Aaghh, I must be spacing out something fierce.. took me 30 seconds to notice he was wearing a suit.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Atlantic's Andrew Sulivan's take on this here.

Originally was linked to this post, but went for an embed and link to some other interesting stuff. I'm just glad I could play a small role in getting this issue the attention it deserves.

The correct term is "Sissy Hawk" :

Armchair Warriors - the Sissy Hawk Brigade

A Sissy Hawk Cheer:
“All-out war is still our druthers,
Fiercely fought, and fought by others!”
-Calvin Trillin, 'Obliviously On He Sails : The Bush Administration in Rhyme'

In his list of Sissy Hawks he forgot to mention :
- Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense and intellectual guru of the Bush regime - no military service
- "Dick" Cheney - no military service
- George Tenet, CIA Director, no military service
- Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor - No military service. -
- Jeb Bush, Florida governor - No military service. -
- Rudy Giuliani, Former NYC mayor - No military service
- Pat Buchanan, MSNBC commentator - No military service.
- Ann Coulter, writer & commentator- No military service.
- Sean Hannity, Hannity & Colmes host - No military service
- Brit Hume, Fox News anchor - No military service.
- Rush Limbaugh, Radio talk show host - No military service.
- Bill O'Reilly, O'Reilly Factor host - No military service.
- Michael Savage, Radio talk show host - No military service.

>> ^Truth:
They have tried in WW2 and failed, thus were forbidden to maintain an army ever since. That is the reason why they are unable to do harm now-a-days.


The United States stopped telling the Japanese what to do with their military decades ago. The limitations of military operations placed in their constitution 60 years ago by the U.S. are now fiercely defended by the Japanese themselves. Politicians who have advocated for a larger role for the military (for instance as peacekeepers, or as logistical support for the U.S.) have faced strong public opposition. So while we may have "forbidden" them from making an army originally, it is a transformation of their culture rather than outside pressure that makes them an essentially pacifist nation today.

The autopsy on Ian Tomlinson found that he had died from abdominal bleeding, ie, the police beat the absolute shit out of him.

Then they go and do this.

The Metropolitan Police in London is a law unto itself, and is riddled with corruption and thuggery. Always has been, always will be.

They are supposed to be public servants, but they are trained with these brutish and unlawful techniques. The same exact thing happens at every single gathering or protest anywhere in the UK when the police are involved.

It's takes somebody to be beaten to death by the cops before any of this gets on the TV news of course.

You know what, if that had been a black guy they beat to death, or that was a Muslim woman they attacked in that clip (did you notice that he removed his badge number before he hit her?) the police and the government would have been hit with FIERCE protests and riots.

I cannot fathom why there hasn't been a massive public outcry in mainland England over this, or if there is, why it isn't being given any attention.

During my hiatus year between high school and college, I went on a student trip to Gambia with my jazz class at the (uniquely Scandinavian concept of) folk college I was attending. We stayed mostly in this village by the river Mini Mini Yang Bolong out in the Gambian countryside.

The occasion for the trip was some kind of cultural exchange organized by a Gambian organization who ran a center for foreign students at this village. The center consisted of several plaster and straw huts where we lived, a large pavilion where we ate our meals and a court yard where we received our music and dance lessons, all contained within a high fence in the middle of the village. At the pavilion there was a plaque advertising for a boat trip on the river, and we agreed to try it out. We had surveyed the river earlier and had found a ruin of an old boat house and an abandoned rotten canoe carved out of a tree trunk and wondered what kind of boats would take us on the river trip.

It should be said at this point that the reggae life style is very prominent among the Gambian semi rich, as our caretakers and hosts at the camp exemplified with Ganja, dreads and the works. These were the very hosts who would take us on the boat trip in, you guessed it, hollowed out tree trunks of highly questionable integrity and seaworthiness. This became apparent when we started to embark the two canoes, 4-5 people in each. The canoes sat very deep in the water with only 5-10 centimetres of clearance from the waterline to the rim of the boat. A couple of my classmates chickened out, which on hindsight probably saved our lives; the river was quite fierce and had strong currents.

We started out downstream, in it self a bad idea with only one Ganja smoking Gambian at the stern in each boat wielding a short paddle. It was then we discovered that the boats had started to leak. On top of the water already sploshing over the rim. Our Gambian captains, all calm, started back upstream while we scooped the water out of boats with our hands as best we could. The boats made little headway at first, but when our intoxicated and skillful caretakers paddled our boats along the banks of the river, the going got easier and we eventually reached the village all wet on our shoes, backsides and brows.

More stories from Gambia upon request...

That was a fierce battle.

This video needs to be promoted something fierce.

That little tortoise is a fierce predator! Look how it runs mercilessly after the fleeing tomato.

A more detailed write up.

Vancouver, with its snowboarders and kayak tours and great produce and Benetton ad-inspired hipster scene, can seem on the surface a little removed from “global issues”. Issues such as Israel’s bombing of Gaza these last few days. Not to mention the worldwide fury stirred by conflict in the Holy Land.

But, for a primer on Vancouver’s connection to the “big picture”, you couldn’t beat this afternoon’s (December 29) pro-Palestinian protest on West Hastings Street.

Palestinian flags were out in force. So were those of Israel, across the street at the small counter-demonstration. The rhetoric was exact, pungent, fierce, furious, and emotional. Speaker after speaker encouraged the 250-strong crowd to shout.

“Free, free Palestine,” Omar Shaban, vice president of the Canadian Arab Federation, chanted. The crowd returned, “Free, free Palestine.”

...

Asif Husain, who attended the event to represent Muslim solidarity, explained to the Straight why he supports Hamas.

“They’re in a difficult position,” he said. “There is no solution to the peace problem so far. Sixty years have gone by with no end in sight.”

Across the street, a yarmulke-bedecked Stephen Burgher agreed there is no obvious solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“They [Palestinians] want to be ‘free to the sea’ so they want no Israel left,” he said. “I don’t think anyone over here is calling for the destruction of Palestine. For peace, you’ve got to start off with somebody who’s a partner. You’ve got to start off with someone who is willing to talk to you about coexistence. If they want to destroy you, it’s not negotiation time; it’s war time. And I think it’s necessary, it’s sad to say.”

Hanna Kawas of the Canada Palestine Association blamed the ongoing conflict on the United Nations and the U.S.

“Yesterday was the 43rd veto in support of Israel,” Kawas said. “No other country in the world has been protected as Israel. And they’re doing it basically to cover the war crimes of the Israeli government. The U.S. is complicit in these war crimes. The M16s are American, the ammunition is American, and Israelis doing it on behalf of the U.S. Without them, Israel doesn’t exist.”

I am amazed.

Okay, okay, you didn't go through my comment queue! If that is what it takes to stop the personal attacks and the anger, I'll give you that. It is worth less to me than never having to see your front teeth on my profile again. And, please, for your own sake, don't be too jealous of my fierce good looks.

Sorry for the wall of text, but it's split up - just three individual rebuttals(mostly). Three posts in one maybe? 1 is about potential life, 2 is our screwed up scale and the attacks made utilising the opponent's uncertainty and 3 is the broken terminology being used to implicitly argue.

If just one person is better off for reading just one of these points I'll be happy

Ok, some argument flaws to point out which I see have seen largely unaddressed so far:

1. Argument for potential life (I think thepinky used this one, as well as others). Left alone in its unique environment x will become y; z will not. This is pure inaction bias. The absence of taking action is an action itself. When making a choice, either doing something or not bestows the exact same responsibility given a neutral context. In real social situations, there are other actors which may have brought about a situation, etc, so it's a bit more complex there.

Basically, leaving a fertilised egg in place and removing it are both positive actions. You cannot say that there is potential life because of "what would have happened". This is also countered by pretty much any cell in the body being able to become an individual human being. From skin cells you scratch off to millions of sperm to eggs, they are all potential human beings. This is usually "countered" by saying it is innate potential, not just potential. That is the no true scottsman fallacy. It also stems from inaction bias.

What are the consequences? Whatever scale you use to rate or determine if something counts as a person you must apply it objectively to both the fertilised egg and everything else. Just prepare for cognitive dissonance, however, since when rating a fertilised egg's level of consciousness or personhood generally a sperm of unfertilised egg is pretty much rates exactly the same.

2. Which leads us to point two. The scale we try to make to classify varying levels of devlopment is completely messed up. This would be a scientific problem if only science were actually in the position to answer our questions to a degree of confidence. Nobody knows what constitutes consciousness or the nature of it. At the moment our most informed observations say that brains are conscious. We don't know how, why, if consciousness is anything but an illusion, if it is specific to brains (or things like brains), if it is physical, the nature of existence and so on!

The passive argument "Look at all these unasnwered questions in your reasoning! If you're more wrong, we're more right." is silly. It just makes that argument more "wrong"; your own retains however much wrongness it had!

Also, the absence of unanswered questions does not make a good argument. Wanna see me answer all questions in existence? God did it. There! No, you build a model and apply it to reality. The better it fits, the better the model. I heard things brought up like why do dogs and pigs not have more rights than human fetuses then? Good question. Our scale is messed up, but we at a species are trying. We can hope to eventually have these things sorted, if at all physically possible for us.

3. Being hung up on the term "human life" or similar. Arguing in a biological sense about whether a fertilised egg (or sperm, or egg) is "human" or not, is classed as part of the human species or other definition.

The problem is people stop at that definition. For example, "From a fertilised egg to birth to death it is always a human being, for such and such sound reasoning, therefor they have the interests of a person." In the case of being a human as in part of this species, you have to remember species is a distinction for purely usefulness purposes in biology. It is arbitrary and meant as a tool - it has no bearing to the actual debate at hand.

My point being, many of the terms used around here have no basis in the context of the argument. One person is talking about a human life in the strict biological sense as basis for personhood and the other is using a description more along the lines of sentient, conscious, able to feel, etc. Be careful around the terms human, life, etc.

That's it for what I can remember for now

So, despite everything we don't know, the best we can go on at the moment says a fertilised egg is nothing special, that a fly's brain is over 100,000 neurons, so what of that 50-cell blostocyst mentioned so much? The best we can determine is it's a gradual scale from no consciousness to more. Drawing lines is horribly messy but observation of reality at least says if it has no neurons it is no more different than any other clump of matter or cells or anything. So far. What happens if we try to draw the line closer, when we try and determine at which point it becomes "conscious enough"? Fierce debate. That is good, but right now debating whether a fertilised egg is anything special is drawing attention away from the important area.

fierce *promote

To answer all the concerns over the dummy v. human debate . . . The problem is that many times the cat HAS known the difference but still chose to maul the human. There was a photographer who did senior pictures with a "tamed" tiger until a girl was mauled by one, her face almost completely torn off. Or the many owners who think it's a great idea until they become a threat.

These animals are fierce hunters who are not inclined to defend their "friends" such as a dog. A dog is a pack animal, willing to give it's life for the pack leader (aka human) while a animal of this magnitude may hunt with others, they are still highly individualistic and will do what they must to be alpha. A 200lb human against a 650lb Siberian is no joke, and your chances of living are almost zero. They are MAGNIFICENT creatures, but they are also highly dangerous to your health. Love and respect them, but from afar.

The only different between you and that dummy . . . you are more fun to kill.

After reviewing comments from this site and many others over the past few days bashing Sarah Palin for her "anti-science" stance, I must say that I am truly impressed with the realization among our citizens of the importance of scientific research and progress, especially from those of the far-left political persuasion. I have just one question for these individuals, however. WHERE WAS YOUR OUTCRY AGAINST ANTI-SCIENCE POLITICIANS AT THE TIME MY SCIENTIFIC CAREER WAS DESTROYED? I am (or should I say WAS) a scientist during the days of Ronald Reagan and SDI. I received a Ph.D. in physics in 1984 with an extensive background in mathematics, and was laid-off in 1992 despite an excellent performance rating for "lack of contract support". My career as a scientist began and ended with SDI.

During this "outbreak of peace", I went to extremes to find work in technology transfer efforts and other non-defense related areas, oftentimes volunteering my time with groups or start-up companies willing to let me work with them in the hopes of securing some grant money someday. These efforts were all in vain, however. Why? Because scientific funding was waning everywhere, not just in defense. Competition for grant money was absolutely fierce and in some cases, merely a lottery. Only those with decades of experience in their special fields had a chance of winning. Our government had taken the "peace dividend" (which resulted in part from my career demise) and used it to prop up the new "social democracies" that resulted from the breakup of the Soviet Union. Once again, WHERE WAS THE OUTCRY AGAINST ANTI-SCIENCE POLITICIANS when all this was happening? Instead, what I saw on the news was euphoria over the "end of the cold war" (euphemism for the greatest one-sided disarmament in history).

From what has happened to other scientists as well as myself, I'm afraid you would have an extremely difficult time convincing me that there ever was much concern about scientific research among our politicians, especially over the last two decades. So why all of this bashing of Sarah Palin for being "anti-science"?