Posts by Chris Waugh
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to Moz,
My response is “is it better than being beaten to death? Yes? What problem?”. Because that’s exactly what we’re talking about here – the “human right” of a parent to continue killing their children, being contrasted with what I think is a right children have, the right to life.
Moz, this aspect of your argument I just don't get. How many child abusers kill their children? Precious few, it would seem. How many repeatedly kill their children despite repeated jail sentences for killing previous kids? A vanishingly small number closely resembling zero, perhaps? It would seem to me that the overwhelming majority of child abusers leave their victims alive to grow up to be seriously damaged adults, some of whom go on to abuse their own children. It would also seem to me that all people, so long as they are still alive, are capable of rehabilitation.
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Farmer Green,
Actually, I hadn't thought of the methane emissions of growing paddy rice.
As for water buffalos, my point was they can't be so destructive if they're still used in agriculture. I guess Queensland is a great example of putting something where it's not supposed to be and doing nothing about controlling it - Australia and New Zealand seem to have plenty examples of that kind of thing. If only those early settlers had read their Daodejing... So water buffalos, cloven hoved, but in the right place doing the right thing, not a problem.
I think "wu wei" is hard enough to grasp even if you have read the Taoist classics in the original.
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Richard Grevers,
Asian farmers – truly sustainable ones who have worked the same land for 5,000 years with no degradation and no external inputs – know that hoofed animals destroy soil structure and significantly reduce the productivity of the land. So they restrict the animals to a very small percentage of the land – housing them, essentially, and achieve outputs per acre far above anything seen in the Western world.
What Farmer Green said about bison, and:
It is my experience, admittedly limited to a small corner of northern China and a few places in southern China, that population density rather than soil destruction that causes them to restrict their animals to a small percentage of the land. There simply isn't room for NZ-style large paddocks. Also, water buffalo are used by rice farmers in their paddies. And historically people living north of a line the Great Wall roughly follows historically were nomadic herders - I believe some still are.
And:
Asian farmers
Essentialising, much? Asia is rather large and quite diverse.
truly sustainable ones who have worked the same land for 5,000 years with no degradation and no external inputs
Utter nonsense. First, because of that old "5,000 years" meme that always gets trotted out, second because you somehow seem to ignore the massive impact of human activity on the environment right across Asia. Please explain China's massive problem with desertification or why the mountain range at the back of my in-laws' village is a reforestation area? Or why in many places the bed of the Yellow River is higher than the surrounding farmland? Or China's massive reliance on agricultural chemicals? Just a couple of China-centric examples, I'm sure others familiar with other parts of Asia can chip in their two cents' worth.
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to Joe Wylie,
And Latin was widely spoken in England before English existed.
Widely spoken in Britain before England existed?
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to Moz,
“next time you do that we will punish you again”, or “to stop you doing that we’re going to put you in jail until you die”. One of which is evidently not a deterrent, the other is IMO worse than sterilisation.
But with jail, including preventive detention, there is the possibility of education and healing, reforming people. If even preventive detention includes the possibility of an eventual gradual, carefully supervised and supported re-entry into the community, then former child abusers have the possibility of eventually raising kids and doing it well. Provided, of course, they do actually reform. Sterilisation simply takes away any chance of ever having kids again, so it society's going to do that to them, why should they bother sorting themselves out? And so long as they're on the outside, they can still get access to kids and abuse them. After all, society obviously considers them less than fully human, so why should they do the rest of us the courtesy of trying to properly integrate into civilised society?
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to Bart Janssen,
The trick is finding a benevolent one.
Chiang Ching-kuo, educated in Stalin's Soviet Union, inherited the Republic of China, then long since reduced to Taiwan and its outlying islands, though still officially waiting for the chance to retake the Mainland from those commie bandits, from his father Chiang Kai-shek and ended martial law and set Taiwan on the path of liberalisation that led to eventual democratisation. King Juan Carlos did a similar thing on inheriting Spain from Franco. Then there's everybody else who inherited an authoritarian state or dictatorship...
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Capture: Coast to Coast, in reply to Nora Leggs,
Beaut day!
Indeed. Such light! Such colour! I feel like I need sunglasses just to look at the photos.
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to Lilith __,
Oops, sorry, saw the humour in the "we never got taught that in school", but missed the rest. Another reminder to never post precaffeination.
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to Lilith __,
Vulgar Latin!?
Yes, Vulgar Latin.
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Hard News: Crashing the party before it starts, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
A good reason to keep/extend ballot box voting.
One of many good reasons to keep ballot box voting. We (collectively, as a species) seem to have forgotten that technology is not the answer to everything and some things actually don't need to be fixed.