Posted on April 5 at 12:50 a.m.Suggest removal

I admire the magnificent straw man you have erected.
If you want to argue with healthcare from a libertarian angle, that's fine, even though I would disagree with you.

But instead, you make a connection to abortion that does not exist, and then use the same bruised rhetoric everyone's seen with regard to abortion to argue against healthcare.

Here's why the connection doesn't exist: I could take the VERY SAME argument and argue that it's hypocrisy by the Right, not the Left. They protest government intervention in an individuals' healthcare now, but were completely OK with it when abortion's illegal. That's the very same argument, and makes the same amount of logical sense...i.e. none.

And to the comment on Ayn Rand: her work would be genius, were it not that she forgets that not every man (or woman) is capable of being Howard Roark. Indeed, perhaps NO man is.

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Posted on December 4 at 11:15 a.m.Suggest removal

"If one believes the Bible to be true (or the Qur’an or the Vedas or none of these), that person aligns him or herself to a source of principles concerning issues such as government, social ills, the environment, etc."

False.
There is far too much diversity of views within every religion, and within atheism, to justify this claim. You can use religion to frame your moral principles, but the principles themselves come from somewhere else.

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Posted on December 4 at 10:49 a.m.Suggest removal

There were also well-publicized forums earlier in the semester. The time for the meeting was voted on by members of the I Hate Ozone group. Apparently, everyone who voted for the winning time decided they had better things to do than have someone patiently explain to them why Ozone was a necessary change, and every one of its problems was an unavoidable shortcoming, which will be improved in the future.
Hate on me if you want. I was as critical as everyone else about Ozone before I heard a couple people speak about it at a Dean's SAC meeting.

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Posted on November 12 at 12:29 p.m.Suggest removal

I like what you've written, but I would point out that reference to the impact of climate change on the third world probably means economic damage. To my knowledge every industrialized nation went through a period of massive emission of greenhouse gases (and pollution) before it got those emissions under control. One could argue that rapid expansion necessitates these emissions for the process of rapid industrialization to occur. The regulation of emissions could hinder growth. It's a subject of some debate in climate change economics, actually. I wish I knew more about it.

Climate change legislation must account for the trade-off, then, between economic growth and the avoidance of the damages of climate change. Or maybe we should forget about growth for the time being, especially if climate change is really an emergency. Which it seems like, according to fact 5, is where the debate focuses.

This is a very small point. I found the rest of the piece educational and a refreshing rebuttal to the ignorant opinion articles I've seen in the past few weeks.

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