Posts by Stephen Judd
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
By "area best left alone" I meant keeping the status quo. Which is also not satisfactory. But I don't believe in changing to something which isn't obviously better.
"...offering a specific defence to people who assault their children."
Well, that's begging the question, isn't it? If there is such a thing as reasonable force - implicit in the term smacking, rather than bashing, let's say - then it isn't assault.
-
(I never smacked my very well-behaved daughter, and the one time I came close, I felt terrible. Nor was I ever smacked that I recall.)
I really think this is an area best left alone. We already have legislation on abuse and neglect, and there is already plenty of scope for agencies like CYFS to act. I have big, big problems with law that is apparently designed to be ignored except when the authorities feel like enforcing it. The select committee observed that technically confining your child to its room is kidnap, to which I can only reply a) I doubt it -- was the really the advice given to the committee ? -- and b) if so, that is an argument for amending the law on kidnap, not creating a new offence that can be held against me if the police decide they need the leverage.
The only saving grace is that a successful prosecution will require evidence - and I wonder what would provide evidence under the new law that would not have been evidence of assault under the old.
plum, I don't see any connection between smacking and climate change. And if you're worried about perceptions of people who espouse progressive causes, you should stop that patronising "socially enlightened" bullshit. We've all seen lights and mine's as good as yours. And I don't think extending arbitrary state power into my house is very bloody enlightened.
-
how do these kids explain their increasingly flexible prehensile thumbs
Dude, Lamarckism is so 19th century.
And moving on, we get a distorted picture of the religiosity of Americans. The truly wingnut evangelicals are a minority of American Christians. And right now a major split is developing in that camp, as the newer, younger leaders are embracing conservation and global warming as important issues and *gasp* concern for the poor. The Kansas school board that tried to get "Intelligent Design" on the syllabus was voted off. I think the fundy grip on the US is weakening, and maybe it was never as strong as its enemies or its advocates claimed.
-
Span: "the Jewish fundamentalist position"
OK, here's the deal. Fundamentalist is not really a word you can apply to Jews. The reason is that in Christianity fundamentalism is a specific Protestant doctrine which asserts the inerrant and literal truth of their bible (of course this presents problems of internal consistency let alone consistency with the observable world but let's leave that for now).
I think you're using "fundamentalist" as a synonym for "extremist" or neotraditional or reactionary. There are various Jewish groups that might be classed under that head... but they are all very Jewish in that far from interpreting scripture literally, they work hard at inferring non-literal conclusions from it, in accordance with their various rabbinical traditions. In that sense they are as far from fundamentalists as it is possible to be.
Like Islam, and unlike most Christian denominations, Judaism does not have a rigid, top-down doctrine. So there is no unitary position on evolution. My brother-in-law, who is an Orthodox rabbi, was very taken with the intelligent design crowd. He could meet another Orthodox rabbi, from a different rabbinical tradition, who thinks evolution is true, and they could have a jolly good discussion about it, and cite rabbincal authorities, and so on. And they might think each other wrong, but they wouldn't label each other "bad Jew" or say "you can't believe that and still be a Jew".
Being a good Orthodox Jew is about following Jewish law as defined in rabbinical tradition, not about having a view on evolution. Which in turn relates to the basic Jewish attitude that doing what God wants us do is much more important than believing things about God. All the study of Torah is about is figuring out what God wants us to do, not discovering secrets of the universe or elaborating a consistent theological view. Come to think of it, in theory that's true of being a good Reform Jew, although the Orthodox would say that the Reform are badly mistaken about what God wants us to do. A bad Jew is one who does not practice and who does not study Torah. (I am a bad Jew).
Yeah, you will find Jews in the intelligent design or creationist camps, as well as evolutionist. But they are allowed to disagree. It is not a matter that is essential to the practice of Judaism, which as a religion is far more about practice than anything else.
There is actually a Wikipedia article on this very topic.
-
Let's just say that paper may not be exactly what it seems...
-
Span, your wish is my command.
More seriously, now that that argument is over, I'm going to semi-godwinise. The last person I engaged with who argued like that was a neo-nazi who would post things in German culture groups. He would say stuff like "Aren't there legitimate reasons to question the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust?" And "Isn't it a reasonable topic of investigation to ask whether it was feasible to construct gas chambers?" And so, slowly, he would as it were outline the shape of something very nasty, without ever actually saying it outright. Which is where we were at with the recent police group rape thing. Continuous innuendo, and shifting of ground when challenged, never acknowledging or directly disputing, always haggling about details as if to prove one detail wrong was to disprove everything, And infuriating to debate with, because the terms and the ground keep shifting.
But as noted above, a master of the trolling art. *gulp*
-
That's a pretty compelling graph, James. Kudos for putting that together.
-
<i>Otago and Canterbury were particularly peaky</i>
My initial scrabble to defend my hypothesis would be to ask how many Otago cases were students...
-
Just rope, hold and brand them.
-
Whenever I read finance journalism, I expect to see a disclosure of interest -- "Stephen Judd holds shares in Megacorp. Stephen Judd has been a consultant to Acme Industries." Readers can then make up their own minds as to the independence of the author.
I would love to see that for political journalism. "X has shagged or may currently be shagging a person referred to in this article." That would go a long way towards transparency on an equally important topic.