Comment author: shelterit 27 August 2012 04:24:22AM 1 point [-]

I've got a brother-in-law who has used this argument often. We live in Australia, and unless you've been paying attention to the politics of refugees, immigrants and asylum in this country, this won't make much sense.

About 10 years ago, the Liberal Party (conservatives, ironically) put in place a policy (sending boat refugees to off-shore handling places to demotivate people to choose this route) and a directive (the navy to make sure boats never reached Australian shores, often by towing them out of Australian waters). Immigration by boat hence dropped dramatically, but the reason for that dropped was put on the introduction of the policy, treating the policy and the directive as the same category of "policy."

This lumping of various policies and directives into one encompassing category has had the unfortunate effect of showing all Australians that "the policy" was successful in demotivating people to hop into boats, when the reality was very, very different (and we don't know how many boats have sunk and how many people have died from this outside of Australian waters because of this; the Australian navy don't report on what happens outside their areas).

Comment author: khms 27 August 2012 07:57:57PM 2 points [-]

the Liberal Party (conservatives, ironically)

Hmm. My understanding is that the liberal parties are rather often, let us say, closer to the conservative side of the spectrum. The reason this appears strange to especially citizens of the USA is that, for convoluted historical reasons, they use the term "liberal" to refer to the progressive side of the spectrum, whereupon their liberal party needs to be called "libertarian". (And it's not particularly progressive, either.)

Comment author: Multiheaded 28 May 2012 07:54:35AM *  -1 points [-]

What meaning does the word have if Faith is something absolutely everyone has?

IMO all neurotypical people do have "Faith" in some form, because religion is an important part of human firmware, and necessarily follows from the workings of our brain in any environment where cultures emerge. (As proven by every relevant anthropological study since Durkheim.)

Comment author: khms 30 May 2012 10:54:49PM *  1 point [-]

Hmm. I wonder how many such studies looked at environments where the majority had a reasonable scientific education and there was no pre-existing religion?

(This just might be a trick question.)