The entire purpose of a door is to keep things out of the house that you don't want in. The lock is an 'extra' piece added on.
The entire point of a Access Point is to mediate requests for use.
What I do with my neighbour's access point is akin to me knocking on a neighbour's door and asking to come in. If they say yes, they can't later say I was trespassing.
In a similar manner, if I send the Access Point a request to use it, and it allows that request, I am lawfully gaining entry.
While I do not disagree with your wording of my evaluation of a fetus, I do disagree with your working of my evaluation of the former.
However, I do agree that it is impossible for us to reach any agreement on the subject at hand, other than the one we have come to.
However, my view on Humanity is something entirely other. One should not confuse one thing with another.
However, if I may offer you one piece of advice: Time spent in debate is never wasted. Even if you fail to convince your intended target to change their views, you still have gained experience in expressing your opinion, and there are generally other people listening who can choose to harken to your view.
I do not consider this as time wasted. No time spent meaningfully, no matter what the outcome, is ever wasted.
Their wireless router is sent a request to allow a connection from my computer to itself. It accepts the request, and assigns me an IP address.
It can be configured to deny my request very easily. The wireless router accepts my request -- it gives me access. I do not take access from it without its consent. Since they have their wireless router configured, through design or ignorance, to allow this, this implies their consent to it.
One could argue, sanely and logically, that since the Access Point is not secured, and therefore, I am allowed to start a transaction with it that the access point approves (I can't force it to give me access to anything, it has to allow me access), that it is impossible for my action to be illegal.
However, the courts, apparently, have let their brains take a holiday.
I wonder if they're in Bath or Brighton this year.
Due to where I live, and the company that feeds them broadband, I happen to know they don't have a cap.
Also, it's not the same class of thing as them 'borrowing' my car, since I'm not using it. If they were to use my car, they would not only have to use up my gasoline, but they would put wear and tear on it. Now, all of this is a moot point, since my car is currently broken, but I hope you see my point. They have to spend electricity to use their router anyway. I'm not increasing their overhead (and if I am, by no meaningful ammount). If they use my car, they are, however, causing me a financial burden. However, if they wanted to carpool to somewhere I was going, say, the Mall, then that would be acceptable since the ammount of wear and tear and gas used with two people in my Jeep does not increase significantly over the ammount of wear and tear and gas used with one person in it.
as someone who has been stealing internet access for more than a year now, really don't see a problem with doing it.
The neighbour whose connection I'm leeching off of uses their connection for about ten to twenty minutes in the morning when they wake up and about an hour or so at night -- and never uses their connection to its full capacity.
As someone who used to work at a Pizza joint where he was almost always the only person not on drugs while working, and as someone who now works at a Pizza Joint where no-one is doing drugs while working, I can tell you that it makes a hell of a lot of difference.
The place I'm at now is much busier but far less stressful, because everyone is working harder (or more efficiently, since they're not stoned to Cloud Nine, they work out to be pretty much te same thing.)
but as to the drug testing, unless you did not agree to such a thing when you started your job, well, it's kind of like having to deal with a Non-Compete clause. You agreed to it.
I don't know... in more civilized law systems some rights are upheld EVEN if you signed them away.
That's why they are called "unalienable", you know.
I hope you are not seriously suggesting we live under a civilised system of law in the United States of America?
Yes, and our government, or, rather, the fools who seem to have gotten the job of being our government for some reason I cannot fathom, sent the troops over there without adequate armor for their vehicles.
We spend an insane ammount on Defense as a country (I love how they changed the name from 'Department of War' to 'Department of Defense' -- When do we get Ministries of Love, Peace, and Truth, too?), billions and billions a year, and yet we cancel a 180 million dollar project that has practical application immediately in saving lives?
I don't think I'm going a tad bit to far to say that we have mixed up our mixed up priorities as a country.
Yes, indeed, it does suck having to make sure you're not related to someone. However, if we go back about 2000 years (or about 67 generations), the number of direct ancestors who are getting it on for you and I to be here is 1.475 * 10^19, which is roughly 98 * 10^10 times as many people as were (estimated) to be alive then. So we're all the products of quite alot of incest, though at a some-what removed level.
However, since half my family comes from German Nobility, and my living relatives on that side (uncles, aunts, cousins, cousins twice and thrice and so-on removed) number less that three hundred, or so I've been told, I'm fairly certain I'll never bump into one of them (as long as I stay out of Germany.) However, the other half of my background is from Arkansas, so I'm afraid I'm worse off than most.
No, I believe you're right: The cylinder doesn't have to be infinitely long (which is not possible, anyway.) However, I believe (with what basic maths I know), that the longer the cylinder and the greater its diameter the lower a rotational speed one can use (as long as you porportionally increase the thickness of outer edge -- so really the outer diameter needs to increase, as opposed to the inner.
Unfortunately, I've only managed to create about a 10 meter diameter sphere of neutronium, and, since it was taken out of Slaver Stasis, it's now a 10 meter diameter sphere of neutronium with maybe a foot of normal and degenerate matter on top of it, and I do believe someone out there just claimed it was a tenth planet.
That would suggest, since my cousins (the female ones, atleast) were born after such an age, that the reason I cannot contemplate being involved with them in anything other than the normal "Oh, shit, you're my cousin, aren't you? What's your name again?" way is because I have been sucessfully conditioned by social taboo.
Yay, me!
/me wanders off to find a way involving an infintely long rotating cylinder of neutronium to go kill Frued, or atleast send Proxmire back in time with a syringe of a sulfa drug.
I can understand the Illegal Search by the Cop (as I've been made to under-go such a thing myself,) but as to the drug testing, unless you did not agree to such a thing when you started your job, well, it's kind of like having to deal with a Non-Compete clause. You agreed to it.
I haven't been in the work-force long (I'll be 20 in 30 days. Email me for my address so you can send me a Pipe Bomb^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpresent for my birthday), but I got my first Job at 16, and they required Drug Testing, and I'm fairly sure it was a pretty standard procedure by then.
Only on the surface. Defects arising from marrying your cousin and having children with them are not terribly greater than from marrying a complete stranger, and far, far lower than from having a child with a first-degree relative. They also have the benefit of increasing the distribution of genes which provide a positive benefit to their possessor.
The trick with marrying a cousin, like with marrying anyone else, from a genetic standpoint, is to avoid marrying someone who has genes which, in combination with yours, would cause an undesired trait.
For example, I am a recessive carrier for Thalassemia Minor, which causes my red blood cells to not form entirely correctly. I am heterozygous for it. While this results in slight anemia and I tend to get fatigued more easily because my red blood cells are not quite as efficient at oxygen transport, I have an increased resistance to Malaria for this very reason.
Any woman I ever marry (which I never plan on doing, but we are speaking hypothetically,) would have to be tested for the disorder, for the reason being that if she was also heterozygous for Thalassemia Minor, there is a one-in-four chance that any child we had would be homozygous for it (they would bear two copies of the defective gene), and as such their red blood cells would be so severly damaged that the child would not live.
This is a reason to not marry your cousin, however, it is also a reason why marrying a cousin can be a good thing. If you are heterozygous for a gene that causes some improvement when only one copy is possessed and/or a great improvement when one is homozygous for it, and a cousin is also heterozygous, this gives you a 25% chance that any child you have will not have the benefical gene, 50% chance that any child will have one copy of the gene, and thus have the same increased ability in something that you and your spouse share, and a %25 percent chance that any child will be homozygous for (have two copies of) the gene, thus having a much better ability than either parent or the other siblings.
That is one way that benefical traits can be increased in the population at large.
However, I could never marry one of my cousins. Maybe the part of the human brain that stops you from being sexually attracted to people you knew during childhood is working, or maybe it's just that I find the idea unappealing for other reasons. For whatever reason, I don't fancy hooking up with one of my cousins.
Who is saying that sex is bad? What some folks are saying is that treating sex like some fun sport -- as so many people would like -- is irresponsible and has consequences that outweigh the benefits. Unwanted pregnancies, VD, AIDS are not things that are prevailent in a monogamous relationship.
I'm sorry, I guess I'm the only one who picked up on the 'sex is bad' theme of most of Christianity when I read Genesis and the Story of Adam and Eve. Though the apple was never explicitly equated with carnal knowledge, everyone from Aquinas to Milton seems to know it.
Also, unwanted pregnancies, VD, and AIDS are not consequences of sex. They're consequences of engaging in sex irresponsibly. If someone is skateboarding without pads and helmet and them come off of a pipe and crash and break their head open, they have very little reason to whine -- they chose to engage in an activity that could have grave consequences irresponsibly. Just because it "wasn't likely" doesn't matter. The chances of me knocking up a girl I sleep with are not extremely high. I still use a condom.
The same applies to sex. You can engage in it as willy-nilly as you would like. My various fornicating pagan deities know I do. But I engage in it responsibly. And that means taking all the precautions I can to ensure that I do not get the girl pregnant and I do not contract a STD.
The problem with sex, like much else in life, is stupidity, human stupidity.
Incest used to be perfectly fine. It's a no-no now not to prevent some kind of power grab but because your kids end up tweaked when you bang your cousin. You know, we've learned a lot since the middle ages. Why on earth would men write a law preventing them from having lots of wives? Polygamy is bad on the books because it creates a legal nightmare -- it's bad in general because it reduces the value of women.
Incest between first-degree relatives has never been fine for the 'common man.' It was only acceptable for royalty. Incest between cousins is actually okay from a genetic stand-point, because the chances of inheriting a bad gene that will express itself are outweighed by that chance of inheriting a good gene. If you look at when marrying your cousin started to become outlawed in the Western World in a big way, you will see it was by the Church, trying to stop the Nobility from keeping wealth closely concentrated. If you couldn't marry a close cousin that pretty much preculded anyone within several hundred miles. They also said you could not adopt, and they limited the days on which one could have sex on. If someone died childless, their lands and property could be siezed by the Church, to make it more powerful.
When have men in power ever cared about "leveling the sexual playing field?"
They never really have, much, but what they have cared a great deal about is stopping competitors from getting ahead.
Leaving the most descendants is all that really counts to your genes, and if you can stop someone from doing something that increase their number of descendants (like marrying many women, a genetic reason), or from keeping power in limited hands (by stopping people from marrying within the family, as in cousins), then they've done it, no matter how much they wanted to do it themselves.
Sorry, more Tree-of-Life roots won't help me, since the change from Human Breeder to Human Protector has already occured, and my brain capacity, which, from your reply and original post, is definately more expansive than your own, are at their 'fixed limit,' barring unusual things.
All Tree-of-Life will do at this point is help me live longer, assuming I eat atleast one root every eight hours or so.
However, in reply to your pointing out the recent incident, I would say that no system is perfect, however, having a system that helps reduce Friendly Fire, no matter how flawed, is worth it, as long as it prevents more deaths than it causes.
If I were you, I would research Friendly Fire casualties in previous conflicts and military actions. Two deaths out of several thousand (how many are we up to in the current Police Action? Somewhere above 2 thousand, I think?) are due to Friendly Fire instead of dozens out of two thousand, I think it's well worth it.
You don't scrap as system that works 99 percent of the time because it fails 1 percent. You fix the flaws that make it fail in the first place.
I am of the opinion, cold-hearted as this may sound, that until a fetus is capable of surviving without the 'life support' provided by the womb of the mother, it is not a human being
Fascinating. Do you consider someone in traction to be not human? They wouldn't survive without a hospital after all....and is in the same category as a cancerous growth or tumor.
Someone in traction is a human being -- I draw the designation between alive/dead and human/non-human at the point where the fetus is born or is capable of surviving outside of the womb, as I said in my original post. Please stop doing yourself and the rest of us the disservice of selecting only the things that support your (flawed) argument. Also, a person in traction can survive without traction, and people have done before the advent of medicine.
A better arguement would have been someone who is on life-support due to an injury that renders them incapable of breathing or otherwise functioning on their own. However, since they are human, it is not my choice to end their life -- they are quite capable of making that decision on their own, and I will fully support that decision, either way. My life, your life, and everyone's life is their own, for ever and always, and no one has the right to tell anyone not to end their life, or force them to continue living when they no longer want to.
Tumor. You've never actually seen a foetus have you?
I have seen many, and they don't particularly disturb me. I've also seen lots of other animals, both ones that were formerly alive and ones that were only fetuses, suspended in liquid in jars. It doesn't discomfort me. I've also seen many fetuses of various sorts dissected (though never a human one), though I have not had the opportunity to do so myself, because I never got to take classes where such a thing was offered, since I have not yet started 'higher learning' and the High School I attended did not offer such things, and I have not had the money to procur the needed materials and tools to do it myself.
Let's face a fact, one that most men probably don't know, and probably alot of women, too: Having a baby is bad for your body.
So, anything that isn't immediately physiologically good for us gives us the right to stop it at any cost? Right.
If we so choose, yes. The world would be a much better place, in my opinion, if the couples that were expecting a baby that were unable to support said baby did not have said baby/gave it up for adoption to a family that was able to support it. It would reduce the dependancy upon Welfare in this country. Let's face it: If you cannot take care of a child (monetarily, emotionally, or physically,) do not have that child.
The decision to abort the child, however, is not mine to make, nor is it the husband's. It is solely the choice of the woman who is pregnant, since she is the one who has to bear the child and (unless her husband/mate helps to rear the child) rear it.
The choice should not be made for her by anyone else, including the government or a religious institution.
It does nothing beneficial for its host (from a sexual selection standpoint -- children only count when they are able to reproduce), and causes a great deal of damage and stress to the host.
By that same logic, if my nine-year-old gives me no health benefits and causes great stress I'm allowed to kill her if I so choose. Hmmmmm.
I never said that. Your nine-year-old is a human being. Not a lump of flesh that has the potential to become a human being. And if I was in your presence and you attempted to end the life of your nine-year-old, or anyone else, for that matter, without a good enough reason (shooting someone who was about to shoot someone else would
That's the way I generally take that quote, and it's part of the foundation of our system of criminal justice (or it's what our system of Criminal Justice in the United States is supposed to work like, which seems to be very different from how it actually works). It's the idea that it is better for ten guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be convicted.
If you are not sure that you are judging correctly, in a right manner, then you should not judge at all. If you do not have all the facts, do not proceed until you do. Of course, this implies a perfect society and perfect people, neither of which we will ever have. That's not me being pessimistic, though, that's me being realistic.
And as a realist, I work hard towards being perfect in everything that I do, without dispairing in the knowledge that I will never achieve such perfection.
However, the point as I put it stands thusly: Alot of persons who practice the religion known today as Christianity simply disregard the vast majority of the teachings of the man they say they hold high. If it's hard to swallow, or makes you go out of your way, the vast majority of them tend not to do it.
One should perhaps, note that the actual religion that is practiced often can differ a great deal from the teachings of the person venerated by that religion.
Did not Jesus also say, "Let he among you who is without sin cast the first stone," and "Judge not, lest you be judged yourselves?"
The only brand of Modern-Day Christianity I know of that actually follows those two particular commands isn't really Christianity. It's called Unitarian-Universalism, and they haven't been a breed of Christianity for some time now.
The reason 'sex is bad' is the same reason that 'polygamy is bad.'
Apparently the people who were making the rules were not allowed to have sex and, for one reason or another, were not allowed to change that rule. So they simply said, "Sex is bad," and made sure that as little of it as possible could go on.
You destroy a competitor with a better way of doing things if you can't adopt that way of doing things, no matter how much you would like to.
Laws against Polygamy don't exist to protect the women in the marriages, or because they're 'wrong.' They exist to level the sexual playing field.
On a similiar note, did you never notice how adultery was a crime because it made it impossible for the husband to make sure he was raising his true children? Almost all the laws on sexuality we have today, whether descended from religion or not, are about stopping other people from doing things that a) give them more children (polygamy) or b) give them more power (marrying your cousin -- this would be in the form of land control, like in the 'old' South), and they're by and large made by men, for men, to protect the interests of men.
Right and wrong have nothing to do with it. It's all about power, and who controls it, and who controls the control of power.
Saying that one set of morals is 'better' than another set of morals is a very stupid thing to do. You can say that one set of morals is 'better' for you than another set of morals, but you should not say that it is a de facto better set of morals.
I am not an antheist. I'm a Discordian Zen-Buddhist (Oh, go ahead and laugh, then keep reading), and I believe in the immortality of the soul. However, I also 'realise' that, since the body can perish but the soul cannot, the manner of death of the body will have an influence upon the soul. So, actually, how someone dies is very important. I also realise that some 'lives' have more 'worth' than another. If I had to choose between letting a fourty year old person fall off a cliff or a 10 year old person fall off a cliff, I would save the 10 year old.
The problem with religion, like anything else, is there are stupid people who don't think about the consequences of their actions. I particularly dis-like Christianity for this reason. In Christianity, all you have to do is accept Jesus as your personal savoiur, and then let the world goto shit! After all, it doesn't really matter to you, since you'll be in heaven soon enough. In religions like Buddhism, where there is a belief that the soul is constantly stuck in this world, and that it has to work hard to get out, there seems to me to be a great deal more thinking about the consequences of actions, and more care for the state of things in the world, since, though your goal is to leave this place, you also do not want to make it a worse place. You want to make it a better one, because a) you don't know when you will leave it, and b) it is a good thing to decrease the suffering of others.
Constitution also takes a hit, IIRC. It's tough when all you have is intelligence and wisdom, unless, of course, you're outside; then Mr. Hawking can cast spells.
Magus Hawking can cast one doozy of a Portable Hole, though he wavers on whether or not it's possible to retrieve things from it.
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The entire purpose of a door is to keep things out of the house that you don't want in. The lock is an 'extra' piece added on.
The entire point of a Access Point is to mediate requests for use.
What I do with my neighbour's access point is akin to me knocking on a neighbour's door and asking to come in. If they say yes, they can't later say I was trespassing.
In a similar manner, if I send the Access Point a request to use it, and it allows that request, I am lawfully gaining entry.
While I do not disagree with your wording of my evaluation of a fetus, I do disagree with your working of my evaluation of the former.
However, I do agree that it is impossible for us to reach any agreement on the subject at hand, other than the one we have come to.
However, my view on Humanity is something entirely other. One should not confuse one thing with another.
However, if I may offer you one piece of advice: Time spent in debate is never wasted. Even if you fail to convince your intended target to change their views, you still have gained experience in expressing your opinion, and there are generally other people listening who can choose to harken to your view.
I do not consider this as time wasted. No time spent meaningfully, no matter what the outcome, is ever wasted.
Their wireless router is sent a request to allow a connection from my computer to itself. It accepts the request, and assigns me an IP address.
It can be configured to deny my request very easily. The wireless router accepts my request -- it gives me access. I do not take access from it without its consent. Since they have their wireless router configured, through design or ignorance, to allow this, this implies their consent to it.
One could argue, sanely and logically, that since the Access Point is not secured, and therefore, I am allowed to start a transaction with it that the access point approves (I can't force it to give me access to anything, it has to allow me access), that it is impossible for my action to be illegal.
However, the courts, apparently, have let their brains take a holiday.
I wonder if they're in Bath or Brighton this year.
Due to where I live, and the company that feeds them broadband, I happen to know they don't have a cap.
Also, it's not the same class of thing as them 'borrowing' my car, since I'm not using it. If they were to use my car, they would not only have to use up my gasoline, but they would put wear and tear on it. Now, all of this is a moot point, since my car is currently broken, but I hope you see my point. They have to spend electricity to use their router anyway. I'm not increasing their overhead (and if I am, by no meaningful ammount). If they use my car, they are, however, causing me a financial burden. However, if they wanted to carpool to somewhere I was going, say, the Mall, then that would be acceptable since the ammount of wear and tear and gas used with two people in my Jeep does not increase significantly over the ammount of wear and tear and gas used with one person in it.
It's a matter of kind of thing, not of thing.
Got it?
Ah. That's the problem. I'm CSS 3.0 Compliant, and you were using an older, deprecated, form of <sarcasm>.
as someone who has been stealing internet access for more than a year now, really don't see a problem with doing it.
The neighbour whose connection I'm leeching off of uses their connection for about ten to twenty minutes in the morning when they wake up and about an hour or so at night -- and never uses their connection to its full capacity.
It's being wasted -- why not use it?
As someone who used to work at a Pizza joint where he was almost always the only person not on drugs while working, and as someone who now works at a Pizza Joint where no-one is doing drugs while working, I can tell you that it makes a hell of a lot of difference.
The place I'm at now is much busier but far less stressful, because everyone is working harder (or more efficiently, since they're not stoned to Cloud Nine, they work out to be pretty much te same thing.)
I hope you are not seriously suggesting we live under a civilised system of law in the United States of America?
Yes, and our government, or, rather, the fools who seem to have gotten the job of being our government for some reason I cannot fathom, sent the troops over there without adequate armor for their vehicles.
We spend an insane ammount on Defense as a country (I love how they changed the name from 'Department of War' to 'Department of Defense' -- When do we get Ministries of Love, Peace, and Truth, too?), billions and billions a year, and yet we cancel a 180 million dollar project that has practical application immediately in saving lives?
I don't think I'm going a tad bit to far to say that we have mixed up our mixed up priorities as a country.
Yes, indeed, it does suck having to make sure you're not related to someone. However, if we go back about 2000 years (or about 67 generations), the number of direct ancestors who are getting it on for you and I to be here is 1.475 * 10^19, which is roughly 98 * 10^10 times as many people as were (estimated) to be alive then. So we're all the products of quite alot of incest, though at a some-what removed level.
However, since half my family comes from German Nobility, and my living relatives on that side (uncles, aunts, cousins, cousins twice and thrice and so-on removed) number less that three hundred, or so I've been told, I'm fairly certain I'll never bump into one of them (as long as I stay out of Germany.) However, the other half of my background is from Arkansas, so I'm afraid I'm worse off than most.
No, I believe you're right: The cylinder doesn't have to be infinitely long (which is not possible, anyway.) However, I believe (with what basic maths I know), that the longer the cylinder and the greater its diameter the lower a rotational speed one can use (as long as you porportionally increase the thickness of outer edge -- so really the outer diameter needs to increase, as opposed to the inner.
Unfortunately, I've only managed to create about a 10 meter diameter sphere of neutronium, and, since it was taken out of Slaver Stasis, it's now a 10 meter diameter sphere of neutronium with maybe a foot of normal and degenerate matter on top of it, and I do believe someone out there just claimed it was a tenth planet.
Thanks for the reminder, Mike.
That would suggest, since my cousins (the female ones, atleast) were born after such an age, that the reason I cannot contemplate being involved with them in anything other than the normal "Oh, shit, you're my cousin, aren't you? What's your name again?" way is because I have been sucessfully conditioned by social taboo.
Yay, me!
/me wanders off to find a way involving an infintely long rotating cylinder of neutronium to go kill Frued, or atleast send Proxmire back in time with a syringe of a sulfa drug.
I can understand the Illegal Search by the Cop (as I've been made to under-go such a thing myself,) but as to the drug testing, unless you did not agree to such a thing when you started your job, well, it's kind of like having to deal with a Non-Compete clause. You agreed to it.
I haven't been in the work-force long (I'll be 20 in 30 days. Email me for my address so you can send me a Pipe Bomb^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpresent for my birthday), but I got my first Job at 16, and they required Drug Testing, and I'm fairly sure it was a pretty standard procedure by then.
But the tasp is the only thing that makes this millenia long existance bearable!
And sorry about being an asshole -- I hadn't had gotten in my once-daily 'cause a large solar flare to lase and aim it at things' time yet today.
Only on the surface. Defects arising from marrying your cousin and having children with them are not terribly greater than from marrying a complete stranger, and far, far lower than from having a child with a first-degree relative. They also have the benefit of increasing the distribution of genes which provide a positive benefit to their possessor.
The trick with marrying a cousin, like with marrying anyone else, from a genetic standpoint, is to avoid marrying someone who has genes which, in combination with yours, would cause an undesired trait.
For example, I am a recessive carrier for Thalassemia Minor, which causes my red blood cells to not form entirely correctly. I am heterozygous for it. While this results in slight anemia and I tend to get fatigued more easily because my red blood cells are not quite as efficient at oxygen transport, I have an increased resistance to Malaria for this very reason.
Any woman I ever marry (which I never plan on doing, but we are speaking hypothetically,) would have to be tested for the disorder, for the reason being that if she was also heterozygous for Thalassemia Minor, there is a one-in-four chance that any child we had would be homozygous for it (they would bear two copies of the defective gene), and as such their red blood cells would be so severly damaged that the child would not live.
This is a reason to not marry your cousin, however, it is also a reason why marrying a cousin can be a good thing. If you are heterozygous for a gene that causes some improvement when only one copy is possessed and/or a great improvement when one is homozygous for it, and a cousin is also heterozygous, this gives you a 25% chance that any child you have will not have the benefical gene, 50% chance that any child will have one copy of the gene, and thus have the same increased ability in something that you and your spouse share, and a %25 percent chance that any child will be homozygous for (have two copies of) the gene, thus having a much better ability than either parent or the other siblings.
That is one way that benefical traits can be increased in the population at large.
However, I could never marry one of my cousins. Maybe the part of the human brain that stops you from being sexually attracted to people you knew during childhood is working, or maybe it's just that I find the idea unappealing for other reasons. For whatever reason, I don't fancy hooking up with one of my cousins.
I'm sorry, I guess I'm the only one who picked up on the 'sex is bad' theme of most of Christianity when I read Genesis and the Story of Adam and Eve. Though the apple was never explicitly equated with carnal knowledge, everyone from Aquinas to Milton seems to know it.
Also, unwanted pregnancies, VD, and AIDS are not consequences of sex. They're consequences of engaging in sex irresponsibly. If someone is skateboarding without pads and helmet and them come off of a pipe and crash and break their head open, they have very little reason to whine -- they chose to engage in an activity that could have grave consequences irresponsibly. Just because it "wasn't likely" doesn't matter. The chances of me knocking up a girl I sleep with are not extremely high. I still use a condom.
The same applies to sex. You can engage in it as willy-nilly as you would like. My various fornicating pagan deities know I do. But I engage in it responsibly. And that means taking all the precautions I can to ensure that I do not get the girl pregnant and I do not contract a STD.
The problem with sex, like much else in life, is stupidity, human stupidity.
Incest between first-degree relatives has never been fine for the 'common man.' It was only acceptable for royalty. Incest between cousins is actually okay from a genetic stand-point, because the chances of inheriting a bad gene that will express itself are outweighed by that chance of inheriting a good gene. If you look at when marrying your cousin started to become outlawed in the Western World in a big way, you will see it was by the Church, trying to stop the Nobility from keeping wealth closely concentrated. If you couldn't marry a close cousin that pretty much preculded anyone within several hundred miles. They also said you could not adopt, and they limited the days on which one could have sex on. If someone died childless, their lands and property could be siezed by the Church, to make it more powerful.
They never really have, much, but what they have cared a great deal about is stopping competitors from getting ahead.
Leaving the most descendants is all that really counts to your genes, and if you can stop someone from doing something that increase their number of descendants (like marrying many women, a genetic reason), or from keeping power in limited hands (by stopping people from marrying within the family, as in cousins), then they've done it, no matter how much they wanted to do it themselves.
Sorry, more Tree-of-Life roots won't help me, since the change from Human Breeder to Human Protector has already occured, and my brain capacity, which, from your reply and original post, is definately more expansive than your own, are at their 'fixed limit,' barring unusual things.
All Tree-of-Life will do at this point is help me live longer, assuming I eat atleast one root every eight hours or so.
However, in reply to your pointing out the recent incident, I would say that no system is perfect, however, having a system that helps reduce Friendly Fire, no matter how flawed, is worth it, as long as it prevents more deaths than it causes.
If I were you, I would research Friendly Fire casualties in previous conflicts and military actions. Two deaths out of several thousand (how many are we up to in the current Police Action? Somewhere above 2 thousand, I think?) are due to Friendly Fire instead of dozens out of two thousand, I think it's well worth it.
You don't scrap as system that works 99 percent of the time because it fails 1 percent. You fix the flaws that make it fail in the first place.
Someone in traction is a human being -- I draw the designation between alive/dead and human/non-human at the point where the fetus is born or is capable of surviving outside of the womb, as I said in my original post. Please stop doing yourself and the rest of us the disservice of selecting only the things that support your (flawed) argument. Also, a person in traction can survive without traction, and people have done before the advent of medicine.
A better arguement would have been someone who is on life-support due to an injury that renders them incapable of breathing or otherwise functioning on their own. However, since they are human, it is not my choice to end their life -- they are quite capable of making that decision on their own, and I will fully support that decision, either way. My life, your life, and everyone's life is their own, for ever and always, and no one has the right to tell anyone not to end their life, or force them to continue living when they no longer want to.
I have seen many, and they don't particularly disturb me. I've also seen lots of other animals, both ones that were formerly alive and ones that were only fetuses, suspended in liquid in jars. It doesn't discomfort me. I've also seen many fetuses of various sorts dissected (though never a human one), though I have not had the opportunity to do so myself, because I never got to take classes where such a thing was offered, since I have not yet started 'higher learning' and the High School I attended did not offer such things, and I have not had the money to procur the needed materials and tools to do it myself.
If we so choose, yes. The world would be a much better place, in my opinion, if the couples that were expecting a baby that were unable to support said baby did not have said baby/gave it up for adoption to a family that was able to support it. It would reduce the dependancy upon Welfare in this country. Let's face it: If you cannot take care of a child (monetarily, emotionally, or physically,) do not have that child.
The decision to abort the child, however, is not mine to make, nor is it the husband's. It is solely the choice of the woman who is pregnant, since she is the one who has to bear the child and (unless her husband/mate helps to rear the child) rear it.
The choice should not be made for her by anyone else, including the government or a religious institution.
I never said that. Your nine-year-old is a human being. Not a lump of flesh that has the potential to become a human being. And if I was in your presence and you attempted to end the life of your nine-year-old, or anyone else, for that matter, without a good enough reason (shooting someone who was about to shoot someone else would
That's the way I generally take that quote, and it's part of the foundation of our system of criminal justice (or it's what our system of Criminal Justice in the United States is supposed to work like, which seems to be very different from how it actually works). It's the idea that it is better for ten guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be convicted.
If you are not sure that you are judging correctly, in a right manner, then you should not judge at all. If you do not have all the facts, do not proceed until you do. Of course, this implies a perfect society and perfect people, neither of which we will ever have. That's not me being pessimistic, though, that's me being realistic.
And as a realist, I work hard towards being perfect in everything that I do, without dispairing in the knowledge that I will never achieve such perfection.
However, the point as I put it stands thusly: Alot of persons who practice the religion known today as Christianity simply disregard the vast majority of the teachings of the man they say they hold high. If it's hard to swallow, or makes you go out of your way, the vast majority of them tend not to do it.
You're really not that bright, are you?
Have you never heard of the 'Friend or Foe' Identification systems used in the Military to avoid things like this?
Wiki Link: Identification Friend or Foe.
One should perhaps, note that the actual religion that is practiced often can differ a great deal from the teachings of the person venerated by that religion.
Did not Jesus also say, "Let he among you who is without sin cast the first stone," and "Judge not, lest you be judged yourselves?"
The only brand of Modern-Day Christianity I know of that actually follows those two particular commands isn't really Christianity. It's called Unitarian-Universalism, and they haven't been a breed of Christianity for some time now.
The reason 'sex is bad' is the same reason that 'polygamy is bad.'
Apparently the people who were making the rules were not allowed to have sex and, for one reason or another, were not allowed to change that rule. So they simply said, "Sex is bad," and made sure that as little of it as possible could go on.
You destroy a competitor with a better way of doing things if you can't adopt that way of doing things, no matter how much you would like to.
Laws against Polygamy don't exist to protect the women in the marriages, or because they're 'wrong.' They exist to level the sexual playing field.
On a similiar note, did you never notice how adultery was a crime because it made it impossible for the husband to make sure he was raising his true children? Almost all the laws on sexuality we have today, whether descended from religion or not, are about stopping other people from doing things that a) give them more children (polygamy) or b) give them more power (marrying your cousin -- this would be in the form of land control, like in the 'old' South), and they're by and large made by men, for men, to protect the interests of men.
Right and wrong have nothing to do with it. It's all about power, and who controls it, and who controls the control of power.
Saying that one set of morals is 'better' than another set of morals is a very stupid thing to do. You can say that one set of morals is 'better' for you than another set of morals, but you should not say that it is a de facto better set of morals.
I am not an antheist. I'm a Discordian Zen-Buddhist (Oh, go ahead and laugh, then keep reading), and I believe in the immortality of the soul. However, I also 'realise' that, since the body can perish but the soul cannot, the manner of death of the body will have an influence upon the soul. So, actually, how someone dies is very important. I also realise that some 'lives' have more 'worth' than another. If I had to choose between letting a fourty year old person fall off a cliff or a 10 year old person fall off a cliff, I would save the 10 year old.
The problem with religion, like anything else, is there are stupid people who don't think about the consequences of their actions. I particularly dis-like Christianity for this reason. In Christianity, all you have to do is accept Jesus as your personal savoiur, and then let the world goto shit! After all, it doesn't really matter to you, since you'll be in heaven soon enough. In religions like Buddhism, where there is a belief that the soul is constantly stuck in this world, and that it has to work hard to get out, there seems to me to be a great deal more thinking about the consequences of actions, and more care for the state of things in the world, since, though your goal is to leave this place, you also do not want to make it a worse place. You want to make it a better one, because a) you don't know when you will leave it, and b) it is a good thing to decrease the suffering of others.
It ammounts to the same thing.
Magus Hawking can cast one doozy of a Portable Hole, though he wavers on whether or not it's possible to retrieve things from it.