Posts Made By: Chuck Cunningham

For those of you who have been harping that the current administration is "anti-business": this is a pretty straight-forward pro-business measure, is it not? If you look around, you will find that this sort of business subsidy happens quite a lot. Does it stimulate the economy? Well, such subsidies do move public money into the private sector. Under what conditions do you support/oppose that? Would the American economy benefit if the government stopped this sort of thing altogether?

What company is going to employ them until they are 80? Getting a job gets a lot harder starting as early as 50. I don't see that getting any easier.

Doug Matulis said:

...Regardless of where his soul will find final rest, I bet he is not an atheist anymore!

This may be the first time I have agreed with you, but I suspect we agree with your statement for rather different reasons!

Lee Spain said:

A band member died after running a gauntlet of band members who all got to hit him. The coroner ruled it a homicide by blunt force trauma.

Question - Should the whole band be charged with murder?

Probably manslaughter rather than murder because I doubt there was any real intent to kill, but, besides that, can anyone suggest a reason why they should be exempt from the law? "Just kids having fun" somehow doesn't cut it.

Jim Brown said:

Down in politics Rob has spent some time denying that he engages in situational ethics.

http://www.astromart.com/forums/viewpost.asp?forum_post_id=776236&poll_id=&news_id=

To Rob, David and many other people, the mere thought that situational context matters when making an ethical determination is equated with moral weakness and more importantly, situational ethics are seen as the denial of a divine and immutable ethical authority. That's really the crux for many folks: how can context matter in ethics, if we accept a Divinely ordained black and white distinction between right and wrong?

Nonetheless, consider one of God's most important commandments: Thou Shalt Not Kill.

On its face, this is not an ambiguous statement. No exceptions are included. Even so, ethicists from the dawn of time have noted situational exceptions to the above commandment; self defense is a good example.

The self-defense exception is so universally accepted that those who deny that they engage in situational ethics will simply ignore the situational context of self defense and illogically claim that they are not being situational at all!

A self-defense exception is not what the Commandment says though.

Jim

Hardly my area of expertise, but I have been assured by people who consider it to be theirs that the correct translation is more like "Thou Shalt Not Murder" -- whatever that means. Thou Shalt Not Kill -- except when it's OK? And then, of course, you get St. Augustine tying himself in knots trying to explain why waging war is OK. Of course ethics are situational. The problem is that two different people may see the same situation differently -- different sides of the same issue. They may even both be absolutely sure that God is on their side. Hard as we may try, life just ain't that simple. Differences need to be worked out. Thinking in black-and-white absolutes makes that pretty much impossible. The results are all too obvious.

Trouble is, our current drug laws just don't make any sense, so it's hard to expect everyone to respect them. I don't like the idea of the government restricting freedoms or imposing one group's "morality" on others, and I know you can make a pretty good argument that it would be more cost-effective to legalize drugs, and regulate and tax them, but when I consider the huge amount of damage that our current legal drugs do -- primarily alcohol and tobacco; two of the biggest killers in America -- I have a hard time coming around to it being such a great idea to legalize additional addictive and/or harmful drugs. In the end, I suppose it comes down to what is "socially acceptable" (for whatever bizzare and obscure reasons) than how harmful the drugs actually are. I mean, alcohol is probably responsible for around 30 thousand automobile-related deaths a year, plus the additional health and social problems it causes, but it didn't work real well when we tried to ban it. And alcohol is certainly more addictive than marijuana, constitutes a greater health risk, and produces a more dangerous high. On the other hand, it does seem kind of ridiculous to have morphine be legal for medicinal purposes, but marijuana be illegal.

JUST KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF MY CAFFIENE, OK?!

"they respond to a market"

So do hit men.

Right. You gotta know that we Liberals wouldn't want to miss the chance to tax it.

You'd think that capital punishment would be a major deterrent, but the statistics have never clearly shown that. I expect that is because the perp either isn't thinking very clearly at the time of the crime or doesn't believe he is going to get caught. As for capital punishment eventually evolving less violent people: that would only work if we get them before they breed.