As usual, this exclusive news was brought to us by our friend Epsilon. This member, who works in the video game industry, announced that Sony initially intended to release 80 000 PS Vita in France on February 22. However, following the disappointing sales results in Japan, the company revised their initial plan and will only release 40 000 consoles, divided as follows : 75% Wifi PS Vita and 25% 3G PS Vita. None of the Vita launch game really has my attention, so I don' t really care. It' s probably a good idea for Sony to not over-estimate the number of consoles they can sell on, pretty much, hype alone.
Nah, that' s my nephew. I cut him out of the picture cause he' s much cuter than me. <_<
Spoiler
Also, as standardized as public schools programs may appear to be, in the end these programs are relayed by teachers. I' ve had dozens of teachers, each having their own take on the program and their own teaching methods. Those programs are more like guidelines, leaving room for improvisation to teachers (and sometimes teachers outright refuse to follow them to the letter, or even to follow them at all). In my country school programs aren' t mere orders given by the state, teachers, recruiters and parents can influence them too. Keeping this in mind, even if homeschooling parents didn' t have an obligation to follow any state-approved guidelines they would still deliver a much more leading and one-minded education. One of my philosophy teachers never explained anything twice, he figured out it was often useless. If someone didn' t understand what he just said then he simply asked another pupil who did understand to explain it with his own words, which nearly always worked. I doubt it. I don' t see how we could not end up with pile upon pile of corrective laws. A while back we discussed about non-agressive ways to deal with people breaking speed limits. Cars and roads haven' t always existed, and I' m pretty certain new ways to maim or kill ourselves and new ways to objectively measure harm or potentially harmful behavior will be invented eventually. Once you have a culprit how do you punish him ? With imprisonment ? Where ? How long ? Does his nationality matters ? With fines ? How much is one dollar worth those days ? Are you even still using dollars ?
Ow come on, that was merely a peaceful attempt at infringing my freedom to free speech. Or maddening me, I haven' t picked one yet. ^^
It was my own logical conclusion. Not that God doesn't exist, rather that he probably doesn' t, and more importantly that I don' t really care either way. It' s not about forcing everyone to act the same, it' s about protecting those few kids that have uncaring parents. Why are we even arguing this ? I have a hard time following you since a few posts, you would think of preventive laws about road behavior but do nothing about uncaring parents or beaten spouses ? I didn' t know a trivia was the international code for "pretense of a position". You argued that mental coercion is much more acceptable than physical coercion. I neither agree nor disagree. Both are coercion and both can have benign or severe consequences, which I thought was already established as my opinion in my previous post and I saw little point in repeating myself just because you more or less did.
Well, I don' t know about books, but I did watch this American movie in a theater when I was a kid : Spoiler [video=youtube;2VbYZDohsHk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VbYZDohsHk[/video] Because "most" doesn' t mean "every" ? Well I can' t have a definitive opinion on anything and everything now, can I ? If I don' t directly answer you it probably means I neither agree nor disagree.
Same reason any kid stops believing in the tooth fairy sooner or later ? If a kid, retcon after retcon, keeps blindly holding whatever his parents or teachers tell him as the unquestionable truth isn' t he the only one to blame ? I was sent to catechism for years from the age of ten. The concept of God seemed as funky to me as the concept of Santa from starters. As young and supposedly impressionable as I was catechism never made a believer out of me, it only made me entertain the possibility of God' s existence. As boring as it often felt I don' t resent my parents for sending me there, because what I learned there comes in handy every now and then.
Touché. It does. I think fighting ignorance is a good thing, a super awesome thing, and I' m glad it' s being enforced, but you' re right, it does contradicts our freedom on a fundamental level. After all if my reasoning was carried through it could be used to caution things like colonization, and I' m not ok with that. Sorry, I' m gonna side-track but I can' t help it. Actually there' s already plenty of ugly things in our public school history lessons. You should ask someone German if his history lessons put his country in a good light. Did your own history lessons skip the Indians massacre and eluded it with a nice and fuzzy Pocahontas tale instead ? All I learned in history is certainly biased nonetheless, but then every single historical source you might find is biased, state-approved or not, is that a good enough reason to not learn history at all ? Do their biased and unreliable nature strip history lessons of any usefulness (if you are told how biased and unreliable they are that is) ? It does. Man, that' s cold. I guess I assumed loving and caring parents would feel concerned about what might happen to their kid if they aren' t careful enough, whatever the law might say about that. It' s just a kid, making horrible mistakes is like his job description. Am ... am I boring you ? End of the story : even though I too feel skeptic about it I would see no harm in trying and see where it goes.
Lol, même pas peur, maintenant que je cerne le personnage il ne risque pas de me vexer. Je suppose que dans la vraie vie il est beaucoup plus...
Oh salut ! Bonne année ! T' as encore changé de nom ? Heureusement que tu me fais signe, je t' aurais pas reconnu tout de suite dis-donc ! ^^...
Oh, I missed that one : In French laws the right to education is called a "droit inaliénable", literally "a right that cannot be taken away". I thought that was the kind of right you were talking about. Does it force you to go to school, or does it prevent anyone to refuse you an education ? Yeah I know, potayto potato. Well if it forces you to do something bad or stupid then obviously not. I see mandatory schooling as neither bad nor stupid, at least in my country, and I don' t really see what kind of (good) plan B parents could have in mind for their kids, but I agree that it' s entirely subjective.
---------- Corporal punishment works slightly different here. Teachers are allowed to beat students, but only if the parent gives permission and...
Gloin is Gimli' s father. The actor isn' t the same, but the striking resemblance is deliberate.
Ah, it' s complicated, I don' t know all the quirks. Our driver licenses have a certain amount of points. If you' re caught breaking a law on the road then you lose points, all of them if your infraction is spectacular. If you manage to not break any laws (or rather not get caught doing so) for a whole year you can gain back a few lost points, if you loose all your points you loose your license. The problem is that all you need to get another driver license is even more money than a fine (some of it goes to the state), and a lot of time. This measure is even more unpopular than fines because for many people a license to drive is a license to go to work, if they were to lose their driver license they would also lose their job. I think that you can also loose your license for good, but I don' t know what the conditions for that are exactly. Here you are legally hold responsible for whatever the hell your kid might do. I wasn' t thinking about a rebellious teenager that is already fairly self-reliant, rather about a lil kid old enough to say "no" but young enough to ingest poison, burn the house to the ground, or whatever childish act you failed to anticipate. Here parents are allowed to slap their kids, but teachers are unconditionally forbidden to physically harm students in any way. Years ago there was some debate about forbidding parents to slap their kids too, which raised more than a few skeptic eyebrows. I don' t know the details, all I know is that this law didn' t come to pass.
You said that the purpose of law is to settle disputes between two or more parties, but often beaten people won' t agree that there was a dispute at all. Not necessarily because they feel threatened, it can be out of love and they can genuinely don' t mind to be treated that way, kind of a sado-masochistic relationship. Would you still step in no matter the severity and nature of the beating is, against their judgement ? I believe fines are bothering enough to make you think twice about breaking the law again without being nearly as unfair a physically harming someone who didn' t actually harm anyone. I' m not sure the fear of enduring a worded *****-slap would be just as dissuasive. I' m not saying it wouldn' t be, I just have doubts on that matter. As for what you suggested before, impairing the driver' s license (which btw is even more harming than a fine), it is already enforced here, the fine is just the icing on the cake. As I said depends what is being forced and how. I believe there is room for nuances here, I wouldn' t call forcing your kid into the car (phisically because you don' t have the time to bargain) in order to make sure someone keeps an eye on him that day "evil". So no, I don' t think it' s necessarily black on principle. I do get where you' re going with this, but bargaining can be just as awful as beating your child, I can think of a few bargains that would be much worse and harming (psychologically) than a little slap. Personally I' ve been raised with a bit of both, but nothing that would traumatize me or actually injure me, just a slap if I was particularly obnoxious. Fun fact : one of my cousins, when he was a wee kid, often banged his head against the floor (even if it was marble) when his parents had the nerve to refuse him something. I don' t know how his parents dealt with it exactly, both bargaining and slapping were utterly useless. ^^
I edited my post with a more fitting example than murder, but you were already answering me. I don' t know what the best country is, I just know they are all flawed somehow. Trying to determine which is the best one seems like a dick size contest to me. I wonder why you jumped to the neighbor loyalty thingy though ... I' m only loyal to people I know well, and their actions can cancel my loyalty to them. A seat belt or seatbelt, sometimes called a safety belt, is a safety harness designed to secure the occupant of a vehicle against harmful movement that may result from a collision or a sudden stop. A seat belt reduces the likelihood and severity of injury in a traffic collision by stopping the vehicle occupant from hitting hard interior elements of the vehicle or other passengers (the so-called second impact), by keeping occupants positioned correctly for maximum benefit from the airbag, if the vehicle is so equipped, and by preventing occupants being ejected from the vehicle. The seat belt is designed to stretch at a controlled rate to absorb crash energy and reduce the severity of the occupant's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt If you' re ejected from the vehicle you might land into another person, or land into another vehicle' s trajectory and cause more mayhem. Rights, as made-man a term it is, are the pillars of our law system. Taken straight from Wikipedia : In several different Indo-European languages a single word derived from the same root means both "right" and "law", such as French droit, Spanish derecho, and German recht. There is considerable disagreement about what is meant precisely by the term rights. It has been used by different groups and thinkers for different purposes, with different and sometimes opposing definitions, and the precise definition of this principle, beyond having something to do with normative rules of some sort or another, is controversial. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights As far as I' m concerned in the sentence you quoted a right is a law. As for liberty being a far better term : Liberty is a contested moral and political principle that seeks to identify the condition in which human beings are able to govern themselves. There are different conceptions of liberty, which articulate the relationship of individuals to society in different ways, including some which relate to life under a "social contract" or to existence in a "state of nature", and some which see the active exercise of freedom and rights as essential to liberty. Understanding liberty involves how we imagine the roles and responsibilities of the individual in society in relationship to conceptions of free will and determinism, which involves the larger domain of metaphysics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty You make it sound as if being forced into anything is necessarily the ultimate evil, regardless of what you' re forced into or why. Doesn' t parenting, as a general principle, take liberty away from children ? If you don' t want to school your kids in any way then what the hell would you want them to do instead ? Wouldn' t it severely decrease their options at picking a job they' d like to do later on ? Teaching children seems as basic a need as feeding or clothing them.
I' m afraid you did. ^^ ... What do they teach you in history ? The subjective and flawed nature of my history lessons has been stated several times in very explicit ways. The fact that informations can be tempered with and/or be used in manipulative ways has also be stated explicitly and repeatedly. I also had philosophy lessons, "Let's deconstruct everything. I think therefore I am, where do we go from here ?" Basically I' ve been taught I should second guess everything. Trust no one Mr Mulder. I' ve also been taught maths, science etc ... things that, as you agreed yourself, are unbiased. If people (at least in my country) are extremely gullible I tend to blame them for that, no one else. Also, from what I know, overall French are a lot less patriotic than Americans. I' m not sure it isn' t just a stereotype (maybe we' re just as patriotic in different ways), and even if it is true I don' t know if school is to be blamed. How would I know that exactly ? Or anyone really ? I don' t even know my own country inside and out. Then why would anyone have any authority on what you can or cannot do at all ? What if my better judgment tells me it' s perfectly ok for my husband/parents to beat me ? I failed to mention that in my country we can be home-schooled, or get private schools diplomas that aren' t state-approved. The only thing that is mandatory is to school your kids somehow (well, more broadly you' re expected to raise them). Overall employers tend to give more credit to state-approved diplomas, but it isn' t a golden rule. I meant that harming yourself isn' t exactly the same as harming someone else (or both), and that harming and potentially harming aren' t exactly the same either. The examples he gave didn' t all fall under the same category. Seat belt laws : it' s been proved that not putting your seat-belt is potentially harmful, not just to yourself. Laws preventing our rights from being taken away : mandatory school comes to mind. To me it' s very different from forcing couples to mate. I can' t think of any reason to force couples to mate, but parents who wouldn' t want to school their kids in any way would look extremely fishy to me, they might as well not want to feed them. One seems potentially harming, not the other.
