A typical definition of socialism is when government owns the means of production. When bush and the republicans bought a controlling interest in GM,the USA became a socialist country. When obama fired the head of GM, that.....was socialism. Feeding hungry people,isn't socialism. Helping homeless,or sick people,isn't socialism. Providing health insurance through a single pool. Isn't socialism. Your in a pool,,,right now.

If everyone somehow isolates and we get down to only only 10 new cases a day, and we let everyone out, that only resets the clock to February with the addition of a million or so people already infected and immune. Everything goes back to shit in another couple months. People's behavior changing will help slow the spread, but will not prevent it. There's plenty you can do outside the home a safe distance from other people with minimal risk, certainly less than just going to shop for food. It's ridiculous they are shutting down beaches where it's simple to walk 20' away from anybody else. To limit crowds just close down parking spaces.

Antibody tests should allow recovered people back into regular life, but the only way we get a lot of recovered people is to have a lot of sick people first. Keep the elderly and high risk people confined, and let everyone else out with reasonable precautions(no gatherings over 20, etc). The only other alternative is a 6-12 month lockdown and 100% testing, which is simply never going to happen. You would still have to lock down the borders until the rest of the world has it under control too.

So, did you not watch it, or are you just incapable of learning, because the answer to that question was thoroughly explained.

They should be obligated to pay sick leave so sick people don't have make the choice to go to work sick or become homeless. That costs insanely less than an epidemic does, and kills no one.

The rest of the industrialized world is capable of it, and they had near full compliance with stay at home orders. In America, not so, which is part of why we are now the epicenter of the pandemic and will remain so for the foreseeable future, and will likely have the most deaths of any nation by the disease Trump said isn't a problem worth addressing and it would just miraculously disappear by April because he's done such a good job. Instead, due to his complete lack of preparation even though he had >3 months to prepare, we are on course to have our casualty number top 1 million....all blood on Trump's hands. His administration could have acted in December and avoided any infections in America. They didn't.

Since so many of the (now gone) jobs created in the last 3 years were minimum wage jobs, how do you think people barely living paycheck to paycheck are going to put away a dime? They couldn't pay all their bills when they were being paid.

"that doesn't justify using people in laboratory experiments"

uhhh, exactly how does holodoc think medical science works?
We use people in laboratory experiments all the damn time. It's called double-blind testing and it means that very sick people get given a placebo that we know does nothing.

I don't remember this episode, but I'm surprised at this lack of nuance from Star Trek.

And holo-space-nazi is right... it's funny how ethics go out the window when one of the main cast members life is threatened. But if a red-shirt is on the table....

Anyway, there's a massive difference between USING knowledge obtained by unethical means and GAINING knowledge by unethical means.

Don't get me wrong, medical ethics is really important. But throwing away knowledge after the fact is not only pointless, it's immoral. Especially in this case, where you're not even using the person who did the research, just a digital representation of them.

Oh, I know May and her cronies would love to destroy it, because fuck sick people? or something... damned if I know why.

But my point is that even if they would like to get rid of it, they know that it's popular with the electorate, whereas in the states, the fucking ELECTORATE hate it... the mind boggles...

I don't represent the entire left, but as a member of the left I think you're misrepresenting our (at least my) concerns. It's not that we don't care about the unborn, it is that this is a complex situation that involves more than one person in an unusual circumstance.

On the one hand, the mother (and others involved) who for whatever reason don't want to bring a child into the world and look after it (yes I know about adoption and yes, it is a very good solution for some women/situations). On the other hand, the foetus. It may be little more than a collection of cells. It might have a heartbeat. It might be thinking/dreaming/hearing/feeling. You could even consider it to be a person at certain stages of development (or even from the very first cell division, if you want). It could even be considered killing a person to kill the foetus. I can accept all of that and yet I can accept the need for abortion. Just like we accept killing and/or not helping (so that they die) poor people, old people, disabled people, sick people, refugees, soldiers from other countries, people on deathrow, animals, etc. We accept justified killing in many circumstances. Making abortion legal simple means that in this circumstance, we accept that the killing is justified.

If you kill a pregnant woman, you may not be charged with murder. You will only be charged if the state does not consider the killing to be justified. I think that is where you're struggling with this issue. In the US, on a basic level, the state and populace consider the killing of an unborn child to be justified killing. You need to make an argument for why it isn't. (I don't really need to make an argument for why it is justified because I'm with the status quo on this one.)

Capitalism is a guideline or system of how to organise aspects of society (trade, labour and services for example), nothing more. How you use it defines its effect on us. I could sell you my child explicitly for the purpose of you raping it and it would show how evil capitalism is. Or I sell you my children's book explicitly for the purpose of you entertaining your own children and that would be quite nice.
The problem starts if you think everything needs to be a for profit business as capitalism should be unlimited. Then you live in a country that makes prisons privately owned businesses and thinks it's ok to bankrupt sick people and their families with medical bills.
Capitalism is as evil as the people controling it. Who allows these people to be evil? Who cares? Apparently not the majority.
However, all that is not the problem of this ad. The capitalism works to nobodies disadvantege here. Edeka tries to brand itself as family-friendly and established part of homelife. That is quite normal and acceptable for a grocery store. It is not like as if VW would be putting out ads on how honest they are.
The version of the ad I described as being better is as manipulative as this one with the exception that it doesn't make everyone look like assholes upon closer inspection.
Nobody nailed grandpa's door shut, he's allowed to step into the world and make new friends and other aquaintances. His isolation is understandable but mostly his own fault. I witnessed stuff like that myself, I have grandparents too.
On the other hand you bemoan the smombies of today. Do you see the irony of complaining about the screen-fixed stare of todays youth (and society in general) on an internet forum?
We created a distraction-addicted, short-term attention-spanned and self-affirming society on our own by willingly swallowing all the crap the distraction industry throws at us.
I don't have a twitter account because nothing I can say in 140 characters without established context is worth saying. That gotta mean something coming from me of all people.
I'm not on Facebook because I know what the 'StaSi' was and see no reason to do their work on my own person for Mr. Zuckerberg and his shareholders.
I have no internet connection on my cellphone because I prefer to know stuff instead of just looking it up. I don't write text messages all the time because I prefer spoken words with their complexity that simplifies communication instead of emojis that emulate things my face did since before cellphones stopped being science-fiction.
I choose not to stare at the palm of my hand and what's lying in it every 5 minutes because I can. Most of our modern society chooses differently. They chose poorly, as the real oldtimers would say.
And here we are, yet again, ranting about the evils of enticing screens in our lives, live on the internet. You know, we would not be this absurd joke if we'd sat at a dinnertable right now. With food and drink from Edeka.

One and the other is not the same. What you said here is the truth, knowing said pictures are "in the wild" can have devastating psychological impact when the child becomes old enough to realize what has been done.

However this feeling is not on a "post by post" biases.

My point is if child porn is banned because it fuels more CP, it fuels more thoughts in sick people, why not outlaw pictures of dead children for the same? Especially since one follows the other in so many cases?

@harlequinn, you do realise that NZ actually has quite sensible gun laws? You can own semi-auto rifles and so on but to do so you need a firearms licence. This includes not only a police check, but the cops will actually come to your house and check that you have adequate storage provisions for your guns. On top of that

You will have difficulty being deemed 'fit and proper' to possess or use firearms if you have:

- a history of violence
- repeated involvement with drugs
- been irresponsible with alcohol
- a personal or social relationship with people deemed to be unsuitable to be given access to firearms
- indicated an intent to use a firearm for self-defence.

To me those are perfectly reasonable and sensible restrictions.

@scheherazade, ah yes, the libertarian argument. I want a gun and fuck everyone else.

Kids getting shot at school? Fuck 'em, not my problem.
Random nutjob mows down a bunch of people in California? Fuck 'em, not my problem.

The fact is that guns do cause harm. The "people kill people" argument is beyond infantile. Of course, people kill people.... with a gun. It's a lot harder to go on a mass killing spree armed with a stick.

Here are the indisputable facts:
- There are some sick people out there. Some are just fucked up, some are in need of help.
- Sometimes these people snap.
- Sometimes when they do, they get a gun and kill a bunch of other people.
- If they didn't have a gun, the harm would be less.
I'm assuming no-one disputes those facts.

Now there are two solutions to this:
- Pro-gun advocates take the position that citizens need guns to defend themselves from this kind of situation. They often argue that instead of taking guns away from everyone, we should focus on either helping the mentally unbalanced or stopping them by shooting them.
- Gun control advocates take the position that if the shooter didn't have access to a gun in the first place, then maybe the whole mess would be avoided or at the very least minimised.

To me, it's a simple matter of practicalities. Option 1 is simply not working. We're decades (possibly centuries) away from completely understanding mental illness, that's if we achieve that at all. Meanwhile, crazy/insane/evil people are still going on shooting rampages.
And stopping them after the fact? That's pretty cold comfort to the people that have already been killed.

I am genuinely perplexed as to how people don't understand this.
Gun control works. In every other developed country in the world, there are reasonable and sensible laws restricting firearm ownership, and there is nothing like the kind of insane shootings we see on a regular basis in the US.

No-one is arguing that all guns should be taken away. No-one is saying you can't hunt or target shoot or even defend your home if necessary (although again, in the civilised world, most of us have no need for that).

But jesus, maybe you don't need an AR-15 with a massive clip. And is it that unreasonable to check to see if someone is mental or criminal before selling them a gun?

Apparently, in the US, it is.

Using that logic, if sick people stopped being sick we wouldn't need a healthcare system!

Hey Republicans. Don't forget, you invented the individual mandate. You tried to pass it into Federal law many times yourself. Don't be all ticked off just because some black guy finally did what you couldn't. Typical move the goal post behavior. What's changed since the Republican version that was endorsed by the insurance industry? Let's see... they now need to cover pre-existing conditions, yeah, that's horrible, making insurance companies cover sick people and not charge them more, how horrible... and they changed it from catastrophic coverage to comprehensive coverage, so now the insurance companies have to pay for far more services... hmm... I wonder why Republicans suddenly oppose their own idea? Perhaps because suddenly there is less profit in the suffering of millions of people? That is all that matters to Republicans, profit over people. To undue the damage caused by unions in giving people 40 hour work weeks and make people work 80+ hours a week again so that the fat rich cats can keep more and more of the limited resource called money... so that nice little income gap can continue to grow. Hey, perhaps someday soon the US will be like the old Soviet Union with long bread lines, the Republicans clearly want to see that. After all hundreds of them chanted "Let them die!" at the Republican debate... that was the moment that I decided even if I got my faith in god back, I'd rather be in hell then in heaven with people like that, apparently they forgot all the teachings of Jesus about how the rich can't get into heaven, how to help the needy and the poor, how to be lovers of peace and not war, how love was the greatest commandment, and everything else that the Republican party is opposed to.

I don't get why people get upset at the keep the insurance plan. It isn't the government shutting it down, it is greedy insurance companies shutting it down. It's like jobs going to China, people get mad at the government rather than the rich ass hole who sent the jobs oversees so his own personal profits could be higher. I seem to recall the people who are complaining, defended oil company profits by pointing out that per dollar earned/gross profit margin oil was down at 17 or so, while banks were number one followed by a small gap, pharmaceuticals were number two and insurance number three with a nice gap to number 4 and on to the rest of the list. So yeah, if changes in how they have to cover people means they might fall off that list of top 3 most profitable bushiness, then I would expect them to drop the less profitable plans to maintain their multi-billion dollar profit off the suffering of others so a few rich people can have a nice cozy life while millions suffer for their greedy gains.

Health insurance shouldn't be about huge profits. It should be about getting people the health coverage they need... of course I could also argue that the health care industry as a whole shouldn't be so profit driven... nor should the education required to train our healthcare workforce (nor education at all really)... We should have gotten what Obama promised in the first place, a single payer system, or at the very least a Government Option, rather than caving into the Republican Right and turning the money over to a multi-billion dollar industry... and now look, they still oppose it even though it was their idea... If they were going to oppose it no matter what, he should have made it worth everyone's while and given actual reform.

And hey, if you oppose it, come up with something better. Something that will help the millions of people working at places like retail and fast food that can't get employer sponsored coverage. Make sure every American is covered and can afford health care, not emergency treatment, but going to see a doctor for preventative care and affording any medication that the doctor may prescribe.

Can't help but think that we're setting us up for a big wave of very sick people on medicare. When the things they have require a lot of therapy and recovery, perhaps multiple surgeries to fix....where as if it had been caught 20 years ago prior to them being on medicare it might have been quite simple to address....but they didn't have insurance so it wasn't feasible.

Plus you look at the insane amount of "defense" and "spying" costs we have in the US, and that stuff keeps getting increased and cheered on like it's a cure for everything.

From a philosophical point of view the answer was "yes" and is for me very easy to understand. I am not saying I agree with QM here, but he did state a reason, whether or not you or I understand it (I do, in this particular case.)

I.e., women in some porn are slapped like animals, spit on, pissed on, shoved with baseball bats and worse. Sick people watch this. Is it voluntary? To those who can afford not to, sure, but just like the army there are those who cannot afford to.

Another way of putting it is thus. Without these women who are degraded and create the expectation that degrading women is fine, then there wouldn't be such. So in essence, propagating this treatment of subhuman standards is the fault of women like Bella.

I.e., again, if there weren't Soldiers willing to fight unjust wars like Iraq, then there would be no unjust wars like Iraq (And yes, that is a fucking good comparison.)

As I said before, you can't argue with me because this isn't my position--so try not to refute it through me plz.

>> ^xxovercastxx:

>> ^quantumushroom:
Disclaimer: I like pr0n as much as the next dude and think hooking should be legal.
However, I hate the fascist dehumanizing element which seems to have become the standard, and hate even more the mainstreaming and glamorization of the pr0n "lifestyle" as legitimate theater.
Pr0n has its place, but if it's such a life-affirming industry then the "stars" wouldn't be drugging and drinking--and occasionally diseasing--themselves to death.
Pr0n is a useful poison; far less useful than other poisons. As for the rest of these clever comments, open mic night is on Thursday(s).

>> ^xxovercastxx:
>> ^quantumushroom:
The problem is "right and wrong" doesn't return after the camera stops, either.
You got an example of how Belladonna's wronged the world?


So, no?

In the last few days we've gotten a real good look at how hardcore right the Tea-Party is. Blame all Muslims for 9/11! Capital Punishment? The more the merrier! Letting sick people without health insurance just die already? Yay! To think that any candidate who believes those same things has a chance in hell in a real election is truly funny.

American Exceptionalism indeed!