Advertisement
Advertisement
Subscribe to The Economist's free e-mail newsletters and alerts.
Subscribe to The Economist's latest article postings on Twitter
See a selection of The Economist's articles, events, topical videos and debates on Facebook.
I wish the same could be said about UK. At least when it does happen it's a long way down the line...
Not possible sorry. You would either have to have one world language with no others or no dominant language. If you have a 'main international language' (which you may suggest English is or is becoming) then it will be corrupted and changed by the locals, such as Pidgin. The influences of foreign languages means that if you want everyone to speak English in a way that can be understood by everyone, you will have to end all other languages and their input. But that is just not possible. People don't mix a common tongue with their mother tongue so that it won't die out, but because they lack the physiological compisition for sounds in other languages. It is easier for an Englishman to learn Mandarin (still not easy) than a Cantonese speaker (as told to me by a Cantonese speaker). Also, can you speak Russian? Generally speaking most non-Russians cannot speak decent Russian because of the throat related sounds which they can create differently but we cannot.
See the tarmac that lines your roads? It effectively deters lions.
Violent crime is very different, as it so often happens at the spur of the moment. Very little murder is reoffending. After they've committed it they're either unremorseful but will unlikely kill again and if they did, time in prison won't achieve anything or they are remorseful and how much more punishment can you face than the guilt of having killed someone? Same with sexual crime. Child sex offenders have the lowest reoffending rates of all.
Not at all. Treatment and imposition are totally different. Most cultures are about treatment. But there are many who would be happy to impose onto themselves what they wish to impose onto others, such as laws, political ideologies, Isla... sorry religions. A communist be more than happy if a left wing political party imposed communism on the country, if not because it is imposed on them as much as it is on people who do not want it.
Why should someone of faith be barred from holding posts of authority any more than someone without faith? That's equally as oppressive as Iran's Islam or die mentality.
America isn't bad? How can you quantify that? It was American speculators that caused the landslide.
What aspects of Christian teachings are being reflected in violent acts? As you suggest, Christianity is never warped, Christ's teachings stay solid, only people's minds are warped. People try and use the name to justify acts but that doesn't mean Christ supports those actions.
Mine is second to last, so I hear your anguish... and A Christmas Carol is third. What was going on in these Victorian minds?
Due to the fact none of them are currently president, I would say yes, they are impermanent. That and American presidents are restricted on the amount of terms they can serve in office.
But their universities are not free though. You just said that yourself. The issue with government spending is when their balance sheets don't equate at the end of the day.
It makes me wonder, what were countries like before they had governments that had budget deficits?
Yeah, pantheism is never going to catch on, sorry.
I think you have misunderstood. S/he is not saying the Bible is self validating, but rather that Mormonism is an extraction from Christianity and that if the Christianity is wrong, Mormonism is even more wrong (because they took parts of the Bible and changed it for their own ends), but if Christianity is right, Mormonism is still wrong because they, yes, changed the Bible. That was the point.
These numbers have been collected only twice before, in 2003 and 1995. The update is not encouraging. The Guttmacher Institute, an abortion advocacy group, and the World Health Organisation found that the global abortion rate has stalled.
How is it not encouraging? Unless you are violently pro-abortion (to the point of being suspected a mentally deranged supporter of infantocide) any drop in abortion rates is surely a good thing. Yes they may not have dropped much, but they have dropped.
No doubt there is more to art than perfectly executed circles, I don't think there's space to argue with that, just as there is more to food than what you can do with a potato. However the issue people were having was whether this art had any obvious talent to it and if you spend any time painting, you'd be aware such perfection does portray talent. People make art to be more politically motivated or more classical than it needs to be. The only way you can classify art to incorporate every form of art is to define art as something created, rather than something naturally occurring. A painting of a landscape is art, conceptual drawings of a car can even be art, but the landscape is not art. It may be beautiful, but it is not art. Similarly, all the stuff that goes in to making the car, the ores, are not art, no matter how beautiful the natural metals and minerals may appear in their natural surroundings. People saying this is not a valid form of art are much snobbier than the typical 'art snobs' who go to shows wearing all black, or a blazer over a t-shirt with a three day beard and box-frame glasses.
My point is that the more plain the work is, ie the less actual visual content, the harder it is to hide or avoid mistakes. When something is incredibly complicated, such as a war scene or a religious painting, then mistakes can easily disappear in the volume of the painting. However, when a painting is as simple as a set of dots, much much more care needs to be taken, because the slightest smudge, error, change in colour tone etc. will stick out like a sore thumb.
I think the last point made sums up a lot of the comments on here. It may seem like colouring in circles is hardly skilled, but I've seen paintwork like this so close you could almost touch it with your nose and the perfection is actually quite spectacular. The crispness and continuity verges on printer standards and sometimes its hard to believe the edges and colours were painted with a brush and human hand. It's much easier to create a gradient than it is to create a block of solid colour with no trace of brush strokes or any of the hairs furring the edge with stray paint. I dare any of the critics here to paint a circle and then print a circle and show it to me or anyone else with experience with paintwork and have us question which is which... the arrogance of some of, nay many of, these commenters far outweighs Hirst's arrogance.
Artificially created more destructive strains is not worth the risk. Computer models cannot tell what will happen, only what might happen, so merely creating more destructive strains, just to "learn how to fight them in the future", is asking for trouble.
Children are not a 'task'. I have never had children but even I know they are not that easy to 'timeslot' - they are sentient individuals. If something happens to your child whilst you are trying to do work, are you going to just leave them crying on the floor having fallen down the stairs because it's not their allocated time slot?
You're the one being ridiculous.
Bit of a weird question.
If a woman, or anybody, hasn't considered their circumstances and just dived into an MBA, they're little short of stupid. So to ask should they consider waiting is like asking "should people consider whether to go to a local university for ease or one further away for better quality teaching?" - obviously they should.