patrick.net

I dunno, bap, whoever said I was for abortion? Especially relatively late in the term?

Is a cluster of 8 cells after fertilisation a baby?

To me, I think the best solution is to avoid the need for abortion. Instead of whether abortion is morally acceptable or not, we need to ask ourselves why people choose to abort. It is best to have a society in which abortion is not needed.

Sean, what are your meta-ethical beliefs?

so peter p would rather see impoverished people on $2 an hour become incredibly negative and disaffected and start robbing and killing people for money, using guns easily obtained illegally. So after they've killed 8 or 10 well-dressed businesspeople and taken their wallets and watches, and done a few burglaries and home invasions and killed a few more people, the police finally catch up with them after a half-day seige in which another 3 people die. Then there were all the people maimed for life but not killed in the robberies, and their ongoing low quality of life and loss of productivity, and a burden on their families. They then get an expensive trial with lawyers, they get locked up for a long time during proceedings, they end up on death row, also for a long time, and finally get executed with all of the public servants time and equipment required. So the cost to the state has been the scars of 16 tragic and avoidable deaths of uninvolved people, another 5 maimed for life, thousands of hours of police time, court time, lawyers time, judges time, administrators time, prison warders time, doctors for the lethal injection, undertakers and funeral costs for all the dead people, the need to build huge prisons and maintain huge police forces and a huge judiciary. Repeat this episode 1,000 times for all the other disaffected low wage people left out to dry by the system. In just one city alone. And congratulations, you've just created Brazil.

That's really shifting costs from the private sector employer to the state and the taxpayer, now isn't it? All because Peter P was too stingy to pay 6 bucks an hour. Very economically rational stuff, Peter.

Fortunately, decent people would not let this scenario happen, although the real situation in the US is already worse than most other high income countries.

so, a cluster of 8 cells that you can't even see with the naked eye is a baby. but 8 undifferentiated cells have no nerve cells, and therefore cannot feel pain.

and if everyone's just a pile of splitting cells, then why does anyone have any value at all in terms of human life?

and what about:
FELLOW CITIZENS … that eliminates all of the illegal breeders zapping the system.

You don't seem to value these human lives very highly...neither them nor their apparently prolific breeding producing children, and the low quality of life they will experience in your system. And doesn't the bible exhort us to 'go forth and multiply'? and it's also a sin to spill your seed on the ground. it's all very perplexing, isn't it?

so it's minimum wage vs welfare? what difference does it make? except that if you can make more on welfare than on a minimum wage, where is the incentive to get off welfare, and try to participate at all?

especially given that all wage setting is an arbitrary exercise anyhow, and not based on questions of social justice, just on an ability to manipulate the system, and very often on the ability to manipulate others. Does the corporate lawyer really deserve $500K per annum? Does the mortgage broker deserve $250K? Doctors in Australia are paid half as well as in the US, but that keeps the total cost of healthcare down, and makes healthcare affordable for all, in fact, free for the most part.

As my Baudriallard quote suggested, there really is no set 'value' on anything, it's all about deciding on what sized gift to give to people. e.g. 'the cult of the charismatic CEO', where CEOs have awarded themselves larger and larger pay packets since the 60s, acting more like opportunistic robber barons. the success of a large company has been shown to have little or no connection with executive remuneration.

again sean, you failed to answer as to why stop at $5 or $6 or $20 … why not pay everyone $100 per hour??

didn't my quote say something about the ability to live in frugal comfort? are you even reading these things properly?

oh well, back to promoting unrestrained childbirth while demonising minorities who are breeding excessively at the same time...with no cultural understanding at all...

sorry, which questions are you talking about this time? you've asked so many hare-brained, pointless, self-contradictory things already...

if you're talking about minimum wages, i've answered them.

if you're talking about this off-thread issue of the ethics of abortion, i could choose not to answer, especially because i don't see the point of the question, particularly as it relates to libertarianism and governmentality.

i could also not have a well-formed opinion on the matter, which is my right and prerogative. however, i don't see how it's relevant to the topic at hand. i DID take exception to it being drawn into a debate on governmentality as some sort of name-calling, baiting and labelling exercise, and i pointed out that you presumed to know my stance on this non-relevant topic without anything said by me.

I am not sophisticated enough to discuss the moral and legal implications of abortion. However, I certainly understand that making the choice to abort is difficult and unpleasant. Perhaps the society can provide more support so that such decisions do not have to be made.

For you will never understand any reason why.

You will be surprised.

Anyway, due to the law being written that way, the average woman in Japan has two abortions in her lifetime.

Abortion cannot possibly be good for the body. I hope they will rewrite the law there soon. :(

And I am NOT saying that abortion should be illegal. But birth control should be legal and promoted.

Unfortunately, bap, I don't think you have much inkling of hardship and the nature of the working poor and the fact that people on minimum wage represent unskilled labour operating in a secondary, segmented and precarious labour market - most people earn above minimum wage for starters.

All these hypothetical arguments about running burger stands don't really represent the real world issues of poverty and providing a minimum safety net for those who have less to bring to the labour market.

They also overlook the fact jobs come easily to the middle class and that this easy certainty breeds indifference and cruelty and an inability to take the role of the other (which seems to be the main problem of 1 or 2 posters here, although you are complaining about high house prices for yourselves).

But your arguments are not uncommon amongst the mainstream of people who take their own position for granted and like to make life as difficult as possible for others.

Of course, if you are working poor, then that makes your arguments even harder to understand...

Each one blowing away your Anti-American, commie, left-lib crap.

I don't think so. nice of you to try though... I'm not against vigorous debate...

Cash requires working. If a person wants more choices they should earn them. That is how life works. You work for cash and cash gives you choices. A person with cash can choose between walking and driving a car. A person with even more cash can have a Caddy to drive. A person with even more cash has the first person drive them around in a long Caddy. Works pretty simple. The pro-welfare people mistake “want” with “need” and even worse, they mix up “hand out” with “right to have”. Nobody has a “right” to a free ride. None.

Look, I know an exporter here in Australia who did the following:
- felt there was a certain confectionery missing from the US market
- went to a confectinery maker uninterested in exporting and signed an exclusive US export/volume agreement with them
- went back to the US and signed an agreement with a supermarket chain and a packager
- buys bulk confectionery from the manufacturer, arranges to have it shipped to the packager in the US and retails it in the supermarkets
- sits back and lets the whole thing operate without him - he neither manufactures, nor packs, nor distributes, but makes $500 K a year profit. He distributes this income to himself and 2 relatives to reduce the tax payable. They all sit around on their bums 364 years a day doing nothing but taking home $166 K each. he owns a BMW.
- his next move is to sign an even more lucrative $10M deal with another American supermarket so he can sit on his bum some more and get even richer. The US market is big - there's a lot of profit in selling to 300 million people with a favourable exchange rate.

Another example:
- Bill Gates has barely written a line of code in his whole life. He purchased DOS (CP/M) for $50K off someone else with Dad's money, and the rest just snowballed from there. Bill Gates' own father, a lawyer, recently released a book actually saying the way money is accumulated in society is pretty harmful, and property laws only foster it. (William H. Gates, Sr. and Chuck Collins, Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2003-01-12-gates_x.htm)

Another:
- A guy in New Zealand (total population 4 million) just sold an eBay-like site to a newspaper for $675 million at 30 years of age. The site only operates in NZ. He pockets some $200 million of it directly and continues to run the business. These revenues are raised by charging the public for classified ads, of course.

Another:
- Tom Anderson of myspace.com sold the business to Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd for around $600 million. The site raises virtually no revenue at all, so it is hard to see what News Ltd are going to do with it, except start injecting more banner ads into every page.

You have to ask how the 'person with more cash' got it, bap. It was not through hard work at an hourly wage. So quit punishing all the little people at the bottom who barely make anything and have a terrible life, under the thumb of some bullying supervisor, and start asking questions about the sharp people skimming at the top who do 1/4 of the hard work of the janitor and ride around in Rolls Royces. These people get rich by skimming tiny bits of money from a lot of people, and nobody really notices it. Or, in the case of Bill Gates, $399.95 or whatever for MS-Office, none of which he wrote himself. Just because they're sharp operators doesn't give them more human rights than the next person. Their success comes from selling products to all the little people - without the little people, the affluent would be nothing.

So who's getting the free ride, bap?

Not to mention the 'society wives' or 'climbers' as someone else here called them, who want to marry a rich guy regardless oftheir feelings for him, so that they can sit around all day, play social tennis, breed, show off their wealth and plot and dream about status symbols all day long. Their children are sent to exclusive schools and are groomed to take automatic positions high in organisations or government through their connections, or just spend their inheritances holidaying all year long. Would you say they're working hard, or getting a 'free ride', bap? When they're watching the Paris fashion shows and planning to buy the latest Versace dress, doing it with YOUR money? because their rich husbands are merchant bankers, or own an insurance company, or whatever, raking in money from people like you... e.g. Paris Hilton, and dozens of other heirs... would you rather be the hamburger seller on $2 an hour, or the extremely hard-working Paris Hilton, bap?

the new guy starts at $4. This keeps both workers happy. The new guy can see where he can get and the experienced worker has no moral issue from training someone earning a like wage.

yeah, right, so the $4 guy can't even survive, unless he's living at home with mumsy and popsy. this is adolescent paper-round pay. and the private sector keeps pay rates confidential, remember?

sorry, i couldn't resist writing again, it's all so laughable. this is what happens when people are raised in countries where labour unions are weak, and brainwashed by the ruling elite to kick their own asses for themselves so they don't have to pay other people to put you down.

ooh, no, i get it all right. i get how the whole thing works.... or doesn't work...

How do you feel about forced birth control for anyone recieving government aide?

It employs a bunch of people that could not work a real job if needed.

hmm

yes, govt as a huge sheltered workshop, I've seen it all...

Note that JK Rowling of Harry Potter fame was on government aid for about a year, possibly while writing her book - she has a daughter - and now she is literally richer than the queen... so things can change over time, and the market doesn't necessarily reward people fairly...

besides which, those aid recipients vote, and have guns, apart from the human rights issue, and people might be angry...

"A woman is pregnant with her fifth child. She has tuberculosis, and her husband has syphilis. Their first child was born blind, the second child died at birth, the third child was born deaf and dumb, and the fourth child was born with tuberculosis. She is willing to have an abortion, if you think she should. Should she go ahead with the abortion or not? If you chose for her to have an abortion… Congratulations! You have just killed Beethoven."