Posts by Stephen Judd
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"Anon for obvious reasons", that is a terrible sad tale. I think you did the right thing, and you have my every sympathy.
James: it seems to me that if you're prepared to acknowledge exceptions for certain causes of pregnancy, that totally undercuts any argument based on "unborn babies' rights". Accepting the notion of unborn children and their rights for the moment: if you have a right to life, how can it be contingent on how you came into being?
The effect of these exceptions, whether intended or not, is to punish women for having the wrong kind of sex, ie voluntary.
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I think of it as being like free-range eggs. I bought them when they were very expensive indeed, as did a few other eccentrics. We were the market, we grew the market, the producers started to compete for our custom, and now there are a great many free range eggs that relatively are cheaper than they used to be.
It is true that in this way large concerns "segment" the market to capture the premium that soft-headed idiots like me are prepared to pay. On the other hand, things are better than they would otherwise be. And if animal welfare laws were tightened up so that only free-range eggs could be sold, the battery farmers wouldn't be able to claim that you can't make a living selling free-range eggs.
So it is with the fair-trade coffee. It doesn't need to take over the world, although that might well be a good thing. To the extent that it works at all, it does something good.
I noticed that People's Coffee in Newtown, who sell very good fair-trade coffee, also sell fair-trade sugar. I've been thinking about the case for switching to it. Sugar is also produced in appalling ways in many places. I believe Chelsea source most of theirs from Queensland, which hasn't had indentured labour since 1906...
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The economics of coffee is a fascinating disaster. There is a terrible mix of factors:
1. It's very labour intensive to produce quality coffee, because the cherries ripen throughout the year, and require hand-picking to get the ripe ones. There is no mechanised way to do this that preserves quality.
2. Huge planting programmes of very low-grade, high-yield varieties in places like Vietnam and Brazil have swamped the market for years. These are owned and operated by large firms, and drive out the little guys.
3. Multinationals cream off a huge, huge profit margin they are loathe to give up.
4. In some places, eg Guatemala, coffee growing operates with virtual forced labour. Otherwise it wouldn't be economic to grow. (Just like cocoa and sugar cane).
Learning about coffee production in the last few months, as I've done more and more reading, has really taken some of the enjoyment out of drinking it. Every bean represents a lot of terrible labour done for a pittance, maybe under duress.
When you put all these things together, it's clear that if you want nice coffee at a price you can afford from a producer who volunteered to make it for you and gets a reasonable living from it, only cutting out the middle-men will do it - they screw down the rewards to the producers and the quality for the consumers.
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Please let's not give mark any more jollies.
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How do we know you're serious in that enquiry mark, and not merely seeking to wind people up for kicks?
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"i just get a kick out of whipping up a storm."
The very essence of trolling.
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In my universe, mark taslov, there is abundant evidence that human beings of all sexes make decisions about sexual partners that do not turn out well - even if they seemed sound to start with. In the event that their judgement was wrong, I prefer not to put the boot in afterwards.
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using a woman as his baby incubator is no different from using a man as a lifelike dildo
We have been trolled, very effectively. I sucked into taking you seriously up until there, mark, but if you want to provoke successfully you're going to have to refrain from the obviously ludicrous.
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So basically, in order to prevent people fucking when wasted, you'd like to threaten one or both parties to an extensive financial and physical commitment.
I don't find that morally compelling, or good policy. It does seem like a very punitive attitude towards drunken sex, which empirically many many many citizens enjoy.
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First your proposed justification for a male veto rested in some notion that you had rights. Then it was about taxpayers paying. Now it's about trivialising sex, and objectifying men (__what does that even mean?__).
To me that all sounds like one rationalisation after another for compelling women to bear children they don't want.