JayB

But Off, if having a female head-of-state was the best manner in which to asses the legal, political, and cultural status of women in a given society, then we'd have to conclude that Pakistan is on par with Finland, since they've both only had one. You might even have to cede the contest to Pakistan, because Bhutto held office before Jäätteenmäki.

Sounds like that'd be a pretty sure fire way to score some red-hot meth-fueled man-lovin', so long as you're the pastor.

There was certainly no demand for alcohol or alcoholism anywhere in the world before the advent of the modern media. Take away advertising and there'd be no demand for anything. Actually, I think if you account for all of the homicides perpetrated by the various cartels and their hit-men in the countries where the drugs are produced, you'd see a significant reduction in the number of homicides in those countries. Not to mention dramatically reducing the effects of narco-corruption and intimidation on law enforcement, politicians, and the judiciary in those states.

Women aren't abused in Canada? Per your argument, the fact that women are abused in Canada - but the practice is both illegal and universally considered abhorrent - makes Canadian women no better off than their Saudi counterparts? Scroll down the list of rights and freedoms that women throughout the West enjoy and compare that to the list under Sharia and you've got a pretty even ledger there. Here's but one example: "A pregnancy as a result of rape first of all counts as evidence of adultery committed by the woman. The rape victim then has to prove that she really was raped. In case the man - which is very likely - denies that he has raped the woman, the woman has to name four male witnesses to prove the rape. In case the woman does not find these four male witnesses - which again is very likely - she will be charged with slander. For the crime of slander, shari'ah prescribes a punishment of 80 lashes. On top of that, the woman will be charged with adultery, and is thus threatened with the death penalty, if she is married. In case, she is unmarried, the "adultery" counts as immoral behaviour and is punished with 100 lashes. This is at least what the criminal code of January 2000 of the Nigerian state Zamfara says." So per your line of reasoning, if you had a wife or sister or any other woman that you cared about who was raped and became pregnant, and you had to decide whether her case would be subject to Western jurisprudence or Sharia, you might as well flip a coin because there's really no moral or practical difference between the two.

Number one. Not being a young woman in a predominantly Muslim country. " By SHAFIKA MATTAR, Associated Press Writer Thu Jan 25, 7:38 AM ET AMMAN, Jordan - A Jordanian man fatally shot his 17-year-old daughter whom he suspected of having sex despite a medical exam that proved her chastity, an official said Thursday. The man surrendered to police hours after the killing, saying he had done it for family honor. A state forensic pathologist, who works at the National Institute of Forensic Medicine in Amman where an autopsy was performed, said in a phone interview that the girl had run away from home several times for unknown reasons. Weeks ago, the girl had returned home from a family protection clinic after doctors had vouched for her virginity and the father had signed a pledge not to harm her, the pathologist said on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the case. "The tests proved that she was a virgin," the pathologist said. The girl returned home only after her father signed a statement promising not to harm her, he added. The father shot the girl four times in the head on Tuesday. On Wednesday, an autopsy was performed that again showed "she was still a virgin," the pathologist said. Authorities have not disclosed the names of the father or the daughter or even their hometown, saying only that they lived in a southern province. The crime is the first "honor killing" this year in Jordan, where many men consider sex out of wedlock to be an almost indelible stain on a family's reputation. On average, about 20 women in the country are killed by their relatives in such cases each year. Women have been killed for simply dating. Global human rights organizations have condemned such killings and appealed to King Abdullah II to put an end to them. In response, the government has abolished a section in the penal code that allowed for "honor" killers to get sentences as lenient as six months in prison. Instead, the government has told judges to consider honor killings on a par with other homicides, which in Jordan are punishable by up to 15 years in jail. But attempts to introduce harsher sentences have been blocked by conservative lawmakers who argue that tougher penalties would lead to promiscuity. Queen Rania also has called for harsher punishment for such killers."

That's better.

Sounds like you are getting a bit aggressive here, Chuck. Perhaps you should log-out and start using the Al_Pine avatar. Step back from the keyboard and dream of a society where the government has the power to outlaw all images of skinny models and fast-food. You'll feel better.

Just from the way you typically react anytime anyone questions whether or not a new law that's been conceived to benefit the public will A) actually do so B) may not have other undesirable consequences that far outweigh the proposed benefit. That and the reaction that ensues anytime someone suggests that any of the myriad of personal problems - from obesity to addiction - originate in the actions of the afflicted. This is my perception of you based on your comments here over the course of several years. You are free to dispute it. Selling heroin to consenting adults is entailed within the "complete legalization of all drugs" statement.

Tvash is on a roll today. Nice to see some fusion between the old-school classical liberalism and it's modern American counterpart from time to time. It causes me great pain to see that folks like Chuck get to call themselves liberals when what they believe represents the polar opposite of the beliefs that the philosophy of Liberalism was founded upon. I guess that socialist-state-interventionist doesn't roll off the tongue quite as easily, but it would be nice if there were an accurate shorthand term for this kind of a person that didn't misappropriate a name that had its origins in a philosophy that I'm fond of.

So it seems like the Chuck position is that if one is against one form of government intrusion - like the granting the government the right to control what you can say without being imprisoned - one must be against any government regulation of anything, because no freedoms are any more vital or worthy of rational protection in a free society than others. If you oppose legal sanctions that restrict speech, then you are thereby obligated to oppose restrictions on murder, because that too involves the government restriction on the scope of your freedoms, and per your argument you can't oppose restrictions on one without opposing restrictions on the other without contradicting yourself. Am I misreading you here, or is there more to the argument that you repeat over-and-over-and-over whenever anyone suggests that there are reasonable limits to the scope of the government's power? Related point: I am all for complete legalization of all drugs, for prostitution, etc. IMO anything that a mentally competent adult chooses to do to themselves, or anything that two or more mentally competent adults consent to do to one another should be legal. The point at which the public has any say in this begins once it is no longer occurring within a private space. There's no law against being naked in your own home, there are laws against being naked in public. There is no essential contradiction between believing that all private consensual behavior that only affects the participants should be legal, and that it's within the proper scope of the government's power to place restraints on what you are free to do once you leave your own home or other private space, or on your interactions with non-consenting parties. In this arena, some restrictions are vital to preserving liberty, others are detrimental to it, so one can support the former and object to the latter without there being any fundamental inconsistency whatsoever. With regards to the harmful potential of pharmaceuticals, I can get my hands on thousands of harmful compounds at the hardware store, but the fact I don't snort Drano has nothing to do with whether or not it's legal. I see no reason to believe that the entire country would rush in and start mainlining fentanyl if there weren't laws in place to prevent it.

Exactly. There are two things that concern me about this kind of legislation and the thinking that animates it. The first concerns the rights of consenting adults to voluntarily engage in activities that others might find distasteful or dangerous for their tastes. Professional jockeys, bull-riders, porn-stars, NFL Linemen, climbers, boxers, ballerinas, sword-swallowers, and members of a gazillion other professions assume certain risk and voluntarily subject their bodies to risks and hazards and strains in the course of earning a living that neither you nor I might want to adopt ourselves. Should we enable the state to outlaw all such occupations on account of the harm that could come to others who might be influenced by becoming aware of their actions? Is the benefit of protecting mentally competent people against their own decisions equal to the cost of enabling the state to restrict private functions in order to secure some nebulous public benefit? We aren't talking about public goods here. If anything is private, it is your body, and the arguments that center on governing things like roads and highways and airports just don't apply here. If you are a jockey and you can't make weight, it's time to find another profession. If you are an NFL lineman and want to slim down to 180, time to retire. If you are a model and can't or don't want to look the way the person paying you expects, find a different employer or find a different profession. The other problem with this kind of legislation is that it won't have any meaninful impact on the problem. It's easy to point fingers at the media, but pretending the shoving all images of extremely thin women down the memory hole is going to protect young women who are susceptible to anorexia or bullemia is pure fantasy. They'll certainly never notice the thin women around them, and I'm sure that it will escape their notice that thin, fit women seem to get alot more attention from men. Better find ways to legislate against these realities as well, not to mention domineering parents, competitive school environments, etc, etc, etc. Meanwhile, there's another eating disorder that affects millions more people, that will impose far greater costs on society and on the individuals who suffer from it. It's about time to pretend that we can legislate that one away too. Let's ban all images of high calorie food, let the government mandate what we can eat, and pretend that something outside of ourselves is ultimately responsible for our obesity or lack thereof. That'll surely solve the problem.

I think a much better approach to this problem would be to address it through argument, reason, and persuasion rather than state-enforced compulsion. Worked against fur, and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work here.

I think it's clear that the fashion magazines and the unhealthy body images that they promote were responsible for the women in 15th century Venice deliberately swallowing tapeworms to maintain their figures too. Ditto for all of those corsets and whatnot - definitely all the media's fault.

Didn't catch the whole thing, but the portion concerning health-care contained some long-overdue changes in the health care market.

The best teacher I ever had taught my 11th grade English class. She left behind a more lucrative career on account of her love for the subject, and she was extremely motivated, talented, and inspiring. She also had zero seniority, so when the enrollment dropped a bit, guess who had to go? She was clearly the best teacher in the department, if not the school, but the dead-weight POS lifers stayed, and she got shipped off to an assignment that was a total mismatch for her talents and aspirations, and she gave up on the profession a couple of years later. Anyhow - here's a question for the teachers out there. Could a competitive voucher system where drive and talent matter more than seniority possibly produce a worse market for your skills that the one you're in now? Could the pay and respect afforded to teachers be any worse than it already is in the current system? Is the status quo - which brought us the situation that I described above, and millions more like it every year - really producing such great results for students and teachers that any attempt to disrupt it will invariably lead to something worse?

True. Between longer-radius turns and the propensity to sideslide, the advent of boarding has not been kind to the zipper-lines. They seem much harder to find these days.

Great location, love the sun-deck on sunny afternoons, everything else is pretty marginal.

I've noticed the same thing, and chalk the decline up to a few converging trends: the advent of snowboarding, the rise of park skiing, and the aging of the folks from the "mogul era." In addition to diverting a significant chunk of the demographic most likely to become aggressive mogul skiers away from skiing and into another activity, the rise of snowboarding seems to have had a negative effect on the mogul population. Between the larger turn-radius, and the propensity to side-slide through difficult portions of the slope, the rise of boarders seems to have lead to fewer and fewer regular zipper lines of moguls. With regards to skiing, I think that to a pretty big-chunk of teenage skiers bump-skiing seems like a relic from the daffy-era, and they'd much rather hone their skills in the park. That's an interesting development, since it was bump skiers like J.P. Auclair and JF Cusson and others that more or less invented the Newschool scene, and quite a few of the older pros that are still competing in the park comps have a background in moguls. I don't think that bump-skiing will go the way of ballet, simply because they'll continue to be a fact of life on the steeper stuff, but most young skiers will aspire towards something else. urWJzuvOO9M

I'm going the other way on purpose! VNQ1JS1V6WA

How about a weight-change contest. I've gone from around 168 to ~181 over the course of the last 5-6 weeks.

One important distinction that seems to be missing from most of the commentary that accompanies these episodes is that Islam is a system of beliefs that one voluntarily adheres to, not a racial category that one is confined to. Once anyone is old enough to think for themselves, remaining a Muslim is a matter of choice, not an accident of one's birth. I am not terribly surprised that CAIR and others have adopted the tactic of attempting to exempt their beliefs from debate and scrutiny by claiming that any criticism or suspicion of Muslims is analogous to racial persecution. What does surprise me is how well this strategy has worked for them. They've largely succeeded in transmogrifying a debate about an ideology into a parable of racial victimhood.

My goodness. Is the new Al the same as the old Al or is someone else in charge of this avatar?

Yeah - hopefully one day we'll all be as enlightened as Ahmedineja and we'll obtain the objective clarity necessary to dispute the occurence of the Holocaust too, won't we, SC? Ahmedinejad has served at least one useful function. He's doing a pretty good job of galvanizing all of the Sunni powers against him. Look for this dynamic to become more prevalent in the months and years ahead, and for official and/or public opinion in the Middle East to become steadily less favorable towards Iran's armed proxies in Lebanon and Palestine. Were it not for the beginnings of this dynamic, Siniora's government would probably have already fallen.

Just offering an OT observation for anyone who might find themselves doing some cold-weather camping with the s/o and thinking "Hey, let's zip the bags together, it'll be warmer..." Best of luck on whatever route it is that you are pondering.

Once again, "Shocking." In other news, "Experts Say: Law of Gravity Still in Effect." I hope that - for the rest of the people who happen to inhabit that second-most-dismal-and-perpetually-fucked continent - at the very least the future plight of the Venezuelans proves edifying in a way that the previous 50 "Peoples Revolutions" in South America have not been.