Suggesting she become a homemaker despite her explicit request for career information and knowing nothing about her other than her gender -- yes, almost certainly misogyny.

I have to preface this by saying I don't currently have the position that any place needs population controls like this right now, so you don't lump me in with this. But your arguments are wild.

Not really. He sterilized "undesirables" and hoped to do it before they had one child, so it wasn't so nondiscriminatory as this proposal.

He was after eugenics -- in many cases, using non-heritable criteria -- not population control.

In some ways this is like going after somebody who killed in self-defense in court by saying "you know who else killed people? HITLER!".

Uhh, yeah. For instance, you can be locked in a cage. Or killed. Or enslaved.

Disallowing reproduction is definitely on the list, but it's not at the top.

Reality may give us that authority.

We might not be there yet, but his hypothetical had, as its premise, the notion that the region *could not sustain those numbers*. That means you don't have kids, or you kill people, or you export people. If there's a third option, that means you could sustain those numbers and the premise is contradicted.

Now you're making shit up. He did not advocate murder.

There are a lot of places with weak governments and poor economies. The idea that government interference causes babies is novel.

Education on birth control and unrestricted access to birth control -- both of which are typically, though not necessarily, provided by governments -- have the most consistent record or stabilizing population sizes. General population wealth and low infant & childhood mortality rates is also significant, but people have lots of funny contradictory ideas about how to improve that.

There's nothing greater than a semantic argument on slashdot.

Arguing whether science is a form of philosophy is like arguing whether the Game of Thrones TV show is an example of art. You don't necessarily have any disagreement about what science is (even though that's what everybody is focussing on); you have a disagreement on the definition of philosophy (which, like art, is notoriously hard to pin down).

No she didn't. What a bizarre assertion.

What? As far as I can tell, this wasn't hacked. And even if it was...that's the opposite of permission.

You realize people taking advantage of all the other things you mentioned are crimes that you can pursue in courts and nobody will blame you? In fact, you realize that if somebody steals your car, even when you left the keys in the ignition, or breaks into your house through an unlocked door, and you *don't* follow up on it with the authorities, that's viewed with suspicion?

(For that matter, I don't think my parents even have a front door lock, and I know my dad leaves the keys in the car -- my mom doesn't mostly so that she can click the button to find her car in the parking lot. Not everybody lives in fear -- to be fair, lots of people live in places where the fear is warranted. And I do lock my doors, living in a more heavily populated area. And none of us would leave a package unattended in a mall).

It's not the insistence on retribution that's the problem here. It's the fact that it was directed at the wrong target. Tor didn't have anything to do with this any more than the mall had anything to do with your package, left in plain sight, being stolen. Or a privately-owned highway that they used to drive your car away, after you left the keys in the car.

He's not saying taking pictures is repugnant. It's republishing them not only without her consent, not only *against* her express wishes, but specifically to humiliate her and make her angry.

Yes, Tor is the wrong target for punishment (though I'm unclear on whether she was seeking punitive damages from Tor, or just suing them to try to get them to help de-anonymize things).

You, however, are actively participating in the problem, by re-posting those links to slashdot. I'm not saying your hands should be chopped off or anything ridiculous, but I am saying that your behaviour is repugnant.

I think people have different notions of what "freedom from religion" means. What you're talking about is not at all the same as what some others I've seen have talked about. The first time I encountered the "separation clause doesn't imply freedom from religion" was somebody arguing that it would not violate the US constitution to require politicians to swear that they believed in a god (without specifying further the attributes of this god), which seems like a crystal-clear violation to me.

Saying that agnostic has in practice become the true absence of religion (as opposed to atheism which is "supposed to be") is not a sensible statement. It's like saying that sometimes people dye their hair, so in practice blue eyed people are the true brunettes.

One thing that's interesting is that nobody sits around talking about the absence of things. It doesn't make sense to sit in a circle and talk about how there are no robot showbusinessmen on Uranus that are re-enacting Earth's transmissions and rebroadcasting them with Faster-Than-Light technology to their home galaxy. Likewise, atheists don't sit around and talk about how there's no god.

So if you see atheists talking on the Internet, or go to atheist forums, then it's almost by definition that they are talking about religions (usually the dominant religion in their area, which in English-language forums is usually Christianity). And just like most informal groups of people, some of them are total jackasses about it.

Even so, a statement like this seems starkly opposed to reality:

I've seen an atheist argue that a condition of political office should be atheism, on the basis that admitting that you are influenced by things that aren't real means you are mentally incompetent in the worst way*, and I can see how that is like "forcing" others to believe as they do -- but this is not a common stance, even among the vitriolic internet atheists.

*I also know deeply religious people who got extremely uncomfortable with George Bush's "god talks to me" speech, because they might not agree with the atheist I just mentioned, but they follow his argument as far as thinking that it's really not a good sign if a powerful political leader claims to be hearing the voice of god in his head.

By any standard. The term undesirable is used because it's not specific.

It would not be sufficient, but the GP was not wrong in calling the GGP wrong, because the GGP said "it may indeed be neceesary to use a proxy or VPN".

That's like saying you can't be a Republican without campaigning against gay marriage. It is, after all, a cornerstone of the official Republican platform.

Despite references to papal infallibility and a highly structured organisation, Catholicisim is generally *not* a literalist religion. One of the fundamentals of Catholicism is that you must follow your conscience, even if your conscience is wrong and/or violates Church teachings ("Primacy of Conscience"). In fact it is sin to do something you believe in your conscience is wrong. Even if the Pope himself comes up and tells you with full authority that it is definitely not a sin to take advantage of a free refills policy, if you feel it's wrong, you don't do it. If Sotomayor believes it's wrong for the law to treat fetuses as morally equivalent to adult humans with respect to right to life, from the instant of conception, then it would be wrong of Sotomayor, as a Catholic, to do so.

They struggle with this, of course, because you can stretch "Primacy of Conscience" to mean anything and it's not supposed to be that loose. But the religion isn't one of sharp boundaries and thin lines between black and white and slavish binary rulesets. This is the religion that inspired the concept of Limbo, after all.

(FWIW I am not a Catholic, and it's no fallacy since I am an atheist and have no memory of being anything else)

How is that relevant? It's not there now, so arguments that Common Core is bad because of their social studies content are incoherent at best and likely dishonest.

If you want to take issue with Common Core social studies, then you have to take issue with that.

I don't know much about Common Core or US education, so I don't know whether Common Core is good or bad, nor whether it is better or worse or a little of both compared to what already exists. But I know that you can't conclude that the US Civil War is being removed from US classes by analyzing a textbook on rhetoric.

The Challenger explosion is often discussed in business classes without analyzing the underlying engineering principles at stake (often disguised so that people won't be biased in their go / no-go decision).

Why?

That's a fair point, but I do believe there are also programs that target the impoverished, including white people (mostly white people, just because there's more of them in the country).

This just doesn't happen to be that one.

Analogously, lots of people have problems other than a societal bias against them in tech. That's not what this is trying to solve.

Sometimes we don't try to solve all things for all people at the same time with the same solution.

Are these ancestors 15000 years old?

If not, yeah, there was a country already there. The colonists just didn't consider it a "real" country.

This is a discussion about H1B workers. They're in the country legally.

Sadly, this is not always true.

Also I hope you at least feel sorry for somebody who crossed the border as a child (as in, their parents took them).