The Pedo Bear strike

It does not seem at all plausible that age of first intercourse was older for females than males.

Claimed age of first intercourse might be older, given that actual age was usually illegal.

I haven't looked into the methodologies of the surveys upon which the authors of this Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) document drew to utter those statistics with regard to age of first intercourse, but your use of the word "Claimed" is certainly advised.  I strongly suspect not only interpretive and subject selection bias on the part of the primary researchers but also questionnaire characteristics which would make the collected data liable to be colored thoroughly by respondents' tendencies to waffle, weasel, equivocate, and otherwise indulge in the sorts of "I did not have sex with that woman" evasions which so many Americans consider useful technicalities.

To quote Heinlein (who kept his own personal history of lustful adventuring behind well-maintained bullwarks of duplicity and misdirection): "Everybody lies about sex."

Americans have a big blind spot in regards to Communism in that they are incapable of discerning between Stalinism, Socialist tendencies and Communism. Therefore their opinions on the subject are irrelevant.

Irrelevant until Europe wants us to save them from it.  Then its all, hale fellow and well met.

I'd say there's a very good chance that Rhonda's plans aren't going to go down as she expects.

Having read more than three days worth of this comic I can guarantee it.

Americans have a big blind spot in regards to Communism in that they are incapable of discerning between Stalinism, Socialist tendencies and Communism. Therefore their opinions on the subject are irrelevant.

Irrelevant until Europe wants us to save them from it.  Then its all, hale fellow and well met.

Nah Europe wanted your help dealing with the Soviet Union. Not an ideology.

This is  my THIRD time starting a long response to your post. I will give you the quick and dirty version. If that raises further questions, just let me know and I will get more specific.

Ex: a parent feels responsible for her child and thinks that he is too young and irresponsible to be on his own.  She has a right to raise her child as she wishes, and the responsibility to do it well. He has rights as a person: he owns himself. Obviously there is potential conflict when these rights and responsibilities overlap.

There is no conflict, because:

Parents have no absolute right to rear their children as they wish. Their right is limited by the rights/desires of the child.

Parents do not have a mandatory obligation of responsibility to their children. Harsh as it may sound, they may withhold any support, if they wish.

If you don't think that's "common sense," then what's your solution? This is your universe. Instead of me guessing in the dark, why don't you simply state how your universe works?

You should have seen my original post! 

Failing that, what I have written above might give you an idea, about what I have in mind. Basically, it is all derived from the ZAP. I am sorry, I gave up rewriting my original response, but I make myself available to questions about specific situations or conditions.

Could the UW be the product of the Democratic vision joined with the rest of a socialist/totalitarian nightmare world? It's possible. The UW doesn't seem to be quite as bad as it could be. I would have thought, with the high-tech tools at their disposal, the UW would consolidated their power better, but who knows, there could be a revolution at the end of this trip.  

I never thought it through in this manner, but that sounds about right. As to why the UW has had problems consolidating its power. First, it is united in name only. Some other countries still exist, more or less on their own. They pay lip service to the UW, but total control is far from reality. You already know that Mars is an "associated state." There are others that will be feature in upcoming arcs. Also...

"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."

Your best post, ever. Short, sweet and to the point.

Socialist/Social Democratic/Liberal/Progressive/Democrat: it's all the same thing, now, whatever they call themselves. It's become obvious that the last conservative Democrats are gone and the moderate Democrats are almost gone.

And the Republicans are about the same.

If you don't want a nanny-state watching over you, you vote Republican and you get it anyway.

If you don't want the government to do lots and lots of crony capitalism then you vote Democrat and you get that anyway too.

If you don't like either one you can go Tea Party and what's the chance it won't be more big government crony capitalism? They have the bases covered.

...if automation is reasonably cheap and there's a labor shortage, why pay someone to follow simple orders when a machine can follow them better?

In that case, you would not be paying a 10-year-old to operate the machinery, you would be paying him to program the machinery. He would have to know what you want and convert it into terms the machinery understood, clearing up any little bugs in the specifications that might cause bad results to the crops or to the machinery itself.

And that's something that I would tend to prefer to do for myself, though I might trust an exceptional 10-year-old to do it.

I can easily imagine that whole classes of jobs might simply not exist -- particularly things which are highly repetitive; things that don't take much judgement, things that are relatively easy to program.
....
Today we haven't worked out the issues of automation. By EFT time they might have solutions. I don't know how it would work. Maybe 10-year-olds would tend to have the sort of judgment that would make them valuable employees. Maybe they could run around and find problems that automated systems didn't know to look for.

I can't expect anybody to give a definitive solution today, but I can easily imagine there would be a labor shortage and that the sort of labor we had shortages of might be something that we currently don't even notice.

In response to this (apparently) we have:

So the ten year old would just have the skills you need by magic huh?

...which suggests that Holt is unfamiliar with the discriminatory capabilities and potential for the exercise of effective action among ten-year-olds, even those who are not arguably "exceptional."  

I've got to suppose that most readers in this forum are familiar with Ayn Rand's 1970 essay on progressive education, "The Comprachicos" (collected in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution).  She later went on to write:

The academia-jet set coalition is attempting to tame the American character by the deliberate breeding of helplessness and resignation - in those incubators of lethargy known as "Progressive" schools, which are dedicated to the task of crippling a child's mind by arresting his cognitive development.

This is, of course, even more pervasive and pernicious today than it was during the last decades of Mrs. O'Connor's life.

It is profoundly stupid to anticipate the technical and moral capabilities of a ten year old child raised and educated in the Belt (in an AnCap society as depicted in EFT) on the basis of what we see today among modern Anglophone ten-year-olds subjected to the effects of systematic comprachico "Progressive" schooling.

Congratulations. Two in a row! And you had me going until the very end. Bravo! Short and sweet rules!

Right now most Americans refuse to admit the situation. But when we do, watch out! We will get a big surge of votes for the Tea Party and then the new Tea Party Congress and Tea Party President will make sweeping cosmetic changes.

Ya know you keep on saying your brand of anarchy is better and I'll keep asking the same old question.
Why hasn't it ever worked then?

In the United States, the word "progressive" has a specific historical meaning, as referencing the LaFollette Progressives.

But it acquired other meanings as well, and not due to it being misused by any mainstream American source. The Communist Party and its supporters used the term "progressive" to refer to those who, basically, did not regard the U. S. S. R. as a threat to American liberty. That euphemistic use can reasonably be expected to turn it into a curseword.

Rather than "euphemistic," the term "duplicitous" is more accurate.

Unless, of course, we're using the word "progressive" in its clinical oncological meaning, to characterize the politics in question as cancerously malignant. 

Most modern Americans, deprived by government schooling of historical literacy, would doubtless be surprised to learn that the "Progressive" movement afflicting us today began in the Republican faction of our permanent institutional "two-party" incumbency, and was staunchly opposed by the Democratic Party until that faction was taken over (first at the national level and then eventually in state and local governments) by "populists" begining in the 1890s. 

Anybody reading here know that H.L. Mencken, an explicitly avowed extreme libertarian, was a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party up through the national elections of 1932?  Until Franklin "The Crooner" Roosevelt exposed himself as the Woodrow Wilson "Progressive" he truly was, the central policies of the Democratic Party had been the antithesis of everything the Republicans fundamentally espoused.

We get a good look at the reality behind the Republican charade by examining the stock stump speech used by Whig politician Abraham Lincoln when he began his political career.  To quote economist Thomas J. DiLorenzo (see http://tinyurl.com/lmkkc):

When Lincoln first entered state politics in 1832 he announced that he was doing so for three reasons: To help enact the Whig Party agenda of protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare subsidies for railroad and canal-building corporations ("internal improvements"), and a government monopolization of the nation's money supply. "My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman's dance," he declared: "I am in favor of a national bank . . . the internal improvements system, and a high protective tariff." He was a devoted mercantilist, and remained so for his entire political life. He was single-mindedly devoted to Henry Clay and his political agenda (mentioned above), which Clay called "The American System."

 
Astonishing though it might seem today, the Democratic Party of the 19th Century was proundly anti-imperialistic, committed to free trade (the abolition of both protective tariffs and pork-barrel government spending on "infrastructure" to benefit politically connected business interests), and supportive of the retirement of Republican "greenback" fiat currency in favor of the complete restoration of money based entirely on precious metals.  It was for this last reason that the Bourbon Democrats of Grover Cleveland's faction were also known as "Solid Gold Democrats." 

The "Progressive" pathology started in the Republican Party, and has been most deeply rooted in that corrupt, evil, malevolent faction ever since. 

I would as soon vest my political hopes in the Red faction as I would seek to transplant into an otherwise healthy patient a heart or kidney or liver riddled with metastatic carcinoma.

Parents have no absolute right to rear their children as they wish. Their right is limited by the rights/desires of the child.

Obviously this theory is untrue at age four.  So when does it become true?

Supposing it to be true, is such a right likely to be respected in an anarchic society?

In an anarchic society, people without income, assets, or reputation, are likely to receive a lesser level of protection.  Also, most people will be inclined to view that a parent punishing his child is probably doing it for the child's own good, and are likely to be disinclined to protect a child against his own parents.

Protection, the application of organized force, will be mediated through the adult income earning members of the family, and to the extent that force is applied by the individuals directly concerned, the male members of the family, thus whatever you believe should be the case, an anarchic society is likely to have greater parental and patriarchal authority than a state society, hence will tend to be socially conservative in family matters, regardless of what anyone thinks it should be.

No welfare payments for single mums, no free childminding and brainwashing services, weak limits on patriarchal use of force, therefore socially conservative.  Fathers are likely to use violence to ensure that their daughters and those courting their daughters behave in a manner likely to ensure support for their grandchildren.  Such violence is likely to be socially acceptable because widely applied, and because no one with means to prevent it has any individual interest to prevent it.

In an anarchic society, whatever use of force is common and normal and people generally get away with it becomes legal, or not illegal, and whatever acts are apt to result in violence being successfully used against one, become illegal.  Patriarchy, therefore, is apt to be legal.  Whatever laws should be in theory, in practice they are apt to be biased in favor of those doing the enforcing.

Analogously, i

Ya know you keep on saying your brand of anarchy is better and I'll keep asking the same old question.
Why hasn't it ever worked then?

Something mighty close to anarchy worked fine in the old west, in Saga period iceland, and in California until 1910 or thereabouts.  The Stanford who founded Stanford university was apt to himself judge and hang evildoers.  As late as the 1930s bankers in the west would themselves hunt down and kill bank robbers.  The "Gunsmoke" series depicts a marshal doing the enforcing, but this is anachronistic.  "Bonanza", where the Cartwrights (landowners) do the enforcing, is historically more accurate.

J Thomas: Right now most Americans refuse to admit the situation. But when we do, watch out! We will get a big surge of votes for the Tea Party and then the new Tea Party Congress and Tea Party President will make sweeping cosmetic changes.

I agree with you on most things, but I'm not willing to give up just yet. It's true that the Republicans have been slow poison to the Democrats' fast poison, but if the Tea Party conservative Pubbies can get a solid majority in the House, the Senate and take over the White house in 2012, there's a chance to turn this around. If not, I may be adopting your very negative position; if it's the same ol' in 2013, the USA, as we knew it, is over.

Me:
Ex: a parent feels responsible for her child and thinks that he is too young and irresponsible to be on his own.  She has a right to raise her child as she wishes, and the responsibility to do it well. He has rights as a person: he owns himself. Obviously there is potential conflict when these rights and responsibilities overlap.

Sand Sandfort: There is no conflict, because:

Parents have no absolute right to rear their children as they wish. Their right is limited by the rights/desires of the child.

Parents do not have a mandatory obligation of responsibility to their children. Harsh as it may sound, they may withhold any support, if they wish.

All right, let's get down to basics. I believe that human beings are best served by a limited government whose only purpose (other than national defense) is to create a groundwork where the people might advance themselves as they desire. I believe this because of human psychology. We don't have a hive mentality and self-interest is thoroughly ingrained in all of us. No one cares to be told what to do, and attempts to make a "Soviet Man" have ended in misery, poverty and death.

The above is not an iron-clad philosophy like some fundamentalist religion or Communism, it's based in reality of what human beings are. And that is also why I say that a five year-old is not equipped to have a gun and defy his parents. Forget about the argument that they need to be taught the values of a society before they should be fully released into it. There's a physical reason: a five year-old brain is not fully formed. It's mush. It makes irrational decisions sometimes. It's not ready for a gun.