And use the ALL CAPS parts as an abstract.

Looked at that thread, saw the post and my response was: "Holy fucking shit!".

I don't know how much has already been written on it, and I know nothing at all about it; but it would be interesting to take some country where slavery/traficking is a big problem, examine their traditional mores and concepts of rights (presumably different from the west's in some ways), see how it's interacted with the west's, and discuss how a result (presumably) so horrifying to both has come about. Of course, it might be simple: really bad people who ignore right and wrong are exploiting people for money.

The rights of the unborn. If people are declared dead when their heart stops beating, why aren't they considered to be living people when their heart *starts* beating at like 14 days after conception??

Yes, that is the pro-life argument, that unborn babies aren't alive.

How astute.

Some good ideas in here. Some not so good.

I have good access to a lot of development aid data thanks to an internship I just got, so I may do something with that.

I am truly fascinated by changing eating habits, agriculture, and nutrition though. I might do a case study or two of the history of dietary and crop change in rural groups and then look at the direction these changes might take in the Sahel as climate change/desertification advances.

I have that and a few other ideas that I'll look into with some cursory research to see if I can get anything out of it.

I think I can incorporate the aid data flows and projects by looking at nutrition/agric NGOs who are trying to actively change crops raised and local diets, and it will be made easier by the fact that the project I'm working on is chiefly concerned with identifying what aid can be classified as "climate aid". So that stuff would fit too.

I like this idea.. hopefully there is actually some sources to work with.

Mujus, nasciturus pro iam nato habetur, quotiens de commodis eius agitur.

End of thesis.

ulytau, semck will have to correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that only applies to inheritance. I know the Romans had laws along this line, but it applied only to inheritance for them.

I have no idea how to read Latin, so I'll be correcting nobody. :-P

Not a bad strategy, actually....

Yes, it's only about inheritance, which is the last thing pro-life and pro-choice crowd can agree on in regard to the rights of the unborn ;) Most of the Western law systems have something similar implemented.

That's latin, Darling. Evidently Mr ulytau is an educated man. Now I really hate him.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gSj1G4Vf0w

Writing mine of the metaphysical problems of transubstantiation..

What field, ralli? (Philosophy? Theology?)

Primarily approaching it from a philosophical perspective, arguing that Catholic theologians unfairly appropriate Aristotelian terminology of substance and accident to describe what happens in transubstantiation. I'm very personally invested in the theology of it though, because I haven't yet found an account of what happens in the Eucharist that is really satisfying from both a theological and philosophical perspective.

"What should I write my senior thesis on?"

Dangling modifiers.

aha a prescriptivist

...a class of grammarian up with whom i shall not put

Thucy, there is some value in not allowing bad linguistic changes to propagate. Sure, YJ is just being a douchebag here, but correcting everything is better than correcting nothing and letting horrible things like a lack of the subjunctive and unclear pronoun usage to slip into "correct" English where they lower the clarity of the language, thereby making it harder to speak and comprehend.

Also, you should have capitalized "aha" and used appropriate punctuation. You sound like a combination of Obi and Norbert.

#fuckthucy

@ralli:
I guess you've read 'God is not Great' by Christopher Hitchens. If not, you should.

I love it when people write research proposals or say things like "little is known about this subject" or "research into this field is limited to..."

and then they do a thorough literature search and then...

uh oh. :D

There actually weren't any dangling modifiers in Thucy's post, by the way.

There was a dangling preposition.

I have a dangling proposition, but nobody seems to be taking me up on it.

semck isn't it more grammatically correct to say, "On what subject should I write my thesis?"

The way he worded it you could interpret it as he's asking on what medium should he be writing...

Or did I just not identify the error properly....? You said thucy, I was referring to OP.

Either way, ghug is correct, correcting grammar online is the epitomy of douchebaggery and I only did it as a chuckle.

'douchebaggery'? I am certainly adding that to my wordbaggerarium.

YJ,

He did end his sentence with a preposition, which he shouldn't have done (at least by some lights), but at least so far as I understand, that is a different problem from a dangling modifier. I could be wrong though. My remark was meant in the same light-hearted spirit as yours (and in the spirit of meeting pedantry with pedantry).

It's true. A dangling modifier and a dangling preposition are both problems, but they're different problems. A dangling participle is a type of dangling modifier.

Dangling modifiers are descriptive phrases that are isolated from the noun they are intended to modify. For example, "As a US president, I like Barack Obama." "A US president" is supposed to modify Barack Obama, but because it's dangling, it could be interpreted as meaning that I am a US president.

A dangling preposition is a preposition that you end a sentence with. <-- Example.

@Timur: I have indeed read Christopher Hitchens. I find his book to be a rather terrible piece of scholarship, filled with innumerable poorly constructed straw men whom he successfully bludgeons to death. The religion that poisons everything according to Hitchens simply does not exist. If you want to read real atheist scholarship, I suggest Bertrand Russel, who at least has the courtesy to seriously represent his opponent.. or Friedrich Nietzsche, who at least has the balls to admit that he's just going on an ad hominem rampage.
Either way, Hitchens doesn't have anything at all to say on the metaphysics of the Eucharist, so far as I've read.

A preposition is a horrible thing to end a sentence with