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The seeds of yet another encroachment on human rights by the UK

Kids are not adults.

I remember when I was about 9 one of my mates drew some caricatures of the teachers in a notebook and passed them around. The teacher noticed us all giggling at it and demanded to see the notebook.

Was that an "encroachment on human rights?"

By that logic, every caricature is a caricature of everyone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yes_Men

The Yes Men often deploy a satirical approach: they pose as a powerful entity (typically a corporate or government representative or executive) and make ridiculous and shocking comments that caricature the ideological position of the organisation or person. Furthermore, they acknowledge the idea that many corporate or government entities manipulate their ideology using spin; in response, the Yes Men use this power of spin to their own advantage, and use media outlets to disseminate their personal interpretation of the situation. A sense of humor and shock value is usually employed to make these issues more palatable to the general public and to call greater media attention to stories of interest.[1] Some of these outrageous ideas include the possibility to sell one's vote or that the poor should consume recycled human waste. On most occasions, little to no shock or outrage is publicly evoked in response to their prank.

On occasion, the Yes Men's phony spokesperson will make announcements that represent fictitious scenarios for the anti-globalization movement or opponents of corporate crime. The result often heed false news reports which cover the demise of the World Trade Organization, or Dow Chemical paying compensation to the victims of the Bhopal disaster, which the Yes Men intend to provide publicity for problems concerning these organizations. One of the effects of apologizing and promising support on behalf of an organization is that the organization is then later forced to re-acknowledge the event in question and retract all of the proposed good will. This served to further publicize the negative event of the organization and sets-up the organization to look bad for taking back any support The Yes Men offered under the name of their organization.

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There are people who attack corporations in this way, and are not investigated by the Democrats on anything like a regular basis.

Perhaps in hindsight, but it's kind of difficult to caricature someone 5 years before they're born...

Extradition is huge political hot topic here in the UK. After Gary Mckinnon (still awaiting extradition), it has become a tricky issue, there have been various calls for the treaty to be torn up, it may be as part of a reaction to the US lapdog caricature. So to send him to the US from here would cause a backlash against the government which is the last thing they need, especially since the coalition are already taking flak about the Cuts.

They simply see a tool which could be abused and therefore assume this is its only intent, and that therefore makes the tool unjustified (demonstrated so by construction of a straw man example of a child who has outgrown the need for the tool).

That sensibility of yours would be more appreciated if the strawmen were uncalled for. When people start they post with: "my children have no expectations of privacy", images of strip searching and hidden night vision cameras come to mind. If you don't want to be caricaturized don't act like a damned cartoon. And if you look above there are even posters that defend denial of privacy until age 18 or even "until they leave my house", the strawmen are meaty indeed.

Not only did it ruin the party, the motion comic version makes for a far superior movie without the inferior human caricatures that pollute all hollywood productions.

It paid homage to the pages but it really did not translate well

Indeed - and, in a way, that ends up making the "homage" more of a caricature. There are a number of shots in the film that look exactly like panels in the comic, but that just shows that Zack Snyder doesn't understand films or comics. Panels in a comic work aren't just static images to be enjoyed in isolation, but work in part because of the pacing that is set up by the relationship between different panels. Likewise, images in films work through the relationship between the movement of the image and the action they convey. Snyder's obsession with the visuals of the comic prevented him from seeing how those images worked in the context of the comic, and prevented him from making a film that worked as a film.

Your claim is blatantly false. I live in Italy and I've never, ever seen or heard of a police squad forcing us to vote for Berlusconi. No representative of the opposition parties has been put into jail, contrary of what happens in Belarus. There may have been a bit of misbehaviour in voting where corruption is strong (Sicily, likely), but we are still swaying on the inner fringes of Democracy.
So why is Berlusconi prime minister since 1994? The plain and simple truth is that the opposition is fas from strong, and mostly every italian would love to be like Berlusconi. Yep, that's it. Berlusconi has stripped off the deontological veil that Italy used to wear, so while the whole world yells at Berlusconi's misdeeds by claiming that "the king is naked", it really should be "the italian people are naked".
We voted for him, and we deserved him.
That doesn't mean we deserve him any more, of course. He should be processed, punished, and (in our hottest, impossible dreams) imprisoned. Anyone is better than such an extreme, outrageous caricature of an italian that he is.

Which is ironic considering how much most Slashdotters disdain the Tea Party.

I very much disdain the Tea Party. Let me revise this, I very much disdain the "Palinesque" majority of the Tea Party, and only vehemently dislike (yet respect) the Libertarian minority of the Tea Party. Even so, I can acknowledge that some of their views align with mine. Actually some of the views of the Democrats and the Republicans align with mine. Its amazing how things are so much more complicated than mere proper noun dogmas.

This is especially true of the Tea Party, since it is a schizophrenic, fractured, beast. There isn't a unified Tea Party.

Disclosure: I am a liberal, progressive, social libertarian (notice the lowercase "L"). I generally agree with 50% of the pure Libertarian dogma, until they start ranting about corporations and Randian social darwinism. Conversely most Libertarians would probably agree with 50% of what I have to say until I start ranting about social responsibility and the need for corporate controls. My best friend is pro-Gay, agnostic, Neo-Conservative who thinks their needs to be a greater social safety net, and greater gun control, whose serving in the military and thinks America should go to war with anyone as long as it serves our interests. She volunteered for John McCain in the primary, and has a polisci degree from Georgetown.

I feel bad for anyone who fits into the caricature of some political organizations dogma. Seriously, you agree 100% with your political party, your an idiot. Hell, if you can sum yourself up with "Republican" or "Democrat", or "Liberal" or "Conservative" you probably are a moron who hasn't taken the time to form your own political views.

... [the] Tea Party may tend toward the religious/Christian voting bloc,

This, to me, is irony. A lot of the Tea Party rhetoric I see puts them as the "for liberty", but are fully willing to be tyrannical and force their arbitrary religious choices on other people. They also talk about the founding fathers ad nauseum, but completely ignore the pains most of the founders went through to eliminate religion from government. They also ignore the fact that most modern Christians (of the Evangelical, and Fundamental flavor) would have condemned most of the founder's beliefs as being un-Christian, them being mostly Deists and all.

If your god condemns being gay, or abortions*, sex out of wedlock, pornography, beer, or whathaveyou, then DON'T DO IT. There is no reason to force this upon others who don't hold your views. That would be the definition of tyranny; forcing your views on others who don't necessarily hold them. This is why I hate the Tea Party. The desire for some flavor of petit theocracy, and the fact that they refuse to accept the views of a majority of Americans (example; Obama shouldn't be president, or whoever was elected by a majority, who we don't agree with, isn't legitimate).

  I'm mostly liberal, and fully realize that if people with a like view as mine ruled completely, it would be unacceptable. I am most definitely wrong on several issues, and no matter how convinced I am otherwise it wouldn't be right for me to completely block out the alternative view. What if there is something we could learn form the much feared socialism? Sure, it isn't all good, but there probably is some decent bits; after-all countries who mix bits of it in are doing a lot better than America is on most metrics. Conversely views more towards the right also have some very decent, and historically proven, bits that the left should learn from... Etc..

* I'm on the fence about this myself, but not because of any religious argument, and I would never force my view on others (recognizing that it is completely subjective).

Perhaps that was because the electorate was not as superficial in that era. Interesting pattern given the demographic changes to enfranchisement over time, but I am not prepared to draw conclusions without further research.)

How likely were you to have seen so much as a woodcut portrait or cartoon caricature of a candidate before 1850? Leslie's one of the first and most ambitious of the national illustrated weeklies only had a circulation of about 65,000 as late as the 1890s.

Of course we don't need every detail of daily military action to be broadcast on the media. That's a ludicrous caricature, and is not what's being debated here. Wikileaks has certainly tried to have responsible reactions and we've certainly had input from the public and everything and anything. With their philosophy of dumping everything except the reactions rather then simply publishing the "juicy bits", they've probably missed a few sensitive portions. I've only seen one so far. And Iranian fencer. But they dump everything in an effort to be impartial. Remember when they posted that "collateral murder" video? Because they edited it for time, everyone claimed that they were blatantly anti-American. So there's a bit of a balance there. With the Internet age and everyone's mother being able to parse through all of it, I prefer the large dump which can be sifted through by the aggregates.

So I don't believe that wikileaks has completely failed on any of these counts, but could probably do more to remain impartial. I mean, Julian is kind of an ass.
But really, what could wikileaks do to make the public comment more on their actions?

You're right about the more moderate channels of protest being a more civil route of action. But I'm not so sure that it would have had as much of an impact as, well, throwing the digital rock through their front window. I've no doubt that Mastercard receives hundreds of thousands of email. Most of it spam. Which is completely ignored. A small public outcry from some punks on the internet would probably have about as much impact.

I agree about the civil action thing. I don't think it's time. But that time will come if and when I lose confidence in the ability of legal civil action to affect the world around me. Other people have differing levels of confidence. Some will never believe in the system, and society needs to deal with them. Others will never doubt the system, they too need to be dealt with.
You know what? I think I'm going to go write a round of flamemail to Mastercard and Amazon tonight. And maybe that dumbass in congress that wants drones to fire missiles into London.

Yeah, sorry. This comment is pretty silly. No climate scientist denies that climate changes naturally and blames any change on humans. In fact, I doubt you even believe your own comment literally, but you are exaggerating for effect. The problem with exaggerating for effect like this, is that it really distorts the view of these people. Then before you know it we are debating straw men as people take exaggerations for fact, and real debate never happens because we are just beating on caricatures of the "other team". That's probably the main problem with public debate these days, such as it is.

I'd be glad to go over the argument with you, starting with your understanding.

Though I'm not the original poster, I would like to take you up on your offer, assuming it's genuine.

To start with, I don't actually believe that strong AI is possible (based largely on my belief that ESP and other phenomena non-reducible to the functionalist/materialist account have been demonstrated - see the book in my sig for Kelly & Kelly's textbook covering the subject). So, a priori, I ought to be disposed to agree with Searle, because I agree with his conclusion.

However I too find the Chinese Room simply a bad strawman in that I don't believe the model of AI which it attempts to refute actually exists.

Let's start with this: in order for the Chinese Room, as a system, to pass the Turing test (we're assuming it does or it wouldn't even be a contender for AI), then it must not simply return valid Chinese sentences, but sentences correlating to the simulated Chinese speaker's emotional state.

That means that the rules the man is following must not only transform English sentences into Chinese sentences, but must also simulate an entire, Turing-plausible (ie indistinguishable from human), human personality. That means that that human personality must be encoded in the workings of the room.

Now, you could certainly argue that the man isn't aware of this simulated personality, but I can't see how, if the room is pasing the Turing test, that such a simulated personality doesn't exist.

What I believe is that no such simulated personality can in fact be built - I suspect because the human mind is actually infinite. For one thing, since I believe in ESP, I think that any constructed AI would fail a test of remote viewing or precognition while a normal human would succeed (though granted, our techniques for validating ESP are still controversial, but Bem et al seem to show that it's a normal human function). But I think, following Kelly & Kelly, that we'll find that many other more ordinary aspects of human congition - such as dreams, intuition, and emotion - actually have 'spooky' sources which are not reducible to symbolic manipulation.

So in the end, I agree with Searle's conclusions, but I think his Room is a vast oversimplification of the real problem of AI, and relies on an unfair emotive response to a caricature of AI, not a real AI.

I think that the basic problem(encountered at the introductory end of most subjects) is that you need some grounding in a subject before you can actually "question" in a useful way, which usually entails some amount of "because that's how it is" based acquisition of groundwork before meaningful inquiry can begin.

Teachers don't generally encourage questions during the introduction of the multiplication tables; because teaching axiomatic number theory to 3rd graders might be a bit tricky. Teachers hand you a list of salient books to be read in English because the list of potential books is a lifetime long, and you need something to hone your critical skills on before you are able to usefully judge salience. Biology suffers from the same chicken-and-egg issue: Science, as a disciple and method of inquiry into the world, is not dogmatic; but unless you want a classroom full of kids who don't even have a conceptual vocabulary asking "why?" "why?" "why?" every thirty seconds, you pretty much have to do a bit of introductory dogmatism to get them up to speed.

In the hands of standardized-test mania, this introductory dogmatism can turn into "Hey kids, we are going to spend the entire year memorizing simplistic and often wrong caricatures of actual science so that our test scores are good!"; but there is some advantage to trying to hurry through some of the ~4000 years of work that got us to where we are today in order to get to the good bits...

Until the 19C, most of the people we remember for their advancement of knowledge were religious, from Socrates to Galileo to Descartes to Newton. A smaller number were irreligious. The reverse is true nowadays. The implication is that whatever cultural forces are in play will shape the views of the population correspondingly, and intelligence or stupidity has little to do with it.

Most people who are atheists are just as stupid as those who are religious because most people simply have an average intelligence. The polarizing caricature that you so wittily displayed merely shows that you are a full participant in the "us good them bad" oversimplification that many if not most folks of average intelligence fall prey to.

I too want to be modded +5 Insightful for being a generalizing asshole who pigeonholes millions of people and their cultures into degrading *caricatures of themselves.

You must've been modded down by a muslim. They don't much like caricatures.

I too want to be modded +5 Insightful for being a generalizing asshole who pigeonholes millions of people and their cultures into degrading *caricatures of themselves.

 
I think you better stick to being an asshole who doesn't read posts before posting angry replies to them. He was talking about states: http://hsudarren.files.wordpress.com/2006/12/map-of-freedom.gif (for those who studied geography in American school system, the purple - i.e. least free, countries are mostly Islamic except for China and couple of others)

All Americans are fat and stupid. There. Can I please have my post modded up again now?
Or do I have to make a stupid generalization about someone else? Like Chinese? Brits? Zie Germans?

COME ON!
I too want to be modded +5 Insightful for being a generalizing asshole who pigeonholes millions of people and their cultures into degrading *caricatures of themselves.

 
 
 
*caricatures are like an exaggerated cartoon of someone, where he looks funny... and then we laugh at him cause he is funny looking.

What you call immersion is really the medium encouraging you to concentrate on it. A good book or movie will do this with characters, but a nice painting or photograph, or a song doesn't need to be character heavy to push it along.

To be honest, the characters in Monkey Island are 1 dimenisional. They don't develop, or progress, and the story isn't that interesting. The game keeps you interested by providing excellent dialogue from witty caricatures.