BC

"In principle" governments rule by the consent of the people. "In principle" laws are enacted by the will of the people. In practice governments rule ...

Exactly. Official torture makes criminals of more than just the torturer holding the cattle prod, but criminality doesn't flow backward to the entire ...

"We always seem to be at war somewhere" is a consequence of the US being the underwriter for the security of the western economy (cop of the world). S...

Organisms are systems. Higher organisms are more complicated systems. Maintaining homeostasis (involving hunger, thirst, oxygen saturation, sleep, exc...

It seems like this all boils down to a search for pleasure (and the concomitant avoidance of discomfort)). Much of life is spent maintaining homeostas...

The Dangling Conversation It’s a still-life watercolor Of a now late afternoon As the sun shines through the curtain lace And shadows wash the room An...

Who, the text you invited us to read is nearly 15,000 words long -- a fairly long text to read without some certain benefit. I did read about 20% of i...

You might have missed the fascinating discussion of toilet utilization by transgendered persons. There was also the "Should torture be a punishment fo...

Please define "important".

I put together a batch of links to several left wing magazines several months ago, including Jacobin. None of them have been entirely satisfactory. Th...

There is a good article on North Korea in Jacobin, A Trotskyist Goes to North Korea by Wladek Flakin. Check out Jacobin.

More amusing pictures of the fat dear leader looking at things /uploads/files/t8/upfkvlk1gwbh63qh.jpg /uploads/files/wd/uyd60wo2ejm033zs.jpg /uploads/...

A moderately amusing diversion: Kim Jong Un Looking At Things on Tumblr /uploads/files/je/zb4662uxqis6nr41.jpg "and now a letter from the editors: ? i...

And when was I not polite to you?

That, of course, is not my problem. I goad well. YOU, on the other hand, do not move like the other cattle. You clearly march to a different drummer. ...

I merely wish to benefit from your lovely, energetic, frequent, sometimes obtuse posts. Better? Love you, honey, Bitter

In addition to torture being ineffective, inhumane, immoral, and inefficient, there is also the corrupting effect. In order for ONE person to be tortu...

You've read GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL by Jared Diamond, no doubt. He lays a good foundation for the success of Europe, white people. It begins in the Mid...

I'm gay and I never had a wife to start with, so I didn't have the opportunity to begin beating her. Beating wives and kicking dogs are unwholesome pr...

Blame? I'm just trying to goad you into a discussion about medical ethics.

I put "loaded questions" into their titles for two reasons: 1. To attract interesting responses where more prosaic titles might not 2. Because lots of...

Of course not. Nobody asked you to administer criminal justice. But... people with criminal records and people doing important work both end up in acc...

I would agree that Erdogan is trying to weasel Turkey's way into the EU, one way or another. I don't think Turkey, as it stands today, is sufficiently...

And you didn't address the issue of your viewpoint's deficiencies.

And what makes you think I "play" Lucifer?

If you were doing triage, and one person had a 40% chance of surviving, but was developing a critically needed new antibiotic, and the other person ha...

Shakespeare wasn't a screen writer. He was a playwright. Died 400 years ago.

Right, here too. As the old Industrial Workers of the World slogan goes, "no need for slaves, no room for masters." Also, "No gods No masters." Worker...

Are there no ethical questions in carrying out triage?

This is an asinine opinion. Why should Turkey and Greece alone shoulder the burden of refugees and migration from Afghanistan, Somalia, parts of West ...

Welcome.

And why is that?

Something is wrong with our site, and it isn't Hegel.

Yes, but that's not what "right to work" means. "Right to work" is shorthand for "anti-union".

So, lactating males are as useful as tits on a boar after all. Granted: all mammalian fetuses begin development using a common template. Offspring wit...

If you alone decide that, you have no right to expect everybody to agree with your usage. If a thousand people say red means gay sex, they don't have ...

If one spent one's first 20 years being deeply conflicted about their sexual identity (am I male or female?) it would not be surprising if these confl...

In some cases it's pretty clear that an animal is displaying a desire. I would guess that in mammals, at least, there is some range of innate sexual r...

For ordinary discourse by the vast majority of people, the meaning of words can change, and often does change, generally over a fair amount of time. I...

Unfortunately, this is true--something like 100,000 deaths per year in the US are the result of medical errors. The current epidemic of opioid abuse, ...

They should be cleaned regularly, and leaks should be fixed.

Instead of torturing psychopaths, we could just send them to the NHS to be treated for tonsillitis or hemorrhoids--that'd fix em right proper. All doc...

I have never witnessed first hand a lion killing an antelope; I have only seen carefully edited film which is almost always more sympathetic to the fl...

1 Samuel 15:2,3 2 This is what the LORD Almighty says: 'I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came u...

Love is a progress. At the beginning, it is all feeling and emotional rush. Later (months at most, one hopes) the heat cools, and love becomes more so...

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The more I read the bios of the core Nazi group, the more undecided I am about whether the Third Reich was actually rational. On one level it was, on ...

You weren't asking me, but... what the hell. Had it been up to me, I would not have executed the Nazis after Nuremberg. In their case, they might have...

Once convicted and sentenced, I don't really give a rat's ass whether criminals like Madoff or serial killers feel or exhibit remorse or not. In priso...

Three connections: 1. To emphasize that the Nazi regime did not depend on psychopaths. Normal, fully human people operated the Nazi state. The crimes ...