Your teacher's retarded.

1. It did not matter if the USSR was two decades behind the US in technology, the USSR's power remained far reaching and the US's ability to break that power was limited. It was only through Gorbachev that the balance of power was broken and the USSR collapsed.
2. China's technology isn't even close to the US'. Their tech is pathetic. Technologically, the US is also advancing. Hint, the US is responsible for 50% of the world's military spending.
3. While the US may borrow from China, China's economy is still insignificant to the US economy. No economy comes close to the mammoth size of the US economy, unless you consider the European Union as a country.

Eh, I'm a kind of Consequentialist. While Utilitarians say that the consequences decide what we ought to do, my position is that there is no scientific way to justify an ought. However, we can observe that people make moral judgments and a common pattern for those moral judgments are the consequences that affect a society. Clearly, a society can't survive and prosper if murder and theft is the rule.

The problem is when we run around and say that nature has these mighty laws, and that there is an imperative to follow them. It sounds a lot like religion when you do that. Relativists assert that it's all opinion. So if you think rape is right, then it's right. If you think it's wrong, then it's wrong. However, that doesn't solve anything either because obviously that's not how it works. Society's don't just form a consensus on subjective opinions and democratically issue that as their moral law. They're totally forgetting about the minority in power, and the pattern of morals having a practical benefit to that society given its political, economic and social conditions in the time their morals were first developed.

To contrast myself from Relativists, I don't consider morals as resulting from a consensus or just personal opinion. Rather I see them as a resulting from of a society's economic, political, and social conditions to serve the desired outcomes of the people living in that society. Yes the morals sometimes unequally benefit those who exercise power, but others like no theft or murder benefit everyone. Secondly, we can judge the actions of others. We can't do so because of some rules that exist in nature (that's [w00f!] religion), but rather we can due to our biological programming (e.g. murder ----> *scream*) and the practical benefits they may serve (e.g. no pork ----> food is scarce and pigs are an inefficient food source).

So Kemp, I want a moral theory that is empirically testable. The ones that name an ought and a principle to decide what we ought to do are not empirically testable and are just as irrational as religion. If I asked you to prove that we ought to do x from an experiment, you would not be able to. I'm assuming you agree that experience or observation should be our guide to what we believe, yes?

> avogadro wrote:

> "And wtf? I'm a monster?"

you know what i meant, dont  pretend to be insulted.>

Hey now. Pragmatists are like computers, not monsters. Moral idealists are monsters.

And what circumstances were unique to those civilizations that caused democracy to fail, and aren't present in current civilizations?

Send a fleet and eliminate them. Problem solved.

Democracy is the source of all evil.

1. Athens
2. France

Two wonderful examples that speak for themselves!

Who cares if it's a human at fertilization?

I say that if people have to die in order for us to enjoy sex like bunny rabbits, then that's a good thing.

In American English, sex and gender have the same meaning. The secondary attributes of sex (women are more emotional etc), which are generally acquired by social conditioning, are a matter of gender identity.

Yeah, that class of feminists who think gender is a social construct, that women are oppressed, and men are evil are full of bs. Not that we shouldn't enjoy equal opportunity and be judged by our merit, but seriously they sometimes go way too far.

There is gender and it's biologically based. Yes there are people who don't fit the either or distinction, but those few exceptions are irrelevant. You would not say that P is false (let P be that humans biologically have two arms) because of a few exceptions of people who aren't born with any arms.

Areh,

BS. Gender and sex are interchangeable. If it wasn't, then I could logically check female between the male/female options listed under gender for medical or other forms. If they asked me why I checked female, they wouldn't ask "so you see yourself as female even though you are biologically male?" No they would say I lied or made an error.

The social aspect of gender is considered "gender identity."

My family just has good genes. No one is fat, despite our poor eating habits.

Is a person who is 5'6, 115 lbs, and a 30 inch waist a fatty?

Because that's what most women are nearby me.