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World of Warcraft / Re: Wrath of the Lich King
« on: March 15, 2010, 05:44:30 PM »race change to tauren inc on cataclysmlaunch dayweeks later when they open it up?
ftfy
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World of Warcraft / Re: Wrath of the Lich King
« on: March 14, 2010, 05:37:03 PM »
At least this removes the fiction that we were at all in control of whether or not we won the mount lottery
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Thaddeus Boyd's Panel of Death / Re: Miscarriage of Justice
« on: February 26, 2010, 03:43:38 PM »Quote from: NexAdruin
1. Carrying the pregnancy to term shouldn't be done if the mother is at higher risk than most to die during the birth.
How generous of you.
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2. Drinking bleach is also a danger to the mother, and whether it's for the purpose of killing a fetus or not it is likely to get them locked up anyway for attempted suicide or something along those lines.
Yeah, and the problem is serious enough to merit special legislation. Just like young bucks driving their welfare cadillacs to buy steaks with food stamps.
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3. This law does minimize the risk of abortion, since currently abortion is being performed by people with no medical background and the practices are posing just as much a threat to the mother as they do the fetus. Furthermore, just because women are going to continue to exert control of their bodies regardless of the law doesn't mean that we should make the law fit their desires. Your argument here could be stretched to say that we should get rid of all law period because people are just going to do whatever they want anyway.
No, what I am actually saying is that we should maybe pass legislation that addresses what the claimed goals are. This legislation does nothing but cause problems and since the goal is actually to increase the state's control over women, your moral admiration is wildly misplaced.
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4. Telling me to go fuck myself because I brought up what can be considered (in this case) a political cartoon dealing with the issue at hand is, well, juvenile at best.
By addressing it at all, I gave that part of your post more consideration than it deserved. Be assured that I have nothing but contempt for the cartoon and whatever point you thought it addressed.
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As legislature, this law is poorly written and will cause abuse enough as to outweigh any good by a factor of ten. As an attempt to make a moral society, however, I can appreciate the sentiment.
You know, I've always sort of rolled my eyes at the people who offer up "the road to hell is paved with good intentions," but if this is the sort of shit that is meant, I may have to reprise my view. Suffice it to say that this bill does nothing but make our society more brutish, less understanding, and less worthy.
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Thaddeus Boyd's Panel of Death / Re: Miscarriage of Justice
« on: February 26, 2010, 10:59:37 AM »QuoteShe may be fired for the weeks she has to spend recovering from the pregnancy
A minor quible, but FMLA requires employers to hold your job for up to 3 months every year for medical issues like pregnancy. Of course, that doesn't mean you're getting paid for it.
Aware, as you must surely be aware that regulations aren't foolproof. Otherwise we would not see 20% of people involved in unionization attempts illegally fired. The women (poor, predominantly minority women) who are in this situation (economically unstable, unable or unwilling to procure an abortion) are particularly vulnerable to these sorts of abuses.
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Thaddeus Boyd's Panel of Death / Re: Miscarriage of Justice
« on: February 26, 2010, 10:01:37 AM »If you can't care for a baby, then carry it to term and then put it up for adoption.
If that is the course that a woman chooses to take, free of any sort of coercion, more power to her. I am just not as comfortable as you seem to be dictating that choice. You're also comically ignorant about the true costs of bringing a baby to term, but hey, it's not like you care about that.
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You seem to believe that abortion is ever the only logical choice, and this just doesn't make any sense to me. Adoption agencies are far more commonly found than abortion clinics, and nobody is going to fire you for putting your baby up for adoption.
Yeah, that's a fair reading of my argument if you are incapable of, you know, reading. My contention, since you're having trouble following along, is that women, regardless of what the law says, are going to exert control over their own bodies. Consequently, we should structure the law to minimize both the need for and risk of abortion. If we decide to deny women access to abortion, it is incredibly disingenuous to a) be shocked, shocked! at the fact that they may make decisions we disagree with and b) pretend that all women are capable of carrying a baby to term and then giving it up for adoption.
The comical ignorance I mentioned earlier is out in full force here. Sure, a woman won't be fired for giving her baby up for adoption. She may be fired for the weeks she has to spend recovering from the pregnancy (unless we're expecting a The Good Earth style delivery and immediate return to the fields), and if she doesn't have insurance she's on the hook for thousands of dollars of medical fees, but anything to prevent you from having that icky feeling I guess.
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Edit: Oh, look.
Go fuck yourself.
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Thaddeus Boyd's Panel of Death / Re: Miscarriage of Justice
« on: February 25, 2010, 10:46:13 PM »I will say that a significant difference between a doctor performing an abortion and falling down some stairs is that one will end the pregnancy and the other is just as likely to result in a deformed baby, which is cruel in and of itself. I don't know if that is why MCE doesn't like back-alley methods, but it seems like a good reason to dislike them to me.
Now, in a way I can see this as reckless endangerment charge, even if the fetus isn't considered living yet. But reckless endangerment isn't a capital punishment kind of crime.
If the choice is a safe abortion or dangerous, shady methods, then the obvious selection is abortion. If—as is the case in Utah—your options are all unrealistic/terrible (oh I get to lose my job or carry to term a baby I can't care for), then it is easy to reach the conclusion that a risky miscarriage is your only credible option. Consequences to the baby are tragic, but the better answer isn't to uselessly criminalize that behavior. Instead, address why it is that women are seeking alternatives.
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If the justice system could definitively prove when someone was trying to end a pregnancy through such methods versus when someone had an accident during some extremely bad morning sickness, then I'd be all for punishing the people (though not for murder or attempted murder). And the reason that I would be for punishing these people is that they do have an alternative to drinking bleach: carrying out the pregnancy. Unless the abortion is absolutely necessary for the well being of the mother, then they should pursue whatever legal, safe ways are available. I understand that in an ideal world a legal, safe abortion clinic would be on every corner, but as long as that is not happening then women are just going to have to deal with the laws of reality.
If you're going to condemn women to be slaves to the thing growing inside of them, then there is no reason to allow abortion at all: either women have bodily autonomy or they don't. If we aren't going to allow women to control their own bodies legally, we have no right to be shocked when they (even if not legally) pursue whatever options are left to them. Telling women to essentially suck it up is fantastically unhelpful.
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Thaddeus Boyd's Panel of Death / Re: Miscarriage of Justice
« on: February 25, 2010, 09:34:45 PM »anyway, all the points about this law affecting accidents etc. have already been made and I agree with them. I think it should be legal to do whatever to yourself and don't give a shit about unwanted zygotes but i also think that driving an hour or two to get an abortion isn't actually that brutal a situation.
TA's response is right on the money, and now assume that missing the minimum two days of work required (clinics don't accept walk-ins and require a waiting period in Utah) means that keeping your job is now an issue. The blindness to these issues astounds me.
Quote from: ZedPower
That little nugget of sense, however, is that it is reasonable to encourage abortions to be performed under qualified medical supervision rather than through artisanal methods, because there are ways to do this that are significantly better than others. Criminalizing the 14 year old girl who drinks bleach because she has no way (socially or otherwise) to get a sensible abortion is an insane way to go about this, but you can't argue that if such a practice was somehow eliminated the world wouldn't be a better place. The stupid law isn't the solution, but I honestly can't look at a sentiment that wants to eradicate the coat hanger, the knitting needle and the gut punch, and judge it abominable (as long as this sentiment comes with a willingness to increase and facilitate access to the safest methods of abortion we can devise, of course).
I'm all for making abortion legal and safe. My issue is that these sorts of asinine laws are counterproductive, and I would further disagree that they are designed to somehow make things safer. All indications from this law in particular and these sorts of "movements" in general are that the real goal is to punish poor women for daring to have sex.
My position re: miscarriage is that since we are denying these women reasonable access to the methods that are safe, it is insane to criminalize the few alternatives that they have left. The fact that it is additionally pointless just makes these sorts of laws even less defensible.
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Thaddeus Boyd's Panel of Death / Re: Miscarriage of Justice
« on: February 25, 2010, 08:52:39 PM »The law is fucked up, but I don't think the distinction that MCE wants to make is.
Her "distinction" is that method matters to a cluster of cells that does not feel pain or have any ability to reason, or that it should matter to us. If there were a way to induce a miscarriage that had no more risk than an abortion, what in the world would be a credible objection? If the relative risk is the concern, then why not discuss reasonable policies to advance that goal, rather than drawing a meaningless line in the sand?
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Thaddeus Boyd's Panel of Death / Re: Miscarriage of Justice
« on: February 25, 2010, 08:40:01 PM »I guess some people want to see such weighty deeds performed with a measure of dignity and want to criminalize anything not meeting that standard. Isn't that just downright bizarre?
Yes, it is. There is no "dignity" in shoving your way through a throng of antiabortion zealots, nor is there some sort of dignity in jumping through hoops that could charitably be described as arbitrary. The only concerns that matter enough for the state to be involved are outcomes. This law does not in any reasonable way address outcomes.
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Thaddeus Boyd's Panel of Death / Re: Miscarriage of Justice
« on: February 25, 2010, 08:26:46 PM »I wouldn't base a decision like whether or not to terminate a pregnancy on something like not being willing to drive the distance between here and LA, but anyway.
Thanks for missing the point. We're assuming that the decision has been made, so the "debate," such as it is, is over method. The pertinent thing to note is that putting hurdles between women and abortion doesn't stop abortion, but does dramatically decrease the ability of women to safely terminate their pregnancies.
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There is a sane argument for this under all the bullshit rhetoric, which is that intentionally causing a miscarriage is extremely hazardous to one's own definitely-living, fully-grown health. There's an argument that that's the person's own business but, fuck, if I'm going to be ticketed for not wearing a seatbelt, then there should be some responsibility on the part of a person whodrank bleach no that's clichefell down some stairs no that's even more clicheFALCKOWN PAUNCH!!!
Fine. Tell me how we determine the borderline (realistically, almost all of them) cases. Or cases where a woman who has miscarried goes to her doctor for an unrelated reason and then boom jail time.
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Of course this argument only works if there is a safer and more responsible action available, which okay no there really isn't. The people of the fine state of Utah will of course argue that the safe and responsible action is to have the damn baby, but that's the kid of someone who was going to harm herself to get rid of it. Hope you've got a big enough social services budget to cover that shit.
If actually promoting responsibility were the goal, there are any number of measures states like Utah could implement that would actually advance that goal.
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Thaddeus Boyd's Panel of Death / Re: Miscarriage of Justice
« on: February 25, 2010, 07:42:34 PM »
New to this particular forum, but some people seem to be taking for granted that there is universal and easy access to abortion in states as awful as utah: this is wrong. The vast majority of counties in utah do not have any abortion providers, and there are a grand total of six in the entire state. This translates into 55% of utah's women lacking reasonable access to abortion, unless you define "traveling 50 to 100 miles to get to a clinic, leaving out all of the other bullshit you need to do" as reasonable access. If your contention is that abortion is preferable to back alley methods, you'd be better served expanding access to abortion in these theocratic backwater states.
Additionally, as many other people have discussed, unless you can prove that a fetus feels pain at any point prior to the legal limits of abortion there is absolutely no moral difference between an induced miscarriage and an abortion. Beyond that, half of all pregnancies and 15-20% of all realized/recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage naturally; are you comfortable with the implications of criminalizing a naturally occurring and to some degree uncontrollable phenomenon?
Finally, we can't even reliably determine motive, as if that should matter. Teenagers believe, in significant numbers, that bleach prevents HIV and/or pregnancy; now you need to prove that a given woman both knew she was pregnant and drank bleach (for example) in an effort to terminate that pregnancy, rather than some other misguided reasoning. All of this so that we can punish poor, uneducated women for having sex or being unlucky; is it worth it?
Additionally, as many other people have discussed, unless you can prove that a fetus feels pain at any point prior to the legal limits of abortion there is absolutely no moral difference between an induced miscarriage and an abortion. Beyond that, half of all pregnancies and 15-20% of all realized/recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage naturally; are you comfortable with the implications of criminalizing a naturally occurring and to some degree uncontrollable phenomenon?
Finally, we can't even reliably determine motive, as if that should matter. Teenagers believe, in significant numbers, that bleach prevents HIV and/or pregnancy; now you need to prove that a given woman both knew she was pregnant and drank bleach (for example) in an effort to terminate that pregnancy, rather than some other misguided reasoning. All of this so that we can punish poor, uneducated women for having sex or being unlucky; is it worth it?
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World of Warcraft / Re: Wrath of the Lich King
« on: February 24, 2010, 05:04:58 PM »yay stamina buff for prot~
Also, I wonder if the new Rampage still counts as an enrage effect, because as much as I love Enraged Regeneration I'm not speccing into Enrage for it.
Let me let you in on a little secret
Berserker Rage is something you should look into
I can't be expected to press buttons!
I just wish berserker rage did not trigger and could be used during the gcd
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World of Warcraft / Re: Wrath of the Lich King
« on: February 24, 2010, 12:59:04 PM »yay stamina buff for prot~
Also, I wonder if the new Rampage still counts as an enrage effect, because as much as I love Enraged Regeneration I'm not speccing into Enrage for it.
Let me let you in on a little secret
Berserker Rage is something you should look into
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World of Warcraft / Re: I Hate WoW!
« on: February 11, 2010, 03:11:51 PM »15
World of Warcraft / Re: I Hate WoW!
« on: February 11, 2010, 02:00:00 PM »So instead of saying that, you tried to raise retarded objections to the people who were actually on that side of the argument?
Yes, because the people who were on that side were being stupid by still actually arguing about it.
There is a lesson to be learned from the Democratic experiences with trying to be above the fray: it doesn't work. You address the shit that people say, otherwise they assume assent while the people watching assume that you have no counter argument.
Your contrarian stance was neither helpful nor illustrative, and served only to waste my time.
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World of Warcraft / Re: I Hate WoW!
« on: February 11, 2010, 12:39:51 PM »Okay, I think this particular argument is getting convoluted - which was my point in the first place (arguing about costs is a really slippery slope that leads down to the deep dark pit of what does this have to do with anything).
It had to do with the contention that wow was a wildly irresponsible use of money, even relative to other modest forms of leisure. Your objections, such as they were, didn't amount to a whole lot in terms of being an "argument." I would characterize them as hand-waving more than I would as constituting a point.
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World of Warcraft / Re: I Hate WoW!
« on: February 11, 2010, 12:14:57 PM »How could I have been so shortsighted to refute some numbers that they discovered?
More like "how could I raise objections to said numbers that are the rhetorical equal of 'cold winters disprove global warming'," and i don't know.
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I wasn't saying it was. I was saying, however, that neither is TV watching.
Great, we agree. Granted, we agree on a point I wasn't arguing, that has absolutely no larger relevance to what I was arguing, but it is a start.
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Us forumgoers are probably too biased to make a call on this, but I'm willing to bet that there are still plenty of people out there who don't have a computer and don't see any need for one. People who can't afford one notwithstanding.
Then we should break down costs for any given activity. Did you know that a single night of drinking costs over $200,000 dollars? We can't assume and disregard the costs of raising a child to age 21, after all.
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World of Warcraft / Re: I Hate WoW!
« on: February 11, 2010, 12:00:34 PM »I'm glad that you find satisfaction in picking nits rather than addressing the substance of the argument.
If it helps you to move beyond this asinine point, then disregard cable tv as an example and replace it with, I don't know, going to a movie with a friend or girlfriend.
here let me address both examples at once
Can somebody find for me some examples of people addicted to cable TV or to going to movies?Could you miss the fucking point any harder? I'm not arguing that wow addiction is not a bad thing. I'm not arguing that wow addiction is something that does not exist. I'm arguing that defining wow addiction as playing far fewer hours a week than the typical person watches TV is ridiculous.
And my point was that watching TV and playing a video game are two separate, sort of incomparable things. You'd have to get into specifics of whether watching TV includes having it on in the background, being asleep in front of it, owning a TV, etc.
Maybe you don't know about it, but there is this field of study called "sociology" that actually takes into account the sort of factors you're alluding to here. They have eliminated the "on in the background" element, and it is those numbers I am obliquely referring to.
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I gamble that if you tone it down to people who are just sitting in front of a TV, doing absolutely nothing else, the rates of addiction - addiction in this case meaning to a degree of self-destruction - would be negligible at best. And even then, that's assuming that every case of obesity in North America is directly related to TV watching and has nothing to do with general lack of exercize or the invention of the deep fried Twinkie.
It is good that you don't gamble for a living. Guess what? The levels of wow addiction, even by the most ridiculously hyperbolic commentators and unreasonable standards, are not some sort of epidemic unexampled in modern times.
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My response to this is that WoW is still a pretty bad game. Somebody is going to make some piddly argument about how what they like defines good and how the ideas of bad taste and quality don't actually, but that's to be expected.
Your taste in music sucks.
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Also how much does Comcast charge for an internet package? Does it come with a free computer, too? I should hope so, or the whole 'cable costs more' argument falls apart pretty quickly.
I had hoped that we could all agree that
Quote from: Mongrel
I love how both Paco and I took some pains to say that we're not saying people should spend every waking hour digging coal, but that the replies in the thread accuse us of saying just that.
Let me tell you why we're responding in that way: arguing that $15 a month is an unreasonable expenditure is effectively saying just that. If a person is allowed to have any leisure money at all, what they spend it on is wholly irrelevant. Consequently, your argument only makes sense if you are moralizing about the fact that someone is
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World of Warcraft / Re: I Hate WoW!
« on: February 11, 2010, 11:40:21 AM »I'm glad that you find satisfaction in picking nits rather than addressing the substance of the argument.
If it helps you to move beyond this asinine point, then disregard cable tv as an example and replace it with, I don't know, going to a movie with a friend or girlfriend.
here let me address both examples at once
Can somebody find for me some examples of people addicted to cable TV or to going to movies?
Could you miss the fucking point any harder? I'm not arguing that wow addiction is not a bad thing. I'm not arguing that wow addiction is something that does not exist. I'm arguing that defining wow addiction as playing far fewer hours a week than the typical person watches TV is ridiculous.
The money argument was a tangential point relating to the idea that wow is an inefficient use of whatever leisure budget someone describing themselves as "broke" has. I don't accept the argument that poor people are to be condemned if they do anything other than what maximizes their economic output, and my examples were to demonstrate that wow is a rational choice to get a relatively high value for your entertainment dollar.
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World of Warcraft / Re: I Hate WoW!
« on: February 11, 2010, 11:29:19 AM »"Oh fuck, he's taking his examples from the largest cable provider in the country,
Because if it's the largest then it must be the cheapest!and the one from whom a lot of people don't have another choice!
I'm glad that you find satisfaction in picking nits rather than addressing the substance of the argument.
If it helps you to move beyond this asinine point, then disregard cable tv as an example and replace it with, I don't know, going to a movie with a friend or girlfriend. Of course, if your argument then becomes "dollar theaters and no snacks, brah!", I guess I will just ignore all further posts from you.
Quote from: P. Birdy
Again, do I need to explain why addiction is bad?
You could just convince me that what constitutes your definition of being addicted to wow is not horseshit. That'd be a fine place to start.