“Dust

If I was as you say ‘a sucker for grand gestures’ why do I not approve of Gonzi’s Parliament?

[Daphne – Does Gonzi have a parliament? I didn’t know that.]

It looks something from the instruction book of Facisim.
‘How to impress the masses ‘

Tsk, Tsk : Just Wikipedia David Irving, history revisionist par excellence, for whom the Holocaust just never happened. Is Kev a chum of yours exchanging conspiracy theories like Panini football stickers ?

Silvio, fascism/nazism = crappy economy. The statement “Benito made the trains run on time” is just a myth – http://www.snopes.com/history/govern/trains.asp

No wonder you admire Mintoff. You’re obviously a sucker for ‘grand’ gestures. Just like those who admired Benito for fractionally raising the wages of the workers at FIAT, whilst ignoring the fact that in the US the auto workers’ wages meanwhile doubled.

To add insult to injury, Italian workers not only had lousy wages, they also lost their civil liberties. At the end, their fascist government (just like the nazi/german government) had to resort to war to cover up their economic incompetence.

You say that anything would be better than Arriva. Rubbish. I and many others would gladly choose Arriva just for the improved emissions; walking was a nightmare every time one of those polluting yellow dinosaurs passed by. The change in drivers is also welcome.

Hopefully one day we’ll fully shed our third-world mentality and the IT side of public transport (vide Geneva’s http://www.tpg.ch/, a pleasure to use) will also work. This however requires a change not just in Arriva’s operations, but in the population’s attitude and education… and guess which party is facilitating that change?

Francis Saliba: “In my extensive experience as a doctor ladies can be, and often are, just as vociferous as men against a destruction of their baby in utero that is often demanded by the male partner against the mother’s wish”.

Unless you work in an abortion clinic (and you obviously don’t), your experience as a doctor in this case is as extensive as that of anyone else. I’m of course assuming you don’t generally get queues of people asking you to perform abortions.

Yes of course there were good Germans. The harsh, terrible truth is that the Church, in particular the Lutheran established Church was complicit in vilifying “the Jew” even to the point of chopping the old testament from high church services altogether. By the time the real church got round to what was happening (see Bonhoeffer), it was too late:

Also: The Nazi party was at its apogee in 1933 not 1945 as this clip supposes. The figures quoted (8.5%) are more in line with Nazi electoral results in the 2nd Reichstag election of 1924 (only the Ost Mecklenburg Vorpommern region managed a higher showing at between 10%-19.9%).

Admittedly Nazi party membership and votes polled at elections are not the same thing. After Hitler banned political parties in 1933, both apples and oranges were off limits.

I suggest you have a look at Susannah Heschel’s ground-breaking research in “The Aryan Jesus” (2010) to better understand the history of German anti-Semitism in the 19th and 20th century. Dig deeper and you get to some fairly ugly bits in Isabella and Ferdinand’s little experiment too.

In law the unborn child has inheritance rights “Qui in utero, est pro jam nato habetur quoties de ejus commodo quaeritur” meaning one who is in the womb is held as already born, whenever a question arises for its benefit. Besides our law prohibits abortion as it is a crime against a person.

[Daphne – Wrong and wrong. In the first, you misinterpret Roman law and worse, try to transpose it to contemporary Maltese law. Ancient Roman law and culture did not even acknowledge personhood at birth, but at around the age of two. And in the second, abortion is not a crime against a person, because persons in Maltese law begin at birth. It is an anomalous situation in which you are not permitted to kill a potential person rather than an actual one.]

Nazism was the later German and more destructive copied version of an earlier Italian fascist state.

In my extensive experience as a doctor ladies can be, and often are, just as vociferous as men against a destruction of their baby in utero that is often demanded by the male partner against the mother’s wish.

[Daphne – Yes, when it’s their own baby they’re talking about and they want to keep it. But in the main, women don’t presume to decide for other women, generally because we’re familiar with all the grey areas involved, and especially because pregnancy and birth are not concepts to us, but biological experiences.]

There is no such thing as a one-cell foetus.

That’s funny.. It’s true.

The difference between a skin cell or any other differentiated cell, and a zygote or foetus, is that the zygote has all potential to become a person, while a differentiated cell does not.

I know that it sounds whimsical to care for such a small set of cells, but if one keeps in mind that it’s the precursor to a fully-fledged being with a personality, it becomes easier to understand the brutality of abortion.

[Daphne – Oh, I don’t know about that. I really do think that with most people, even if they won’t admit it, there’s a line to be drawn between those first few cells and an actual baby-like foetus. The potentiality element doesn’t really strike many chords. When we break eggs, we don’t mourn the chickens they could have been. I suspect much of our thinking on this subject has been conditioned by the increasing inability of women to become pregnant, when they finally get round to begin trying in their 30s. The reality is that for earlier generations of women, it was a matter of ‘please God don’t let me get pregnant yet again with my ninth child’, so they were far less sentimental.]