imatfaal

litmus Has been suspended for 7 days for failing to heed moderator warnings and continuing to mistake this for a conspiracy theory forum.

Mrs Moontanman is obviously a talented photographer - and congrats on your title :-D

subhumn has been banned for numerous breaches of rule 1.c which prohibits slurs and prejudice against any group

Bearing in the trouble the RC Church has had with the sexual predilections of many of its priests - I am not sure about the placement of that switch

! Moderator Note spam post deleted - you can always report a spam post which will bring it quickly to the attention of a moderator

Welcome John. To my knowledge there are at least a couple of ex servicemen here, and there are many of us who got education late! Enjoy Good isn't it!

We really do prefer it if you put quotes around a source and reference it. Wikipedia dixit would possibly suffice - but a link to the page you lifted the quote from would be better. This allows members to see the quote from Popper and the original authors' take on the quote and the context. Whilst you did leave in the hyperlink and the wiki-reference - it would be more acceptable if you were to use the quote facility (it's the 13th from the LHS bottom row) that looks like a speech bubble and provide a link to the source.

I had LL The Demise... The Case MR Creation Science is not Science LL Science at the Bar MR Pro Judice The final response from Ruse is published the next pages in the same journal as Science at the Bar. By the way noted this when checking I wasnt going mad. Do you know if it ever got published?

I actually swapped my 4H for an H to make it more legible - I take notes all day in pencil and I get fed up sharpening pencils - but for sketching you are spot on! OK - never really used that way, but both seem to work

I meant the awful "science at the bar" - rather than the terrible "the demise..." You not concluding with Ruse's final rebuttal (only a few pages long - but cannot find it now)? Seems to be the natural conclusion. Presume you have a copy of Barry Gross' Philosophers at the Bar - I downloaded a hooky copy when you first posted the Ruse article - but it seems to have been removed

Quick Tutorial

I have read Malthus, Schopenhaur, and a few others and remain almost entirely unconvinced. THey predict disaster in the next 25-50 years - and have been doing so for centuries. It's a neat excuse to deny others the rights and privileges that I enjoyed - and I won't take that option. For a nice diversion and potential solution watch some of Hans Rosling's TED lectures on birth rate / gdp per capita / female education. In fact I would always recommend watching Dr Hans - one of academia's great communicators. Very good - did you read Larry Lauden's slightly ill-considered follow-up and Ruse's counter?

incompressible.fluid was also banned as yet another sockpuppet of mpc755

Anilkumar - has been suspended for 3 days for regularly hijacking threads and continuing to argue the point even when warned.

Sorry Daedalus - he isn't at liberty to disagree with you, we banned him yesterday. He is/was a sophisticated troll and you probably would have ended up pulling your own hair out trying to get him to see reason.

Seventh has been banned as a further sockpuppet.

Strict Liability offences are dangerous and should be strictly limited - too often they lead to unavoidable injustice. I am a great believer in common law or if a statute is absolutely necessary then giving the judges as much flexibility as possible. I will try and read up on the US statutes and law that governs this area - and if you have any pointers it would be appreciated. On the wrongful conflation of teenage flirting/sexting and pornography depicting child abuse there can be no excuse - if the situation is as described by the article then laws need to be changed. On the impediment to prosecution I remain less convinced, although open to argument; the evidence in the articles is scanty - whilst the age of the iphone is referenced well, the legal and procedural claims seem to be backed up by newspaper articles and reddit threads (apart from the child in the sea cartoon - and reading in the swedish press some of the images - although all manga - were slightly odd. If I had found those images on a friends pc I would be vaguely perturbed if there were not a reasonable purpose - such as being a translator of manga from the japanese ). Regarding the filming of a incident in a public place I would argue in an English court that a film is not necessarily pornography . The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act of 2008 (which I believe is governing law on this matter - but this is not my area and I have not researched it, there may be specific statute on child pornography) reads inter alia: Subsection 3 would easily be interpreted to show that a recording made without conscious decision by a passer-by of an incident over which they had no control is by no means pornography - and thus the strict liability (if it exists in English law) would be thwarted as the recording would be merely a recording and not pornography. in an English court I am reasonably sure that the scenario in the park would not lead to prosecution let alone conviction. I find it hard to believe that any sensible jurisdiction would have a definition of pornography that did not contain the ideas of arousal, prurience, and/or titillation. By the reckoning of the article's author surely possession of a copy of any of a fair proportion of Renaissance religious art would be illicit - the babe Jesus and the cherubim would seem to fall foul of those regulations if there is no check regarding the titillatory purpose or prurient intent of the picture. It is a very good article that I am glad you posted - and even though my (fairly uninformed) reaction is that the legal impediment case is over-stated - the main thrust of his argument does stand.

Bill - I think your photo and caption is insulting to the students pictured, you have no knowledge of their cares, interests and vocations and yet you choose to portray them as uncaring merely because they are having a good time at college. When I was at medical school in the 80/90s I can guarantee that there were numerous scenes of drunken debauchery - it's practically on the syllabus - and yet all of my year spent at least some time working in a universal health care system with free provision at the point of use and I believe about 80% are still working in the NHS (this is despite much higher rewards available in private health and/or abroad).

Rigney has been suspended for 7 days for continued abuse of logical fallacies, refusal to debate, inability/unwillingness to provide backup to claims of fact, and generally treating the forum as a political blog rather than an arena for discussion

O/T re amazon. I like Jeff Bezos much more than most of the independent booksellers I meet - most of them seem to think Bernard Black has too sunny and cheerful a disposition. There are far fewer independent booksellers in London than there used to be - and most of the high street chains are far more dangerous than amazon. the net book agreement made uk booksellers very lazy and ripe for the picking - dillons started the fight and amazon finished it. I use Daunt books for presents and easy-to-come by novels - but for my texts and less common books when faced with a choice between a considerable markup and a two week wait against a decent discount and next day delivery convenience wins. I lost it with Foyles when they refused to believe me that Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics was in paperback and wanted to charge me 90 quid for an hardback import from USA - Amazon sold me the paperback for 20!

eyesOpened has been permanently banned for using a sockpuppet to subvert this suspension. The sockpuppet Offended is also banned

Amazon is a seriously dangerous thing - I am now £3.71 poorer and a copy of You Can't Read this Book is due on my door mat in 5 days time. Really liked the sound of it

EMField has been suspended for 7 days for continuing to hijack threads after numerous staff warnings.

The dragon-man plainly crazy - but on VP's words being similarly so ... Frankly when I read some of Paul Ryan's tax plans and then read articles like this one I don't think that Biden's comments about chains is that far off the mark. Trashing the safety net, reducing tax burden on the rich preferentially, and legislating to make voting (especially for black communities) more difficult; I would go along with Biden to a fair extent. OK so the words were deliberately inflammatory and an exageration - but speaking to a crowd for whom the situation may under R/R be made considerable worse and are being actively disenfranchised by the GOP it is acceptable rhetoric. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/18/republican-voter-suppression-early-voting_n_1766172.html?utm_hp_ref=politics

Absolutely has been suspended for a week for posting unintelligible text-speak and using foul and abusive language when asked to communicate properly by staff