Matt

I wonder if people’s attitudes would be the same if the woman was in the man’s position? i.e. It’s the womans egg being grown in a surrogate (or artificial womb, whatever). If her signature was forged by the man on the final  consent form, should she “be forced to uphold her parental responsibilities?”, as Belle put it?

Also, Strega, the man…[Read more]

Isn’t the point of a society to protect and provide for its members? I can’t imagine a universe in which that doesn’t include universal, socialised health care. I’d really love to see an alternate universe where you ended up with a Sanders presidency.

Spot on, Davis. It has always boggled my mind how the US is simultaneously a first world and third world country (for lack of better terms), and the anti-intellectualism is just astounding.

I can only hope Australia doesn’t follow its normal path and copies the US.

police are often dealing with people who have been engaged in a crime or have been acting hostile toward them or others

So if the police have a bad day, they can shoot someone running towards them? They had no evidence that this man had committed any crime or intended to commit any crime, yet he has been killed. He may of been running over to…[Read more]

the worst he can do (which is ironically the best for most of us) is run a third party campaign that hands the election over to the Democratic Party

Do you not have any kind of vote transfer? Here in Australia we can vote for a minority party and if they don’t win the seat, our vote is transfered either according to our preference (indicated…[Read more]

So if a policeman (or anyone really) sprints at me and I’ve done nothing wrong I can shoot him dead? I don’t understand. Are you saying it’s ok to kill people because they disobey your authority?

What happened to the policeman’s taser? Were there no other non-lethal options left?

Small piece of evidence for evolution, giant piece of evidence against intelligent design.

@Unseen

Species move around, disappearing from where they originally “belonged” and taking up what can only be described as temporary residence somewhere else.

I wasn’t talking about species, I was talking about individual animals. E.g. Zimbabwe is home to X lions. Obviously species as a whole can move, change, and even span multiple cou…[Read more]

Here’s something you need to remember: If your parents truly believe in their religion, then they probably believe you will be going to hell as a non-believe. All they are trying to do is protect you from that. My advice is to be outwardly aloof and inwardly to feel like your parent’s behaviour is predictable. If you go into the…[Read more]

I don’t know enough about lions to endorse or condone the hunting permit scheme.

I do know that in the US, a big part of allowing the hunting of deer is to cull their numbers so that they don’t over consume their environment. Likewise here in Australia, we had a massive kangaroo cull because their numbers were spiralling out of control. Even…[Read more]

Should viruses be studied by biology?

Surely virology has that covered? I suppose the real question then becomes “is virology a specialisation of biology”. An interesting topic, maybe we should start a new thread for it?

would …cells be like life?

By most definitions, cells are life.

I can see where this could go wrong…. and where how you…

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Wow, the idiocy, it burns. I like how they put “e=mc^2?”, which to my knowledge hasn’t changed. It’s layer upon of layer of stupid.

They suggest that a changing model of reality (changing to better model reality) is not as good as a static god.
They fail to realise that, as SteveInCO mentioned, christianity has changed significantly in the last…[Read more]

Hi Belle,
So many things to say. First is that BDSM is not for everyone all the time. It can involve some fairly psychological play and if anyone involved isn’t ready for that, it’s probably not going to go well.

I wandered onto a BDSM forum

Was it Fetlife? I’d recommend Fetlife… it’s huge and diverse and people are generally…[Read more]

Personally, I’m just glad you didn’t call it racism. As someone said earlier, islam is not a gender, sex, or race. For me, the alarming part of islam is the quran, in the same way the alarming part of christianity is the bible. Both books call for killing and as such I denounce them as hate speech.

Think about it… If you wrote a book like the…[Read more]