121–130 of 151 posts
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Using the tax system to discourage abortions must be the worst idea I ever heard.
Why? We discourage smoking with the tax system. And I'm not talking about a regressive tax, like on smoking. It can be purely for rich healthy women. If abortion should be rare, than why not tax it.
People who say that abortion should be rare aren't saying that the procedure itself is bad. They're saying that unwanted pregnancies are bad.
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I wish that Johnson had been better prepped for some of his interviews. I really don't like where the democons are headed in this country.
No amount of prep was going to help that train wreck -- Johnson never had a reputation as a particularly smart politician (he was rather proud of his ignorance, actually), but he showed less knowledge of world affairs than the average evening news viewer. And he's still the most credible candidate the Libertarian party has posted! If you want libertarian views to gain political credibility, you'd probably be better a…
Can you give me an example of this? I'm a Johnson fan, and I've never perceived him as being proud of ignorance at all.
In fact, I thought his response to the Aleppo gaffe was spot on. I think the media was really unfair with that, as they give Clinton and Trump passes on much more egregious errors.
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As an Icelander living abroad for almost a decade now, if you think the grass isn't greener or the other side how do you explain the rapid increase in Icelanders who are expats over the last decade? Are all these people just wrong in thinking they've found a better live abroad?
Plenty of people have left and found a better life, I'm not trying to say otherwise. I just hate it when people use the weather and the government as reasons to move because every country has its problems. A large number of Icelanders move to another country sometime during their lifetimes but a large percentage of them move back at some point. That tells me that maybe things aren't so bad over here.
The government was a major reason for my move. I moved after the collapse, which was entirely caused by Iceland's dysfunctional government policies (none of which have really changed), and the measures put into place post-collapse largely benefited homeowners at the expense of the rest of us.
I didn't want to spend the next decade paying for other people's bad financial decisions at the cost of the currency & my purchasing power having fallen around 1/2.
Similarly people move from say the UK to Spain for the weather. As I'm sure you know Iceland doesn't just have "bad" weather, it's on a whole different level where working around the weather often becomes a major logistical difficulty. Whole towns often become snowed in during the winter.
So it's hardly a surprise that someone would move just to be rid of that.
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Yes, the EU is ahead, but just like every other part of the future it is unevenly distributed. Some country in Europe will pioneer a concept, others will follow, some faster some slower. The US usually catches on long after the concept has already become normal in a fair chunk of the EU. As for your constitution, America gets it right on paper, but in practice God (the Christian one) is all over American politics, wh…
Define "long after." Gay marriage became legal in France in 2014, the UK in 2014, the US in 2015, and is still not legal in Germany. Abortion was legalized in the U.K. in 1967, abortion bans were made illegal in the US in 1973, in France and Germany in the mid 1970s. Sure some Scandinavian country might be ahead in those issues, but if Vermont was a separate country the US still wouldn't be behind. Also, this is real…
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> In America, as has so often been proven, the system is rigged to prevent alternatives to the established parties. But the difference is that the parties in the US and the UK aren't very powerful in their own regard. Trump wasn't even a member of the republican party until very recently, and he won the nomination -- and Sanders forced Clinton very far to the left before dropping out. On the other hand, the leaders o…
Why is party discipline undemocratic? If you want to get the benefit of the support and branding of a political party it seems reasonable that you should have to follow their rules. The discipline only extends so far as removing that support. That seems fair to me. Does it not to you?
Can you explain why you think it's not? I think party discipline is simply autoritarianism applied within a political party. If anything, it advertises to me that said party doesn't really believe in democratic principles.
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The pirate party is actually pretty socialist.
Libertarian has different meanings: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
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Is Europe ahead of the US on LGBT rights? Marriage equality is the law of the land in all 50 states here. The first amendment of our Constitution separates church and state, for whatever that's worth. You might want to suggest that to Ireland. ;)
It's also incorrect to assert Europe is more progressive on abortion. Europe's two largest countries, Germany and France, only permit abortion during the first trimester (12-14 weeks), and have mandatory counseling. Germany has a 3-day waiting period, and France had a one-week waiting period until last year. The Supreme Court threw out Arkansas's 12-week abortion law earlier this year. Two states have 20-week bans, a…
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It's also incorrect to assert Europe is more progressive on abortion. Europe's two largest countries, Germany and France, only permit abortion during the first trimester (12-14 weeks), and have mandatory counseling. Germany has a 3-day waiting period, and France had a one-week waiting period until last year. The Supreme Court threw out Arkansas's 12-week abortion law earlier this year. Two states have 20-week bans, a…
I don't think a purely legal view is a sensible way to look at this. In much of Europe, abortion is not a major political issue that motivates the voting patterns of a significant chunk of the electorate and hasn't been for a long time. In that sense, Europe is more progressive on women's reproductive rights.
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Libertarian has different meanings: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
Yes, but since Iceland is geographically part of Europe, it is better to use the European definitions to avoid ambiguity.