Indeed, this works across languages as well. I've watched Japanese and Chinese ESL students carry on very simple conversations by writing them out in characters, even without knowing each other's languages. English and Spanish students would never be able to do that. I've been shopping in Asian markets with Japanese people, and they can tell me what a new product is from the box, but not what it is called. An ideogram system is harder to learn and harder to extend to new words; but once learned, it can be used in amazingly broad contexts.

People keep saying this, but my experiences with the DMV have been about the same as my experience with AT&T, Citibank, and most the major airlines (long lines/on hold forever, mistakes that take forever to fix, completely unhelpful costumer service, etc.). And I'd rather deal with the DMV than Acer or Well's Fargo.

So, your rebuttal is basically, "Yeah, but we had good reasons for it. And we weren't hiding it. Most of the time." Your more accurate account (and I agree it is more accurate) still amounts to the U.S. being guilty of the accusations, just that it was justifiable behavior.

I agree the show isn't propaganda. They ran a news piece on the Fox News at 10 immediately following the premier saying that the approach probably doesn't work. I just took it as an attempt to get another police procedural on Fox with a unique twist, like Bones.

Of course. And Al Capone went to jail for the rest of his life over tax fraud related to his business of murder, bribery, etc. Sometimes we prosecute people for what we can rather than what they really did wrong. You can be sure they are revising and closing loopholes so they can prosecute it for the right reasons next time.

By your logic, there is nothing wrong with forced abortions, because an embryo is just a mass of cells that "could potentially become a human with the right signaling factors and growth conditions." It is exactly the same as removing a tumor from a person without consent. That is just silly.

Observable facts inform our morals, but they do not decide them. You cannot derive should from is. Many people believe that because the natural course of embryonic stem cells leads to a human being, they should be considered a human being. If you disagree, you need to tell them where the dividing line between human and not human is. You know any such line is arbitrary. Until we decide on where that line is a society, doing anything within a reasonable range of that line is morally questionable. That does not mean immoral, just questionable. If you want it to be unquestionably moral, prove to a majority of the population why they are clearly not human yet.

The color of the sky is an empirical issue. We can look at it and know the answer. If nobody can look at it, then it remains an open question until someone can. Morals are not empirically observable. They are values decided upon by society. Therefore, you're entire analogy is fundamentally flawed and invalid.

The fact that you thinks its moral, and someone else thinks its immoral is exactly what makes it morally questionable. If you both agreed, it wouldn't be questionable anymore, it would be definitively moral or immoral.

You forgot Poland.