a liar of you Yobbo.
If people over for over 5000 years from different traditions point to a singularity and describe it as ineffable and as the ‘peace that passeth all understanding’ and if as a result the religion practices ‘compassion’ or ‘service to others’ why do0n’t you simply say thank you?
Did some priest come around and intervene as you tried to root ur asian bird last night?
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 2:03 am
I just fail to understand why people think it’s a good idea to make government policies based on a fairy story written 2000 years ago.
Except that people are not expressing their opposition to requiring all health insurance plans — including those offered by Roman Catholic universities and hospitals — to include free birth control for women “based on a fairy story written 2000 years ago”.
dover_beach
15 Feb 12 at 2:10 am
How about making government policies based on an amendment to the Constitution ratified about 220 years ago?
spot
15 Feb 12 at 2:22 am
Seriously: If Americans want to repeal the First Amendment to the US Constitution, any one of them is free to get the ball rolling.
It cannot, however, be nullified by Executive Order.
No matter how much Obama and his acolytes might wish it so.
spot
15 Feb 12 at 2:24 am
Some libertarians aren’t vehement radical secularist anti-religious bigots.
Judge Andrew Napolitano for instance who reired from Fox Business.
He gave a final, inspirational monologue on Monday night discussing the founding of his country and the importance of liberty. He began his conclusion with this statement:
“Whether you believe we are the highest order of natural selection, or whether you believe, as I do, that we were created by God in his image and likeness, you know in your heart that these ‘natural yearnings’, as St. Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Jefferson called them, are our natural rights, are apart of our humanity and cannot long be denied us.”
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 2:40 am
Okay, Jim. I was being simplistic. Do you agree with the thrust of my comments?
Sea Wolf
15 Feb 12 at 3:28 am
Evolution is an observable natural process. Saying you don’t believe in it is like saying you don’t believe in rain or tides.
In other words, retarded.
Yobbo
15 Feb 12 at 4:03 am
Evolution is an observable natural process.
You cannot observe evolution like the tides or rain; you can only infer it from what is observed.
dover_beach
15 Feb 12 at 4:09 am
Bullshit. You can watch 2 animals breed and give birth to offspring that is different to either of them, that is the essential process behind evolution and you can certainly watch it in action.
Yobbo
15 Feb 12 at 4:54 am
Yobbo, you made a stupid argument and lost. Get over it.
Winston Smith
15 Feb 12 at 5:50 am
I am not a creationist, nor a proponent of “intelligent design”; but I’m not a believer in evolution, either.
To my mind, it beggars belief that a human being shares a common ancestor with a protozoan. Natural selection; now this I have no problem with. It’s observable. It explains minor variations in species. However, it doesn’t (to my mind) explain how something as complex as the human eye or brain could develop from the primordial sludge.
Accidental, favourable mutations are supposed to do the heavy lifting in terms of the evolution of major organs and the like, right? Has this ever been observed? Has an accidental, favourable mutation ever been observed in an organism and been passed down to its offspring? I’m not aware of this.
So where do we come from? Well, by my reckoning, the omnipotent, omniscient creator in the sky sounds about as (im)plausible to me as the evolutionary explanation.
I simply don’t know.
Oh come on
15 Feb 12 at 6:26 am
Try “antibiotic resistance”.
perturbed
15 Feb 12 at 8:33 am
@OCO,
Yup – http://www.sciencebuzz.org/blog/scientists-witness-evolution-labi
David Elson
15 Feb 12 at 8:41 am
OCO you realise that the process takes place over hundreds of millions of years right?
People have bred animals and plants with favourable mutations in a matter of decades to produce something completely different – that’s where everything you eat comes from. Every single domestic animal and every piece of plant matter that you eat has come from an organism that is descended from a very different ancestor only a thousand or so years ago.
E.G. Modern domestic cattle are descended from a different animal known as Aurochs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs. They only became extinct a few hundred years ago.
Is it really so hard to believe the same thing could happen accidentally when it has had hundreds of millions of years to take place?
Yobbo
15 Feb 12 at 9:35 am
We’re not. Do as you please within civil law. The church and state must have strict separation.
Just because Yobbo is an athiest doesn’t mean he is a bigot.
.
15 Feb 12 at 9:40 am
Sickening, but this is what much of our society has degenerated to.
Chris M
15 Feb 12 at 9:41 am
“Has this ever been observed? Has an accidental, favourable mutation ever been observed in an organism and been passed down to its offspring? I’m not aware of this.”
Of course it has, one very prominent example is the sickle cell anemia mutation that gives resistance to Malaria.
Yobbo
15 Feb 12 at 9:43 am
I’ll say again:
“Some libertarians aren’t vehement radical secularist anti-religious bigots”
I’ll add that not all leftists are vehement radical secularist anti-religious bigots
The bigot is one with a chip on his shoulder but not all individuals with a chip on their shoulders are bigots.
Keep up with this lark and there might ne a nutsery rhyme in it dot.
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 9:47 am
[...] theory from Steve Kates at the Catallaxy Files (“Australia’s leading libertarian and centre-right blog”) that Obama does not [...]
» Obama “undoubtedly pulled punches in his first term to maximise the likelihood of winning a second term” - Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion
15 Feb 12 at 10:00 am
Does this actually make sense to you? Do you think someone can think religion as silly without being bigoted?
.
15 Feb 12 at 10:10 am
don’t be silly dot.
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 10:17 am
Yobbo Says:
Well how do you explain Homer in the natural selection process, Yobbo? How has he helped the human genetic gene pool?
JC
15 Feb 12 at 10:22 am
This thread is hilarious.
Sorry, but there is nothing in the 1st amendment that gives citizens a right to ignore laws that offend their conscience.
Quakers, catholics and pacifists who believe violence is never justified and is a violation of god’s teaching still have to pay taxes to fund the SEALs and ICBMs.
Native Americans who use peyote ritually are still subject to federal drug laws.
I’d be interested to see if anyone can produce a link to a credible legal commentator who thinks that there is any prospect of the new contraceptive insurance funding rules can be overturned on first amendment grounds, or even get Scalia and Roberts to vote in favour of overturning on first amendment grounds.
But go on fighting against Obama to restrict access to contraception.
Let’s see how that works out in November.
Just don’t blame the lamestream media or Obama cheating when your guy – whether it’s soulless douchebag Romney or principled nutbag Santorum – gets wiped out.
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 10:24 am
Grow a brain, JC. Are you really putting Homer forward as an example of intelligent design?
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 10:25 am
Not quite.
.
15 Feb 12 at 10:27 am
lol.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 10:28 am
Either, you cannot be serious James or why bother bringing it up? Maybe you’d like to actually answer the question.
.
15 Feb 12 at 10:28 am
“Do you think someone can think religion as silly without being bigoted?”
Are you calling me a bigot? If you are a bigot you are intolerant. Whilst I may find religion silly and religious people find my view silly that is ok so long as we can at least accept the others point of view.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 10:30 am
Forcing people to privately fund procedures or technology they don’t wish with or without a conscience decision to is obviously ultra vires and thus void. With a conscience decision it is a slam dunk.
Maybe you can find a legal notable who says the opposite, you slipperty turd, les.
.
15 Feb 12 at 10:31 am
Here’s what Scalia thinks:
http://www.oyez.org/cases/1980-1989/1989/1989_88_1213/
So go on guys, keep up your first amendment fight. It’s a loser. DOA.
The political stupidity of Obama’s opponents is breathtaking.
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 10:31 am
Scalia a good enough legal notable for you Mark?
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 10:32 am
Sorry, but there is nothing in the 1st amendment that gives citizens a right to ignore laws that offend their conscience.
There is no law in the United States that says that Person A has to provide free abortion pills, in direct contravention of their religious convictions, to Person B.
If semi-automatic weapons were determined to be a “basic human right” in the US, the government would likewise have trouble forcing Amish or Quaker elders to provide them “free” to members of their community.
spot
15 Feb 12 at 10:32 am
C’mon guys, stop ranting. Let’s see some legal authority for your argument that this is a first amendment violation.
GO!
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 10:33 am
Yes and if grandma had wheels she’d be a streetcar.
Can you think of an example that has anything to do with reality or the actual facts we are dealing with?
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 10:34 am
I don’t understand. What conduct is being prohibited?
Gab
15 Feb 12 at 10:38 am
Scalia did not write that, his words have been twisted.
Military service, child neglect, payment of taxes etc are not congruent or even relevant.
You cannot find a relevant legal authority, only the twisted words of some far left website.
Indeed les, man up.
.
15 Feb 12 at 10:38 am
Yes but there are plenty of laws that say pacifists and Quakers have to pay their pro rata share of the expense of placing warheads on ICBMs.
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 10:39 am
These arguements are silly. What about the going against it because it is forcing the purchase of insurance which may in many cases be for an event that can’t happen. That is extortion by insurance companies using government laws. Surely the insurance companies would have some conscience about this. For example it may mean that nuns, old people, infertile people etc. must be insured for contraception.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 10:41 am
Ok, Mark here are Scalia’s actual words:
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 10:41 am
Ok, I’ve cited Scalia writing for the majority of SCOTUS in support of my position.
Anyone got any contradictory precedent they would like to point me to?
Or are you all just talking out of your collective arse?
Thought so. Thanks for playing.
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 10:43 am
I agree with Les. This is just bad policy but it’s silly to claim that it can be invalidated on 1st amendment grounds. if this law could be invalidated on 1st amendment grounds, many other laws would and we’d have a libertarian utopia in the US
jtfsoon
15 Feb 12 at 10:43 am
Yes but there are plenty of laws that say pacifists and Quakers have to pay their pro rata share of the expense of placing warheads on ICBMs.
Yes, and individual citizens who are against abortion are taxed to pay for others’ free abortions. “Render unto Caesar…”
That is not the same as forcing a Catholic organization to hand out “free” abortion pills or forcing an Amish community to hand out “free” semi-automatics.
spot
15 Feb 12 at 10:44 am
Scalia thought they were relevant when he wrote the opinion of the court, dummy.
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 10:45 am
Yes, but no one is forcing anyone to hand out free abortions or weapons so your example is silly and irrelevant.
You don’t have the facts or the law on your side so you are just being silly.
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 10:46 am
Scalia’s words are irrelevant.
No, you don’t at all. You have tacked this controversy onto something completely different.
These are nothing like forcing private organisations to privately fund and distribute services and technology they find contrary to their religious beliefs.
.
15 Feb 12 at 10:48 am
Okay Les.
Tell us exactly what the Catholic Church is being forced to do and if they aren’t, why bother brining up the opinion of Scalia?
.
15 Feb 12 at 10:49 am
But that’s not what is happening.
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 10:51 am
Okay Les.
Tell us exactly what the Catholic Church is being forced to do and if they aren’t, why bother brining up the opinion of Scalia?
.
15 Feb 12 at 10:52 am
Scalia decision is about upholding an existing law prohibiting drug use. WTH has it to do with forcing religious organisations to hand out contraceptives and abortifacient?
Gab
15 Feb 12 at 10:54 am
Yes they do already fund services contrary to their beliefs. If they are currently required to provide healthcare I am pretty sure it will still cover you if you for example get an STD or fall over drunk and injure yourself.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 10:55 am
But that’s not what is happening.
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 10:55 am
Okay Les.
Tell us exactly what the Catholic Church is being forced to do and if they aren’t, why bother brining up the opinion of Scalia?
.
15 Feb 12 at 10:56 am
Les that’s apthertic presmise wrt to obummer’s mandate.
Richard Epstein, celebrated constitutional scholar:
“This conditional grant offers the president the perfect way to expand his influence without having to endure the rigors of the political process on such a poisonous dispute. But the doctrine of unconstitutional conditions should apply here, as it did in the Witt case. A direct legislative order to engage in conduct antithetical to their religious convictions would be in flat violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of the “free exercise of religion,” which is far broader and more comprehensive than the religious right to “worship,” to which the president grudgingly acquiesces. The mandate should go and the religious groups should receive government support on even terms with all other groups, even those that support legalized abortion.”
Now some may disagree but it rather puts your ridiculous “nothing in the 1st amendment” drivel as a means to shutter debate.
So even obummer’s laughable “accommodation” which apart froom being an affront to intelligence, provides no legal cover.
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 10:56 am
I don’t see how it’s much different than mandated maternity leave. My personal beliefs tell me that if someone doesn’t turn up to work for a year then they shouldn’t get paid. But the government doesn’t care what I believe.
Yobbo
15 Feb 12 at 10:58 am
Yep, and if Yobbo is an employer who thinks extramarital sex is sinful, he still has to pay his unmarried female employee who gets pregnant and takes leave.
He is funding her sinful activities. No first amendment violation.
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 11:00 am
If I run a hotel and think that the Bible prohibits race-mixing, I still have to provide a room to the mixed couple that asks for one.
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 11:01 am
“This thread is hilarious.”
I agree and it will be even more hilarious if Obama loses an election due to forcing insurance on the supply of condoms which in itself is hilarious because it must mean sex is an accident that needs insurance.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 11:02 am
Tillman is dodging a question now because it has him by the balls.
Okay Les.
Tell us exactly what the Catholic Church is being forced to do and if they aren’t, why bother brining up the opinion of Scalia?
.
15 Feb 12 at 11:02 am
If I run a hospital in a state that prohibits discrimination against gays, I can’t fire a lesbian nurse.
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 11:02 am
It would be even more entertaining if Tillman would answer my question.
.
15 Feb 12 at 11:03 am
“If I run a hotel and think that the Bible prohibits race-mixing, I still have to provide a room to the mixed couple that asks for one.”
In many countries the rules are not all that different must be married and can’t have a non denominational marriage let alone gay marriage. So you would have to check they are married.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 11:04 am
Not much:
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 11:06 am
And you believe this to be the case… I mean insurance companies checked the actuarial tables and confirmed that it is cheaper in the long run.
Yes or no?
JC
15 Feb 12 at 11:09 am
If you’re right, your reference to Scalia was irrelevant.
What about Catholic insurers? Are they covered by the exemption as well?
Clearly the exemption was made because anything you wrongly inferred Scalia supported would obviously be unconstitutional and sink Obamacare.
.
15 Feb 12 at 11:10 am
This is the same guy responsible for Keystone, Solyndra and tripling the deficit.
.
15 Feb 12 at 11:11 am
Uh yes JC. it is much cheaper to give birth control pills and IUDs than to pay for a pregnancy and child care.
I don’t think they even needed to look at the actuarial tables to work that out.
The insurance companies are delighted to hand out free birth control to their insured.
That is an absolute no-brainer. In fact, this entire argument is a no-brainer. Which is why it’s so funny to me to see all these Barry-haters tie themselves in knots on something that is a legal and political loser.
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 11:11 am
Except that you contradicted yourself on the legal stuff.
A no brainer that Solyndra Barry, Keystone Barry and deficit tripling Barry came up with. Yeah right.
.
15 Feb 12 at 11:13 am
I’ll take that as an admission that you were unfamiliar with the law and the facts when you started bloviating.
No need to apologise. I’ll take it as read.
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 11:13 am
So just to recap… we are still waiting for any legal precedent suggesting the new contraception rules would violate the first amendment.
[crickets]
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 11:14 am
No you are lying.
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 11:15 am
Well it would seem you are correct. If religious backed insurance companies are also exempted. Obama backed down as it was a Constitutional issue then.
Gab
15 Feb 12 at 11:20 am
This is a very good illustration .. the whole sorry mess.. why odumbocare is a fucking abortion.
As sorry as our insurance system is and it is a sorry mess, it is still miles better than what Odumbo hatched up requiring employers to foot the insurance bill and mandating shit they want in there.
One other pertinent thing about medical insurance in the US.
If an employer is large enough they are very likely to self insure for the most part. It’s a complex arrangement they have with the carriers. Employers are charged administration fees for doing the work and have all sorts of contractual agreements that protect the employer over an above a certain hit.
So in effect the Catholic Church would be directly paying for things it doesn’t believe while there isn’t much of a buffer between itself and the carrier.
Les or others used the argument that certain groups are pacifists etc but still have to pay for the military through their taxes. That basically true. However religious organizations are tax exempt in the US so the linkage isn’t as direct as it seems.
There is a way out of this. The Catholic Church has said it will stop funding medical insurance which means Medicare will take a pretty big hit.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 11:20 am
You can’t say that at first hand. You really need to look at it. Show me the evidence, which I asked Mrs Steve Stepford to provide and all he could say was that da president said so.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 11:22 am
Barack’s white mamma managed.
C.L.
15 Feb 12 at 11:27 am
Actually many catholic organisations self-insure to avoid getting state mandated policies in the few states that have such mandates without the religious exception clauses that are the norm
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 11:28 am
Is see Les is repeating a lie to himself in a pathetic exhibition that presumably hopes to convinnce others that the lie is true.
It’s not a good look.
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 11:30 am
Interesting. I heard about this on one of the MSNBC program vids but wasn’t entirely sure what it was about.
Mathews was arguing the point that it was dishonest to suggest Odumbocare replicated the state systems accommodating the Catholic Church and it was dishonest of the Administration lackey to even suggest it.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 11:32 am
No. It means that we were asking honest questions and you were making it up as you went along.
…and that was IF you were right. Which James suggests you are not, and you refused to answer questions from me about Catholic insurers.
Why? You quoted an irrelevant case to “prove” the opposite.
Rubbish. This assumes most people who get pregnant and carry to term do so by accident.
.
15 Feb 12 at 11:35 am
Poor chris the focus of his onanistic adulation has offended the memory of his dead mother.
He’s bewidered.
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 11:35 am
bewildered
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 11:36 am
What’s even more bewildering is why Obama came up with this crazy scheme in the first place. Are condoms and abortifacients so expensive in the US as to be unaffordable?
Gab
15 Feb 12 at 11:39 am
Don’t worry obummer, the liberal catholics are more liberal leftists a than catholic, the black rights movement are more leftist than black, the feminists are more leftists than the rights of women, the homosexal lobby are more leftists than gay rights etc
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 11:41 am
wedge issue.
He underestimated (? – we’ll see) the bishops.
He’s the classical thug.
The bishops backed him strongly with Obummercare despite his history of infanticide.
He didn’t count on Benedict and his letter to the bishops before Obummer even tried this on.
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 11:44 am
Gerson in WaPo:
Obama’s epic blunder on birth-control mandate.
Worst president ever.
Rasmussen: Catholics dump Obama.
C.L.
15 Feb 12 at 11:48 am
No, it doesn’t, if you gave it more than a nanaosecond of thought.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 11:49 am
It’s a fucking wedge issue alright. Odumbocare is wedging so mnay he’s ending up with only the rusted ons.
What an imbecile.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 11:50 am
Mrs. Steve Stepford
You couldn’t provide any evidence yesterday and you’re now trying to plagiarize someone else.
Have you no shame?
The washing please. Now.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 11:51 am
Come on then moron, give us the assumptions, given your regional TAFE Diploma in the arts qualifies you as an actuary.
.
15 Feb 12 at 11:53 am
A good explanation of how the Catholic bishops’ (and generic Right wingnuts) moral objections to the compromise do not stand up to scrutiny under Catholic moral reasoning.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 11:53 am
Gerson from Cl’s link:
“If Obama is playing a political chess game, he has just sacrificed his queen, a rook and all his bishops. It would have to be a deep game indeed”.
Gerson os basically sayin’ Steve Kates is a bed-wetter
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 11:56 am
What an awesome thread.
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 11:56 am
Devout pro-abortion ‘Catholic’ Steve claims the US hierarchy, Benedict XVI, Joe Biden and Chris Matthews are “right-wing” nuts, quotes USA Today.
Ahahahahaha.
C.L.
15 Feb 12 at 11:57 am
Polling from NYT/CBS:
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 11:58 am
I think it was Mark Steyn who said Obama isn’t a chess man.
Nor even checkers.
It’s tic-tac-toe.
C.L.
15 Feb 12 at 12:00 pm
Actually many catholic organisations self-insure
A Baptist group which runs a boarding-house and school which I contribute to self-funds, and they’re not thrilled about this either.
Community members voluntarily give them money to help support and educate pregnant teenaged girls who don’t want to kill their babies. If those same funding community members wanted to voluntarily pay to kill babies, they’d do so. But they don’t. So….
spot
15 Feb 12 at 12:00 pm
So Step, USA Today is now. Possibly the most left rag in the country.
Have you no fucking shame. Look Stepford, this isn’t a debate in that rural TAFE you went to where the average IQ equaled the number of people in the class. You’re in the big leagues. So sending us to the Daily Kos, Rachael Maddow, or LeftToday is not going to cut it as an authority piece, you pathetic idiot.
Have you washed the kitchen floor yet?
JC
15 Feb 12 at 12:00 pm
Time blog article explaining why costs of providing contraception coverage to insurers is, at best, minimal.
Lots of links in it for JC and dot to ignore.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 12:02 pm
Well that’s good then, right? He shouldn’t compromise and ought to run with this as part of the ptatform… Because the NYTimes poll says it’s a good idea.
I’m with you on this Stepford. He should go hard on this.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 12:03 pm
I sometimes wish Christian groups weren’t so selfless. If the Christian “Atlas,” who takes care of so many people in all manner of need, were to “shrug” ….
spot
15 Feb 12 at 12:04 pm
“Come on, guys, come on“
Gab
15 Feb 12 at 12:05 pm
Ah right, Time magazine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TT81o4hL4c
TIME Announces New Version Of Magazine Aimed At Adults
.
15 Feb 12 at 12:09 pm
Stepford:
From you link.
Read more: http://moneyland.time.com/2012/02/14/why-free-birth-control-will-not-hike-the-cost-of-your-insurance/#ixzz1mPNGlzrC
This more or less what I said yesterday, you ignorant twat and it would support my argument.
Carriers are going to experience cost front loading with the possibility of better margins down the road. However to suggest that carriers will not raise prices shows an inept understanding how businesses operate.
If cost of providing insurance rises in the short term, carriers will raise the price of their premiums in order to protect short term earnings.. and yes they are important… If margins increase longer term they will most likely lower the cost of premiums on that alone all things being equal.
However to suggest that costs won’t rise even in the short term is not only dishonest, it’s basically appealing to ideological dumb fucks like you Stepford.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 12:12 pm
Steve and USA Today versus:
C.L.
15 Feb 12 at 12:17 pm
But, but USA Today is America’s national daily. It’s influence is extraordinary.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 12:21 pm
You cannot observe evolution like the tides or rain; you can only infer it from what is observed.
Oh rubbish Dover.
Adrien
15 Feb 12 at 12:28 pm
How many of those bishops voted in favour of giving Gingrich an annulment so he could keep screwing his mistress and remain in his adopted Church’s good graces?
Sorry, CL, but like 99% of the rest of the population (including all the Catholic chicks who insist their boyfriends wear rubbers when they fuck) I don’t turn to a bunch of bishops for moral guidance.
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 12:33 pm
Bullshit. You can watch 2 animals breed and give birth to offspring that is different to either of them, that is the essential process behind evolution and you can certainly watch it in action.
And we still must infer the process. That includes you as well, Adrien. BTW, nice attempt to divert attention from your earlier stupid statement, Yobbo.
dover_beach
15 Feb 12 at 12:41 pm
Just to keep Romney inperspective there’s this from Marginal Revolution
The joke going around last week was that a liberal, a conservative and a moderate walk into a bar. “Hi Mitt,” says the bartender. Here’s Mitt proving the point:
“This week, President Obama will release a budget that won’t take any meaningful steps toward solving our entitlement crisis,” Romney said in a statement e-mailed to reporters. “The president has failed to offer a single serious idea to save Social Security and is the only president in modern history to cut Medicare benefits for seniors.”
Hat tip on this one to Paul Krugman
Alan Moran
15 Feb 12 at 12:41 pm
No Les.
You turn too an even more capricious and hypocritical source.
Your own desires and prejudices
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 12:49 pm
If the commentary on this thread is any guide Obama’s wedge tactic is working wonders. Let’s just go down the sliding scale shall we?
Imagine Bill Clinton falling for that one?
I suggest you read Clinton’s interview in Esquire Joe. He is selling Obamanomics. And he’s gonna continue to do so right thru this year. He is going to sell the notion that Obama’s policies are the best response to the Republicans foolhardy and wasteful wars and greed and all the rest. And along with FDR-era type Americans pull together schtick it’s something you should take seriously. It plays.
Adrien wants desperately to believe
Again CL project his own madcap requirements for an Absolute Ideology with an Absolute Leader at its centre. He’s never been able to understand anyone who makes up their own mind or makes observations from a disinterested point-of-view.
He’s also, despite years of acquaintance, failed to register that I have no loyalty to the Democrats or anyone else. I’m interested in this election for the same reason Bismark was interested in the Civil War: technique.
And last and least that greatest of single celled organisms James K who links to a story by Jake Tapper in order to prove what really went on in the White House. Jake Tapper is one Obama’s prime mouthpieces. What are you proving you big donkey’s arse?
So as to demonstrate the remarkable and penetrating nature of his assertion that Obama threw the abortion spanner in the GOP works on purpose to cause trouble. Wow!
Look at this thread you people. Even Ann Coulter, who usually trades in the irascible, has called for a calm and sober approach in this election. Because of course she knows that the whole Obama is a Commie Kenyan Indonesian Gay Jihadist thang sounds batshit and evasions into cultural politics will split the Right.
And what have we got? Well here at Catallaxy an argument about evolution. He’s playing you and you don’t even see it.
Adrien
15 Feb 12 at 12:52 pm
And we still must infer the process.
And that make a difference how?
Adrien
15 Feb 12 at 12:53 pm
United States bishops: Obama lying and we’ll take him to court to stop his wacky jihad…
http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/religious-liberty/conscience-protection/index.cfm
C.L.
15 Feb 12 at 12:55 pm
Next up from Dover Beach, tides are caused by God because gravity is only a theory.
Yobbo
15 Feb 12 at 12:55 pm
Sounds like the whole Bush is a Skull ‘n Bones oil monster thing – which was official Democrat PR for 8 years.
LOL. Adrien is claiming that Absolute Ideologist Obama is protecting the right of people to ‘make up their own minds.’
Um no. That’s exactly what he’s banning.
C.L.
15 Feb 12 at 12:58 pm
Obama as a Marxist is entirely plausible.
Conspiracy theorists need to mention 1. QE II 2. Reptilians 3. Bush and Kerry are related and 4. a hollow earth for me to tune out.
Well actually only one of the above.
.
15 Feb 12 at 12:59 pm
Hey, it worked out well for Obama that his unmarried MOM didn’t have a state-provided IUD or franger.
Obama actually believes it would be better if he hadn’t been born.
No comment.
C.L.
15 Feb 12 at 1:01 pm
Isn’t Adrien’s breath of vision breathlessly intelligent?
7 months from a general election and with the GOP candidate far from being selected, Obummer makes committed enemies of people who used to support him whilst us nutter right wing extremists are falling into his trap………
if only we possessed Adrien’s nutty leftist vision.
Okay, oakay…. so Adrien probably sez he’s libertarian like so many around here.
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 1:01 pm
I reckon JC might be a reptile as he shows about as much compassion for others as a reptile would.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 1:01 pm
an actual general election campaign
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 1:02 pm
That’s not fair kelly.
He cares deeply about m0nty
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 1:03 pm
Where’s the lack of compassion, Kelly? Describe it to me, so I become a better person in your eyes.
Don’t confuse intolerance with idiots and lack of compassion.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 1:03 pm
And that make a difference how?
Because we don’t need to infer what we can observe. The sun rises and sets are observations; that the earth spins on its axis is an inference from this and other observations.
dover_beach
15 Feb 12 at 1:04 pm
Yep we’re everywhere Kelly. JC and I hail from Nabiru, as you earthlings know as Planet X.
May we have some of your DNA for our research?
You can buy a genuine colloidal silver orgene blaster which will repel us, available from our website, at only 14.99 each.
This conspiracy theorist gag is too much fun.
.
15 Feb 12 at 1:05 pm
JC
Just like to stir you sometimes. I would say Steve and Monty must be buffaloes if it makes you feel better as they seem to be big and stupid but really tough hides.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 1:06 pm
If you want compassion, kelly, best you head off to a new age blog.
Gab
15 Feb 12 at 1:06 pm
I like the entertainment and find it a amusing the number of different names I have been called at times.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 1:09 pm
What?
You mean it isn’t?!!!!
I’ve been duped
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 1:09 pm
Next up from Dover Beach, tides are caused by God because gravity is only a theory.
I never said that evolution is merely a theory, Yobbo; nevertheless the claim that you’ve observed it remains ridiculous and repeating juvenile tropes isn’t going to suggest otherwise.
dover_beach
15 Feb 12 at 1:10 pm
Dunno about Steford, but Monster certainly is. The lug is at least 40 kilos overweight and when I tell him to lose the pounds and dress a little better to attract the opposite sex, he get upset with me.
Dunno about their hides as I really don’t much care one way or another.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 1:11 pm
How do we know the moon generates the tides? All causative associations are based on inferences. Read your Hume.
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 1:14 pm
JamesK, in your view is thinking for oneself a venial or a mortal sin?
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 1:15 pm
Yep, and that didn’t work for daily kos then and it won’t work for the bishops today.
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 1:17 pm
Bushitler was a stupid rhetorical device for the left in 04.
Obamarxist is a stupid rhetorical device for the right in 12.
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 1:19 pm
You haven’t explained why it’s ridiculous Dover. Evolution results purely from minor genetic differences between parent and offspring. This is easily observable anywhere in the natural world. It’s how you get a Chihuahua from a wolf over a few thousand years, and it’s also how you get a modern human from an Australopithecus over a few million.
Yobbo
15 Feb 12 at 1:20 pm
How do we know the moon generates the tides? All causative associations are based on inferences. Read your Hume.
Les, why are you addressing this to me and not Adrien and Yobbo?
dover_beach
15 Feb 12 at 1:22 pm
For d-b: a nice post at a scienceblogs about watching speciation occur.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 1:22 pm
Evolution results purely from minor genetic differences between parent and offspring.
Yes, but evolution is more than this; all you’ve observed so far is minor genetic difference between parents and offspring.
It’s how you get a Chihuahua from a wolf over a few thousand years, and it’s also how you get a modern human from an Australopithecus over a few million.
That is an inference.
But, anyway, you diverted attention from your initial stupid and unsupported statement by diverting our attention with evolution. I have no problem with evolution.
dover_beach
15 Feb 12 at 1:26 pm
Small mouthed snakes have replaced large mouthed snakes down the east coast of Australia. Because a snake with a small mouth can’t swalllow a cane toad. Evolution observed in action.
Bring Back Tillman
15 Feb 12 at 1:31 pm
For d-b: a nice post at a scienceblogs about watching speciation occur.
Still requires inferences. May be I should add that the fact that inferences need to be made is not in any way embarrassing.
dover_beach
15 Feb 12 at 1:31 pm
Bring Back
What are you on about. Maybe you have been eating a few cane toads yourself to get the haluconogenic effect.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 1:33 pm
Small mouthed snakes have replaced large mouthed snakes down the east coast of Australia.
Other way around, I would have thought, given what you said below.
Because a snake with a small mouth can’t swalllow a cane toad.
Inference.
Evolution observed in action.
You mean: evolution inferred by a series of event.
dover_beach
15 Feb 12 at 1:35 pm
Calm down Kelly. Graeme Bird is not here. We’re not not not licking toads. There will be no lying on this blog.
Tillman answered no questions posed to him. Squib.
Obama as a Marxist is perfectly plausible.
.
15 Feb 12 at 1:41 pm
Not the other way around. Because cane toads are toxic. Snakes with large mouths (or heads, actually) died.
Snakes with large heads died out. Snakes with small heads thrived. Observed fact. Evolution.
Bring Back Tillman
15 Feb 12 at 1:42 pm
The only evolution about reptiles regarding cane toads is not to eat them. There are still plenty of toads around the sunshine coast but no reptiles die anymore because for whatever reason or however they have worked out not to eat cane toads. A goanna or a python can swallow a toad of any size.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 1:42 pm
I’m inferring you’re talking about inferences for no good reason.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 1:43 pm
It may have been possible to kill off a vulnerable population when toads first arrived but if the population was not vulnerable already it only caused a dip in the population.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 1:44 pm
The insurance companies are delighted to hand out free birth control to their insured. That is an absolute no-brainer. In fact, this entire argument is a no-brainer.
Then why was a government mandate necessary for a ‘no-brainer’?
dover_beach
15 Feb 12 at 1:50 pm
I think DB has a decent point. What we’re seen is a lot of tiptoeing in regards to evolution however I also think there’s a huge piece of the puzzle missing here that we’re just not getting.
John H spoke about this some time ago. I think it revolved around sudden changes that occur outside of what can be called evolution.
Sure we see lots of evidence that I call tiptoeing, that is what’s called I think horizontal evolution where say insects develop resistance to pesticides and crap like that.
We see lots of different varieties of cats and dogs too. However they are still dogs and cats.
I’m talking about straight up and down shit where you can arrive at an entirely new species.
I’m not being anti-science in this stuff but I think more work needs to be done and no area of science deserves cred simply because it’s the easy way out. Look at the abortion we call climate science. Make these fuckers work for their living and get them to prove their assertions.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 1:50 pm
I remember reading about this some time ago. However, google has provided what may very well be peer reviewed science on the subject.
Snake Heads
That the snake heads shrank is fact. That it was caused by eating cane toads is inference. In much the same way that when I let go of my pencil, it is observed to fall to the ground. But we can only infer that the fall was caused by gravity.
Bring Back Tillman
15 Feb 12 at 1:54 pm
Bring Back:
What you’re describing is tip toeing. And in fact your example is really positing an opposite conclusion than the one you thought. Those varmints died out because they couldn’t evolve.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 2:00 pm
Not the other way around. Because cane toads are toxic. Snakes with large mouths (or heads, actually) died.
Yes, but being from down south I’m unfamiliar with these creatures.
That the snake heads shrank is fact. That it was caused by eating cane toads is inference. In much the same way that when I let go of my pencil, it is observed to fall to the ground. But we can only infer that the fall was caused by gravity.
Precisely my point.
dover_beach
15 Feb 12 at 2:00 pm
“I’m talking about straight up and down shit where you can arrive at an entirely new species”
With some animals that have had a geographic separation for about 500 000 years they are considered separate species. They can still breed but the success rates of the offspring breeding is low. Like how you can make a liger (lion crossed with tiger) it can’t breed.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 2:05 pm
And the big mouth creatures lived because they had fucking mouths. How is that an example of evolution? It’s chance and luck.
We don’t know enough about this stuff. We may may end up fitting all the pieces in the puzzle at some stage but we don’t know enough now.
I also posit that it was this branch of science that gave those in climate science an opportunity to begin pushing alarmism and climate predictions which are essentially nothing other than pseudo science.
As I said these fuckers need to be made to prove their assertions all the way and until then we should remain sceptical. It doesn’t mean we need to take a hard line contrary view. Just have no opinion in their claims until they prove it.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 2:05 pm
Dude, there are african lions and even Indian ones and shit like that. I dunno if they can breed. These aren’t new species.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 2:07 pm
Many people have also been pointing out on the blogosphere that Catholic institutions who use insurers who for other businesses provide cover for contraception or abortion are already providing indirect financial support for the provision of those services. Insurance money is pooled.
Have the Bishops thought to tell all institutions to take this into account? Have they in fact condemned those Catholic institutions that have complied with State based mandate and provided cover for contraception? (Several have in several states, but no one seems to have a comprehensive list.)
Seems to me they are playing a game of moral outrage based on numbers.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 2:07 pm
To paraphrase a legal aphorism Les, a man who relies on himself for moral guidance a fool for a guru/ spiritual counselor/ moral philosopher
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 2:12 pm
has a
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 2:12 pm
Not true. It’s a fabrication.
States systems are not what Odumbo is replicating.
look Stepford, why the fuck are you getting involved in this discussion at all. Just state what you believe and leave it at that, although no one gives a rats anyway.
However we know exactly what you’re doing. You’re running around in between left wing sites picking up this or that argument that you think we haven’t seen before plagiarizing it and posting that crap up here.
stop it and go do the afternoon chores.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 2:12 pm
Seems to me……..
…if you ask me
Lol
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 2:14 pm
Catholic institutions who use insurers who for other businesses provide cover for contraception or abortion are already providing indirect financial support for the provision of those services
What a ridiculous argument.
dover_beach
15 Feb 12 at 2:15 pm
a lion and a tiger are different species but they can produce offspring. I think the definition of species is about viability of offspring. I know you are bit of a neanderthal but so am I and I can work it out. Look at this page ” non-African humans have 1-4% more in common with Neanderthals than do the genomes of subsaharan Africans. “
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 2:19 pm
Should steve be rewarded wiv da cat’s official bedwetting-commenter-in-residence award?
Say a Sinc approved official gold star next to his gravatar?
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 2:20 pm
For a number of reasons. The neanderthals were in cold climes and didn’t move into Africa and I’m sure they were also cut off during the glacial periods.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 2:24 pm
JC so do you think you are a pure bred neanderthal? If you do not then we are a new species.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 2:26 pm
d-b: well that’s a convincing argument.
From that USA today article:
Look, d-b, you don’t find Catholic ethicists worrying about pin-pricks in condoms used by husbands for (fertility treatment) to be ridiculous.
Your standards of what is ridiculous is not a safe guide.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 2:26 pm
By definition, the sub-saharan Africans are the ones who didn’t wander out of Africa. Hence any mutations that could only be picked up by leaving Africa they didn’t get.
jtfsoon
15 Feb 12 at 2:27 pm
I don’t pretend to be well-versed on either the U.S. constitution or science, but thought I would proffer a couple of thoughts anyway.
Peter Schiff has a slightly different perspective here, in ‘There is no such thing as free birth control.’ (He doesn’t think it should be viewed only as a religious rights issue.)
With regard to LM’s comments like this:
“If I run a hospital in a state that prohibits discrimination against gays, I can’t fire a lesbian nurse.”
I tend toward the Libertarian frame of mind, and wonder why someone shouldn’t have the right to hire or fire whomever they want. If I want to open a restaurant that refuses to serve red-heads, I think that private property rights should respect that.
Yobbo doesn’t like fairy stories written 2000 years ago, but seems happy to concede that frogs turn into princes. (I think it’s the time factor that helps him out.) I think the evolution debate would be helped along if both sides were able to tease out the obvious differences between micro and macro evolution. I don’t believe the most ardent of creationists refute micro-evolution.
And, if I may finish up with a little C.S. Lewis:
“If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our thought processes are mere accidents, the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the materialists’ and astronomers’ as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts, i.e., of Materialism and Astronomy are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give a correct account of all the other accidents.”
Wishing all my fellow Catallaxian ‘accidents’ a lovely Wednesday.
Ellen of Tasmania
15 Feb 12 at 2:29 pm
Neanderthals and those of the African continent were difference species though. That could easily be explained by isolation during the glacials and horizontal evolution doing its thing.
————-
I read a theory once that could have caused vertical evolution to stand on it’s head.
The theory suggested that the different species evolved as a result of different life forms being introduced through numerous meteor strikes bringing with them different strands of basic life with them.
I find that more plausible than an fish suddenly getting out of the water and developing feet and/or wings.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 2:29 pm
It wasn’t mutations picked up, I think it was more interbreeding with neanderthals when we were subspecies. That is my guess anyway.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 2:29 pm
Both, Kelly.
My point is that the non subsaharan Africans were more exposed to all the stuff that was bouncing around outside Africa including the possibility of scoring a Neanderthal
jtfsoon
15 Feb 12 at 2:33 pm
Kelly, you idiot. It’s a myth that neanderthals were stupid.
It’s actually quite the opposite.
They were supposed to be really smart fuckers, but because they tended to live in family groups and not in tribes. The African gossipy, more gregarious and far more violent types overwhelmed them and raped a lot of their women, so we’ve ended up with a hybrid.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 2:36 pm
The funniest thing is that devout pro-abortion ‘Catholic’ Steve originally crowed about the Obama jihad, then dismissed demands for a compromise, before moving effortlessly on to crowing about the ‘compromise.’
He’ll say anything to protect his beloved Obama – whose beclowning on this issue is considered historic even by Chris “Tingles” Matthews.
C.L.
15 Feb 12 at 2:36 pm
“fish suddenly getting out of the water”
It probably took millions of years that is not sudden and is just as implausible having mamals like a dugong which most closet relative is an elephant going into the water.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 2:36 pm
what sick fuckers our ancestors were to want to ‘score’ a Neanderthal …
jtfsoon
15 Feb 12 at 2:37 pm
JC
You are starting to sound racist now. I don’t actually think they were any more or less intelligent but it does conjor up the stereo type. People still do this there has been no real change in human brain size for more than 100 000 years but we think we are smarter due to what is only accumulated knowledge and an explosion of that knowledge since written language.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 2:41 pm
The face of ‘climate change’ is married.
C.L.
15 Feb 12 at 2:42 pm
http://www2.canada.com/ottawacitizen/columnists/story.html?id=5825acf3-9d6a-4147-9e92-9bceda163f31&p=1
http://www2.canada.com/ottawacitizen/columnists/story.html?id=bd4f58f7-be2f-4088-8121-55a9596c651a
Ivan Denisovich
15 Feb 12 at 2:45 pm
d-b: well that’s a convincing argument.
The argument is ridiculous because the same nonsense claim could be made about anyone paying for any good or service by another who then goes on to spend that money on a good or service the purchaser finds unconscionable.
Look, d-b, you don’t find Catholic ethicists worrying about pin-pricks in condoms used by husbands for (fertility treatment) to be ridiculous.
An erroneous inference about a misleading claim.
dover_beach
15 Feb 12 at 2:46 pm
What makes you think it was consensual? Neanderthals were much stronger.
AndrewL
15 Feb 12 at 2:46 pm
I don’t even pretend to know much about this stuff, however I recall reading that there was a very sudden explosion of new life forms over a relatively short period of earth time. Whereas before that the evidence showed a far less in both life forms and variety.
One explanation for it was that it may have coincided with a massive number of comets and meteors slamming in to the earth at the time, for which there has been some plausible evidence.
That’s why I think exploding the comet theory is more valid to me than fish getting out of the sea and suddenly coming up with wings and feathers.
However unlike Bird I’m not going to abuse anyone if they choose not to believe it. Not even you Kelly and you richly deserve it.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 2:46 pm
You mean like a couple of Neanderthal females captured by a bunch of horny darker fellas with spears and clubs.
You reckon they would have been able to fight them off. Really?
JC
15 Feb 12 at 2:49 pm
The idea the original life may have arrived by asteroid or comet seems like a reasonable possibility but still has to start with some slime in the sea and fish crawling out of the water as you put it before you reach the higher forms of life. Sudden could be 20 million years.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 2:51 pm
I think you’ll find I said there would be a compromise and that Obama could have saved himself some grief by going straight to it from the start. (In fact, some reporting since said that Obama always did favour the Hawaiian style model, but had been talked out of it.)
CL, when it comes to your claims as to what my positions are, you routinely lie. Either that or imagine things out of thin air which you then sincerely believe. It’s the ongoing forensic puzzle of this blog guessing which of these explain your mental state best.
Steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 2:53 pm
No, I don’t lie, Steve.
You’re a pro-abortion phony ‘Catholic’ on record calling the American bishops “extremists.”
Everyone here now laughs at everything you write.
You hate the Catholic Church.
As for mental states, you’ve now spent about three months talking about semen and contraception.
As I’ve said many times, you’re a morally ill person.
C.L.
15 Feb 12 at 2:58 pm
Yes, but the theory I read wasn’t one accidental comet hitting, it was countless and over oceans of time. In other words different life forms started with different causes and at different times.
None of this shit has been proved accept horizontal evolution, which only a few people doubt.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 3:00 pm
It is more likely the African’s at that time were like Europeans of recent times and couldn’t look after themselves and had to go to the neanderthals for food. Good example of this is Burke and Wills Quote from Wills “We have been unable to leave the creek. Both camels are dead and our provisions are done. We are trying to live the best way we can, like the Blacks, but find it hard work.” Yeh bloody hard work you didn’t make it.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 3:01 pm
oops.. except…
JC
15 Feb 12 at 3:04 pm
Great post from Ellen
Sounds like mere materialism thoughts suffer the same fate as the cartesian evil god who fools us into believing we have some substance or independent reality which thought experiment leads Rene to discount the existence of such a god as incompatible with his (Rene’s) conceiving of it and therefor to accept his own reality
‘Course many theologians advance the idea that the false belief in one’s own independent reality is the orginal sin bestowed on us from the generations preceding.
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 3:13 pm
Just one more brief comment on ellen’s post.
I don’t think it’s a matter of Yobbo not liking stories written 2,00 years ago or 5,000 years ago.
The issue is Yobbo actively despising people who do like them.
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 3:19 pm
From Slate:
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 3:27 pm
Except if ur a leftist and confusion suits you
Like steve.
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 3:31 pm
Oh my god. The horrors of competition and market differentiation of product and lines of service.
Obviously that stupid fucker from Slate must eat boiled cabbage each day because he doesn’t realize there are other veggies.
As I said, Stepford spends his time combing left wing sites thinking we don’t know the arguments.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 3:31 pm
Steve
Condom $1
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 3:37 pm
Don’t listen to Kelly, Stevie. You can get condoms online for free.
Gab
15 Feb 12 at 3:38 pm
The point is, if you have a health insurance system tied to employee benefits (not an ideal situation, granted, but maybe one they figure is too hard to dismantle now?) employees shouldn’t be stuffed around in basic coverage by the whims of employers.
The employees do not have the benefit of competition.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 3:42 pm
They’re not paying for it, you dope!
JC
15 Feb 12 at 3:44 pm
Jesus you are one economic illiterate steve.
So every employer in the US is a monopsonist?
jtfsoon
15 Feb 12 at 3:44 pm
What’s at stake here is what it means to have national, near-universal health care.
Nonsense. Condoms, abortifacient, and the like are not heath care.
dover_beach
15 Feb 12 at 3:45 pm
Free chapstick and toothpaste for all.
Infidel Tiger
15 Feb 12 at 3:46 pm
I would have thought free moisturiser for all, IT.
Gab
15 Feb 12 at 3:47 pm
Lube, you’re forgetting the lube, IT.
As for Jason: what’s being said? At a time of high unemployment, workers who score a job offer are going to be able to risk knocking it back to look for a job with a better health plan attached?
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 3:50 pm
Gab
No way in the world moisturiser is more expensive than condoms and if it contains any alcohol like perfumes do it may make the muslims unhappy.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 3:50 pm
steve
what’s being said? Are recessions a normal thing?
In 90% of economic life, all US employers are monopsonists? this is a pretty Marxist view of looking at economic life for someone who calls himself a conservative
jtfsoon
15 Feb 12 at 3:53 pm
I can’t believe Stepford is peddling for stuff in the US we don’t get on the PBS here. At least I’ve never read Stepford suggesting condoms ought to be on the Australian PBS. Have you steve?
I wonder if US petrol stations, bars, 711′s, airport toilets will all have to provide for medical insurance claims if someone buys a pack of condoms?
JC
15 Feb 12 at 3:53 pm
Moisturiser is a very personal thing. I’d prefer to keep the government out of this part of my life.
Infidel Tiger
15 Feb 12 at 3:54 pm
Condoms, abortifacient, and the like are not heath care.
As CL says, it is if you believe pregnancy is an illness.
Gab
15 Feb 12 at 3:55 pm
Some contraception is indeed on the PBS, JC.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 3:58 pm
As I understand it, Jason, this is all arising out of the emphasis of the Affordable Care Act on preventative measures, which are seen as reducing health costs overall.
The Institute of Medicine recommended that contraception be included on a national basis, completing what half the States had already done.
The situation is not ideal – no one here thinks tying it to employment is a great idea due to the complexities involved, but if you are interested in reducing health care costs without upending the whole system, this sounds quite reasonable.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 4:01 pm
And besides, although the ideologically driven refuse to look at it, better access to contraception is more likely to reduce abortion than Rick Santorum telling the electorate that they really should stop sleeping around.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 4:03 pm
And what does history say steve – you ideologically driven clown?
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 4:08 pm
The fact that pregnancy is not an illness is irrelevant.
It is a health condition that involves medical costs, sometimes extremely expensive ones. People also want to plan it. That is enough to consider its impact on health insurance and medical expenses generally.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 4:09 pm
LOL
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 4:16 pm
Do we know how many pregnancies are occuring in the U.S. because people can’t AFFORD contraception?
Ellen of Tasmania
15 Feb 12 at 4:21 pm
No James, it’s more likely that Obama, a secret gay Hitlerite, fears fecundity and wants heterosexuals, especially Catholic ones, to not reproduce.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 4:26 pm
Yes, Ellen. Zero.
Gab
15 Feb 12 at 4:26 pm
Lol.
So it’s true.
Obama really does hate Bobby Kennedy.
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 4:32 pm
Well, now it seems my calm logic and rational responses have convinced everyone, what next issue do you want me to clear up?
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 4:39 pm
You have convinced me of many thing, Steve.
Infidel Tiger
15 Feb 12 at 4:43 pm
I don’t mind obummer hating Bobby Kennedy steve.
Really – none of us do.
It seenms a strange thesis tho
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 4:45 pm
How d’ya think Bobby might feel ’bout obummer’s hatred of the Catholic church, steve?
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 4:47 pm
CL – LOL.
When you’re insane enough not to actually see the real world anymore it always the cause for much mirth. Say hello to Batman next time he drags you off to Arkham.
Adrien is claiming that Absolute Ideologist Obama is protecting the right of people to ‘make up their own minds.’
No Adrien is claiming that you will lie about what I said whilst stealing my riffs.
Um no. That’s exactly what he’s banning.
Yep. The long standing bipartisan project of whatever you might call the vermin problem in the District of Columbia. But yes. The motherfucker wants to put drones all over the place in ‘Merica. Fan-fuckin’-tastic! I’m sure Dick Cheney’s grinding his teeth ’cause he didn’t get to do it.
Obummer makes committed enemies of people who used to support him whilst us nutter right wing extremists are falling into his trap………
How many enemies has he made? Are we going to have to endure some more polemic from old Chuck KrautHammer, pileous with its brief-points from up on high viz who he hates this morning?
Adrien
15 Feb 12 at 4:56 pm
Ellen – I tend toward the Libertarian frame of mind, and wonder why someone shouldn’t have the right to hire or fire whomever they want.
Anti-discrimination laws have a tendency to actually cause discrimination. Besides you can’t change bigotry with a law. You can only repress it.
Adrien
15 Feb 12 at 4:59 pm
From a Guttmacher paper:
….
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 5:24 pm
Steve you dum dum stated preference data is inferior to revealed preference data.
Get some actual consumption data you goose
No. This happens globally.
Which ones Dr Guttmacher?
.
15 Feb 12 at 5:37 pm
The biggest barrier to the use of condoms worldwide is most likely male laziness. Seriously steve, condoms are neither out of the price range of even the poorest American, nor scarce.
Quentin George
15 Feb 12 at 5:54 pm
Nothing arouses our Steve more than government intervention. He’ll be requiring some contraception for his hand later.
Infidel Tiger
15 Feb 12 at 6:02 pm
Yes, Quentin: women should always rely on their partners being willing to use a condom; they are a famously popular form of contraception for men, especially if they are living with their woman and have no concerns about STDs. They also never break or fall off, and are well known to have a much bigger failure rate than other forms of contraception.
We don’t want the woman having control over her own fertility now, do we. They might get all uppity and want to leave the house now and then.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 6:03 pm
Woops, I slipped out of sarcasm mode there for a second when I mentioned failure rate..
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 6:04 pm
IT: availability is not the same as compulsion to use.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 6:05 pm
Question: why is the blog full of non or ex Catholics who nonetheless want to side with Catholic thinking on contraception?
The Stephen Colbert quote: “A woman’s health decisions are a private matter between her priest and her husband!!!” seems to just sage nods of agreement from here.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 6:09 pm
It’s not a question about Catholicism or contraception you insufferable twerp.
Infidel Tiger
15 Feb 12 at 6:13 pm
I see Steve the devout ‘Catholic’ is still pretending that Obama’s failed wacko jihad against the Catholic Church is about the morality of contraception.
We of course destroyed this argument days ago.
He believes, with Colbert, that a woman’s health decisions are a private matter between Obama and her husband.
But thanks, Barry. If Mormon Romeny is to be the nominee, he now has full evangelical and Catholic backing.
Oops.
LOL.
C.L.
15 Feb 12 at 6:14 pm
So far today Steve Stepford has linked to or brought
USA Today
Slate
Stephen Colbert
Showing he’s a well read TAFE’er.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 6:16 pm
Oh, that’s right: it’s about Newt Gingrich’s plan to mine cheese from the moon.
Thanks for the reminder.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 6:19 pm
Did you complete all the assigned chores the little bride assigned for you last night, or did you lie and tell her you had a headache when in fact you’re annoying people on a blog and making yourself even more unpopular than before?
JC
15 Feb 12 at 6:20 pm
CL: availability is not the same as compulsion to use.
You and the American Catholic Bishop’s famous powers of persuasion to the Catholic women of the country will, ensure that few of them take the opportunity to use the contraception that will be more freely available.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 6:24 pm
How in hell could contraception be more freely available? If you are currently having trouble accessing contraception you defrinitely shouldn’t be getting your freak on.
Let me tell you this for nothing retard, anyone who can’t afford contraception isn’t going to be working a job with health insurance.
Infidel Tiger
15 Feb 12 at 6:27 pm
steve, I don’t care what the catholic position is. I do not call myself one and hence feel no obligation to follow their edicts. I fail to see in an open market why the government should mandate what should and shouldn’t be in a health insurance policy. Seriously, if you have a dud policy, you switch providers, if that means switching jobs then do so.
It’s no better than people in Queensland who bought “no flood” home insurance and then complained that they weren’t covered for floods.
Quentin George
15 Feb 12 at 6:28 pm
Well, we crushed Obama like a bug.
How’s that for persuasion?
C.L.
15 Feb 12 at 6:28 pm
LOL.More freely available than free? What do you want Obama to do, Steve? Put the free condoms on for you? Ensure women who take the pill do so by getting them to report each night to the Bong Police?
F.I.
Gab
15 Feb 12 at 6:31 pm
Bonk Police.
Gab
15 Feb 12 at 6:32 pm
By being available at no cost as part of your health insurer’s benefits?
Look, you mob: you can make your completely gut reaction claims as much as you like, but they don’t actually count for much without having something to back them up in terms of studies and such about how people use contraception and how cost affects its use.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 6:35 pm
Outside of been a middle ranking Nazi bureaucrat, that’s probably his biggest fantasy.
Infidel Tiger
15 Feb 12 at 6:35 pm
You can get them for free, you S.F.W.
You;re just trolling to get attention.
Gab
15 Feb 12 at 6:37 pm
like
USA Today
Slate
Stephen Colbert
JC
15 Feb 12 at 6:38 pm
I get the nagging feeling he’d enjoy that.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 6:39 pm
Come on: the people who will most benefit from this (women in lower paid jobs with limited saleable) are probably the least likely to be able to find alternative employment.
The arguments being put forward today are as weak as water.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 6:40 pm
..limited skills to shop around…that should have been.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 6:41 pm
Fuck you’re bogan dickhead.
Take a look at an income pyramid, you fucking fool. Which jobs are scarcer do you reckon. The CEO like positions at Rio for instance or the dude driving the truck in an open cut mine?
You really are appallingly dense.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 6:43 pm
“how people use contraception and how cost affects its use.”
For the $ I suggested or free over then internet as Gab suggested I would suggest that US citizens would use a condom based on that price no need to study it. Many men both here and in the US will pay $100 + for half an hour root and it does include a condom. So I think paying a $ for a root is not too bad.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 6:47 pm
The Catallaxy collective: the only bunch of people in the world who think:
* condoms are popular as a long term contraceptive for couples
* women never have an argument with their partner about them having to use a condom
* working class women in poor areas can just ditch a job and go hunting for one with better health benefits
* a working class woman would never skimp on contraception if paying $50 is the difference between paying the power company for the overdue bill this month.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 6:51 pm
Steve are you a real person or is it your job to make stupid comments because the suggestion about condoms etc. being too expensive is just beyond belief assuming the churches in the US do not have slaves and pay some minimum wage?
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 6:51 pm
“a working class woman would never skimp on contraception if paying $50 is the difference between paying the power company for the overdue bill this month”
Ok Steve will run with that is $1.30 per day ok which is even cheaper than condoms (if sex more than one time per day) or are you assuming that both the sexual partners can’t come up with $800 every 2 years. http://www.plannedparenthood.org/health-topics/birth-control/birth-control-implant-implanon-4243.htm
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 6:57 pm
Steve believes women are stupid:
The only person here sprouting that is you, you patronising jerk.
Gab
15 Feb 12 at 6:57 pm
JC you have fallen into the hole of stupidity so deep that I can’t see you waving any more.
Here are some figures:
Sure, a black woman in a city with 20% black unemployment is going to ditch her job for a better health plan.
Yes, you’ve convinced that job mobility is the answer to this – easy peasy.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 6:58 pm
There is fierce competition going on here for which of you lot – Gab, JC, kelly, CL, IT, etc are willing to make the stupidest comments.
It’s dizzying.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 7:00 pm
Shouldn’t the unemployed man be able to obtain a condom?
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 7:02 pm
Well, we crushed Obama like a bug
You and the archbishop ‘ey CL. Ooohh yer such a hero.
Ol’ ‘Bama’s still curled around Michelle as of right now weeping like the smelliest kid after their first day at school.
Adrien
15 Feb 12 at 7:04 pm
Gab you are unbelievably dumb at times and care-less of the position of women.
What is “patronising” is a rich woman from Australia arguing that a cheap or free supply of condoms is all a poor American woman needs to ensure the best and most reasonably reliable control of her fertility in her relationship.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 7:16 pm
Steve, aggressive voice of the fairer sex.
Well, his “body man” is no longer in situ so I guess that’s possible.
C.L.
15 Feb 12 at 7:18 pm
I’d be worried if you thought me smart, Steve. From you it’s the death knell of credibility.
I’m not just rich, I’m a millionaire according to Tanya Pleberserk.
I never said that you patronising milksop.
Gab
15 Feb 12 at 7:19 pm
The year’s prize for that has already been given, Steve.
You should know.
Your claim that semen has a “philosophical” purpose was the trophy winner.
C.L.
15 Feb 12 at 7:20 pm
PS Steve. “careless” is one word, no hyphen.
Gab
15 Feb 12 at 7:20 pm
No dickhead, that’s not what i was saying at all. On the whole it’s relatively easier to get a lower paying job than it is a higher paying one.
If you think that isn’t true you are then being absurd.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 7:24 pm
JC: do you or do you not accept that it is fanciful to think black women in lower paid jobs are going to find it easy to find another job in a city with 20% black unemployment; let alone another job with better health insurance?
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 7:28 pm
Actually Stepford, it is relatively easier for an employed person to find another job. It’s the long term unemployed (Odumbo has created) that are having serious problems finding work.
Dickhead, do you understand what the term flow of jobs means?
Something like 2.5 million jobs are even now being destroyed and created in the US each month. The flows are enormous.
Furthermore if the woman holding the job in this environment is employed it means she’s eminently employable.
Lastly, how do you square an economic decision with your ostensible catholic morality, Step.
So, let me understand your train of illogic here. The Catholic Church should be made to include condoms because the unemployment rate is high and people may not be able to move around so easily. Fuck you’re a moron.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 7:38 pm
Irrelevant. If they want a job that provides health insurance with contraception cover then they shouldn’t apply for jobs at organisations that don’t provide it.
Infidel Tiger
15 Feb 12 at 7:43 pm
Ah, ic, JC. So the long term unemployed, when they do get a job offer, are going to look at the health insurance and say “nah, it’s not quite comprehensive enough, I’ll keep looking.”
The Obama deal is not that the Catholic Church includes contraception at all – it is an addition to the health insure offered direct from the insurance company to the employee, and without direct cost to the church institution.
Even if there is a tiny short term increase in premiums until the full cost benefit of increased contraception use is felt, this will be spread across all companies using the insurance provider. (Because everyone will have contraception under their cover.)
If the Church is going to whine that this makes them complicit in providing contraception – as I argued before, they already pay for insurance from companies that provide contraception to other employers. Oh! Catholic money has already helped a insurance company cover a non catholic getting the pill. Freaking crisis!
In fact, Catholic institutions, including in New York where they lost a court challenge to the State mandate, have been directly paying for Catholics to get the pill via insurance for years. What a crisis that’s been.
This is about Bishops seeking an unreasonable interference into a matter of Federal action, taken on medical advice, that preventative care available on a uniform basis across the country is a sensible thing to improve health and health costs. The preventative care in question is “women who don’t want to be pregnant”.
It is likely to reduce abortions, but Catholic purists would rather tell women to just not have sex, rather than control their fertility via means 98% of Catholic women are willing to use in good conscience.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 7:58 pm
“The Obama deal is not that the Catholic Church includes contraception at all – it is an addition to the health insure offered direct from the insurance company to the employee, and without direct cost to the church institution.”
Steve if that is true why didn’t you just say so to start with?
I do find it ironic though you arguing for the twisted capitalist system of the US when the Aus system is much better, much cheaper and much more socialist.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 8:04 pm
Women may not realistically have a choice.
If they do go to place that offers the insurance, the will have the choice whether or not to use the contraception.
What’s so hard to understand about that?
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 8:08 pm
What?
Tal
15 Feb 12 at 8:10 pm
Too bad. Life’s not fair.
Otherwise you’d be a crash test dummy.
Infidel Tiger
15 Feb 12 at 8:10 pm
There are trade off is life. Ask your wife as she seems to be the breadwinner and you wouldn’t know much about this.
We know it’s a mandate.
Bullshit. You’re talking about cross subsidies and it won’t apply.
You’re an idiot. You have no idea what you’re talking about.
That’s not the full story as they hid behind federal protection laws as a last measure.
No it isn’t. It’s preventing former community organ grinder from controlling people’s lives and he’ll lose.
Then don’t listen to them, but don’t expect Odumbo to force them.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 8:12 pm
For a long time I have suspected that Steve is an ALP plant, possibly from Kevin Rudd’s local office.
.
15 Feb 12 at 8:12 pm
kelly?
I’m not arguing for the US system at all. I’m just saying that if they aren’t going to dismantle the whole unduly complicated employer/health insurance connection, then the reform makes sense as a means of improving the health system overall by ensuring a uniform level of basic cover with an emphasis on increasing preventative care.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 8:13 pm
Cue Benny Hill music
Tal
15 Feb 12 at 8:14 pm
I have made no comment on the expense of condoms at all!
I know they are as cheap as chips and available everywhere.
They are also typically not popular in long term relationships, and the woman has to rely on the co-operation of the man.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 8:17 pm
Steve that’s a private matter
Tal
15 Feb 12 at 8:21 pm
Where have you been Tal? Was it the lure of me talking all day about matters sex-u-al that enticed you back?
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 8:22 pm
Poor thing. She could always go out and do what hundreds of millions of other women worldwide have done and purchase her own contraception. Who knows she may even be able to find an employer that offers contraception under its health care plan. Best she doesn’t look for employment in organisations that don’t offer these plans.
Infidel Tiger
15 Feb 12 at 8:24 pm
Steve continues to be the patronising idiot.
Gab
15 Feb 12 at 8:24 pm
lol
Gab
15 Feb 12 at 8:25 pm
Steve as a Mick I thought you would side with the bishops
Tal
15 Feb 12 at 8:29 pm
Maybe if she wants contraception and he says no and won’t spring for the pill and she cannot afford it, maybe she can tell him to leave off?
Is the purpose of this legislation to keep together shaky relationships revolving around dumb people and contraception?
Steve the ALP plant says this is a golden way to run society.
.
15 Feb 12 at 8:30 pm
Steve prefers to bash his bishop.
Infidel Tiger
15 Feb 12 at 8:31 pm
“emphasis on increasing preventative care.”
So Steve just stick to good arguements then you will not have to fight everyone so much. That is correct due to the intolerance and interferance from religious groups in the US, Aus way outperforms in this area and examples are free needles for drug users, condoms for prostitutes when HIV broke out unlike US and I am sure that religious and government interferance still exists in healthcare due to the arguements that surface in the US.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 8:35 pm
IT
Don’t be so judgemental when a priest got into my cab a few years ago he said to me words to the effect when I asked him about contraception “no we don’t all believe that” so there are many catholic priests I would suggest that do not stick 100% to the party line. You might be thinking about the Labor party lol.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 8:43 pm
Pay for your own condoms
Tal
15 Feb 12 at 8:51 pm
Kelly – well duh. Why bloody enforce this though?
.
15 Feb 12 at 8:54 pm
Kelly
You’re accosting priests when they get into your cab, you realize there is a complaints number displayed.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 8:56 pm
If it was an old school nun Kelly would have his head smacked
Tal
15 Feb 12 at 9:01 pm
“The Obama deal is not that the Catholic Church includes contraception at all – it is an addition to the health insure offered direct from the insurance company to the employee, and without direct cost to the church institution.”
Dot
If this statement by Steve is true then the problem is solved. I am guessing it is the compromise.
JC
I haven’t driven a cab for a year but intend to go back to that shortly if i can get a loan to actually buy a cab. Chatting to the customers will lead to more tips not some evil endeavour like you suggest and also is good for market tips especially if they come from the airport.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 9:06 pm
Good luck with that Kelly. You’re an idiot, but I wish you the best.
I always give a tip to those that don’t wanna talk.
Stay away from tips unless you research them yourself.
As an aside
I have a huge guilt trip over a Cabbie and a cab ride once. It’s still fresh in my mind. I caught a cab to go from the Upper Eastside to Downtown to get to work. I got there and then realized I forgot my wallet. The dude suggested he write me his address and I send him the money. It was $12.80 and I still recall the amount. I lost his freaking address so there’s a dude who thinks I cheated him out of his money. It’s one of my biggest guilt trips.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 9:16 pm
JC
I Always research market information but when I say tips is more along the lines of research it is surprising how much people talk to cab drivers and you would too I think, as it is like we are completely anonomous.
So you do have a heart. LOL
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 9:27 pm
James: I don’t despise people who believe in fairy stories – I just think they are a bit simple and feel sorry for them. If that makes me a bigot then so be it.
Yobbo
15 Feb 12 at 9:42 pm
Hey, re black women – let’s bear in mind what Obama and his Planned Parenthood friends’ have wrought:
BlackGenocide: Abortion and the Black Community.
Heckuva job.
C.L.
15 Feb 12 at 9:44 pm
Release the Elephants Lad
Tal
15 Feb 12 at 9:51 pm
Amazing innit. Planned Parenthood also provides free contraceptives, and not just condoms.
Gab
15 Feb 12 at 9:51 pm
In fact, the whole thing has nothing to do with whether or not women use contraception. Even Chris “Tingles” Matthews has described this line as a spin-doctor’s lie.
And LOL. Steve is now claiming that child murder advocate Barack Obama cares about reducing abortion.
He’s as indifferent to it as you are, Steve.
You really are morally sick person.
C.L.
15 Feb 12 at 9:52 pm
CL
Your link said 17000 babies in the dumpster. This number seems highly unlikely. Assuming the babies weighed no more than 100gm on average so the dumpster was only 1.7 tonnes it is likely it was cleared weekly just like any other bin meaning more than 2000 abortions a day in secret.
kelly liddle
15 Feb 12 at 9:56 pm
Oh dear.
CL appears not to have read Chris Matthews’ comment on the Obama compromise position:
How embarrassing for the CL.
By the way, what is this all about again? Something about Obama being a Hitlerian monster who fears fecundity and sexuality, pompous crap, pompous crap, pompous crap etc.
Steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 10:04 pm
You’re such a whore for Obama, really you are Steve.
Gab
15 Feb 12 at 10:07 pm
I’m still waiting for a decent argument for criminalising health insurance that fails to cover abortions or contraception.
Of course, all this goes away if people’s own individually purchased health insurance were tax deductible in the USA.
wreckage
15 Feb 12 at 10:14 pm
LOL.
Chris Matthews said Obama’s policy was “frightening” and slapped down his own reporter on air for defending it (using Steve’s “28 states” dodge).
So old Tingles slapped down a week’s worth of Steve’s lies. Now Steve the abortion advocate (and devout ‘Catholic’) has decided to return to Tingles’ side. And Steve previously dismissed compromise as something to placate “extremist” bishops. Now Steve embraces the ‘compromise.’ (Which is not a compromise).
Oh dear. Have we ever seen an episode in which Steve’s moral sickness has been more sadly on display?
But the man having the loudest laugh is Mormon Mitt – his religious problem now completely solved by Obama.
Epic fail.
C.L.
15 Feb 12 at 10:18 pm
hahahahahahahahahahahahahaahhahahahahahaha
Fuck the weakest link in the chain. And premiums won’t rise of course. No siree. Odumbo understand the commercial world deeply.
JC
15 Feb 12 at 10:18 pm
First of all Yobbo, I wish it were merely you being benignly indifferent to christianity and christians.
But it isn’t the case.
And you repetitively demonstrate that fact.
As merely an addendum to this comment – an aside if you will – your view that people of faith are “simple” and deserving of your pity is on its face an assinine position from a purely rational perspective.
I say that not to engage you in debate on that subject.
It would bore me.
But if you can’t acknowledge that is in an assinine position purely from a rational perspective then any discussion with you is a waste of time.
Allbert Eistein, William Buckley or C. S. Lewis for example all had remarkable Faith although Einstein without necessarily caring to practice Judaism whilst loving his people and proudly identifying as a Jew.
Intelligence has naught to do with any of it.
I suspect a similar range of IQ in the atheist camp and the Faith camp.
Perhaps not a similar distribution in higher education because modern universities are hotbeds of anti-religious dogmatism.
Please be clear I have no ill feeling to atheists per se or agnostics – in fact agnosticism is an especially noble position to my mind if arrived at honestly rather than as a device.
My take on what you facilely call ‘pity’ is that it would be more accurately characterised as disdain and oppropbrium in you case.
In short you are superciliously nasty about christians and gratuitously so.
No point in playing civil now and pretending that’s how you normally comment about christians and catholics.
It isn’t.
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 10:28 pm
Not enough attention is paid to the ‘why’ of Obama’s Hitlerian attack on Christianity, specificially in relation to contraception. And people who aren’t mental midgets and morons also wonder why the hell any employer should pay for workers’ contraception.
The explanation is quite simple. The Democrat Party is wedded – nay, welded – to an extreme anti-natalist ideology whose signature dogma is passionate hatred and fear of human sexuality and fecundity. Institutionally allied to Planned Parenthood and Marie Stopes International – both organisations founded by ‘feminist icons’ who also happened to be white supremacists and Nazi sympathisers – the anti-natalists bitterly resent that pregnancy continues to prevent women from the ‘freedom’ of being as much like men as possible. Indeed, they almost literally regard pregnancy as an illness. This is why Obama opposed legislation designed to prevent accidentally un-aborted babies from being murdered, and why he insists that health insurance schemes cover the cost of combatting the natural disease of fecundity. Force is important for the anti-natalists because by imposing their dogma they satisfy themselves that they have successfully ‘won’ the debate about what, and who, women are – and should be. The Catholic Church was targeted because of its role in health care and its powerful indifference to secular ideology. It had to be humiliated for the ‘win’ to be real to them.
Obama did this because he is filled with fear and hatred, as are the feminist extremists advising him (like his hate-mongering wife).
We should also remember that leftist anti-natalism works hand in hand with gay lobby extremism. Homosexualists also hate fecundity, though with the idiosyncratic feature of hating it because it points to the axiomatic familial supremacy of heterosexuality. As a result of their success, policy-wise, the Church has already had to close some of the oldest and most successful adoption agencies in the United States. So the party of Bobby Kennedy (11 children) now officially believes that children can and should be murdered, that the extremist organisations that do the murdering should be subsidised by the state, that pregnancy is an illness and that the only families worth waxing sentimental about are the gay ‘families’ whose very existence destroys (they hope) the idea of women as designedly fecund, unchangeably different to – for the anti-natalists, inferior to – men.
Finally, an explanation of timing seems important. Well, the fact is support for abortion – for women’s right to ‘choose’ – has been plummeting for years. Almost every pollster has found that majorities now oppose abortion outright or oppose it in most situations. Added to this – and, to some extent, driving it – is science. The science of ultra-sound, the science of premmy medicine, the science of genetics (and all it tells us about who we are as persons, in utero and ab initio) . The old ‘abortion on demand’ slogan of feminists has been abandoned. The old ‘just a clump of cells’ line has been discreetly binned. On science, the pro-abortion lobby has lost. On morality – in the public’s eyes – they have lost. It goes without saying that the holdout extremists have an especially livid hatred for the one institution that, above all, fought their despicable ideology. That was the Catholic Church. Corrupting the law – taking this and associated anti-natalist dogma – out of the public agora and enforcing them by fiat is the measure of both their loathing and also their epic failure.
C.L.
15 Feb 12 at 10:29 pm
Oh dear.
Cardinal Dolan: nothing’s changed, Obama just lying.
Announces legal and legislative war.
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1200596.htm
C.L.
15 Feb 12 at 10:32 pm
Good.
Benedict is a great Pontiff.
I really hope the Catholic Church in the USA doesn’t falter and revert to its inane liberalism.
She needs to take this thug anti-catholic leftist President on.
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 10:40 pm
I’m not sure how much some people (a particular brand of materialist) realised the scope of their own-goal every time they revelled in the discovery that yet another component of the personality was genetic.
wreckage
15 Feb 12 at 10:45 pm
Nutty.
Contrary to the number of “Two Mums/Two Dads have a baby” stories we see in New Idea.
Pomposity.
Paranoid.
Projection.
Paranoid, and stupid.
Exaggeration and deceptive cherry picking.
That would explain RU486, I suppose (?)
Inconsistent with great majority believing abortion is acceptable in some situations (many of which Catholic Church would not approve.)
Paranoia mixed with unjustified triumphalism.
Wrong factually; paranoid; stupidly triumphalist.
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 11:13 pm
Shorter SfB: me saying “nuh-uh!” point by point is a rebuttal!
wreckage
15 Feb 12 at 11:25 pm
Some brief points in there have been expanded upon by me in previous comments over the last week…
steve from brisbane
15 Feb 12 at 11:29 pm
Conrad Black in National Review – who always writes wonderfully well demonstrating a great comprehension of whatever topic he opines on.
“In 1790, the new president of the new country addressed the country’s Roman Catholics: “May the members of your society in America . . . enjoy every spiritual and temporal felicity.” George Washington cannot have meant anything like this. It is such an insane enterprise, so brutal, gratuitous, and premeditated, after a debate between the Catholic men and militant feminists around the president, that the administration will, unless it has taken complete leave of its senses, backpedal as far as it has to to get clear of this fiasco, and the immediate, rather specious climb-down may not achieve that.
Vice President Biden, who is pretty accident-prone himself but at least saw this one coming and takes his Catholicism seriously, told a Cincinnati radio station that he was confident of a compromise. Such a dirigiste regime, so hostile to any alternative source of moral authority in America to itself, may have trouble withdrawing gracefully. The administration is trying to retreat in the proclaimed interests of social peace, but some taste, though not a lethal one, will linger. If it does not compromise seriously and eliminate the requirement for church-related organizations to pay for something of which they morally disapprove — especially the post-conception drugs and treatments — an epochal turning point impends.”
Well worth rtwt
JamesK
15 Feb 12 at 11:34 pm
Last time I checked, CL, Barry was President of the United States and you were working in an RTA in suburban Brisbane.
You have a strange concept of “winning”, my friend.
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 11:49 pm
I’ve heard he is a real expert on not dropping the soap.
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 11:50 pm
Now you are just being an idiot.
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 11:51 pm
You are a drivelling nutbag.
Les Majesty
15 Feb 12 at 11:54 pm
I can excuse people who lived a century ago James. They didn’t have access to the wealth of information we do living today. To continue to believe in a deity that controls the universe in the information age when the world around us has been thoroughly explained by science – and the explanations and proof are readily available on the internet – is a sign of ignorance and stupidity.
Now there’s nothing wrong with being stupid. There are plenty of stupid people in the world and they live perfectly happy lives without hurting anyone. On the other hand, we shouldn’t be letting stupid people make laws or negatively impact the lives of others with their stupid beliefs.
This extends to both letting people make laws based on religious superstition, and letting people make decisions on behalf of others based on religious superstition. (e.g. refusing blood transfusions for your children). Because that’s all your faith is, James. A superstition, no different to a fear of walking under a ladder or the belief that wearing garlic around your neck will ward off vampires.
Yobbo
15 Feb 12 at 11:59 pm
I should add though James that I think you are missing the point if you think I’m opposed to Christianity especially. All religions are equally stupid, and I’ve previously been moderated here and elsewhere for expressing similar views regarding Islam and other religions.
Religion is a great big hoax, invented by primitive people to help allay fear of death.
Yobbo
16 Feb 12 at 12:03 am
No, sorry. Christians (and Jews) have held for centuries now that the material universe is explicable. Not all of them certainly, but a consistent and unbroken lineage of thought. You can have your view, but to say that a sect that believed in an explicable material universe a century ago was fine, but today is stupid, because today, as a century ago, scientific knowledge is considered close to complete? That doesn’t make any sense.
Of course people who disagree with you do need to be controlled. They are dangerous and frightening, and for a variety of very good reasons must not be permitted to follow their conscience.
wreckage
16 Feb 12 at 12:11 am
But as a libertarian why do you care, Yobs? Why is this so important to you to tell others so frequently.
JC
16 Feb 12 at 12:12 am
I must say the elitist stupidity proudly paraded is jaw-dropping.
You are an unmitigated fool Yobbo with an unpleasant and overt bigotry.
If you happened to be religious, you’d be an unmitigated religious fool and doubtless with an unpleasant and overt bigotry.
I wonder what your bigotry of choice would be in that circumstance?
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 12:51 am
We can and should go deeper too.
Remember Obama’s background.
And, of course, his well-known support for child murder.
Throw in his belief that the CIA created AIDS and that he doesn’t know when life begins (!) and the upshot is that we’re dealing with the most extreme and obscurantist president ever.
C.L.
16 Feb 12 at 12:57 am
It should be obvious JC. I don’t care what people personally believe if it doesn’t affect others. I might think them stupid and they might think me a prick but that’s as far as goes.
When I care is when governments make laws based on religion, and where people make decisions on others behalf based on religion. For instance, I think a parent who refuses medical treatment for their children on religious grounds is a child abusing cretin and should be in prison.
They need to be prevented from inflicting harm on others, yes.
Yobbo
16 Feb 12 at 12:59 am
Getting back to the issue of Romney, and how genuinely awesome he is, and how it’s only the stupid knuckle-dragging mouth-breathing right wing religious extremists who are sidelining him…
“Hey, y’know, maybe it’s Romney who’s doing the Romney cause the most harm.”
Hmmm…
spot
16 Feb 12 at 1:04 am
But what if it’s the other way around, where in fact the state is impacting on what people believe, as in the case being discussed?
You brought up the example that you believe a woman who takes off a number of months to drop a kid shouldn’t be paid for the privilege of being away from work.
I agree with that.
But you also said that we have those laws and we live with them, or words to that effect.
You recognize that is a bad law, so why would you double down with another mandate or bad law? I don’t quite get the point. Two bad laws doubles up. It’s worse than one.
That’s the problem with allowing creeping statism. We give up caring.
JC
16 Feb 12 at 1:10 am
How is harm inflicted by the religious quantitatively different from any other harm? Stopping people from acting just because their motivation is religious is no different to stopping people from acting for any other moral reason. Stopping people from inflicting unquestionable harm on others needs no reference to motives.
I’d tend to agree, but I’d be willing to bet there’ll be corner-cases. Again the issue is harm, not religion. But what about someone who refuses vaccines on what they are thoroughly convinced are scientific grounds? We don’t say “Idiots! If only stupid people stopped following science!”
Even harm can be contentious. Some insist male circumcision is harmful, and on a short-term analysis it is. But is massively reduces your risk of contracting AIDS, too. So then, would someone who had their boy circumcised for Jewish reasons be committing a violent religious act, but a non-Jew be taking rational (and therefore acceptable) actions?
wreckage
16 Feb 12 at 1:14 am
You – in particular -might like this, spot:
Mitt is Mean!
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 1:23 am
To bring it back to the present, does disbarring harmful action also mean making it illegal to not take action, in particular if the harm is contentious, minimal, or easily avoided by other means?
If the Catholics are not permitted to take no action to supply contraceptives, why is it permissible to not ban cigarettes? After all, that inaction causes harm (that could otherwise be avoided by the agent in question, the smoker, just as pregnancy can otherwise be avoided by the individual.)
If it is not permissible to not act to prevent harm the individual can avoid anyway, what are the boundaries of Government coercion?
wreckage
16 Feb 12 at 1:23 am
Hahaha. I don’t think @Grrr_Romney fully expected this “campaign” to take off as it has xD
spot
16 Feb 12 at 1:30 am
“You recognize that is a bad law, so why would you double down with another mandate or bad law? I don’t quite get the point. Two bad laws doubles up. It’s worse than one.”
I’ve never said that I support this law. I was just pointing out that there’s nothing remarkably horrible about it, just another example of government interfering in the running of business, which is something they have always done.
Many of the same people in this thread who are bitterly opposed to this law from Obama are in favour of Abbott’s maternity leave proposal.
“If the Catholics are not permitted to take no action to supply contraceptives, why is it permissible to not ban cigarettes?”
If parents were forcing their children to smoke then you would have a point. A person should be free to refuse medical treatment for themself if that is their choice. They shouldn’t be able to refuse it on behalf of someone else.
Yobbo
16 Feb 12 at 1:39 am
“How is harm inflicted by the religious quantitatively different from any other harm?”
Because a lot of religious harm is protected under the guise of “freedom of religion” laws.
If you refused a blood transfusion for your kid on the basis that you were sick of looking after him and wanted him to die, you’d be sent to prison for murder.
If you refuse it on the basis that you are Jehovah’s Witness and god said so, then that’s perfectly fine and your child will die.
Yobbo
16 Feb 12 at 1:44 am
@wreckage
Ur in contortions.
The Church axiomatically cannot pay health insurance for Her employees that includes sterilisation, abortifacient drugs and contraception despite Yobo’s silliness.
The church’s employees are not prevented from going out and purchasing these or purchasing additional private insurance that does cover these items
Many if not most employer health insurance doesn’t presently pay for contraceptives.
From now on all employer health funds are mandated to cover these – the only exception is the actual church/place of worship itself or if an institution eg a hospital then only ones where every single one of the patients are committed catholics.
It’s Leviathan gone nuts.
That’s all.
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 1:45 am
It’s interesting that the protestant Rev Costello wants to force people to accept – and businesses to provide – pre-commitment cards, a form of contraception.
Indeed, almost all of the statist Stalinism in Australia is idiosyncratically protestant.
C.L.
16 Feb 12 at 1:52 am
Same thing, they shouldn’t be allowed to. Those anti-vaccination kooks are some of the stupidest people on the planet.
Vaccines are of even greater importance because refusal to vaccinate not only directly impacts the health of your own child, but any other kid they come into contact with.
Yobbo
16 Feb 12 at 1:53 am
I always had the sneaking suspicion about the Australian left. There’s more than a hint of Calvinism here.
JC
16 Feb 12 at 1:55 am
That’s the statists’ rallying cry.
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 1:57 am
Yes James, not allowing people to kill their own kids makes one a statist.
Yobbo
16 Feb 12 at 2:01 am
Actually I agree with you. But how does lack of vaccination imperil those that have been. I don’t quite get this one. Isn’t vaccination supposed to prevent that very risk on coming in contact with a carrier?
JC
16 Feb 12 at 2:02 am
Vaccinations aren’t 100% effective, more like 98%.
Yobbo
16 Feb 12 at 2:06 am
Look at the packed lunches some kids are given!
They’re heading for an early death.
Fools like that and fools like you are a recipe for statism, Yobbo
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 2:06 am
James, even if you weren’t a god botherer, you’d still be a simpleton.
Yobbo
16 Feb 12 at 2:08 am
James
Yobs isn’t a statist by a country mile.
He has a hang up about religion and lets fly at times. To his credit he hates all religions equally.
He’s a good side. Always on the side of the angels. Lol
JC
16 Feb 12 at 2:09 am
I know he’s not a statist JC but he regularly uses their rhetoric.
I didn’t call him one.
He also displays statists’ rabid anti-catholic bigotry and rhetoric.
Additionally, he is unforgiveably stupid.
Preschooler’s Homemade Lunch Replaced with Cafeteria “Nuggets”
State agent inspects sack lunches, forces preschoolers to purchase cafeteria food instead
“The girl’s turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the agent who was inspecting all lunch boxes in her More at Four classroom that day.
The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs — including in-home day care centers — to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home.
When home-packed lunches do not include all of the required items, child care providers must supplement them with the missing ones.”
That’s just further along the same course championed by and with the same attitude as Yobbo.
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 2:18 am
To continue to believe in a deity that controls the universe
As if this exhausts religious belief. This would be like me saying that science is bunk because there are people who still believe the “universe…has been thoroughly explained by science” in age as thoroughly skeptical of ultimate or empirical explanations or proofs as ours.
On the other hand, we shouldn’t be letting stupid people make laws or negatively impact the lives of others with their stupid beliefs.
Yobbo, you’ve persistently failed to demonstrate that Catholic opposition to this amendment (or even to contraception per se) is based on ‘stupid beliefs’; I’m counting this as a sign of stupidity and ignorance on your part.
dover_beach
16 Feb 12 at 2:26 am
It’s really not James. Diet may have an effect on health but it’s hardly irreversible and won’t do much damage before the kid is old enough to decide for themselves what to eat.
What I’m talking about are cases where the parents decisions will lead to kid dying before they are old enough to make up their own minds. Like dropping them off a cliff, or refusing to allow a blood transfusion.
Again, do you really think it’s statist to prevent people from killing a child in their care?
Yobbo
16 Feb 12 at 2:29 am
He’s rabidly anti-religion, that’s all. He may sound as though he hates Catholicism but unfortunately that’s a hot topic in these parts for some reason. So he gets stuck into that.
Yobbo is a good guy.
No he’s not. He’s quite bright and amusing especially when he gets into altercations with cops near a bar.
He does have a good point about vaccination though, that really is child abuse.
Americans had a good way of dealing with that. A kid couldn’t enter school unless there were vac papers.
JC
16 Feb 12 at 2:30 am
Isn’t that lunacy illegal now?
JC
16 Feb 12 at 2:31 am
Dover, you have persistently failed to even register through your skull that nothing I have discussed in this thread is at all related to the amendment, I have just been debunking stupid religious shit.
I agree with others here that it’s a stupid amendment. I don’t agree that the world is 6000 years old and god created dinosaur fossils to give archaeologists a job like Rick Santorum does.
Yobbo
16 Feb 12 at 2:32 am
More on Yobbo..
Never ever take his word about a movie though. He has horrifying taste in movies and his reviews can’t be relied on.
JC
16 Feb 12 at 2:33 am
I beg to differ Jc.
Read his post at 11:59 pm in response to mine and tell me if that could remotely be called intelligent.
He says everybody who has/had a religious faith is unintelligent or if intelligent must have died more than 7 years ago when there wasn’t so much information avilable.
Geddit?
Now, tell me again how Yobbo isn’t a stupid.
One last point of difference, Yobbo’s vulgar radical secularism is rather typical.
The hatred is focused primarily on christianity and most especially on catholicism.
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 2:42 am
Dover, you have persistently failed to even register through your skull that nothing I have discussed in this thread is at all related to the amendment, I have just been debunking stupid religious shit.
Rubbish. Apart from the initial comment I took issue with you said, “I just fail to understand why people think it’s a good idea to make government policies based on a fairy story written 2000 years ago”; to now say this had “nothing” at all to do with Catholic opposition to this amendment or even to any Catholic position taken in the political realm is intellectually cowardly and morally dishonest. If you can’t provide evidence where the Church has argued for government policies on the basis of “a fairy story written 2000 years ago” then you ought to simply admit that this was a ridiculous statement without any foundation.
I don’t agree that the world is 6000 years old and god created dinosaur fossils to give archaeologists a job like Rick Santorum does.
Yes, these are stupid beliefs (neither of which is held by Santorum), but stupid beliefs are also held by atheists, and themselves arise within the field of science too.
dover_beach
16 Feb 12 at 2:54 am
Is this a serious challenge Dover?
Here’s an example: George Pell’s opposition to stem cell research, where he not only voiced his opinion against it here, but later threatened any Catholic politicians who voted in favour of therapeutic cloning with excommunication.
Yobbo
16 Feb 12 at 3:19 am
You object to Cardinal Pell voicing his opinion, Yobbo?
And which 2000 year-old fairy stories mentioned embryonic stem cell research?
I must have missed that one.
And how exactly is excommunication any different to compulsory line-item voting (under threat of disendorsement), as practiced in the atheist Labor Party? Indeed, in all parties?
C.L.
16 Feb 12 at 3:30 am
Sorry CL, i wasn’t asked to explain how it’s different, just to provide examples – which I did.
Yobbo
16 Feb 12 at 3:41 am
Is this a serious challenge Dover?
Well, it seems serious enough for you to fail to meet it. Where in Cardinal Pell’s argument is his opposition to embryonic stem cell research based on “a fairy story written 2000 years ago”. Hint, natural law argument exists independently of the story of Christ.
dover_beach
16 Feb 12 at 3:51 am
You didn’t provide an example, Yobbo; quite the opposite.
dover_beach
16 Feb 12 at 3:54 am
But I don’t see how embryonic stem cell research is part of the corpus of Sacred Scripture you were referring to, in the way you intended. Catholics would argue the Church’s teaching on that is, of course, posited pursuant to Scripture, via the Magisterium (or teaching authority of the Church). However, there are good scientific reasons for concluding that a) life begins at conception (because it does, scientifically) and that b) therefore, the harvesting of embryos – that is, human individuals – for research experiments and/or efficacious drugs (of which there have so far been none) is immoral, is wrong. Many non-Christian ethicists grappled with the whole question too, which is why it was so controversial for so long.
The attack on Pell in relation to excommunication (that is, banning the politicians from receiving the Sacrament) was laughable given that the ACTU hierarchy routinely threatens to destroy the livelihoods and careers of any Labor MP who doesn’t obey their dictates.
So I don’t see it as being a very good example.
Throughout the Western world, the most pious and prominent ban-hammers are non-religious – usually atheistic – liberals in the wowser anti-booze, anti-smoking, anti-gambling, anti-fun, anti-freedom movements.
As a professional gambler, I presume you know that Catholics are the religious group which, above all, has no problem whatsoever with your lifestyle.
I can’t think of one thing Catholics are demanding be banned anywhere in the Western world.
C.L.
16 Feb 12 at 4:00 am
I’m not sure why you keep bringing up the Labor party. Do you mistake me for an ALP voter?
Yobbo
16 Feb 12 at 4:07 am
Abortion?
Yobbo
16 Feb 12 at 4:11 am
Not at all.
But you went out of your way to imply there was a shocking religious interference in governance dimension to Pell’s statement.
In contrast to what?
Politicians are routinely threatened with repercussions for not supporting particular policies.
The only difference is that Pell’s ‘threat’ involved certain politicians not being able to receive communion.
C.L.
16 Feb 12 at 4:16 am
Yes, CL. I agree that churches are not the only organisations that try to influence government policy. I was asked to supply an example of them doing it, which I did. Saying “everyone else does it too!” doesn’t negate my example.
Yobbo
16 Feb 12 at 4:21 am
Abortion?
Is their opposition based upon “a fairy story written 2000 years ago”? Is it any different to their opposition to murder or theft? No, so your failure continues.
dover_beach
16 Feb 12 at 4:24 am
Nope. Not really.
The Catholic Church has long since accepted that it will not be banned by current legislatures and prefers to campaign against it by educative and cultural means. This has yielded a good deal of success. Via public pressure, it seems likely that most abortions will eventually be banned on scientific and human rights grounds.
No, it’s the non-religious or atheist groups in the West who are ban-drunk: whether it’s the Aboriginal industry and its lawyers in Australia, the Bloomberg salt and sugar police in America, the UK’s ever-expanding health and safety sharia squads or Canada’s ‘human rights’ Gestapo banning Dire Straits (plucked this one from Google News).
If you’re sick of the pious banning things and policing people, have a word to your brothers in what I call the Atheist Taliban.
C.L.
16 Feb 12 at 4:27 am
I was asked to supply an example of them doing it, which I did. Saying “everyone else does it too!” doesn’t negate my example.
No, you were asked to provide an example of them attempting to influence government policy employing arguments based “on a fairy story written 2000 years ago”. You’ve now repeatedly failed to do this.
dover_beach
16 Feb 12 at 4:36 am
Easy. Public holidays for Easter and Christmas. The bastards!
Gab
16 Feb 12 at 4:41 am
You mean in Australia, right? Because last I checked, Ireland is in “the western world”, and abortion is banned there, along with travelling outside Ireland to procure an abortion.
I did do that for 8 years, CL. Reminder. Just because left-wingers do it too doesn’t make it right.
Yobbo
16 Feb 12 at 4:46 am
Very amusing, Gab, but the justification for public holidays is secular. BTW, love your new avatar.
dover_beach
16 Feb 12 at 4:46 am
You mean in Australia, right? Because last I checked, Ireland is in “the western world”, and abortion is banned there, along with travelling outside Ireland to procure an abortion.
I’m sure “
abortionmurder and theft are banned there as well, along with travelling outside Ireland to procure anabortionmurder or theft; those damn Irish Catholics!dover_beach
16 Feb 12 at 4:50 am
You mean science is catching up to religion?! That’ll never do.
Gab
16 Feb 12 at 4:53 am
I’m coming to this after an unfortunate absence, so sorry about the delay.
Yobbo: no, the example of the condition that results in sickle cell anaemia cannot be described as a mutation. In fact, that would very definitely fall under the category of natural selection, which I don’t deny happens and is in fact axiomatic – although it doesn’t credibly explain how a protozoan’s offspring developed a human brain, by accident, over time.
But let’s cut to the chase. Yes, we all know about the bounty of selective breeding. We made those udders bigger. Those apples larger. We bred a pig whose meat didn’t taste so good but yielded a lot of offspring with a pig whose meat tasted good and yielded not so many offspring. And as a result, after much trial and error and there inbetween – we got a pig whose meat tasted good and yielded a lot of offspring.
That’s great. I can see that. I can’t see, however, how the human eye could be developed incrementally from an organism with no vision. Over a billion years. Over 6 billion years. Sorry, but I find it difficult to accept this happened accidentally. We bred those pigs quite deliberately to make them what we want them to be. So how did we come to be? Accidental genetic combinations, as you claim? Seems far-fetched. Omnipotent, omniscient sky man who moulded us? Seems far-fetched.
Basically, I don’t know. Count me as an agnostic. I’m waiting for more information.
Oh come on
16 Feb 12 at 5:34 am
It only seems far fetched because it is difficult to imagine the time span involved. The selective breedings you are talking about have brought about significant changes in just a few thousand years. Natural selection has had 6 billion years. That’s a pretty long time for a lot of happy accidents to happen.
Yobbo
16 Feb 12 at 5:40 am
No, I don’t accept that argument. There are a lot of laboratories studying such things right now, Yobbo. And now there is more life on earth than ever before. If there were accidental beneficial mutations, we should be able to see them in our lifetimes, considering the volume of life we study and the length of our lifetimes.
Oh come on
16 Feb 12 at 6:06 am
It only seems far fetched because it is difficult to imagine the time span involved.
No, the timespan is easy to imagine. What is difficult to imagine is that an unintelligent process could actually produce such a complex and intricate organ like an eye given all the possibilities for failure that might ensue and over such a long period of time. None of which suggests that such a process is impossible.
It would be nice for you to show briefly why the cosmological argument, for instance, is both stupid and ignorant. This should be easy given the ‘stupidity and ignorance’ of figures like Aristotle, Aquinas, and Leibniz, among others.
dover_beach
16 Feb 12 at 6:23 am
PS. Yobbo, I’ve had this argument many times and it always revolves around the time span with the evolutionists. Who are you, mere human – confined to this earth for 70 or 80 or so years, as I am – qualified to determine that 6 billion years or one billion years or 500 trillion years is enough time to evolve a human eye?
As I’ve said before, I just don’t know. You seem rather more dogmatic about the issue.
Oh come on
16 Feb 12 at 6:29 am
damned drink. I should have said “Who are you, mere human – confined to this earth for 35 or 40 or so years, as I am – to deem yourself qualified to determine…:
Oh come on
16 Feb 12 at 6:34 am
Yobbo,
Lamarckian theory has made a comeback recently.
I don’t know why it was junked so harshly. It is complimentary to, not in opposition to Darwinian theory.
A six day creation dealy isn’t even properly a literal translation of the bible from the Hebrew (the early church fathers recognised this).
Everyone ought to shut up and just accept evolution no matter their faith.
.
16 Feb 12 at 7:08 am
Oh come on
Such things have been observed in natural history and slight mutations have been observed to occur in 20 years or so in lab experiments.
Wiki says 400 000 years for the human eye.
.
16 Feb 12 at 7:11 am
Oh, really? Links? Not dismissive. Sceptical. Curious. Hell, I’m agnostic.
Oh come on
16 Feb 12 at 7:13 am
As an aside, “Wiki says 400 000 years for the human eye” ain’t really floating my boat, so to speak. How could you, or me, or the brains trust of “Wiki” (and I’m not even absolutely sure what that can be defined as at this point) can decide that’s how long it takes to form a human eye…
Hey greenies! We only have 3 years to save the polar bears from Global Warming!
A low blow, I know. But it sounds like one of those numbers. Sorry, but it does.
Oh come on
16 Feb 12 at 7:17 am
No the wiki article is properly referenced etc. No jokers editing articles in the dead of night etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye
They have bit of a hard on for Dawkins but so what.
.
16 Feb 12 at 7:20 am
And every evolutionist who’s engaged me on this issue has provided me with evidence of Natural Selection, which I don’t deny and have claimed is in fact axiomatic. It’s the beneficial accidental mutations that interest me.
Oh come on
16 Feb 12 at 7:21 am
400,000 years. Quite a number, that.
Oh come on
16 Feb 12 at 7:23 am
Sorry, Dot. I’ve read it but I’m skeptical. I don’t know.
Oh come on
16 Feb 12 at 7:27 am
I’ve already given you an example of one, that being the sickle cell anemia mutation. Lactose tolerance is another.
Yet another here from Wikipedia:
More on sickle cell and blue eyes.
There are plenty of examples of beneficial mutations, I’m not going to copy/paste any more until you accept these ones first. Call it a test to see if you are arguing in good faith.
Yobbo
16 Feb 12 at 8:18 am
By the way OCO i’m not sure why you are so obsessed about the human eye. Humans, like all land animals, evolved from the first terrestial animals – amphibians, who themselves have perfectly functioning eyes – as did their immediate ancestors the lungfish. By the time upright walking apes emerged a few million years ago, there had been 300 million years for their eyes to evolve from fishy ones to mammalian ones.
Yobbo
16 Feb 12 at 8:22 am
Yobbo, raising evolution was an effective diversion but since almost all intelligent Catholics and the like have no problem with evolution shouldn’t you be dealing with arguments that are more likely to illustrate their “stupidity and ignorance” like the cosmological argument? At the moment, your style of argument is like that of a creationist arguing that evolution is wrong because it claims that sometime in the distant past a chimpanzee gave birth to a human being.
dover_beach
16 Feb 12 at 8:50 am
Superb piece linked by insatpundit by John Leo, The Fiscal Times on how religious organisations are being coerced into be3having like secular ones:
How Obamacare Reignited the Culture Wars
“But this story isn’t just about birth control. It’s also about the “morning after” pill and sterilization, and down the road it will be about suicide pills, genetic engineering, abortion and mandatory abortion training, transgender operations, and a whole new series of morally problematic procedures about to come over the horizon. One very large principle is at stake: the right of religious believers to apply their own moral principles at their own institutions.
The elites in this country, once largely Episcopalian, now almost entirely secular, are determined to limit if not banish the influence of religion in the public square. This line of thinking, much of it derived from political philosopher John Rawls, means making sure that religious organizations behave precisely like secular ones.
Anti-discrimination law is the principal battering ram used against religious believers and their institutions”
RTWT
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 9:06 am
As it will be here, once we are ‘blessed’ with state sanctioned same sex ‘marriage’.
Rabz
16 Feb 12 at 9:11 am
I’m taking this as an admission of defeat. I don’t see what Catholics have to do with anything. It’s Rick Santorum that doesn’t believe in evolution, and the reason I brought it up was to show what a joke the US republicans have become when being a creationist is seen as something desirable to have in the person you are hoping will be running the world’s most powerful country.
Yobbo
16 Feb 12 at 9:18 am
I’m taking this as an admission of defeat.
How is it an admission of defeat? You’ve failed to provide an example of Catholics “attempting to influence government policy employing arguments based “on a fairy story written 2000 years ago”. You’ve failed to show how anyone that finds the cosmological argument, for instance, at all convincing as an argument is both “stupid and ignorant”, and you’ve now lied again by claiming for the second time that Santorum doesn’t believe in evolution. You’ve been retreating all morning, Yobbo.
dover_beach
16 Feb 12 at 9:46 am
I see Yobbo is using the utterly irrelevant but profitable wedge that the leftists use almost invariably dishonestly.
Whoda thunk it?
And I thought Yobbo just lurved ‘controversy’.
He like the leftists thinks he can profitably demagogue in lieu of an argument.
The similarities ‘twixt Yobbo and elite statists is uncanny
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 9:47 am
JFK’s religion banned eating meat on Fridays. There were actually Southern Democrats who pushed the line that if elected, JFK would ban restaurants from serving anything but fish on Fridays.
I thought we all got over our fear that Presidential candidates would (a) want to, and (b) be able to, impose their personal religious beliefs on the citizenry at large… back in the 60′s.
spot
16 Feb 12 at 9:51 am
As noted at Reuters, the bishops are supporting legislation to let anyone have conscientious objection to things in health cover:
If that is correct (the Bishops would be happier to see stupid inconsistencies across employment insurance) it shows what appalling judgement they are displaying.
steve from brisbane
16 Feb 12 at 10:25 am
Steve
Just give up on the Americans they make Australia’s worst politicians look really good.
kelly liddle
16 Feb 12 at 10:38 am
Look, conscientious objection is a silly idea; the problem here is that employers are asked to provide health cover for employees. Remove that nexus and this imbroglio dissolves.
dover_beach
16 Feb 12 at 10:47 am
I am not descendant from fish. Other people might be though.
Gab
16 Feb 12 at 10:53 am
I have read, d-b, that the problem is that employers and employees both feel that they get better tax treatment by having insurance as part of the employment package (as opposed to just getting higher pay and buying their own.) It seems so entrenched that no one is talking about compulsorily ending it. Which means reform has to be done via setting standards for insurance that is provided.
The wikipedia article on the mess is pretty informative.
steve from brisbane
16 Feb 12 at 10:57 am
Gab
You like me have our most ancient ancestors as what we could call slime. Gives a whole new idea to ancestor worship that the Chinese do.
kelly liddle
16 Feb 12 at 10:59 am
Are you fucking serious? The Detroit bailout was largely due to this. The Detroit bailout also cost 5% of GDP that year.
.
16 Feb 12 at 11:02 am
Slime might be in your family tree, Kelly, but not mine.
Gab
16 Feb 12 at 11:07 am
Sorry.
5% of GDP spread over three years.
The Auto industry reckons if it disappeared that income would fall by 0.2% of GDP, whereas the least efficient industries (which the auto industry fits in) have ratios of over 25:1 for the cost of jobs saved to wages. This occurred over 2008-2010.
They could have been largely spared from recession if they let these industries fail. A large cost of these industries is health insurance.
.
16 Feb 12 at 11:22 am
I have stuck with USAA for my American health insurance needs. I’m happy with that, because I can choose exactly what I want to be insured for (ie I have opted out of “preventative” care). I can also have an HSA, Health Savings Account, so that I get preferential tax treatment on savings that I can then spend on things I prefer to “self-insure” (pay out of pocket) for.
American citizens are (at the moment) free to buy their own policies covering whatever they want, you know.
What do so many of you Leftoids have against “choice”?
spot
16 Feb 12 at 11:23 am
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSqxVMbml_k
More laughable stimulus economics.
As for the cost of auto workers, CNS had an article on this, the cost per worker was $1.54 million per job.
This is easily 25 times the average salary, and 25 times 0.2% = 5%.
The auto bailout cost 1.3% of US GDP for three years. A large proportion of auto worker compensation is health insurance. Steve thinks employers “like” this.
.
16 Feb 12 at 11:32 am
spot, the point being that people who have to rely on their employer benefit have no choice, as many would not be able to afford additional cover.
Everyone knows it is a messy and unduly complicated system, and that for the well paid who can insure for as much as they like, you can get great health care in the States.
But your much beloved “choice” has left them with an expensive system that does not serve many people well.
By most people’s reckoning, they would, as a society, have been better off going off with universal health insurance scheme when it was first mooted decades and decades ago.
We still have lots of “choice” in our system.
steve from brisbane
16 Feb 12 at 11:34 am
Spot, despite your experience and knowledge of both US and Aust healthcare systems, Steve da Expert sez shut up.
Gab
16 Feb 12 at 11:35 am
“So when I say that the fashion of using Sickle Cells in Biology and Medical Textbooks to claim that Darwinian Evolution took place by natural selection is a defect in clear thinking, I know what I am talking about. The fact that the Sickle Cell Trait [Norm/Ache as I have called it in Genetic Counselling (AS)] like my mother, does not die from Falciparum Cerebral Malaria in childhood, as the Norm/Norm (AA) and Ache/Ache (SS) do, to balance the polymorphism, should never be cited as proof that Natural Selection has propelled one-celled organisms in proto-antiquity to progress to the multi-organ multi-cellular reader of this message on the BBC website. Not surprising that Professor Hoyle described such thought processes as nothing short of superstition. ”
“Sickle-cell disease
Sickle-cell anaemia is caused by an inherited defect in the instructions which code for the production of haemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying pigment in red blood cells. You will only develop the full-blown, serious disease if both of your parents have the defective gene. If you inherit the defect from only one parent, the healthy gene from the other one will largely enable you to escape the effects of this serious condition.
However, this means you are capable of transmitting the defective gene to your offspring, and it also happens that such carriers are less likely to develop malaria, which is often fatal. Being a carrier of sickle-cell disease without suffering it (heterozygosity is the technical term) is far more common in those areas of the world which are high-risk malaria areas, especially Africa.
This is good evidence that natural selection plays a part in maintaining a higher frequency of this carrier state. If you are resistant to malaria, you are more likely to survive to pass on your genes. Nevertheless, it is a defect, not an increase in complexity or an improvement in function which is being selected for, and having more carriers in the population means that there will be more people suffering from this terrible disease. Demonstrating natural selection does not demonstrate that ‘upward evolution’ is a fact, yet many schoolchildren are taught this as a ‘proof’ of evolution.”
(Felix I D Konotey-Ahulu)
“Felix I D Konotey-Ahulu is Dr Kwegyir Aggrey Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics University of Cape Coast Ghana. He trained at London University’s Westminster Hospital School of Medicine qualifying MB BS in 1959, and proceeded with the Doctorate in Medicine while working at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital and University of Ghana Medical School. He distinguished himself in Sickle Cell and other Clinical Haemoglobinopathy. He investigated AIDS at the grass roots in African countries when the pandemic began, and wrote extensively about his findings. He has made some discoveries in Tonal Liguistics. He made several discoveries in Clinical Medicine and has received many Awards.”
(You can read more about the man here.
It’s a long way from Romney and Obama, but a valid contribution to the discussion, I hope.
Ellen of Tasmania
16 Feb 12 at 11:39 am
So I read, Gab.
More than Delingpole, Andrew Bolt and Catallaxy.
steve from brisbane
16 Feb 12 at 11:39 am
Yes Steve, you read TIME
http://www.theonion.com/video/time-announces-new-version-of-magazine-aimed-at-ad,17950/
.
16 Feb 12 at 11:41 am
Lol.
Steve scans leftist blogs to cutn’paste or plagiarise thier ‘critiques’ to troll on Delingpole, Andrew Bolt and Catallaxy.
He subaequently has the original idea ( his only one) that he’s well read……
Lol
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 11:55 am
Oi. Obama at 50% in CNN Poll.
Oh well…..
Alex Pundit
16 Feb 12 at 11:59 am
Yep. Having been schooled by an Expert on Everything from a Brisbane pub, reckon I’d best get back into my box.
spot
16 Feb 12 at 12:04 pm
Well at least Steve and me recognise that the US health system is a failed one based on cost outcome. So could all these experts please inform us of the reasons for the failure.
kelly liddle
16 Feb 12 at 12:21 pm
Bullshit.
.
16 Feb 12 at 12:22 pm
[...] From Steve Kates: [...]
An Aussie take on our election « Don Surber
16 Feb 12 at 12:23 pm
I have discusse this before with you dot and how can you say that double the cost and using the holistic view life expectancy being lower is a good outcome. If that is not a failure when would you call it a failure triple the cost?
kelly liddle
16 Feb 12 at 12:25 pm
If kelly is happy to be so wilfully naive, she’ d obviously agree with WHO rankings where the USA is near level pegging with Cuba and behind 36 countries – all leftist or dictatorships of one form or another – in the healthcare stakes
The World Health Organization’s ranking
of the world’s health systems.
Today is utr lucky day, kelly.
You’re extremely fortunate.
I have this wonderfully fruitful investment opportunity in a bridge that i’d like to exclusively ofer to you for being such an inspiring thinker
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 12:39 pm
Santorum certainly holds some of the scariest and whackiest views of any Presidential candidate in memory. Unfortunately these views are his economic policy and love of big government.
Infidel Tiger
16 Feb 12 at 12:42 pm
James I am a fellow. Seems people here except me and Steve are in denial that the US has a crappy health system.
kelly liddle
16 Feb 12 at 12:42 pm
It’s bullshit and it has been explained to you why. Furthermore you are conflating health services with health insurance.
.
16 Feb 12 at 12:45 pm
That is patently untrue.
.
16 Feb 12 at 12:46 pm
Well, when was the last time you checked?
1). Abortion is not outright banned in Ireland.
2). No party or group supported US-style legalisisation when it was debated in the 80s.
3). Most protestant groups joined the Catholic Church to back the Pro-Life Amendment.
4). Travelling for an abortion is not banned.
Is that it, Yobbo?
This is your example of how de Christians are banning everywhere?
No – the ban addicts in today’s Western world are the Bloombergian/Canadian/Roxonian/EU lefties and atheists.
As for the merits of banning abortion, given the science, that is increasingly inevitable. The US Born Alive Infants protection Act and the late term abortion ban were overwhelmingly passed by Congress with virtually zero input from the Catholic Church.
Abortion is on the way out, culturally. If Ireland is leading the world on that, good for them.
C.L.
16 Feb 12 at 12:46 pm
Now you are conflating the cost of healthcare with the quality of healthcare!
Fuck me dead a “debate” with you Kelly is frustrating. You don’t even know what the fuck you are talking about. Do you know how hard it is to have a discussion when the other discussant keeps on forgetting the frigging subject matter!?
.
16 Feb 12 at 12:47 pm
Meant “banning everything“
C.L.
16 Feb 12 at 12:48 pm
You guiys will have to excuse Kelly. He’s been on the piss since 10a.m… 1997.
Infidel Tiger
16 Feb 12 at 12:49 pm
Last time I checked, BAIPA was an illegal statute.
I thought we settled that a long time ago.
Les Majesty
16 Feb 12 at 12:52 pm
USA
Maternal mortality rate:
Field info displayed for all countries in alpha order.
24 deaths/100,000 live births (2008)
country comparison to the world: 121
Infant mortality rate:
Field info displayed for all countries in alpha order.
total: 6.06 deaths/1,000 live births
country comparison to the world: 175
Life expectancy at birth:
Field info displayed for all countries in alpha order.
total population: 78.37 years
country comparison to the world: 50
Health expenditures:
Field info displayed for all countries in alpha order.
16.2% of GDP (2009)
country comparison to the world: 2
Hospital bed density:
Field info displayed for all countries in alpha order.
3.1 beds/1,000 population (2008)
country comparison to the world: 73
HIV/AIDS – adult prevalence rate:
Field info displayed for all countries in alpha order.
0.6% (2009 est.)
country comparison to the world: 64
Aus
Maternal mortality rate:
Field info displayed for all countries in alpha order.
8 deaths/100,000 live births (2008)
country comparison to the world: 156
Infant mortality rate:
Field info displayed for all countries in alpha order.
total: 4.61 deaths/1,000 live births
country comparison to the world: 190
male: 4.93 deaths/1,000 live births
female: 4.27 deaths/1,000 live births (2011 est.)
Life expectancy at birth:
Field info displayed for all countries in alpha order.
total population: 81.81 years
country comparison to the world: 9
Health expenditures:
Field info displayed for all countries in alpha order.
8.5% of GDP (2009)
country comparison to the world: 47
Hospital bed density:
Field info displayed for all countries in alpha order.
3.82 beds/1,000 population (2009)
country comparison to the world: 53
HIV/AIDS – adult prevalence rate:
Field info displayed for all countries in alpha order.
0.1% (2009 est.)
country comparison to the world: 111
OK so tell me where the good news is for the US? These figures seem to be pretty conclusive that the US system is crap.
kelly liddle
16 Feb 12 at 12:53 pm
Santorum has made it pretty clear he wants to overturn Griswold.
So the currency lad is lying about the institution of the catholic church not wanting to ban shit.
Les Majesty
16 Feb 12 at 12:54 pm
Kellford, you idiot, stop confusing the healthcare as a service with healthcare insurance.
Here’s a little tidbit that will rock your boat.
We have a niece who is in the last throws of becoming a doc and went to do some studies in the US at one of their teaching hospitals on the East Coast. Smart kid and all that. She came back and suggested that it seemed their docs were offered superior training over there and came out more knowledgeable. She felt a little humiliated. She graduated in the top .6% in the state and was scoring excellent marks through medical school.
STFU about this shit and focus on buying that cab this year.
JC
16 Feb 12 at 12:55 pm
Anyone who doesn’t support abortion on demand is banned from becoming President by the Democrat Party.
Barack Obama said he didn’t know when life begins in 2008. This is the funniest and most bizarre scientific clanger in recent US history. All medical texts point out that life begins at conception.
Anyone who denies this (like Obama) is a nutball.
Santorum:
This is perfectly legitimate. There many practical problems with evolutionary theory and it is very badly understood. In most discourse, it amounts to: “x creature was a slug and then it evolved into an elephant ‘n stuff.” It needs a lot more work.
C.L.
16 Feb 12 at 12:57 pm
Santorum isn’t the Catholic Church, dummy. He’s just a big government statist sweater wearing pillock. Nice guy though.
Infidel Tiger
16 Feb 12 at 12:58 pm
Is health insurance a part of the health system or not? So it is very likely it is part of the problem if it is.
kelly liddle
16 Feb 12 at 1:00 pm
ROFLMAO
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 1:02 pm
The Catholic Church has no position on Griswold.
We should also recollect that Obama believes the CIA created AIDS – so it’s possible he wants to ban something to give effect to this belief.
C.L.
16 Feb 12 at 1:03 pm
James
I am bit slow with this language, what does ROFLMAO mean?
kelly liddle
16 Feb 12 at 1:04 pm
Absolutely it does, which is what I was saying yesterday. Evolution science has basically given the opportunity for the worst to rise to the top in glimate science, as it became an political advocacy thing rather than science itself.
Certainly tiptoe (horizontal) evolution has been proved. Vertical hasn’t. I’m not suggesting it can’t be, or that it won’t but it hasn’t at this stage whereas the troopers for evolution go around implying it’s a closed book. Bullshit it is. This is exactly what’s happened in glimate science with seriously faulty models being used to force economic policy.
JC
16 Feb 12 at 1:04 pm
I can tell you from personal experience that their specialist training is significantly better than here.
Their healthcare is – far and away – the best in the world and ours is excellent.
In our defense our excellent stadards are more uniform.
We are multiples of standards better than the UK.
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 1:07 pm
Do the atheists here support their brothers’ ban on Dire Straits in Canada?
C.L.
16 Feb 12 at 1:07 pm
Kellford,
Yes, Medical insurance is part of the health system, but it is not healthcare service, you nimrod.
Stop talking about stuff you know little about.
JC
16 Feb 12 at 1:08 pm
FFS Kelly you’re admitting you don’t know what you are talking about!
Reasons why the US has high mortality and infant mortality rates
1. High legal and illegal immigration from lower income countries. Think of pre-existant conditions, poor education of the sub population, epigenetics and the likelihood not to seek medical attention.
2. The world’s policeman: the US loses a lot of young men in combat.
3. The war on drugs: Many die directly, with half a million in prison on drugs related charges, every day in prison reduces their survival rate and life expectancy.
As for costs, absurdly rigid professional licensing is a major cause for the US blowout in health costs.
US Health insurance is cheap, check out some plans for yourself.
.
16 Feb 12 at 1:08 pm
kelly.
There’s new search engine service called google…..
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 1:08 pm
It’s internet jargon, Kelly.
Here: ROFLMAO
Gab
16 Feb 12 at 1:12 pm
I pay around 2,500 bucks a year for my kid, which is a system that basically resembles ours. Unlike the premium plans we were on, she can’t first go to a specialist, but has to first see an internist for a referral. It covers drugs but not dental.
It also covers hospitalization. If she’s in the city she has several choices of 24 hour clinics she can attend.
That’s not a very expensive plan.
JC
16 Feb 12 at 1:12 pm
Dot
It insurance is not cheap as I have explained before because you have to pay more for the public system in taxes in the US than here. It is just not reasonable to say that there are a few reasons why someone would die younger so what? Could it be those less beds for higher costs is a problem. So effectively we must have more people in hospital because surely Australia’s hospitals don’t let you stay there unless you have a problem. You have just claimed that there should be larger health problems in the US due to various reasons so shouldn’t they have more people in hospital?
kelly liddle
16 Feb 12 at 1:14 pm
thanks for that Gab
kelly liddle
16 Feb 12 at 1:17 pm
Not quite.
The US tax system/Medicare is regressive.
FICA is a payroll tax. It is applied regressively.
Well 1/7 of that cost is from occupational licensing.
Visit triage. Go through the regulations on medical clearance to see if that is actually true. It isn’t.
No, I explained why they have mortality rates – most of which had nothing to do with going to hospital.
.
16 Feb 12 at 1:23 pm
We know certain parts are not cheap, Kellford. It’s very difficult to understand the US system because there are so many permutations to it and there is no one US healtcare system.
My kid’s plan for instance is provided through the university she attends who in turn have negotiated deals with clinics as well as for drugs.
That’s one small example of the system that seems to work well and it appears cheap and effective.
Other parts of it aren’t so. Medicare is a fucking mess with estimates of around 60 to 90 billion of fraud each year. The fool, Krugman once compared the administrative costs of medicare and the private plans declaring medicare to be superior because he thought it was more efficiently run, as the admin expenses were lower. The idiot forget to include the estimates of annual fraud against it.
Why are you so fucking worried about healthcare all the time? Go and enjoy life instead of worrying sick about it.
JC
16 Feb 12 at 1:23 pm
have higher mortality…
.
16 Feb 12 at 1:24 pm
I am worried about the mental health of those here on this website not being able to recognise a completely crap system. That private healthcare system in the US costs as much as our entire system and it doesn’t take care of everyone so it is crap also. Great free enterprise bringing the price down hey?
kelly liddle
16 Feb 12 at 1:27 pm
Lol…please stop kelly — ur killin’ me…lmao…. oh my ribs hurt
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 1:32 pm
Kellford;
We had this discussion before. Many times Go start a blog on US healthcare.
You’re starting to bore.
JC
16 Feb 12 at 1:32 pm
Jesus Christ.
Here you go
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_differentiation
.
16 Feb 12 at 1:33 pm
Every single crony capitalist pig has their snouts in the trough in the US healthcare system. Insurance companies, healthcare providers, Pharmaceautical companies, Lawyers and probably left and right wing NGOs. There is nothing defensible about the US healthcare system except it could be argued that all the cash sloshing around does lead to increased drug research.
kelly liddle
16 Feb 12 at 1:34 pm
JC I might do that at some stage sounds like a good idea.
kelly liddle
16 Feb 12 at 1:35 pm
Insurance companies probably have the cleanest noses.
Have you looked at any US PHI plans yet?
Get rid of the FDA and renewal of patents. Let the money flow to good use and make sure the drugs get to market quickly.
.
16 Feb 12 at 1:36 pm
@ kellly
In the, I suspect, forlorn hope that you educate urself to think:
U.S. Health Care and U.S. Productivity
“According to Ohsfeldt and Schneider, this model explains 93 percent of variation in health spending internationally — much greater explanatory power than the linear (dollar-for-dollar) model (pp. 7-8). Most importantly, the United States is not at all an outlier.
This finding challenges our intuition, however, because it is hard to grasp how much more the U.S. earns than other countries, and how much buying power this gives us. According to a recent research article of mine, U.S. GDP per capita is far greater than almost any other nations’ and this is largely due to American productivity. U.S. GDP per person engaged (employed) in 2008 was $65,480, followed by Hong Kong at $58,605 and Ireland at $55,986. Some of this was due to Americans working longer hours, but mostly it was due to productivity: value produced per hour worked. Most developed countries produce between 60 percent and 90 percent of the value that the U.S. does, per hour worked.
For the four countries compared in this analysis, France was the second most productive, with a productivity rate 91 percent of the United States rate. Germany lagged at 72 percent. The table below (drawn from a recent analysis) compares the U.S. with four countries whose health care systems are often held up as admirable options: Canada, Germany, France, and Great Britain. In all these countries, GDP per capita was significantly less than the United States. The U.S. spent significantly more on health care per person than comparable countries.
Nevertheless, Americans still have much more money left over after paying for health care. Indeed, we have between $4,500 and $8,400 more income per capita than Germany or France — after paying for health care — a “bonus” of American productivity.”
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 1:43 pm
James that is interesting and to me it just shows how low the physical productivity is in the health system. So it is a massive drain on the system. To me this is an indication that governments in democracies should they have successful economies will manage to stuff up healthcare and other government regulated industries. When you are rich you can do stupid things for a while before failing. It is also a part of expanding government in general as a share of GDP. The end result is collapse in the entire system economically. So while it might be fair to say the US currently has richer people than other countries they are currently on a sharp downward slope in my opinion. Government debt levels around the same as PIIGS countries will eventually bring them un done.
kelly liddle
16 Feb 12 at 2:09 pm
What? How?
.
16 Feb 12 at 2:12 pm
Around half the physical productivity for the same money spent in Australia is pretty bad. Other parts of the economy must be earning through good physical productivity otherwise the GDP will go down either through a lower dollar or lower incomes. It could also be considered false due to the reserve status of the USD.
kelly liddle
16 Feb 12 at 2:23 pm
There’s a lot in there, Kel. So you’re saying the Dollar’s reserve status is what allows them to have what you consider to be an unproductive medical system?
Interesting.
JC
16 Feb 12 at 2:26 pm
Rooly kelly?
How so?
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 2:27 pm
Kelly:
Where are you getting all this shit from, if I may ask?
JC
16 Feb 12 at 2:28 pm
I do think that the reserve status of the USD has allowed the US government to do stupid things. I believe that Australia has never reached an extreme position with debt and government spending because we are small and nobody cares about us and until recently didn’t have AAA ratings. Now is an extremely dangerous time for Australia economically especially if Labor wins the next election because with our prized AAA rating we can run up huge debts with little effect and low interest rates until failure.
kelly liddle
16 Feb 12 at 2:33 pm
That’s just baby-talk
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 2:35 pm
Kel
Have you ever thought about the possibility that reserve status is voluntarily conferred and not commanded and in that respect the US must be doing some good things to be able to attract the capital?
Is that possibly in your model?
JC
16 Feb 12 at 2:36 pm
WTF has this got to do with high US worker productivity and the affordability of value for money and high end PHI in the US?
WTF!
.
16 Feb 12 at 2:38 pm
JC
Observations between Aus, US and Thailand. Considering history of spending and tax rates along with social policies and government effectiveness at spending and policy. It appears to be a trend that a democratic country will become rich and then become stupid.
Take these examples Snowy River Scheme versus NBN.
Aus policy about energy carbon tax and MRET versus Thai policy of better information on energy use stickers and strong encouragement to have efficient vehicles running on natural gas or LPG. Snowy River Scheme and Thai energy policy make country richer, NBN and MRET and carbon tax make country poorer. 50 years ago we wouldn’t embark on such stupidity as we do now because we are rich.
kelly liddle
16 Feb 12 at 2:42 pm
USD will lose reserve status fairly soon if nothing is done about government spending or China decides that.
kelly liddle
16 Feb 12 at 2:44 pm
Come on now. Explain this toad licking.
.
16 Feb 12 at 2:45 pm
WTF has this got to do with PHI? Are you saying someone buying the Chubb plan is “stupid” and therefore “inefficient”?
Stop licking toads!
.
16 Feb 12 at 2:47 pm
To put it simply I can be very productive if someone wants to lend me money cheaply I am the soveriegn with a reserve currency. If you want to give me a million dollars at 2% interest I will make a killing. If you cut that supply off then I can’t be productive. Same applies to companies as they are still USD assets which people will buy even if the return is lower due to reserve status. Having easier access to capital is a major advantage and guaranteed the US does not want to lose this status but they will if something is not done relatively quickly.
kelly liddle
16 Feb 12 at 2:53 pm
Christ almighty if I was still an academic and you wrote that on an essay paper I set for you on the topic of private health insurance, I’d consider committing suicide.
.
16 Feb 12 at 2:56 pm
Nothing directly to do with PHI but is just about government behaviour but PHI increases the cost of healthcare in the US as there is no incentive for them to reduce costs at the moment and they prefer higher costs anyway because they work on a margin.
kelly liddle
16 Feb 12 at 2:57 pm
Dot
Blame James he started the whole of economy arguement.
kelly liddle
16 Feb 12 at 3:00 pm
Christ almighty, shut up already or you may be charged with assisting a suicide.
WTF!
Don’t you realise their margin will be bigger if they reduce costs?
I’m done here. Next stop if I continue on this insane train of thought is a bottle of scotch, some nembutal and some Vera Lynn.
.
16 Feb 12 at 3:01 pm
Dot ok my last word on the subject reduced healthcare costs will only be a one off gain for the insurance companies eventually leading to lower revenue.
kelly liddle
16 Feb 12 at 3:05 pm
kelly baby-talk liddle at 1:34 pm:
kelly b-t at 3:00 pm
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 3:06 pm
OK it is my fault then lol
kelly liddle
16 Feb 12 at 3:07 pm
Now you want to send accounting lecturers to an early grave.
Revenue is not profit.
FFS. Buy a fucking textbook.
.
16 Feb 12 at 3:08 pm
[...] resist checking a 700-comment thread on the US elections. I shouldn’t link, but I will. While there is plenty of not-so-innocent amusement to be had, what struck me was that most of the [...]
John Quiggin » The zombie economics of austerity in Australia (updated again)
16 Feb 12 at 4:01 pm
I see the pup that is Quiggan’s remarkably inappropriate intellectual arrogance is taken for walkies again.
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 4:18 pm
Not true.
No one here is a creationist.
The idea that evolution is a complete theory, doesn’t need work or was right to deny Lamarckian evolution for decades is completely and utterly wrong.
.
16 Feb 12 at 4:19 pm
” and you must wonder how Romney manages even to stay in the race”
What the???
I live in Australia and I have seen more of Romney than I ever need or want to, ever.
The last thing that I saw Raomney espousing was that Iran is a global threat because soon they will be religious fanatics with their hands on Nuclear Weapons….and you don’t want that to happen….do you????
Well,…Mitt…I hate to point this out to you, but if the Tea Party ever get to sit in the White House, that is exactly what we will have. Religious fanatics in control of this Planets largest Nuclear Arsenal….and, the Big Red Button, as well.
Any Looney Tune who will use an argument like ‘Global Warming cannot be true because in the Bible God promised to not deliver another Flood” in the course of seeking a plum position in a US Environment Agency, is a total crackpot who puts the whole globe at risk. So yes, lets rush these idiots into the Commanders seat, give them the launch codes. How long will it take their super combover Secretary of State, Donald Trump to devise a Nuclear Arab Clearing plan to provide the free path to that oil “which is ours, and we are going over there to take it”. It is obvious why even a half baked intellect like GWB’s saw the wisdom in establishing liveable real estate far enough away,…on Mars.
And then there are all of those “average Americans” being interviewed in the streets advising that “the government has got to stop spending, and create more jobs” as they scurry home with today’s cluster of purchases from WalMart. WalMart, that American stalwart company that buys absolutely nothing “made in America”.
It is a simple message Americans. Your government is only a service, not the whole economy. If you do not start buying “home made”, you will all eventually have no jobs at all, and you will have to start taking economic advice from the Greeks.
BilB
16 Feb 12 at 5:48 pm
Presumably – after scanning the preceding dross – BilB followed the link from Quiggan’s first stage thinking, sanctimony central blog
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 5:52 pm
How long will it take their super combover Secretary of State, Donald Trump to devise a Nuclear Arab Clearing plan to provide the free path to that oil “which is ours, and we are going over there to take it”.
He wouldn’t. He’s a real estate developer. He’s gonna make the whole place look like a combo Las Vegas/Miami/Disneyland Ballardian resort.
Religious fanatics in control of this Planets largest Nuclear Arsenal
They’re the good religious fanatics.
Adrien
16 Feb 12 at 5:59 pm
Yes, you presume correctly, JamesK, and I can see why Quiggin was amused.
BilB
16 Feb 12 at 6:03 pm
There is no such thing as a “good religious fanatic” Adrien. In my experience the more “religious” a person becomes the more they are prepared to lie and cheat their way through life, and the the less regard they have for their neighbours and others. There are some exceptions of course, but they are just that, exceptions.
Praise the Lord!
BilB
16 Feb 12 at 6:10 pm
That explains all those Christian charities and hospitals. Despicable bastards.
Infidel Tiger
16 Feb 12 at 6:13 pm
Lol. Who breeds these people? Where do they come from?
JC
16 Feb 12 at 6:19 pm
You’re a complete and utter fuckwit.
.
16 Feb 12 at 6:20 pm
You uneducated, illiterate fool.
.
16 Feb 12 at 6:23 pm
There really is no such thing as a good anti-catholic, anti-religion radical secularist.
They’re all green religious zealots
except for theand there are no occasional exceptionsTry the ‘brave’ critiques on with our Muslim brethren Bill, why donthca?
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 6:25 pm
I thought that this would be time to remind ourselves what a religious nutter looks like, but alas the video has been pulled by…yes…a bunch of religious (you know, those open and honest types) organisations.
”
http://www.juancole.com/2010/11/energy-committee-chairman-candidate-says-god-promised-no-more-catastrophic-climate-change-after-noah.html
Energy Committee Chairman Candidate Says God Promised no More Catastrophic Climate Change after Noah
Posted on 11/09/2010 by Juan
Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), who will seek the Energy and Commerce Committee chairmanship maintains that we do not have to worry about climate change because God promised in the Bible not to destroy the world again after Noah’s flood.
The video I posted got pulled by YouTube as ‘spam’, which it isn’t, so I presume Google was successfully trolled; but I found another one; unfortunately it has added expletive subtitles for which I apologize. Update: A reader found a better one:
YouTube has the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW5WHkT45Vs
“
BilB
16 Feb 12 at 6:30 pm
No warming for 15 years and estimates for glaciers melting overstated by centuries. Why bring religion into this you sad Marxist fucker?
.
16 Feb 12 at 6:33 pm
JC and dot dash, great critique technique. Very enlightening. Deep.
BilB
16 Feb 12 at 6:38 pm
What is your information source, dot dash, the palm of your hand?
BilB
16 Feb 12 at 6:41 pm
Oh fuck of Marxist creep. You slurred 99.99% of religious people as psychotic cheats. You’re a lying piece of shit with baggage weighed in decades of therapy.
Your comments about economics verge on tin foil hat territory.
.
16 Feb 12 at 6:42 pm
Use google, fuck knuckle.
.
16 Feb 12 at 6:42 pm
I must be using a different google to yours, Dash Dot, because I get a completely different message to the one you seem to have extracted. Though I can see a path to your conclusions if one were to take random words from scientific studies to form and “abridged” compilation of the works. I can see that you are a creative kind of thinker.
BilB
16 Feb 12 at 7:31 pm
What The Quiggler said about this thread:
Lying sack of shit.
Oh come on
16 Feb 12 at 8:00 pm
Harry again.
Does he conveniently forget the times he’d go spastic here to the point of being moderated. Man what a chameleon he is.
JC
16 Feb 12 at 8:06 pm
Bib:
You mentioned this Illinois senator having strange ideas.
Dude, you think it could be an Illinois thing because the president of the US sat listening to sermons that the white man introduced AIDS to them blackfolk in the US of A.
The Rev., who happened to marry him, was also peddling the evolutionary line that Jews descended from pigs.
How does that stack up in you estimates?
JC
16 Feb 12 at 8:11 pm
I take it that Harry and Sinkers rarely get together over a few beers at the local?
In the immortal words of Rodney King ‘why can’t we all just get along?’
jtfsoon
16 Feb 12 at 9:10 pm
Actually the last I saw harry we were in the pub after he came to a seminar. I’ll have to remember the crank comment the next time he asks me to referee for his journal.
Sinclair Davidson
16 Feb 12 at 9:25 pm
Who’s Harry and is he also BilB the radical secularist nong?
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 9:34 pm
I don’t follow your thinking,JC. Are you suggesting that Barak Obama is somehow tainted because the minister who performed his marriage service had some strange ideas, that Obama is guilty by association?
Wow, that is a total stretch which I think you will care to retract when you have thought that through properly.
Ah! wait, people keep putting this little gem up as fast as others tear it down
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5yNZ1U37sE
God Bless America.
You have to feel sorry for Shimkus’ interns who try to become invisible by fading into the paneling behind Congressman Shimkus in this video.
BilB
16 Feb 12 at 9:37 pm
So what did you guys think of President Obama’s recent state of the nation speech?
BilB
16 Feb 12 at 9:44 pm
You gotta love it when some fresh fish arrives at the Cat and the old timers give him a right softening up.
Allow me to pile on:
BIIB, you despicable leftist nazi scum
Les Majesty
16 Feb 12 at 9:45 pm
He’s president Obama to you, dummy.
To us, he’s the Grand Mufti Clandestino, B. Hussein Obama-Soetoro aka the Great Usurper, Chancellor of the Fourth Reich, the guru of Hitlerian Marxist Alinskyitism.
Les Majesty
16 Feb 12 at 9:49 pm
You must be a fucking idiot.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245636/Glacier-scientists-says-knew-data-verified.html
The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.
Eat shit, freak.
.
16 Feb 12 at 9:50 pm
He might be President of Chicago, but he’s never been the President of the constitutional United States of America.
Les Majesty
16 Feb 12 at 9:51 pm
\
I would retract it why exactly, Bib? No stupid you tube links, just in your own words why exactly I would retract anything about Odumbo hanging around a lunatic for 20 years spewing racial hate whereas I’m supposed to think worse of some idiot that thinks nothing will happen because the world already experienced Noah’s arc.
Les, no need to soften them up. They’re already soft in the head as Bib ‘ably” demonstrates.
JC
16 Feb 12 at 9:51 pm
I couldn’t listen to it. I had a bad attack of burps through it and didn’t hear it.
What did he say Bib? Did he mention the Fast train network from Buffalo to Newark Airport like he did last time or some really boring shit like that … avoiding the fact that the asshat has a deficit of 10% of GDP to worry about.
JC
16 Feb 12 at 9:55 pm
They may, but I reckon they would be counting their lucky stars as the Demolitionists Party members usually try and fuck or orally sodomize theirs as Clinton, Weiner (Weiner Lol) et al have shown.
JC
16 Feb 12 at 9:58 pm
Sinkers is a great guy to have a drink with. Always gregarious and amusing. By the sounds and looks of things, you’d probably want to leave the bar after Harry’s 2nd drink because it appears he can’t hold his grog without getting nasty.
I’ve known a few fuckers like, seriously. They were like pets but after a drink they turn into veritable demons. One dude, I recall was a total arsehole, got really smartarsey with another bunch of blokes and got knocked out. He thoroughly deserved it and we left him there.
JC
16 Feb 12 at 10:05 pm
The truth hidden in a ball of lies.
This is so transparent Tillman. Fuck you are acting desperately.
Worst President ever.
.
16 Feb 12 at 10:06 pm
Poor Graeme.
Les Majesty
16 Feb 12 at 10:09 pm
Hey guys we are making a list of convicted Aust politicians to work out which is the most corrupt party in Australia. ALP winning the corruption stakes with a string lead. Can’t find any libs from state or fed level convicted since 2000 except for a lone Vic drink driver. Plenty of ALP pedophiles and crooks though. Check it out on the another gift from thentrade union party thread. Help add to the list guys.
John Comnenus
16 Feb 12 at 10:14 pm
No, wasn’t him. It was in NYC. He embarrassed us. This was years ago. We were in a group with this idiot, a broker now less, was getting drunker and nastier with every shot or some crap he was downing and he then started to hound another bunch of guys and he finally got knocked out.
The other dudes pointed to us thinking it was going to be on and one of the guys turned around and thanked them while he was lying there. It was the funniest thing I’ve seen for a while.
Harry kind of reminds me of Bird in his anger switch tied in with the booze. I reckon if you can’t handle the crap, you shouldn’t be doing it.
JC
16 Feb 12 at 10:16 pm
Quiggin:
Huhwut?
Is there an alternate version of this comments thread floating around out there in the ether?
spot
16 Feb 12 at 10:17 pm
Like BilB, Quiggin must be “using another version of google”.
.
16 Feb 12 at 10:19 pm
I posted a comment over at his blog pointing out the fact that he’s lying. He didn’t publish it.
Oh come on
16 Feb 12 at 10:19 pm
What a pussy.
.
16 Feb 12 at 10:20 pm
Dunno where JQ got that idea as the only doubter of vertical evolution was moi. However I suggested that I read about another plausible theory of a period when the earth was slammed by numerous comets and meteors that carried different lifeforms or settled differently causing the divergence. However doesn’t suggest creationism in the least.
JC
16 Feb 12 at 10:26 pm
I thought current theory was life evolved somewhat in parallel in water, in the air, in hot deep parts of the ocean and from extra terrestrial sources.
How could anyone in their right mind view this as “creationist” except in the weaker, mainline church (i.e non fundamentalist) way?
.
16 Feb 12 at 10:28 pm
Les.. can I ask you a serious question here.
Odumbo’s father was a Marxist. He mother was a Marxist. There was a story going around that his grandpa’s buddy may have molested him as a child and he happened to be an outirght commie. He grandparents were open commies.
Odumbo met and befriended two far left wing lunatics, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers who were far left socialists.
After Odumbo completed his affirmative action studies he went to Chicago and functioned as a community organ grinder, which is exactly what Aliniski was.
Odumbo was also closely involved with ACORN, an extreme right group.
He hung around a ‘church’ for 20 years that followed a black Marxist religious ideology. The preacher, was an out and out rat bag far left lunatic.
Let me ask you why you consider it implausible that Obumbo doesn’t harbor Marxist leanings?
JC
16 Feb 12 at 10:36 pm
I think I got lumped into the “creationist” camp, too, despite the fact I declared several times that I was agnostic on the issue.
I guess that if you’re not an unqualified supporter in evolutionary theory, Quiggler thinks you’re a creationist. Very sophisticated analysis indeed. Up there with a Chris Shiel effort for sheer penetrative reasoning and intellectual depth.
Whatever happened to CS, anyway? I remember that hilarious wank fantasy he wrote that went something like “he dived into the hot towels, clutching his treasure”
bwhahahahaha hilarious. Here’s a link for Steve from Brisbane: I’m sure he’ll find it useful http://timblair.net/ee/index.php/weblog/onan_the_historian/
And the quote “Holding tightly to his treasure, he buried himself under the warm towels”
wasn’t too far off!
Oh come on
16 Feb 12 at 10:37 pm
Sheil, not Shiel. Sorry CS
Oh come on
16 Feb 12 at 10:38 pm
Sure you mean left.
ACORN in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SmeZjF4bis
.
16 Feb 12 at 10:43 pm
Yobbo, all I’m saying is that harm is harm, religion or not. But there are grey areas where you can’t refuse people their conscience. A life-saving blood transfusion, refused for a child by their parents, is unequivocally harmful. A refused vaccination is a bit greyer; in my opinion their intuitive risk assessment is badly broken, but vaccines do have risks so I balk at making it categorically illegal to refuse them. Sometimes people’s gut instinct is right, even if I think they’re being stupid.
However the argument at hand is whether refusing to buy an insurance policy that covers contraception or abortion is unequivocally harmful. I think it’s damned clear it is not, because EVEN IF we assume that contraceptives and abortions are generally good things, they are almost never life-saving, and never expensive.
For example, it is legal to buy health insurance that doesn’t cover physiotherapy, or that doesn’t cover all dental care, or that doesn’t cover ambulance expenses. It is perfectly legitimate to exclude items from coverage.
I do not agree that refusing to pay for someone else’s contraceptives is even slightly harmful, since at less than $1 per condom, contraceptives are cheaper than bottled water and it’s one of the rare instances where “alternative medicine” ie., not having sex if you can’t afford contraception this week, is 100% effective. No, I don’t advocate abstinence-only. No, I’m not Catholic. I love condoms; sometimes I buy them just to admire their ingenious design and manufacture.
SfB sais brand-name pills cost upwards of $60 per week. Condoms are less than $1 a piece and are in health terms far superior, offering full or partial protection from many STDs, particularly the worst ones. So, there’s no health case for the pill, no pressing need to buy the most expensive pill, and the alternatives are cheap enough that the average person could cover their own expenses for a week by eating porridge instead of coco-pops.
wreckage
16 Feb 12 at 11:13 pm
oops Left yes…
JC
16 Feb 12 at 11:19 pm
Some of them cavorted with witches and heretics! No matter their views, nor their arguments, those that deign to associate with such filth must be rejected at every turn! PS: I’m not a fundamentalist; my intellectual purity is untainted!
wreckage
16 Feb 12 at 11:22 pm
$60 a month, wreckage, not $60 per week.
They aren’t expensive by most people’s standards; except for the poor, working or otherwise, who are the ones who have more unplanned pregnancies…
Steve from brisbane
16 Feb 12 at 11:39 pm
Condoms cost less than $1 per sexual encounter and protect against a broad range of STDs, including AIDS, for which purpose the pill is useless. Not only are they vastly superior in terms of health benefits, their cost is so small as to be unworthy of discussion.
wreckage
16 Feb 12 at 11:48 pm
Groundhog Day, Steve. You invented it.
Gab
16 Feb 12 at 11:49 pm
Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine endorses Rick Santorum:
“Earlier in the election, I was completely oblivious as to who Rick Santorum was, but when the dude went home to be with his daughter when she was sick, that was very commendable. Also, just watching how he hasn’t gotten into doing these horrible, horrible attack ads like Mitt Romney’s done against Newt Gingrich, and then the volume at which Newt has gone back at Romney… You know, I think Santorum has some presidential qualities, and I’m hoping that if it does come down to it, we’ll see a Republican in the White House… and that it’s Rick Santorum.”
JamesK
16 Feb 12 at 11:49 pm
Steve likes to hit it raw dog.
Les Majesty
16 Feb 12 at 11:50 pm
I also suggest that pill coverage for the poor would be a very cost-effective charity.
Perhaps a concerned Catholic, such as yourself, could start an not-for-profit with that very focus, thus achieving two goals: free Pill for poor women, regardless of employment status, and; the right of conscience for Catholics, whose views on contraception I categorically disagree with, but who are harming no-one and should be left in peace by any tolerant society.
wreckage
16 Feb 12 at 11:53 pm
And wants the Catholic Church to be forced to pay for health insurance that covers his little quirk (that of preferring less effective preventative health-care in favour of the more expensive).
wreckage
16 Feb 12 at 11:57 pm
The purported reasoning the WH uses to mask the truth of the mandate is womens’ health.
Condoms protect women’s health whilst the pill is a threat to a woman’s health with higer risks of stroke, deep venous thrombosis, pulmonary embolus.
So the mandate by cheapening the pill over condoms actually is a risk to a woman’s health.
Leftists think pregnancy is a disease but condoms are better protection against preganancy than the pill and thus make the necessity of abortifacient pills (high risk medication and predictably nausea inducing) and instrumental abortion less likely as well.
JamesK
17 Feb 12 at 12:17 am
“A refused vaccination is a bit greyer”
This is very grey because with some diseases you might cause others to get it when they are small babies who are not able to take the vaccine yet.
kelly liddle
17 Feb 12 at 12:38 am
Nice attempt at painting lipstick on a pig, as far as condoms are concerned.
But try using some common sense for a change.
Americans are still marrying younger than Australians, with a median female age of 26.
Even allowing for time off contraception to have a few kids, and a divorce, it’s pretty clear that the majority of contraceptive use over the lifetime of a huge proportion of women is likely to be while they are in a relationship.
I would bet anything you like that the typical pattern of contraceptive use is for people to use condoms just as much for their STD prevention as for contraception when they are first sleeping with a new partner. Once it becomes a permanent relationship with a high degree of trust – they just ain’t that popular for two reasons:
1. They have a substantially higher failure rate than the pill or other methods.
2. Men, apart from wreckage who seems to have a bit of a fetish for them:
don’t like using them much. I don’t think women particularly like the interruption to the timing of the whole show that they involve either.
Finally: it is clearly a dis-empowering thing to tell women that they have to permanently use a less reliable, essentially male controlled form of contraception than one they can control themselves.
Steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 12:43 am
“The Poor” can get the pill free from Planned Parenthood and other free clinics, as has been explained to you umpten times, mate.
And the $15/month generic version is 100% as efficacious as the $60/month “brand name” version.
Even in Australia, home of “Free Cheese for All!”, if you want the brand-name version of a drug (ie Keflex(TM) rather than generic cephalexin or Zofran (TM) rather than generic ondansetron) you yourself are going to have to pay out of pocket for your preference for expensive brand names.
spot
17 Feb 12 at 12:51 am
No argument from me here. Forcing people to buy insurance is a ridiculous market distortion and I would never support it.
Yobbo
17 Feb 12 at 3:19 am
Add “fantasy football league” and we might be on to something here…
spot
17 Feb 12 at 6:49 am
Dreadful attempt by steve who thinks he sees an argument he can win.
As usual it’s the strawman.
The point was the WH’s pseudo argument is false.
Childless single women break for the Dems.
In general the infantilised pop break for the Dems.
JamesK
17 Feb 12 at 8:03 am
So Yobbo, you think that it is wrong that people need (are forced) to have third party personal insurance before setting out to drive on our roads (Aust)? Meaning that if some broke drunk hits you on a pedestrian crossing and leaves you a paraplaegic unable to work and support you wife and three kids, then that is how you believe things should be?
BilB
17 Feb 12 at 8:23 am
WSJ Op-Ed: Meet the ObamaCare Mandate Committee
Think the contraception decision was bad? Wait until bureaucrats start telling your insurer which cancer screenings to cover.
“Offended by President Obama’s decision to force health insurers to pay for contraception and surgical sterilization? It gets worse: In the future, thanks to ObamaCare, the government will issue such health edicts on a routine basis—and largely insulated from public view. This goes beyond contraception to cancer screenings, the use of common drugs like aspirin, and much more.
Under ObamaCare, a single committee—the United States Preventative Services Task Force—is empowered to evaluate preventive health services and decide which will be covered by health-insurance plans.”
JamesK
17 Feb 12 at 8:33 am
You could achieve the same outcome without punishing good drivers if the road user charges were hypothecated for road and related use only such as insurance, made welfare more strict (who exactly are drunk penniless drivers going to be?) and had tougher gaol sentences. Perhaps better locations of pedestrian crossings would help. The simple solution is to make it a condition of driving on the road, but up to the road user, but as a (virtual) legally enforced monopolist the Government gets stamp duty on the insurance, GST and makes you pay the road user levy which isn’t earmarked at all.
The problem isn’t that it exists, but it is simply part of treating road users as sources of revenue. The insurance is only available to the six largest insurers in NSW. It is corporate welfare at the moment.
.
17 Feb 12 at 8:34 am
You have exhausted my patience.
wreckage
17 Feb 12 at 9:08 am
Yes, yes. Making people feel dis-empowered by not buying things they don’t need for them should be illegal.
Your argument is airtight.
Next up on disempowering women: laws restricting concealed carry should be abolished.
wreckage
17 Feb 12 at 9:10 am
Or maybe: you don’t have a good come back to my point that few married couples find long term condom use acceptable. Since I wrote that last night, I spotted an estimate from an American study that they are used by about 4% of married couples.
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 9:15 am
As for getting the pill from Planned Parenthood: I don’t know much about how that works. I would guess, however, that if you are working and get them for free via a visit to the local doctor, it’s likely to be more convenient than driving across town to a (possibly poor) neighbourhood to the nearest free clinic.
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 9:23 am
steve the conservative catholic troll from Brisbane studies medical epidemiological journals in the wee small hours.
What a hero.
JamesK
17 Feb 12 at 9:29 am
Steve, are you even an American citizen?
Why are you so concerned about American women’s “right” to “free” birth control & abortion pills anyway?
AFAIK, they’re not “free” in Australia on the PBS either. Shouldn’t you be agitating for your own countrywomen to be granted this “basic human right”?
spot
17 Feb 12 at 9:30 am
As for JamesK: go talk to the Institute of Medicine which is the body which made the recommendation to mandate contraception as a sensible measure for health care overall.
Or the the 28 States that have already mandated it, some with very few exceptions.
The mandate is now effectively on insurance companies, not the Church institution or other Catholic employer who has a problem with it.
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 9:30 am
Go talk to the Institute of Medicine….muhahhahha.
Be serious for once in your life steve.
Who do you think populated the white coats in the Rose Garden championing Odumbocare?
FACT Mag: 1,189 PSYCHIATRISTS SAY GOLD WATER IS PSYCHOLOGICALLY UNFIT TO BE PRESIDENT!
Leftist infestation destroys the integrity of everything they get control of whether climate science, universities, education, treasury, everything.
Leftists are dishonest activists and leftism trumps everything.
So for a leftist scientist, it trumps science, for a black equal rights it trumps his own race, for ferminists it trumps womens’ rights, for leftist catholics like Nancy Pelosi it trumps catholicism., etc after nausea indicing etc.
Now fvck off steve. Tend to ur chores.
JamesK
17 Feb 12 at 9:42 am
The Pro-Abortion Committee Behind the HHS Contraception Mandate
“Through a search of public records, HLI America has been able to substantiate the claim that members of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee who wrote Recommendation 5.5 have ideological commitments that raise serious questions about the supposed objectivity with which they considered the scientific evidence that led to their recommendation that the HHS mandate contraception and sterilization coverage as “preventive care.” The IOM members below have strong relationships with both Planned Parenthood and NARAL, and have actively supported pro-abortion candidates for public office. The following is a summary of some of the committee members’ political involvement:
Claire Brindis is a member of the Board of Directors of the NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation, as well as a member of NARAL’s Pro-Choice California “1969 Society,” which has been called by NARAL “a group of our most steadfast and generous donors.”
Angela Diaz is a former board member of “Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health,” an advocacy group that “work[s] to improve access to comprehensive reproductive health care, including contraception and abortion.” Until just a few weeks ago she served as the senior vice president of the International Women’s Health Coalition and was on the board of directors from 2007-2010. Her biography on the IWHC’s website (which was recently removed) stated that she “has a deep and long commitment to IWHC’s mission and to the organization.” The IWHC is a pro-choice advocacy group that declares that “access to safe abortion is a human right” and that abortion and contraception are “universal and inalienable” rights.
Francisco Garcia has donated between $11,750 and $13,000 to candidates that support abortion since 2004. These pro-choice candidates include Raul Grijava and Barack Obama.
Kimberly Gregory, as indicated by public records, has donated $35,200 to the California Victory 2010 of the Democratic National Committee in support of Barbara Boxer.
Paula A. Johnson is the Chairwoman of Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts and is affiliated with the pro-abortion National Organization of Women (NOW). This year she will be the winner of NARAL’s 2011 “Champion for Choice” award. Public records indicate that since 2003 she has given between $9,550 and $11,000 each to the political campaigns of Pro-Choice candidates including Martha Coakley, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton. She also has made contributions to Emily’s List, an organization dedicated to “electing pro-choice Democratic women.”
Roberta Ness has donated at least $2,500 to pro-abortion candidate John Kerry and to the Democratic National Committee.
Magda G. Peck is associated with a host of organizations that advocate for abortion and free access to contraception, and was on the board of directors of Planned Parenthood of Nebraska and Council Bluffs and served as both vice chair and chair of the board.
E. Albert Reece donated $1000 in 2010 to the campaign of pro-abortion politician Barbara Mikulski, the sponsor of the amendment that paved the way for recommendation 5.5.
Linda Rosenstock, committee chairwoman, has since October 2004 donated over $40,000 to pro-choice political candidates including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Barbara Boxer, and the Democratic National Committee.
Alina Salganicoff is the Vice President and Director of Women’s Health Policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a major proponent of abortion and contraception on demand. She donated $950 to the Barack Obama and Judy Feder campaigns in 2008.
Carol Weisman has made $4,500 in political donations to pro-abortion candidates including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry and Judy Feder since 2000.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of the involvement of the IOM committee members in pro-choice advocacy groups and pro-choice political campaigns. But these eleven members—out of a total of fifteen—demonstrate a more than casual commitment to the furthering of the abortion lobby. According to public record, not a single member of the committe has financially supported a pro-life candidate.”
No shit Sherlock
JamesK
17 Feb 12 at 9:53 am
~Steve’s busy penning his demand to Nanny Roxon that Mrs Steve receive free birth control and abortion pills~
spot
17 Feb 12 at 10:02 am
This is by no means an exhaustive list of the involvement of the IOM committee members in pro-choice advocacy groups and pro-choice political campaigns. But these eleven members—out of a total of fifteen
But, but, the decision was entirely medical!
More seriously, reading that list confirms that many of these institutions, like the Institute of Medicine, do nothing more conceal the fact that many of these decisions are political.
dover_beach
17 Feb 12 at 10:29 am
Don’t try that Hitlerian jive on with us, you lying Marxist git.
If you are trying to get your arse moderated, you are going about it the right way, champ.
Les Majesty
17 Feb 12 at 10:38 am
What a farce, JamesK: committee members who have donated relatively small amounts to Democrat candidates are all deemed to be too “pro choice” to make insurance recommendations. (Which, by the way, do not include mandating that abortion be part of the cover.)
Maybe if Republicans made more of a name for themselves in promoting women’s health initiatives instead of working out how best to reduce taxes for the rich, they might get some support from doctors and the like who work in women’s health policy.
And to anticipate your complaint that contraception is included abortion drugs:
* the “normal” morning after pill is understood to primarily work by preventing ovulation;
* the new “Ella”, which can work up to 5 or 7 days later may also work by preventing ovulation, but presumably must be interfering otherwise in some cases.
* I am told by a doctor friend that the only IUD used in Australia now is Mirena, it also works by preventing ovulation by releasing hormone. I do not know what IUDs are common in the US, but other ones can work by interfering with sperm’s ability to reach the egg.
* despite pro-lifers having complained that the contraceptive pill might sometimes interfere with implantation, no one not associated with right to life causes seems to believe it.
* RU 486: the drug that is clearly designed and used as a “chemical abortion” is not covered by the contraception mandate.
In short: for most methods of contraception, they work by preventing fertilisation in the first place.
The main one which one would have doubts about the primary way it works is probably Ella – but there is no way that is going to be used as a regular form of contraception.
Personally, I think that removing Ella from the list of contraception covered might allay some Catholic fears; but the problem is that the Right to Lifers are so dogmatic (insisting that even the Pill can sometimes interfere with implantation) they are likely to say they are still not satisfied.
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 10:48 am
Steve. the wannabe gynaecologist.
Gab
17 Feb 12 at 10:50 am
Not yours, Gab, I can assure you.
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 10:51 am
My response jammed that right up Tillman so stop this horseshit that there is no argument against it.
.
17 Feb 12 at 10:51 am
Steve, wouldn’t employer mandated wooden penis gourds solve the problem?
Les Majesty
17 Feb 12 at 10:53 am
You at least are right on that point, Steve.
Gab
17 Feb 12 at 10:55 am
Bilb, the kind of situation you are talking about could just as easily be dealt with through criminal compensation – And in fact already is for cases where a car is not involved (e.g. if instead of hitting you with a car, I hit you with a cricket bat)
The problem with forcing people to buy insurance is that it means that insurance companies can basically charge whatever they like.
Yobbo
17 Feb 12 at 10:57 am
We’ll find out Steve’s identity when we read in the papers about a guy in Brisbane arrested for tax fraud and unlicensed amateur gynecology who has his walls covered with pictures of Tony in his speedos.
Les Majesty
17 Feb 12 at 10:58 am
For a lot of people insurance isn’t worth it at all. For example a healthy 25 year old does not need health insurance. He is better off self-insuring and paying out of his own pocket in the extremely unlikely event that he needs medical care.
By forcing him to take up insurance (or more accurately forcing his employer to take it up on his behalf as in the case in the US), you allow insurance companies to overcharge to a very large degree.
Yobbo
17 Feb 12 at 11:00 am
Yobbo is right. In NSW the MCIS levies goes straight to the Government so BilB’s question is just stupid. Basically you are insuring yourself for other damages. But as I said the big six get corporate welfare for this, more or less. You also must pay stamp duty and GST on this as well as having to pay registration, stamp duty on that purchase stamp duty and two lots of fuel excise, subject to GST.
It’s just a rort for Government and big insurance.
.
17 Feb 12 at 11:10 am
Another rort is the rental bond board.
In got 39 cents interest for a bond of $1280 for living in a place for 22 months.
How the FUCK does that protect me? Can’t I just pay insurance against myself or have the cash held in escrow in a Federally insured ADI?
.
17 Feb 12 at 11:12 am
I got
FFS
.
17 Feb 12 at 11:13 am
Think it through, Yobbo. You cannot get money out of people who have none. So if the guy who shatters your spine has no money, then no amount of litigation is going to pay for your medical bills and the replacement of your income on which your family depends.
Case studies.
A friend from the past had his sports car written off by a mid twenties unemployed guy who had no license and had “borrowed” the other car from his flat mate. The guy was drunk at 8am.
Total loss for the friend and tough luck for him.
Case study 2
In more recent years a highly energetic business friend who went for a lunch time training ride slammed into the side of a car that came racing out of a blind private driveway. That guy is now a C5 quadraplegic. The total value of the assets of the person who caused the accident would not even start to cover the cost of his (the friend) recovery and ongoing life support.
Much and all as I hate paying third party personal insurance with the registration of my vehicles, there is no way in hell that i would ever argue for the removal of the system. Improve it maybe, but remove the compulsory insurance? No way.
BilB
17 Feb 12 at 11:27 am
You also reckoned you drove from the Blue Mtns to Sydney airport for work on the Thoughts on Freedom forum as an argument against tolls.
You’re full of shit pal.
.
17 Feb 12 at 11:28 am
Why didn’t your imaginary deadshit millionaire friend have his own comprehensive insurance?
.
17 Feb 12 at 11:29 am
Your other imaginary friend hit the car. Did this corporate high flyer have death and disablement or income protection insurance?
.
17 Feb 12 at 11:31 am
Why didn’t your imaginary deadshit millionaire friend have his own comprehensive insurance?
Your other imaginary friend hit the car. Did this corporate high flyer have death and disablement or income protection insurance?
Very good questions, dot.
dover_beach
17 Feb 12 at 11:51 am
Furthermore did he pay the driver for the damage to his car that he caused? Or was this in imaginationland again?
.
17 Feb 12 at 11:53 am
I find it incredulous that BilB had two friends. That they both ended up having terrible accidents is spooky beyond belief.
Infidel Tiger
17 Feb 12 at 11:58 am
Rick Santorum’s backer helps promote hip, with-it, image of Rick:
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 12:16 pm
You guys are very articulate, and such caring and sharing types. Particularly Dash Dot, the pronunciation for which I prefer Victor Borge’s rendition.
No Corporate high flyer millionaire, Dover_Beach, just a regular small business owner, but very energetic just the same (was). His ongoing life support, care and income replacement costs $750,000 per year.
While the friend was in the spinal unit there was another guy who had been backpacking in Africa. This guy fell backwards off a bar stool somewhere in the Congo and broke his neck. His life would have ended there had he not, on a whim, taken out American Express Travel Insurance at New York airport. So it cost $2 million to charter aircraft to airlift that guy back to Australia. That guy’s ongoing costs amount to $1.5 million dollars per year.
That is the problem with risk and protection, it is impossible to predict.
BilB
17 Feb 12 at 12:21 pm
And that is why we have income, health and travel insurance. Where is the justification for no- fault, third-party insurance?
dover_beach
17 Feb 12 at 12:27 pm
#
JC and dot dash, great critique technique. Very enlightening. Deep.
Oh fuck of Marxist creep.
Catallaxy is a blog based on deceit – crank theories on climate change, crank macroeconomics and cranky foul-mouthed commenters
Adrien
17 Feb 12 at 12:29 pm
His life would have ended there had he not, on a whim, taken out American Express Travel Insurance at New York airport.
Sounds to me like a preferable situation to the one that manifested. Modern people are, in the face of the fact of death, chickenshit.
Adrien
17 Feb 12 at 12:31 pm
The problem with being wise and careful, Infidel Tiger, is that eventually everyone around winds up being dead. The High School reunion group becomes an smaller select few, with not a single Libertarian (all of whom ran into one unanticipated problem or another mid life) amoungst them.
BilB
17 Feb 12 at 12:31 pm
You’re an inveterate liar.
No, it isn’t.
Except for you.
Did your friend pay the damages he owes? Why didn’t your other imaginary friend have comprehensive insurance?
So for $55 he gets an annuity and initial payment equal to a net present value of $23.4 million?
Fuck me dead you’re an insurance guru. Well hey they just have to make sure they only ever pay out on one in 425 500 policies taken and it’s solvent.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
You are so full of crap it is beyond parody.
.
17 Feb 12 at 12:32 pm
Yep. From the day you’re born, you’re heading towards death.
Gab
17 Feb 12 at 12:33 pm
Yep. From the day you’re born, you’re heading towards death.
“I don’t deserve to die. I was building a house!”
“Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”
BANG.
spot
17 Feb 12 at 12:52 pm
Panel Behind ObamaCare Abortifacient Mandate Dominated by Abortion Advocates and Democratic donors.
Gab
17 Feb 12 at 1:07 pm
jesus, BilB, you’ve got some bad voddoo around you. Remind me not to be your friend. I don’t want to be cripppled (alternatively you could just be making all this up)
jtfsoon
17 Feb 12 at 1:10 pm
BilBo Bagwash is a fucking communist stooge.
Ignore his Hitlerian troll bait about no-fault insurance.
Les Majesty
17 Feb 12 at 1:20 pm
Meanwhile, happy days are here again.
http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/02/how-the-gop-went-back-to-the-1950s-in-just-one-day.php?m=1
I think this is a genius strategy from the GOP. One that all liner yards can get behind.
Les Majesty
17 Feb 12 at 1:23 pm
Not liner yards – LIBERTARDS
Damn you, autocorrect!
Les Majesty
17 Feb 12 at 1:24 pm
What he really needs is a backer who’s a former Nazi collaborater.
There’s nothing more hip than that.
Interestingly, the Nazis had the same kind of abortion and contraception policy as Obama.
C.L.
17 Feb 12 at 1:27 pm
If Santorum didn’t exist, Obama would have had to invent him.
Infidel Tiger
17 Feb 12 at 1:28 pm
It’s far more fun to rip him to shreds. Plus his no fault claptrap has been discussed.
.
17 Feb 12 at 1:30 pm
Hitler mandated no fault insurance for anyone who drove a Volkswagen (or “nazi sled” as I call them) on zee autobahnen.
Coincidence? Doubtful.
Les Majesty
17 Feb 12 at 1:30 pm
Proof that only Nazis wear rubbers:
http://robertlindsay.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/s640x480.jpg?w=500
Les Majesty
17 Feb 12 at 1:36 pm
I figure that Catallaxian distrust of something as sensible as compulsory third party car insurance makes them a good market for lucky charms. Since I’ve taken to wearing a Roman phallic amulet, I’ve been able to cut my insurance premiums in half.
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 1:37 pm
around your neck?
Very apt, Steve.
Gab
17 Feb 12 at 1:40 pm
Here are some Nazis invading Russia with a pocket full of frangers and a no fault policy in the glove box of the Panzer.
http://www.fprado.com/armorsite/TIGER-1%20PICS/Tiger_DR_Zihtomir-02.jpg
BilBo Bagwash finds this image heartwarming, because he’s a Nazi.
Les Majesty
17 Feb 12 at 1:41 pm
Fuck me. Please get off the site. We all want to live.
And the way
Bullshit.
Even a global express would cost multiples less than that.
Jc
17 Feb 12 at 1:42 pm
Steve, it has been discussed why it isn’t sensible as you think and is at least in need of reform:
*People drive without it anyway, so you ought to get personal cover anyway for yourself and anyone in your car.
*It is at present corporate welfare with legislated anticompetitive practices
*It may be a fine principle to allow road owners to set rules, but ‘we’, vested in the Crown, are the owners. ‘We’ also impose monopsonistic pricing on ourselves.
*It is a tax sinkhole to boot – totally unaccountable, non earmarked and doubly taxed in a series of unfair and inefficient taxes and double taxation.
*It provides no incentive to the state to minimise road accident damage to persons such as safer design of pedestrian crossings, lighting or dual carriageways.
*The fee is taken apart into separate functions, including MCIS levies – so it is basically like a victims of crime payment anyway.
*Road negligence rules are actually lax, as per the lack of incentives to prevent personal injury damages.
*Those likely to cause uncovered catastrophic damages are subsidised to drink and drive through welfare.
.
17 Feb 12 at 1:43 pm
The Democrats’ and Nazis’ policies (if not, praxis) on abortion, the disabled and contraception are indistinguishable.
That shouldn’t be surprising given Planned Parentood’s white supremacist origins or the views of Marie Stopes International’s Nazi foundress.
The Democrats also shared Hitler’s view of blacks.
They had the KKK, he the SS.
C.L.
17 Feb 12 at 1:47 pm
Les might like this World War One poster at the Wikipedia post on the history of condoms.
Surgeon Sage: I like that.
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 1:48 pm
Oh? So your good chum Les has a condom obsession too?
Gab
17 Feb 12 at 1:50 pm
Steve, with your personality you don’t need to concern yourself with contraception.
Infidel Tiger
17 Feb 12 at 1:51 pm
You’re week isn’t complete unless you’ve found at least 3 ways to slip “praxis” into a comment, is it CL?
Can’t you swap to another never used intellectual wank word and give us a break for a month?
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 1:54 pm
Your week…dang it.
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 1:54 pm
Really BilB? All of your socialist mates end up dying by their own fault and demand to sue the third party victims of their negligence.
Somehow you think this is an argument for CTP.
.
17 Feb 12 at 2:08 pm
SfB, I have answered all your points, most of them several times. I’m done typing now. It’s nothing personal, it’s just I get bored of winning after a while.
wreckage
17 Feb 12 at 2:12 pm
You’re “winning” in the CL-ian, Charlie Sheen sense only.
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 2:22 pm
-
Barack ObamaAdolf HitlerC.L.
17 Feb 12 at 2:25 pm
Steve, you’ve been flogged harder than a donkey in a Tijuna sex show.
All you have left is our pity.
Infidel Tiger
17 Feb 12 at 2:28 pm
- Democrat Party icon and Planned Parenthood founder, Margaret Sanger
C.L.
17 Feb 12 at 2:34 pm
- Letter from Democrat Party icon and Nazi, Marie Stopes, to Adolf Hitler, August 1939.
C.L.
17 Feb 12 at 2:36 pm
Surgeon Sage say: IT, you’re a boob.
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 2:40 pm
And, of course, the country with the very best integrated no fault accident insurance system is New Zealand.
I think that Quiggin was right again. This thread will make it to 700 comments.
BilB
17 Feb 12 at 2:43 pm
Jeesh
She was writing love poems to hitler . How sweet.
No biggie the current prez used to hang with a terrorist
Jc
17 Feb 12 at 2:50 pm
Strange, Planned Parenthood seems to have missed the eugenics message:
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2011/05/25/study-u-s-abortion-rate-drops-except-among-poorest-women/#ixzz1mbjQ8lpe
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 2:51 pm
Quiggin doesn’t like any polite criticism so we pile on here with nastier stuff.
NZ is rooly good is it BilB?
Does everyone “smart” like you drive 100 km to work every day?
Can you get travel insurance for eleventy billion dollars?
Do all the libertarians die before they turn 40?
All are religious people mistrusted?
Can negligent cyclists sue car drivers for the damages they themselves cause?
Does it cost $4 million a year to look after an invalid?
You’re a joke, pal.
.
17 Feb 12 at 3:03 pm
Planned Parenthood loyally continues the tradition of its founder: eliminating as many blacks as possible.
The party of the Ku Klux Klan – the Democrats – encourage them in their work.
http://www.npr.org/2011/07/18/138473348/debate-boils-over-african-americans-abortions
C.L.
17 Feb 12 at 3:12 pm
So abortion supporters are now clearly involved in racial hygiene. ‘Imperfect’ babies are routinely killed and in the US, abortion disproportionately slaughters blacks, Latinos and Native Indians. Planned Parenthood – founded by KKK supporter Margaret Sanger – deliberately targets minority neighborhoods. Also, abortion everywhere kills more females than males – which means that abortion supporters not only hate the disabled and the non-white but also females. Abortion will, I think, be illegal in the not too distant future.
C.L.
17 Feb 12 at 3:17 pm
LOL!
m0nty
17 Feb 12 at 3:19 pm
Low income has nothing to do with it, hey CL?
No, it’s more likely all the Planned Parenthood bureaucrats who close the door to the office each morning before pulling open the curtain that hides the Hitler photo on the wall, and giving the Nazi salute.
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 3:20 pm
monty,
This guy actually reckons that you can pay out $55 and get an insurance payout with a NPV of around $24 million.
Don’t take sides too eagerly, this bloke is a braindead dropkick. I’m not using “hyperbowl” either.
.
17 Feb 12 at 3:21 pm
Yes. That must explain the result of the survey in Australia in 2010 which found:
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/national/call-for-early-abortion-to-be-lawful-poll-20100704-zvtt.html#ixzz1mbreIVfr
CL, you and your ilk seem not to have noticed, but women are just walking past you while you stand on the blogospheric street corner telling them not to use contraception, make sure their husband always finish inside, and have any baby that results.
If you want abortion to be reduced, you need to be realistic about human nature and contraception.
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 3:27 pm
So you admit that Planned Parenthood targets poor blacks.
Thanks.
C.L.
17 Feb 12 at 3:33 pm
I’ve never told women what to do, contraception-wise.
Abortion fanatic and child murder advocate Barack Obama is telling women and men what to do with their companies and their money.
He is intruding into the bedrooms of America like no president ever has before. Not since Bill Clinton last raped somebody, anyway.
Nice try with the Obama talking point, though Steve.
LOL. Feminist Steve returns to his favourite cause – the right of men to ejaculate anywhere but a vagina.
Note here that Steve the devout ‘Catholic’ foe of abortion is suggesting (like Margaret Sanger) that some babies should be exterminated.
Of course they should have any baby that ‘results.’
C.L.
17 Feb 12 at 3:44 pm
Way to avoid the key point – your suggestion that abortion will “be illegal in the not too distant future” is so plainly not supported by polling – here or in the US – it is evidence you live in a dream world.
The Obama mandate leaves it entirely up to women whether they take advantage of the contraception or not.
The Catholic Bishops, by being against increased availability via insurance if the boss happens to be a Catholic, is, of course, the one seeking true interference with what can take place in the bedroom.
Your spin is laughable.
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 3:51 pm
If all preganant mothers were made to look at a scan of their unborn baby before aborting it, I’d say we’d see a dramatic decrease in abortion. You’d have to be an ice cold mofo to abort a baby after that.
Infidel Tiger
17 Feb 12 at 3:57 pm
Child murder supporter Barack Obama and the Democrats also believed the late term abortion and live birth abortion bills would (and should) fail.
They are now law.
Support for abortion – for women’s right to ‘choose’ – has been plummeting for years. Almost every US pollster has found that majorities now oppose abortion outright or oppose it in most situations. Added to this – and, to some extent, driving it – is science. The science of ultra-sound, the science of premmy medicine, the science of genetics (and all it tells us about who we are as persons, in utero and ab initio) . The old ‘abortion on demand’ slogan of feminists has been abandoned. The old ‘just a clump of cells’ line has been discreetly binned. On science, the pro-abortion lobby has lost. On morality – in the public’s eyes – they have lost.
It’s very likely that abortion will evnetually become ilegal again.
But thanks for again confirming that you’re an abortion fanatic.
—————————-
The Catholic Church has no say in whether women use contraception. It teaches, they decide. They decide, they pay. There is no access or availability ‘crisis’ regarding contraception – except the one invented by busybody bedroom snooper Barack Obama.
C.L.
17 Feb 12 at 4:03 pm
A scan of most abortions would show nothing of note Infidel since the vast majority of abortions occur in the first trimester.
looks a bit like a jellyfish, or nothing in particular
Yobbo
17 Feb 12 at 4:05 pm
CL you keep saying that science agrees life begins at conception, and that’s true, it does. But not all organisms have a right to life. If they did then penicillin and eating would be illegal.
The question is when a fetus becomes a human being, and therefore acquires the right to life. And that’s a question to which there are many equally valid scientific answers.
Yobbo
17 Feb 12 at 4:09 pm
You live in a fantasy world.
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 4:10 pm
When was the last time you and your girlfriend/wife/life partner were in an obstetrcians office looking at an ultra sound of your baby?
I’d wager it was the twelth of never.
The latest 3D scans are incredibly clear.
Infidel Tiger
17 Feb 12 at 4:11 pm
At what week was the first scan done, IT? That’s the key point.
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 4:13 pm
It can be as clear as a digital TV IT, it’s still going to show a mess of goo, since that’s what a fetus looks like in the early stages of a pregnancy.
Yobbo
17 Feb 12 at 4:16 pm
http://www.babycenter.com/fetal-development-images-6-weeks
doesn’t really matter how clear the image is IT, it still doesn’t look like anything remotely human. More like a peanut.
Yobbo
17 Feb 12 at 4:17 pm
IT regardless of how clear the scan is, you aren’t going to see anything remotely resembling a human on a first trimester scan. You might see something that resembles a peanut or a kidney, but that’s it.
Yobbo
17 Feb 12 at 4:21 pm
Most scans wouldn’t be until the 6th week at the very earliest.
I’m not sure it is the key point though. If you believe in the right to abortion I’m not sure these abitrary dates of when it suddenly becomes unacceptable make any sense. What’s the difference between 12 weeks and 40 weeks for a termination? It’s just a much bigger clump of cells they have to cut up and vacuum out of you.
Infidel Tiger
17 Feb 12 at 4:26 pm
And I should reiterate that over 90% of all abortions occur in the first 11 weeks of pregnancy.
Yobbo
17 Feb 12 at 4:27 pm
Yobbo, they barely resemble humans when they are born. Looking at a scan does make it seem a damn sight more real. It would make the decision to terminate a lot more challenging than just an aspirin for a headache.
Infidel Tiger
17 Feb 12 at 4:30 pm
Leave it up to a common law rule.
If there can be a live birth, no abortion.
I don’t like abortion but I’m realistic about the ins and outs of them happening and legalities. (Like people getting stoned until they miscarry, being pushed down stairs, etc). I also have neither a womb or a vagina. Having seen what an abortion can look like it didn’t shake my policy views but it did change my personal view.
The idea of setting out to offer as many abortions as possible (planned parenthood) is a bit fucked up in my mind.
.
17 Feb 12 at 4:33 pm
Again I think you are overestimating the emotional impact of a first trimester scan. A 2nd trimester scan, sure. It looks like a baby. But that wouldn’t prevent any abortions since they would have been performed months ago.
That’s just no true. For one thing, a 24-week old fetus can feel pain, respond to stimuli and has measurable brain activity. a 10 week fetus is basically a lump of cells.
Yobbo
17 Feb 12 at 4:34 pm
IT: It was a key point to the point you were making, you twit: that scans would result in a lot less abortions.
There is a fair chance that someone has researched how much this has affected abortion rates in those US states where it is required. I’ll look later.
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 4:36 pm
My personal view is that Abortion should be legal up until about 16-18 weeks. After that point you really are killing a human being.
Yobbo
17 Feb 12 at 4:37 pm
Well, that’s easy.
At conception.
Or are you saying it could be a giraffe until we wait and see?
That’s what Democrats said about slavery in the nineteenth century and desegregation in the twentieth.
C.L.
17 Feb 12 at 4:38 pm
The year is 2012, I can procure an abortion but not smoke in a pub.
Fuck me.
Infidel Tiger
17 Feb 12 at 4:42 pm
whether you can smoke in a pub should depend on the pub. dont take that for granted
jtfsoon
17 Feb 12 at 4:45 pm
Containing human DNA and being a person are not the same thing CL. There are many cases of people who were born with a conjoined twin fetus forming part of their anatomy. The condition is called “fetus in fetu”.
The extra parts have human DNA, and grow and draw blood/oxyen like your regular body. But they do not constitute a person. They have no conciousness or sense of self. They are routinely excised and disposed of in surgery.
Yobbo
17 Feb 12 at 4:45 pm
Yobbo is exaggerating somewhat (a 10 week fetus looks like this).
Still, I have no problem with the proposition that even if one is against all abortion, it is still reasonable to want any that are done legally be completed as early as possible, for the reasons Yobbo said.
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 4:45 pm
what do you define as human DNA?
Downs Syndrome sufferers have an extra chromosome. Are they human or should we be free to terminate them without repercussions even when they’re out of the womb?
jtfsoon
17 Feb 12 at 4:47 pm
Are you talking to me Jason?
As I said whether or not something contains human DNA is not the question. It’s whether that something is a person or not. And downs syndrome sufferers certainly are.
Yobbo
17 Feb 12 at 4:52 pm
Where do you think the extra chromosome came from, Jason? A passing monkey that gave the mother a fright?
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 4:52 pm
I was making the same point in an indirect way. This ‘containing human DNA’ criteria is ill defined, and is neither sufficient nor necessary. I suppose CL would say that yes, Downs Syndrome people also have a right to life but if so we are now down to saying you can have human DNA even if you don’t have 46 chromosomes.
jtfsoon
17 Feb 12 at 4:54 pm
Perhaps the mother read this thread while pregnant.
Les Majesty
17 Feb 12 at 4:57 pm
Tillman causes birth defects.
.
17 Feb 12 at 4:58 pm
I’d love to be a fly on the wall of the Tige’s gp’s office when he rocks up, sucking on a durry, and demands an abortion.
Les Majesty
17 Feb 12 at 4:59 pm
An interesting run down here of how religious attitudes to abortion have swung around over the centuries.
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 5:01 pm
Steve, I hope that survey is more reliable that your tales of how ye olde Romans would trade blow jobs for sacks of potatoes.
Les Majesty
17 Feb 12 at 5:03 pm
The irony is that the doc would demand I put out the smoke and then happily abort the baby.
Infidel Tiger
17 Feb 12 at 5:05 pm
Les, I worry more about the Scottish now. The Economist noted recently:
I believe Catallaxy drinks nights are not dissimilar.
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 5:12 pm
Ugh. Steve from Brisbane makes my skin crawl. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if one day his back yard was crowded full of cops with shovels and forensic experts in white overalls carting out clear plastic evidence bags full of body parts.
Oh come on
17 Feb 12 at 5:14 pm
Steve, your google cache must be a bio-hazard.
Infidel Tiger
17 Feb 12 at 5:15 pm
I find the idea that you whack off to images of me whacking off totally revolting.
I need shock therapy and a belt of scotch.
You’re like a filthy degenerate version of Sir Les Patterson.
Do you seriously wonder why you cop so much verbal abuse?
Keep your onanistic fantasies to yourself, you sexually repressed grub.
.
17 Feb 12 at 5:16 pm
Steve has no google cache. The sure sign of a guilty conscience!
.
17 Feb 12 at 5:17 pm
What?!?! Steve has pictures of Hill whacking off, and he whacks off to them?
Mark, why did you send Steve pictures like that?
Steve, just why?
And I thought this thread couldn’t get any weirder.
Now excuse me while I go whack off to a picture of CL in an SS uniform.
Les Majesty
17 Feb 12 at 5:21 pm
Les you are seriously not helping.
Let me you distract you.
Campion! Linebacker. Pape. Kosovo. Obama. Santorum.
.
17 Feb 12 at 5:23 pm
Yes, that line did read like an accidental admission that dot has some photos on the net that he would rather not discuss.
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 5:23 pm
You filthy degenerate. You said you imagined such things, conservative Catholic Steve.
Sinclair. Is sexual harassment a good enough reason to ban Steve? Thanks.
.
17 Feb 12 at 5:25 pm
Well. The tone at Catallxy has dropped to stupid levels.
Steve, do you ever think of anything else other than wanking?
Sinclair, seriously, why do you allow such dirty school boy humour at the Cat? It’s not even funny.
Steve’s low class smuttiness really brings the place down.
Gab
17 Feb 12 at 5:28 pm
Gee, it would just be like what happened to that Tillman guy all over again.
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 5:33 pm
Steve,
This just goes to show you ought not to be banned for being a sexually confused twerp, but one dumb motherfucker.
.
17 Feb 12 at 5:36 pm
Go for both. You won’t be wrong.
JC
17 Feb 12 at 5:43 pm
Yes, Gab. I am interfering with the insightful commentary such as (the easily shocked) dot’s that all feminists need is a good f*ck?
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 5:47 pm
Steve
You disturbed person.
1. Dot’s most likely correct.
2. He makes one comment and it is not smutty.
3. He makes one comment, he does not comment on the subject for four to five hours a day, unlike you.
Lift you’re game. I’m sure your wife would be most proud of what you write. I pity her.
Gab
17 Feb 12 at 5:52 pm
your game
Gab
17 Feb 12 at 5:52 pm
Anyway, after that diversion, encouraged by that Les Majesty guy and my reading The Economist (sheesh, people are acting as if I got it from a subscription to Total Todgers Monthly), we can go back to discussing abortion and how CL is wrong on nearly everything.
steve from brisbane
17 Feb 12 at 5:54 pm
SfB; I had the misfortune to be raised religious and rationalist. My position on abortion is rationalist, and in my opinion some restrictions on abortion are inevitable in a rationalist society that maintains a commitment to individual rights and human dignity.
I just can’t see that terminating a viable foetus without pressing reasons can be justified without resorting to a magical, arbitrary line, before which a viable individual is of no significance, and after which is a person.
wreckage
17 Feb 12 at 11:54 pm
Wreckage, what “pressing reasons” ever justify killing a human being who has done no wrong?
Anyway, can we talk about Italian politics for a while?
Has Berlusconi endorsed Santorum yet?
Les Majesty
18 Feb 12 at 12:05 am
The question is when a fetus becomes a human being, and therefore acquires the right to life. And that’s a question to which there are many equally valid scientific answers.
No there aren’t because the question, when does something acquire the right to life, is not scientific but moral/ philosophical and so must be the answer.
Containing human DNA and being a person are not the same thing CL. There are many cases of people who were born with a conjoined twin fetus forming part of their anatomy. The condition is called “fetus in fetu”.
Quite, but a fetus does not merely “contain human DNA”, no one, for instance, imagines that my finger nail or hair constitutes a human being or person and that it because it lacks the features which in sum compose a human being. And the fact that we can distinguish a fetus from a ‘fetus in fetu” suggests that a fetus and an infant are the same person.
Yobbo (and Jarrah in the recent past), the argument you’ve just deployed is analogous to arguing that we are entitled to murder the elderly because some of them are afflicted by conditions , like severe dementia, that radically diminish their personality and thus make them something other than human beings.
The extra parts have human DNA, and grow and draw blood/oxyen like your regular body. But they do not constitute a person. They have no conciousness or sense of self.
That the introduction of ‘fetus in fetu’ was irrelevant is made plain by reference to extra parts; as if a typical fetus is ever an “extra part”. The insertion of ‘consciousness’ and ‘sense of self’ are also irrelevant because there is no evidence that infants in utero have consciousness or a sense of self at 16-18 weeks (the magical number you’ve chosen later than which abortion will be illegal); and no, responding to stimuli, pain, or measurable brain activity does not constitute ‘consciousness’ or a ‘sense of self’. And the gratuitous reference to fetus at 10-12 weeks as simply a “bunches of cells” is simply that, gratuitous. Fetuses at 16-18 weeks are also “bunches of cells”, they are simply more organised “bunches of cells”. All of which points to the problem I initially referred to.
dover_beach
18 Feb 12 at 1:19 am
There are many cases of people who were born with a conjoined twin fetus forming part of their anatomy. The condition is called “fetus in fetu”.
And it is no longer viable.
Nor does an unconscious person, nor someone who’s on particular drugs, nor in a strict sense does a toddler.
wreckage
18 Feb 12 at 1:46 am
Maybe if all the Catholics could go and live in America, the rest of us can get on developing good public policy.
Would the 1st Amendment argument apply if catholics dreamt up some conscience objection to minimum wage hikes.
What if they complain about being forced to pay decent wages, on the pretext of conscience?
If Catholics cannot accept social standards then why should society accept Catholics?
Bye, bye catholics, its been nice to know ya, but we gotta keep moving along ….
MaryT
18 Feb 12 at 10:50 am
Sometimes bigoted irrational hatred is easily sen forr ehat it is.
MartT being a priime example.
Presumably she arrived from Quiggan
JamesK
18 Feb 12 at 11:00 am
..or maybe coming home from the rave.
Gab
18 Feb 12 at 11:01 am
Then staff get fired, labour is only an input at the margin.
I wonder if mary wears sheets besides at toga parties.
.
18 Feb 12 at 11:14 am
Bye, bye catholics, its been nice to know ya, but we gotta keep moving along ….
As if the intellectual incompetence exhibited by your comments or the rabble which goes by the name, New Atheism (a movement that would embarrass the Old Atheism if it were alive to see it as it does many contemporary atheists/ naturalists like Nagel and Ruse, for instance), would see anything off; certainly not Catholicism.
dover_beach
18 Feb 12 at 1:03 pm
Nice to know the calibre of intellect we’re up against.
wreckage
18 Feb 12 at 1:49 pm
Fascist? Nazi? Or Stalinist?
wreckage
18 Feb 12 at 1:50 pm
I suppose we are all sick up to the back teeth of all these Catholic crackpots.
If they are not abusing kids, they are abusing the blogosphere.
Selective conscience-mongers are fruitcakes. Good for the 1950′s, not so good in the 70′s and all fully exposed by now.
Little wonder all the churches are mostly empty except for a few geriatrics. Lets use the sites for pizza parlours.
May be we could ask each Mormon as they return homw, could they please take one of our Catholics with them?
This will help – Clean-up Australia.
MaryT
18 Feb 12 at 2:16 pm
The scumbagess doubles down
JamesK
18 Feb 12 at 2:18 pm
This is clearly phil/freddie/isher/jinmaro/pip/jenny/loki3 etc etc.
Just fuck off and get a life you sexually confused loser.
On a humorous note, you have been called “Graeme Bird’s sycophant” by eminent biologist PZ Myers.
.
18 Feb 12 at 2:19 pm
Some of us care for kids.
Some don’t…
Guess where we put the Catholic priests?
And the joke is – they try to suggest others are “sexually confused”. Maybe they don’t read the papers or watch the news.
Maybe it was dumb-dot-dash’s Freudian slip.
MaryT
18 Feb 12 at 3:01 pm
Of course Phil. Lol
JC
18 Feb 12 at 3:05 pm
wreckage
May like to know that the worst nazi’s are catholic nazis.
Was Mannix a fascist?
MaryT
18 Feb 12 at 3:06 pm
Each child abuse case ought to be vigorously prosecuted. However the Catholic and other mainline churches has sexual and other abuse rates lower or the same as any other private or public institution.
You’re a bigot, whichever personality you have decided to be today, Jinmaro.
An uneducated, stupid, lonely unattractive bigot.
.
18 Feb 12 at 3:23 pm
Geez
Dumb-dot-dash
Are you using this site as a dating agency?
Sorry but the no vacancy sign is up as far as you are concerned.
How many times have you heard this/
MaryT
18 Feb 12 at 4:53 pm
Fantasy.
Show us the evidence.
Show us the evidence.
[Sometimes you have to punch data into dumb terminals more than once]
MaryT
18 Feb 12 at 4:59 pm
Ya reckon anyone would go near Bird’s fat, nasty sycophant? Lose the tickets Phil. No one’s buying them.
JC
18 Feb 12 at 5:27 pm
And stop pretending you’re a woman, Phil. You were born a male and no amount of pretending will change that- even cross dressing and sucking in that gullible Bird in a sort of sick Crying Game fantasy schtick you two have going.
JC
18 Feb 12 at 5:34 pm
Catallaxy – by their words ye shall know them.
and these are the ones complaining that the Left dominates intellectual endeavours and polite society.
This is just survival of the fittest.
MaryT
18 Feb 12 at 7:27 pm
Phil…
You forgot the references to you..
The term you suggested I used as abuse “orally sodomiz” wasn’t in fact any form of abuse at all, you lying sack of shit.
The term was used as a response to a leftwing idiot who suggested a climate sceptic in congress was abusing hs interns as a result of what I also think are his silly beliefs in creationism and climate science.
Like most things however,,it’s never propert to allow a leftwinger any right to a free pass, so I then compared demolition party comgressmen sexually manhandling interns either through having or trying to have straight sex with them or orally sodomizimg them as Bill Clinton had done. Congressman Weiner was the rep who came to mind.
You really are mentally poisonous Phil. You have poison in place of grey matter in that thick skull of yours.
Now head back to Birds blog and begin the abuse pretending you’re either me or my spouse like you always do. Bird sycophant.
Jc
18 Feb 12 at 8:07 pm
UPDATE ***** UPDATE ***** UPDATE ***** UPDATE *****
Why don’t these rightwingers have a language filter?
(Apart from the fact that they would then be blocked from posting anything).
catallaxy – “Australia’s leading libertarian and centre-right blog”. Another rightwing lie.
By their words ye shall know them.
MaryT
18 Feb 12 at 8:56 pm
In roughly the same bracket in terms of abuse per capita as other institutions that grant access to children.
Yes, yes, of course. There is nothing inconsistent or totalitarian about your very reasonable insistence that you be permitted to force people to violate their conscience.
Of course, when faced with a person who wants to undertake a religious purge and deport all Catholics on the one hand, and someone who swears a lot on the other hand, we should all instinctively know which way to break.
wreckage
18 Feb 12 at 9:15 pm
religioustolerance .org refers to the study
Charol Shakeshaft, “Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature,” U.S. Department of Education, 2004-JUN
As follows:
“Comparison of abuse in the Catholic Church with that in U.S. public schools:
A U.S. Department of Education report issued in 2004 examined a number of American studies into the prevalence of sexual misconduct by school staff. They found that between 3.5% and 50.3% of students are targets of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career. They found that teachers, coaches, substitute teachers were the most common offenders.
If this report is accurate, then sexual abuse by priests in the Roman Catholic church, and by other clergy, appears to pale in comparison with the abuse being experienced by children and youths in the public schools.”
While it does not clear the clergy accused of misconduct both as Christians, as clergy, and as authority figures in the lives of the young men involved, the vast majority of all cases of “abuse” were homosexual relations with boys over 16. In many jurisdictions this is considered sex, not abuse.
wreckage
18 Feb 12 at 9:33 pm
#ProTip for “MaryT”: Donning a dress and adopting a female screen name for trolling & general comment-abuser purposes in the hopes that no-one will hit back because “I’m just a guuuuuuurl!!!!” is pathetic in the extreme.
Chucklehead.
spot
18 Feb 12 at 9:54 pm
Such an hope would be sexist, wouldn’t it? I see no evidence that women are in any way inferior in debate, in terms of capacity, agility or aggression.
However, pomposity is usually a male failing these days, in which case MaryT certainly reads as male, over 40, and white.
wreckage
18 Feb 12 at 10:03 pm
Fat and ugly, oozing with olive oil.
.
18 Feb 12 at 10:12 pm
“There is an Alinskyite Marxist in the White House”
That’s funny. My spoodle is a libertarian.
Alphonse
19 Feb 12 at 8:41 pm