> it makes the implication that the mother should have a choice and anyone else (government, priests, etc) can go bugger off.

Which means you accept the exact premise I mentioned as inherent in the phrase, that it isn't an important choice. I.e. that it is 'living' but isn't 'life'. You are willing to be just tolerant enough to allow some poor deluded Christer to imagine it is a baby and not kill it if that is their choice but you know better. You wouldn't be arguing for the mother's right to off the lil crotch fruit the day after birth, right? That would be MURDER, where the day before it is just a PROCEDURE.

But as for me, I'm more of the opinion that on one side you have people who hear Monty Python's _Every Sperm Is Sacred_ and fail to realize it is a joke at their expense while the other side, pushing for abortion right up to the instant of natural delivery is across the line to infanticide. So stupid or evil, are those my only choices? Seriously, it is a question that logic and reason can't decide in the limited knowledge and philosophy available to us so lets just pick something reasonable in the middle, call it "The Line; For now" and move on. No more killing things that could just about as easily be delivered alive and no more of this life begins at conception either. Admit we can't decide for now and agree to revisit it when science advances.

Sticking an electrode into a creature and have it twitching to music is not funny, it's cruel.

Obviously. Gamma rays obey the light speed limit just like everything else.

What I'd like to know is how much gamma ray action the Earth sees when those jets are fired up. We now have evidence that gamma rays influence climate so would it be a good or bad thing if it lit up again? Then we need to be asking if we can determine if/when it will start back up.

Whoosh!

Try and keep up, K? This thread is about bias and the difficulty of preventing it, even defining it. Personally I stopped giving the NRA money because they aren't pure enough and seemed to spend more than I was giving them on postage begging for more money. Doesn't mean I can't borrow the gun grabber arguments in an example of the framing bias inherent in the selection of terminology.

> I suppose you *could* wonder this, but that'd make you an idiot.

Not really. The benefits you speak of are designed to promote a public policy purpose that homosexuals can't fulfill so the public (i.e. the state) should have no interest in expending finite resources upon them. See how easy it is? No religion or 'idiot' required. Coldly rational. One could even say reality based if one wanted to taunt the politically correct? Or take this argument: A hundred years ago it was pretty much universally accepted in the medical world that homosexuality was a mental defect. Is it really unpossible for someone to believe that the modern rethinking of that position is in error and was based more on politics than science; without insisting that said belief could only be based in stupidity or religion? I know I haven't devoted enough time to researching the scientific lit to say and I'd bet good yellow gold you haven't either. Leaving aside the entire question of which side is right or wrong, I'm only interested here in demonstrating that there ARE other sides possible that aren't limited to stupid, homophobic, bigoted, blah, blah. That sort of dismissal of the possibility of valid opposing viewpoints is the whole point behind controlling the language of an issue.

I'm just glad someone is working on keeping all the Wangs straight.

> It's absurd that the Wiki page you link to labels the "southern strategy" as racist

You make good arguments but failed to go for the kill. Go reexamine the election of 1968. Does anyone think a California liberal Republican like Nixon would think he had a shot at many 'racist southerners' in a cycle with George Wallace in the race? Nixon was many things, mostly bad, but fool wasn't one of them. This rewrite of history re: Nixon's 'Southern Strategy' requires putting that little historical fact in the memory hole.

> Define doomed.

Hyperinflation, total collapse of social order, cats and dogs sleeping together.

Their basic problem is they are spending far more on their welfare state than they can take in through taxes. Full stop. They are far beyond the point where any conceivable tax scheme is likely to actually generate more revenue to their treasury, that 'ol Laffer Curve is a reality that can no longer be denied for them. Their ability to borrow the difference between what they can raise through taxation and what their voters demand is about finished. If they repudiate their current debts and stop making the interest payments they can forget raising more through the international bond markets. That is reality.

Long term you can't spend more than you take in. An argument can be made for borrowing for a short term problem or perhaps for a long term capital improvement. But when you try to borrow for day to day expenses with no plan for getting income balanced to outflow the result is certain. You can't do it, business can't do it, corporations can't do it and governments can't do it.

> For example writing about modern civil rights (gay marriage, gun rights, etc) in the USA is going to get a intention and/or unintentional bias from me.

It is worse. Just using those phrases implies a bias. NPOV is a very difficult thing, few could actually attain it and even fewer would actually be interested in the result. No, what most people want is their beliefs confirmed in such a way that they are assured that what they believe is the only Truth, thus defined as 'neutral'. The Truth has no Agenda, all that rot.

Gun Rights? Biased. Denies the possibility of common sense measures to stop the epidemic of gun violence on our streets. The Constitition isn't a suicide pact. Besides the 2nd Amendment only protects the government's right to an army you know. Framing it as a 'civil rights' issue is so loaded.

Same for 'gay marriage.' Implies the word 'marriage' somehow quietly morphed to cover groupings other than one male mated to one or more females in a reproductive unit. The idea it had such a strange and impractical (from a historical perspective) meaning would be amazing for all of human history up until the 20th Century. And to suddenly go from a novel new notion to a fundamental civil right being discovered in the space of a decade or two is even more amazing. Regardless of the desirability of the idea, it should be admitted it is a new one but the language usage of quietly overloading existing language is intentionally deceptive. Again, how would you even approach the notion of NPOV on such a controversial question since the very success of the project hinges on framing it as an uncontroversial and logical extension of 'civil rights' and just saying that is controversial. Tricky.

Far too many employers would rather turn technical people into bullshit artists capable of selling their broken crap instead of just allowing them to fix it and letting it sell itself.

This sad state of affairs has a basis in the deep economic fallacies that underpin nearly the entire global economy. There is no money to be made in selling products that work. Warfare increases the GDP, etc...