Lurker > red sox 777

Romney/Paul showdown in South Carolina!

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Well, considering Satan's primary goal is to troll humanity, it makes sense that he's going to achieve at least some successes.

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don't you find it strange that so many people started looking at it that way though?

Not really, once they were collected together and published in a single volume, it's natural, even though it's wrong, that people would take the whole canon to be one book.

Or that so many people decided that that exact bundle of texts is the 'right' way of studying religion?

If any religious texts are true, then logically there must exist some set of religious texts that constitutes all true and materially relevant religious texts. So, no, it's not strange.

Especially considering some texts are even believed to be polytheistic in origin?

I and others would disagree about that.

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Yes - 17
No - 22

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The Bible was never intended to be one single story. It is a collection of scriptures, not one book, and has never claimed otherwise.

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My impression is that God likes to work in such a way as to minimize the number and extent of miracles (stuff that is impossible by the laws of physics), while still displaying his awesome power in a way that humans can understand.

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Global floods are much cooler than instant unexplained death. The Flood gave us the word "antediluvian." Where would the English language be without such a wonderful word?

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God created land bridges for them. The water level was probably lower back then, actually, before the deluge.

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People can't swim forever either, and they can safely board ships without making them sink. Televisions cannot swim at all, or even float, but they can also safely board ships.

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Both hippos and elephants can swim, so I don't think their weight is problem as far as floatation goes.

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So that's why Pokemon was banned in Saudi Arabia! It promotes evolution!

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Because the dinosaurs were actually killed by a comet impact on the 6th "day" of course, before humans were created. The dinosaurs on ark discussion is just a hypothetical.

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Yes - 9
No - 9

Tied so far. I suspect there'll be less yes answers than usual today due to football, but hopefully people are watching football and using this board at the same time so we'll get a fair poll.

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People have already thought of that. That scientists can create universes, in which scientists can create universes, ad infinitum. It's the scariest idea that science has ever produced, in my opinion.

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Indeed, something like apatasaurus (or whatever it's called) would probably take up as much space as all the insect species combined. Given that there were many large land dinosaur species, they would probably have taken up more space than all other land animal species together.

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Yes

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God is omnipotent. Surely you do not doubt that he can make species evolve at will?

Of course, as I said, the "plot hole" brought up in this topic isn't strange, or miraculous, at all. The vast majority of species on earth are really really small, and Noah's Ark was pretty big. Fitting them on there would be pretty easy. If you think the flood is strange, there are several aspects of it that are far more strange than this one.

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Yes or No. I will construe unclear answers to mean one of those for vote counting purposes.

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http://www.fastcompany.com/1769468/scientist-discover-the-oldest-largest-body-of-water-in-existence-in-space

Perhaps scientists have found God's reservoir from which he innundates planets from time to time.

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If you want to attack the flood, the real thing that demands explanation is: where did all the water go?

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Yeah, an elephant needs more space than it's body volume to survive too. But there's plenty of room on an ark as large as the one for which the measurements are given in the Bible. Feeding them is more difficult, but presumably if God can get all those species to come aboard the ark, he can deal with that too.

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And remember the power of volume. Say an elephant is as tall as 100 insects, as long as 200 insects, and as wide as 70 insects. Then you can fit 100 x 200 x 70 = 140,000 insects in the same space as 1 elephant.

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Sure, no one said that the animals on the Ark had any comfort.

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Most species are very small, so you could fit them all on a large ark. You can fit probably tens of thousands of insect species in the same space you need for the elephants.

Also, with the bread, the point of that is that it was a miracle. That means, it is impossible by the laws of physics, but God made it happen.

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Ideally, they both agree. Or, they go to two different courts and the two courts agree. In the worst case scenario, you could always have a businesses whose job was to arbitrate differing claims among courts sort of like how we have "bankers banks" already today.

How could they possibly agree? They're both going to choose the court that's best for their case, and unless all the courts are the same, those are definitely going to be different courts.

As for the arbitrator between courts, that sounds exactly like our current court system.

Remember, the whole point of a judicial system is to exercise control over people who do NOT consent to it. It is involuntary. The purpose is to protect our liberty and property.

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No, you're not an economist. But the question stands, and is really super obvious. Who gets to decide which court to go to? The plaintiff or the defendant? They can't both choose.

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You only have access to the limited liability of your LLC in the context of business dealings performed by/for your LLC. You can't just get general limited liability for everything you do as a private citizen.

No corporation can get that though, because they don't have any activity as private citizens.

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A corporation exists because of law, not government. The government is under the law, in our country.

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Also, individuals do have access to limited liability. Just go form your own LLC. Just file some papers, and voila, you've got a company with limited liability! It's not a free lunch, however, as people are going to be more cautious lending to your LLC than to you directly- because your LLC is limited liability.

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How exactly does this agency thing work for crime? What if I don't want to be under the jurisdiction of an agency? Can I opt out? But then real criminals will opt out of all agencies. Does each agency maintain a sort of gated community guarded by its forces? Sort of like 1990s Afghanistan?

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Isn't the exact point all Ron Paul supporters are trying to make that he stays true to his beliefs and that they want him to make them true in the US

whether or not that would happen when he'd be elected president is not the point

I want Ron Paul to make changes, because he's the only candidate who will make real changes. I don't necessarily want him to enact his entire platform, but I'm not really afraid of that happening, because Congress will stop the really far out ideas.

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Smuffin, our success depends as much on the stable rule of law as a free market. Competing court systems and police agencies is anarchy, plain and simple. I get the South Carolina Supreme Court to rule for me, and you get the North Carolina Supreme Court to rule for you on the same case. Then SC and NC go to war to enforce their rulings. That is exactly what anarchy is.

Now, as for the right to vote, in my opinion the right to vote is important to preserve, because it does not come from the contribution one makes to society. There's 2 good arguments for 1 person, 1 vote:

1. Because the right to vote is given to people at birth by God. It is your birthright as a human citizen of this country.
2. Because it makes society better off. This is hard to see or talk about in a short space, but consider the Roman Republic- why did the Roman Republic have so much success in war? Because its soldiers were Roman citizens. The republic they fought for was their own. In your proposed tax-based voting system, the only people who care for the success of the country are the people who are paying lots of taxes.

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Fortunately the rest of our government is not extreme, and the president does not have unlimited power.

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I can't think of a war where we haven't fought in the interests of the United States. What good did we do for the world when we attacked Nicaragua? Iraq? Afghanistan? Those countries and the world are both in far worse shape than where we found them.

Korea- we fought here to support South Korea, and fight global communism. Fighting global communism could be seen as helping the US, but in my opinion it helped our interests very little. Our desire to promote our ideology across the face of the earth and stop communism from doing the same, yes, but that's not the same thing as promoting our interests.

Vietnam- same thing, but even moreso.

Iraq 1- Fought almost completely altruistically to help Kuwait.

Iraq 2- Fought almost completely altruistically to help, um......Halliburton?

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What on Earth makes you think Iran would invade Israel? Only the US right wing media believes that, everyone else in the world understands that if they got a nuke it would be used as a deterrent. Israel is one of the top 10 military superpowers in the world and has the ability to nuke any of it's neighbors at any time. You really have to understand that region through a US media lens to think Israel is under any real threat.

The fact that Israel's neighbors have already tried 4 times since it was founded? Israel has a strong military, but it stands alone without friends and vastly outnumbered in a sea of countries hostile to it. If Iran wanted to make a serious attempt at invading Israel, it would try to get the surrounding nations to go with it.

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Before Korea, the US never fought a war except to help the interests of the United States. Afterwards, we've gone to war for the good of the world.

How does he expect the government to make revenue then, if he wants to the eliminate capital gains and income taxes?

Well, I can't speak for him, but I wouldn't eliminate those taxes entirely. Maybe eliminate them for the bottom 80%.

The way the Federal Government made money before the income tax was tariffs on trade. Many economists of course say that is anti-free market and bad, but I am not so sure about that in our present situation.

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If North Korea dared to invade South Korea again, every single nation in the ****ing UN would be on their asses in moments. North Korea would never be so stupid as to try that again.

South Korea can probably win a war against the North nowadays on their own due to superior technology and better technology (though not without incurring massive casualties and damage). But if the US does not intervene, I doubt any other nation is going to provide substantial support to South Korea either. North Korea isn't a pushover like Iraq. They've got the 4th largest standing army in the world, the largest army including reserves. No country is going to be willing to go fight North Korea just out of altruism, unless the whole international community goes with them, or the US.

Plus, China is still semi-allied to North Korea.

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That is incredibly childish.

And if you suddenly tell old people that have been paying into SS their entire lives that they're getting nothing out of it, there will be a f***ing riot. SS and medicare are not going to be fixed/ended in one fell swoop unless it's a total crash.

Filibusters and vetoes are how you get stuff done in Washington today. Change is not easy. You could have a more gradual reduction of SS and medicare than instant amputation of course- maybe say that people over 65 today get the full amount, people 50-65 get less, people 40-50 get less than that, people below 40 get nothing, or something like that. And it's not true that people have been paying taxes all their lives and gotten nothing- the money was spent by their elected representatives, on things like bank bailouts and wars in Iraq. The military is easier to make drastic cuts to quickly.

Anyway, any response to my point that a uniform sales tax is completely regressive?

I agree it would be completely regressive and I do not support it at all. As far as I am aware, neither does Ron Paul.

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Cutting those programs is about as impossible as Ron Paul being elected President of the United States. Once he's in there, he just needs 1/3 of either the House or the Senate to back him (get the Tea Party to help, say), and he can pursue a policy of blanket vetoing everything, absolutely everything, unless his demands are met.

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I admit I didn't read the Citizens United opinion so I could be wrong, but I thought that's what the Supreme Court based its ruling on- free speech.

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Sure it makes sense, you just have to cut spending. Really cut spending.

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Also, are donations to shell corporation completely anonymous, or just publicly anonymous? Because if there isn't ANY oversight, people can easily use illegally made money to donate to political campaigns because the entire structure of the system is a legal form of money laundering. What's stopping a "politician" who's made $500 million from importing cocaine into the US from forming a shell corporation, anonymously donating to it, donating that to his PAC, and using the PAC to purchase a private jet and employ all his family members for ludicrous salaries, all under the guise of a political campaign?

That would be illegal money laundering though, because the source income is illegal and the recipient knows it. The difficulty is just in proving it.

So, **** the poor, basically.

No, the government would not be doing a thing to stop poor people from speaking freely.

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What if you don't have money?

Then you're still free to spend the money you have has you see fit. No one is stopping you from doing so.

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I mean, the key thing to remember about these Super PAC funds is that they are spent. That means they are not pocketed. It would be disturbing is Sheldon Adelson gave Newt Gingrich $5 million and told him to keep it. But this money is all going to be gone within a couple of weeks, spent on TV ads attacking Mitt Romney.

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I've spent some time in China before, so yes. But the way to stop corruption is to conduct business out in the open, not to make rules against it. You bet China and Russia have loads of laws on the books against corruption. Once in a while, some businessman is discovered to be corrupt in China and they are unable to hush it up in the media. Then the state does a show trial and hands down severe punishment to appease the public and try to make it look like they are not massively corrupt. But the only crime from the state's point of view here is getting caught.

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So money = free speech, then?

So Mitt Romney has more free speech than you and I? Or does that only apply to corporations?

You and I are just as free to use our money in free speech as Mitt Romney. Only he has a lot more money.

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No, the money comes from somewhere, and it all gets spent on the campaign, especially with expensive TV ads. The donors do not have unlimited capital, you know.

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You've gotta weigh free speech against everything else. I tend to side with free speech always.

And remember, the entire point of free speech is to protect offensive speech. I think shadowy donations by shell corporations to PACs is pretty offensive to a lot of people.

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Or we could just get rid of the restrictions on individuals donating to candidates!

Personally, if I was a shareholder in a corporation, and it was donating large sums of money to candidates, especially candidates I opposed, I would be bothered. Corporations are supposed to make money for shareholders, and giving away money doesn't seem too profitable. And if I don't like the candidate, obviously I don't want my money spent in that way.

Now, shell corporations aren't publicly traded, and don't have this problem. If a shell corporation is donating, you can bet that all its owners want it to donate.

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Well, shell corporations nobody has ever heard of are pretty common. People often use them to hold real estate.

I mean, you can't really circumvent the law legally. That's almost like saying you are circumventing the law (the 18th Amendment) every time you drink alcohol, legally, using the 21st Amendment.

Our law here is, you can't donate this much money to a candidate, unless someone is willing to file some forms and jump through a few hoops. Which is ridiculous, but it also suggests we could/should just scrap all the campaign finance laws completely.

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