So if I am walking through a dark alley when I'm hit over the head/tied-up/whipped, then it's my fault, and I have no moral recourse?

I again dismiss the attempt to draw moral equivalency. Pregnancy is not a mugging. The mugger is an adult who chooses to commit an act of violence. The fetus an innocent life incapable of decision making. Holding the mugger responsible for his crime is the just punishment of a guilty adult. Aborting an unwanted pregnancy is the unjust punishment of a guiltless child in-the-making. They are diametric opposites.

Please support that assertion, a fetus does harm and contributes nothing, even children do harm, as they are troublesome and expensive to raise. While reproducing benefits the genes, it does not benefit the individual.

Until you have gone through the process of child-rearing and parenting, then I fear you will have very little capacity to understand what I'm talking about. Mothers form intimate bonds with children that stretch across the gamut of their existence. Mental, physical, social, emotional - and this begins in the womb. Your terminology regarding children relegates them to the status of a wart or a tapeworm. My perspective ascribes more inherent value to a human child than that, and therefore we are at cross purposes.

People without children are happier/healthier/richer than people with them, and I can show you numbers to back that up if you doubt it.

Happier is a subjective term. Healthier could be quantified I suppose. Richer is also a bit subjective since it could be many things besides raw income and people with children have support networks & assets that single people do not. These days people can find 'internet statistics' to support any claim though I guess. I'll bite. What are yours?

And if this mother or father is black? Does your world view really require that all these fetuses be white? Your little fairy story does not work for non-white newborns.

What's race got to do with it? My caucasian sister & brother in law adopted a half african/american girl and she's a fantastic kid. Black families adopt white babies & vice-versa. It's not a big deal.

Is it morally superior to bring to term one potential human, or to save hundreds of actual fully developed humans?

I see no viable reason why you can't do both. Framing the issue as a dicotomy is illogical.

Have you never known somebody who was pregnant? Are you really arguing that being pregnant is free? Are you aware that, even for people with good health care, pregnancy has a higher fatality rate for the mother than abortion?

Yes. MANY. I've also seen the adoption process, and for the mother giving up the child the transaction very much is 'free'. The adoptive parents pay for the whole shebang (no pun intended). The stats on maternal mortality vs. abortive maternal mortality are mixed depending on who & how you look at.

NetRunner,

Please make a list of the problems associated with crime. Then give me a percent (number addressed / number listed) for proposal #1, and proposal #2

Example crime:
I see you withdrawing money from the ATM and as you are putting money in your pocket, I grab it and run away. The amount lost was $1,000. A week later the cops catch me using a surveillance camera.

1. Our current system which focuses on punishment:
The district attorney presses charges against me, and you are subpoenaed. You have to take off time from work to go to court to testify. The jury finds me guilty, and sentences me to 1 year in jail. You pay taxes to feed, shelter, and pay for my cable TV in jail. So far you are out $1,000 cash, a days work, and approximately ($43.11*365/number of people in your state) in taxes. How do you feel about being mugged? How afraid are you of being mugged in the future?

2. The system I am proposing which focuses on restitution:
You go to the police station and decide to press charges. You voluntarily testify at the trial. You state how much money you lost and how it has impacted your life. The jury finds me guilty, and orders me to pay you $1,000 for the money I stole, $1000 for the impact to my life (psychological and otherwise), and orders me to 100 hours of community service. How do you feel about being mugged? How afraid are you of being mugged in the future?

Now lets assume I don't have $1000 to pay you back (after all I was probably stealing because I don't have much money). You could address this any number of ways, but here is one possible system:

1. Lien against my person
2. Wage garnishment
3. If I have no money, no possessions, no job, then I will be sent to jail. While in jail I will be permitted work release, and the ability to search for jobs. If I find a job, I will be immediately released from jail and proceed with wage garnishment until the debt is paid.
4. If at this point I still have no way to repay the debt, inmate work programs, or term sentencing may apply.

Compare these two systems as the damages become greater and greater (say for bank robber stealing $50,000, or a mugger violently assaulting someone). Now imagine you are a bank CEO who is thinking about committing $5 million fraud.

Which system is scarier to a criminal (someone who doesn't want to work)?
Which system provides more restitution to the victim?
Which system encourages the criminal to re-enter society as a law abiding citizen?
Which system allows the criminal to absolve themselves of their crime?
Which system reduces the fear associated with being a victim of crime?
Which system is less of a monetary drain on society?

>> ^NetRunnerI guess I don't understand what your proposal really even is. Is it to just abolish the idea of criminal justice entirely, and make everything into a civil suit over damages?
What would you do with people who would not, or could not pay?

I guess all libertarian philosophies rely on restricting situations and outcomes so it makes sense.

I thought it was just the economists who did that.

Let's try on another alternative:

You get laid off from your job, after years of doing good work, due to bad decisions made at the highest levels of the company. You try to find a job, but no one is hiring, especially not with a job that would allow you to keep paying your mortgage. Your 401k got wiped out in the stock market crash, and the value of your house has dropped below what you owe on it. You've tried to sell it, but no one's buying. You quickly burn through your savings, and fall behind in your mortgage payments. The bank decides to foreclose on you, and orders you to move out in 30 days.

You try to find a buyer, a new job, you try to sell off possessions, and negotiate with the bank, but nothing works.

30 days later, the cops are at your door, asking you to leave the bank's house.

Now you get blankfist's same no-win decision tree, just replace "shot by a sniper on the battlefield" with "killed by a mugger while sleeping on the street".

Same thing, and all the government's doing this time is enforcing the sacrosanct right to property.

Gee this turned into a debate about American foreign policy fairly quickly. i'm talking about self defense though, and America is nigh invulnerable, so it's kinda irrelevant to my point about the concept of war in general. But let's take the example of Pearl Harbor for instance. Japan was convinced that they had to create a peaceful Co-Prosperity Sphere around the pacific, and to them that meant killings thousands (potentially millions) of Americans. I'd say trying to stop them from doing so was a fairly unambiguously proper thing to do.
Now, I know you'll want to turn THAT example around and talk about the nukes and collateral damage again, but you still haven't given any alternative course of action, except Doing Good Works. Tell me, can you tell the difference between a beggar and a mugger? Would you recommend dealing with the two in the same manner?

See the vid I linked ^above. It seems the typical elevator mugger move is to wait for the doors to open then snatch a purse and run like lightning, but these girls are so damned strong it's sometimes frightening.

Well, since I'm probably one of the few who didnt actually learn anything I didnt already know, I can atleast tell you that everything in this video is actually true. I can also teach you a couple of other words: nsfw

Shit= Møkk or dritt (not considered nasty, and not really swearing in Norwegian)
Piss= Piss
Cunt= Fitte
Fuck= Knulle or Pule (considered naughty, but not used in swearing)
Cocksucker= Kukksuger
motherfucker= no actual word for this..
Tits= Pupper or mugger
Hell= Helvete(this is a common swearword, it sort-of evens it out for Shit, which again, isnt really swearing in norwegian)

^ It doesn't "devalue" murder charges, it just increases the severity of sentencing for a hate crime murder. There's no requirement that non-hate crime murder charges must have a lesser sentence, even if that means lowering the sentences for "regular" murder, or breaking bans on the death penalty.

The right counter-argument to make is to question why we should be adding penalties for what what the perpetrator was thinking when he/she committed the crime. Isn't that akin to thought control? (Though that argument is easy enough to cut down -- isn't all judicial action an attempt to control what people see as valid action, and therefore valid thought?)

In the current political environment, I think the most interesting question to ask is why terrorism is different from hate crime? If you disagree with hate crime legislation, why create special charges for terrorism? At the root, they're the same thing, just terrorism sounds scarier.

I don't think there's a lot to worry about with "hate crime legislation", it's just guidelines for why a sentence for a particular crime can be more severe, one of many, I'd imagine. There's a list of extenuating circumstances as well (emotional distress, self-defense, etc.), so I don't see why we can't make violent attempts at manipulating a group of people an additional crime on top of the violence itself.

Don't you agree that there's an extra level of crime being committed when the KKK lynches a black man for being "uppity", than there is if some mugger ends up killing the person they steal from? Without hate crimes legislation, the mugger gets the higher sentence (murder + theft), since with the KKK it was "just murder".

This video is about as idiotic as taking it as a personal insult when your neighbor locks his door. She's not adopting a defensive posture because she thinks you're a mugger, she's adopting a defensive posture because she can't know for certain that you aren't. It would be foolish to pretend that it's impossible.

Acknowledging facts and behaving rationally is not racism. Believing in stereotypes without any evidence, or assuming that any particular person will fit the mold of a statistically well-backed stereotype, is more like racism.

The protagonist of the video is the one making unfounded assumptions about the motives of the other on the basis of stereotypes. The woman may merely be agnostic and playing it safe. So the man in the video is being a hypocrite. He's calling her a "stupid white bitch" on the basis of some really unfounded assumptions about white people. THAT is racism.

>> ^Pprt:
^If you're being mugged and you really, really don't like it and concentrate on channeling that emotion to the mugger, do think think he'll just turn around and hand back your wallet?

You are, perhaps intentionally, not getting the point, as well as putting words in my mouth.

The alternative to torture is not to "hope he'll be nice from now on", but to use other interrogation methods, which many experts say is more productive than torture.

To borrow your analogy, say you get mugged. The mugger gets away, but the next day you decide to go chasing after the guy. To do this, you capture his family, imprison them and torture them over the course of years in order to get information that might lead you to the capture of the mugger. You make sure there are reports about your doing this on TV on a regular basis, so that the mugger knows what you're doing to his family...

Which one of you would you call a terrorist now?

If I change the mugger into a car bomber, does that make what the hypothetical "you" did justified, or are they both people who should be locked up?

Isn't what makes a person a terrorist defined by what they do, and not who his friends are?

^If you're being mugged and you really, really don't like it and concentrate on channeling that emotion to the mugger, do think think he'll just turn around and hand back your wallet?

Of course not.

Sometimes... no matter how much you want something, it won't materialize. You can't reason with everyone for the simple reason that not everyone shares the same intellectual drive.

Go tell some priapic Sudanese Kalashnikov wielding maniac that he should treat his enemy with respect because some gentlemen met in Switzerland and laid down some ground rules. He'll laugh in your face, and with good reason!

If you partake in a gentleman's duel and you're well aware that your opponent has a nasty habit of shooting people in the back, would you still begin your ten paces with assurance?

Only a fool would insist on being a gentleman when dealing with swine.

I think everyone missed the point here, even the host towards the end. They all were good at spinning their arguments to match the others but really it doesnt matter what McCain said or didnt say. We are staying, period. The little one can try to make it sound positive and how we are all for leaving, but no this administration has never had any intention on leaving and I like how they are still trying to plug the "surge" as the win all be all strategy that saved the war, mission accomplished. Trying to play this development off as some sort of AMERICAN victory is insulting, especially to Iraq. Makes me dread the political pandering that is now going to happen the next few months because of this, typical say one thing while doing another like a mugger saying im not going to hurt you while beating you senseless. Like having the words on record makes it not only true but right? Its like fucking for virginity, it doesnt make sense.

Yes after couple years of martial arts and continuing, I still run like hell when I'm scared.

BUT (See below)

You cant run from an attack from behind. The point of this attack is to get you when you are unaware. If you have any survival instinct at all, you can tell the attack is comming, an instant before it comes. this is nature giving you a chance to survive. Most attacks from behind are aimed for getting your wallet, but this puts you and the attack in a strange situation. Most humans when attacked from behind will try to run and struggle. With a little training this attack can be the easiest to defeat.

Best thing to do is stay calm, and let him have every thing you have. Soft tissue targets are excellent, Nose, Kidneys, Throat, underarms, crotch, inside knee, and all of this cool stuff. You will always get a chance at some soft target. The crotch is the most sensitive on any one, and is therefore the best target at all times.

Never ever do any sort of ju jitsu, wrestling, pins or any holds for that matter. This isn't MMA cage fighting, this is for real, and the enemy doesn't fight by the rules. The moment you go to the ground you are dead, his partners in crime will come up and stomp a mud hole on you. Most of these muggers work in groups, and carry weapons.

When I get mugged I just yell SHAZAM! and a bolt of lighting crashes down around me turning me into Captain Marvel. This tends to not work for everyone, however, so maybe you should just give the muggers your wallet lest you look silly yelling SHAZAM! at knife point.

I'm calling *fake on this one, not because the reactions were faked (although they could be!) but because when you factor in that ...

- these are the best reactions out of god knows how many takes
- and they cut the video, presumably when people stopped panicking
- many people would be too dazzled by the headlight to see anything more than a dude on a bike ... and some yellow blobs
- many, probably nearly all would think it's a demented mugger and not hang around to find out

... then all in all, you're left with a very misleading prank which has less to do with people afraid of being dragged to hell by a motorbike riding skeleton and more to do with people being afraid of a large, loud object appearing beside them on a dark road. Frankly, anyone who doesn't jump when that happens needs help. It's on par with jumping out from behind a wall and yelling "BOO!" at someone.

I love how the guy finishes wailing a heavy bag and then calmly opens the umbrella up. Y'know, just in case you ever have to beat the living crap out of a mugger and then take a casual stroll in the summer shower.