The internet is international because everybody in the world said to themselves, 'look at that fucking awesome network the US runs, I want to access that!' Outside interest in a network does not magically transfer control to the outside. Just like every pilot who flies a plane must learn English because we invented powered flight. Suck it up. I'm sure when China gets around to building a base on the moon, all the world's scientists will want a piece of it, and the Chinese will rightly say, 'you'll be happy with whatever we give you, because we will dictate the terms by which any, if any, external access is allowed to our facilities.'
Besides which, the UN is made up mostly of petty corrupt dictatorships in the developing world. That's why the security council has permanent seats for first world nations, otherwise there would never be any intervention every time one of the petty dictatorships decides an ethnic/religious/political genocide sounds like a fun way to round out the season. The internet has enjoyed a laissez faire existence thanks to the fact that the US rarely engages in censorship. UN ownership would almost certainly end that, with China and other authoritarian regimes (now including even Australia for chrissake) vying for any excuse to exert control over the internet through filters. But it will be ok to crush dissent and prevent access to (Islamically) immoral ideas like equality for women and people with non-heterosexual lifestyles because that will be done for the children.
Sadly, appeasement in the US and pressure from major international powers will eventually make the internet and internationally governed entity. I wish I were naive enough to believe it wasn't inevitable. It'll just take some idiot President to give it away just like Panama. However, mark my words, that day freedom on the internet will begin a rapid decline. Even with the First Amendment we have enough trouble keeping the laws off of discourse, without even that semblance of protection, free discourse is doomed.
What, you think DRM-processing is somehow resource-free? The cycles and memory that must be allocated to do it come from magical land instead of system resources? Please. As talked about at length here, Flatout 2 plays 15% slower with DRM than without. DRM can also decrease battery life by 25% because of the additional processor load creating more heat.
The GP was saying that N. Korea's isolation was The Great Satan's fault as opposed to the crazy despot that runs N. Korea who repeatedly rebuffs efforts to diminish isolation by all the other members of the six party talks. The parent post was talking about Bush sarcastically, because he's become the scapegoat for anything possibly perceived as wrong in American policy.
While I'm not the sort to look to regulation as the answer, you've basically said that the POTS is reliable because it was made illegal for it not to be. Everybody seems to be forgetting that when phones came into existence a century ago that system was not reliable either. However people didn't throw up their hands and stick with the telegraph.
These systems that work for corporate offices can be scaled down into new residential construction. The primary reasons that it's infrequently done today are a) it's somewhat more expensive and b) while some overlap exists, the vendors who do residential construction are frequently wholly different in skillset and method from those who do large-scale commercial construction.
You're comparing a real, practical and deployed technology to FTL travel theory. Really? It's like you're trying to win a 'worst possible analogy' competition.
'VOIP will never be as reliable' is the sort of absolute phrase a luddite would use. Why dagnabit, those first generation diesel engines will never develop to be as reliable as these 10th generation steam engines! The sort of sentiment which reprised itself I'm sure in the minds of luddites when diesel-electric was replaced by nuclear on submarines. And let's not forget that steam too was first thought of as ludicrous, as Napoleon Bonaparte once said: "What, sir, would you make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck; I pray you excuse me. I have no time to listen to such nonsense."
You call me an uneducated consumer. I support a successfully deployed VOIP system as part of my job function. Out of the last year, I believe there hasn't been more than an hour of system-wide downtime. Not perfect, but far from impractical.
Like any other technology, development will solve problems. I can't understand the mindset of people who think that some technology is so special that it will never be replaced and that no newer technology 'will ever' be developed and refined enough to be useful. It's like looking back at the history of human progress, sticking your fingers in your ears and going LALALALA.
You should really join the real world already. Computer networks have moved beyond the 80s and 90s. When the power cuts out at my office, our generator kicks in and all the VOIP phones and wireless APs stay running by way of POE. Thanks to my docked laptop's battery I could be in the middle of a call remoted into a server somewhere and I wouldn't even notice anything other than the main lighting go out. And we have both a physical internet connection as well as a wireless point-to-point, so if one fails the other doesn't.
The technology exists to make infrastructure more failure resistant and redundant. People are too lazy and/or afraid of the cost. POE could make networks and VOIP just as independent of the main power grid as POTS is.
I hope you get moderated funny, because Christ man, you're talking about an organization that completely destroyed the very expensive Mars Climate Orbiter because they screwed up converting between imperial and metric.
The nice thing about 'wireless broadband' is that every major carrier has its own version with fairly decent coverage. So it's a real possibility for people to say to a carrier with a stupid TOS, 'Screw you guys, I'm going to the competition.'
I would expect some people to look at it practically, as English is the de facto universal language of the present era, just as French, Latin, and Greek once were in past eras. I would also expect others, both English speakers with white guilt and ESL speakers who resent that their first language isn't relevant, to bitch and moan about how arrogant it is to expect people to learn English. Never mind that each person does it more or less voluntarily (I understand it's part of mandatory schooling in many countries) for their own benefit.
You too? I was homeschooled from 4th-12th, went into the Honors Program at Seattle University, and I still saw a lot of egregious errors when we were asked to review each other's papers. I somewhat 'lost it' at one point and started diagramming one guy's sentences on the back because it was so terrible. We're talking about an exclusive, Socratic method program that takes only 25 students each year, and they're writing sentences WITHOUT VERBS. I shit you not.
If you'll excuse my pedantic response (and this is Slashdot, so you have to), the 'u's aren't always extraneous. Sure, 'colour' is stupid because it's never handled as a diphthong, but 'attourney' makes more sense than 'attorney' because it's pronounced much closer to 'turn' than 'torn'.
Do you listen to yourself? You call polygamy an 'ancient practice' immediately following a paragraph where you mention you think Muslims (1+ billion) still practice it (they do), especially in Africa where in places it is beyond normal to the point of being encouraged. It was also a part of Chinese and Thai culture as recently as the last century.
Be careful whom you call historically uninformed. I was a Baptist for 15 years, and homeschooled in time-wasting Bible studies by fundamentalist parents every weekday nine months out of the the year for NINE YEARS. The Bible is ambiguous about polygamy (even in the Old Testament, so Judaism too), alternately tacitly accepting/ignoring it, condemning it, and just saying monogamy is better. Because of the importance to organized Christianity of the image of marriage as a reflection of Christ and the church, after the religion had established its dominance over Europe, any Biblical doctrine that might have viewed polygamy as not necessarily sinful was conveniently forgotten. There was also a certain degree of syncresis between the monogamy of the Roman world and emphasis of monogamy as a symbol in the New Testament. There are also, supposedly, parts of the Quran that say monogamy is better than polygamy, but I can't find them, and in Islam the acceptance of polygamy won out in the ambiguity.
I also never said you couldn't be considered a libertarian just because you don't agree to every plank in the LP platform. I just wanted to make sure you knew about the difference.
The crux of this seems to be that you have drawn very, very weird boundaries for things like tolerance, acceptance, and compulsion. In the realm of law, compulsory acceptance is almost always a physical thing that impacts somebody directly. Take for example the frequently forgotten Third Amendment outlawing compulsory acceptance of boarding soldiers as was common under British rule. Under colonial rule, if you didn't accept soldiers in your house, you were brought up on charges. When it comes to non-physical or 'mental' compulsion, the category becomes extremely narrow. Basically the only real history there is in law that I can think of is a) state-madated religion and b) the loyalty oath. That is as far as any state seems to go in compulsory acceptance of ideas or beliefs.
Nobody and no law can force somebody to 'accept' (hold it as a good thing) something under US law. If gay marriage were legalized, that wouldn't mean the thought police would go door to door saying 'SWEAR YOU LIKE IT OR GO TO JAIL'. That would be real compulsory acceptance. Everybody would of course be permitted to their own opinions about it, but would be expected to not interfere and be civil about it, which brings us to tolerance. That's what tolerance is. Understanding that people can do things that others might believe are morally but not legally wrong. You speak of being 'satisfied with tolerance' but yet you won't allow the legalization of the act so that it can be tolerated.
You say there is no right to marriage, which is ironic after voicing the opinion that government should not be involved, but nonetheless your challenge for 'honest scholarly analysis' is amusing. Apparently you're not familiar with the Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia wherein it was noted:
"Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resi
If this can be given some momentum by other scions of Wikipedia following the model and pushing for similar arrangements with archives around the world based on referencing the WikiDE arrangements, maybe this could be turned into a tidal wave trend. The time has come for the artificial scarcity of knowledge in the modern era to end.
Wrong. I'm not trying to stereotype (unlike yourself right now).
I guess the keyword is 'trying'? Because you were stereotyping. 'I see this a lot in arguments against libertarians' is a generalization of observation about a group. It is objectively equivalent in meaning to 'I see Jews being miserly a lot' or what have you. It's an oversimplified negative observation (albeit the negative is a later referenced antecedent) that you're trying to apply to a group of people. Textbook denotation of a stereotype. So, if the keyword is 'trying' then I guess I have to accept that your stereotyping is an accident, but if you're arguing that you're not stereotyping, you might as well be pointing at a cat and calling it a dog.
As for me, only by a very subjective standard (specifically how much is something oversimplified) could my argument be considered a stereotype. Even that would be a stretch, since stereotyping connotes assumptions about groups much more than individuals, and I was talking only about you and what you said, never once saying 'you fall into group X, which is bad'.
(If I might borrow your own logic momentarily, I must say I've seen a pattern in the behavior of Slashdot 'intellectuals' to knee jerk about the first assigned negative and assign it back to the accuser whether it's the least bit rational or not.)
... but they're at a rhetorical disadvantage for ignoring the other guy's arguments, and quoting the one-size-fits-all phrase instead.
I can see and accept this as a reasonable perspective for your original post.
Another example: it's a fairly common argument to say "Stereotyping is wrong". This too has conditions attached to it. It's great (mostly) if someone is stereotyping a group. It's not so great if someone is passively observing a trend.
Too bad observations about a group, such as you made, are within the definition of stereotyping. The observations may be true, but it is an oversimplification (by nature) of the attributes or behavior of a group.
I forgot to mention, since you brought it up as a parenthetical tangent, marriage has not been exclusive to one man and one woman. Many cultures have accepted polygamist marriage. The Bible itself records many arrangements, most notably the wives of one of the Patriarchs, Jacob.
Monogamy vs. polygamy in marriage is purely cultural, and anthropological studies suggest that in prehistory most/all societies were polygamist.
Only since crusading monotheism started destroying the de facto pluralities that existed in earlier times did monogamy start to become anything more than a matter of taste, means, or convenience.
You should probably worry more about whether a concept is right or wrong than trying to stereotype the style in which it is presented like that's some kind of insight. In fact, I would go further to say that the reasoning of 'you're wrong because the pithy phrase said so' is actually more sound than 'you're wrong because you quoted somebody'. A phrase can itself be right or wrong, sound or unsound, relevant or irrelevant, but categorically dismissing arguments because they center on one is irrational.
I will grant you didn't explicitly say that this is how such arguments should be handled, but at the very least you imply that they are somehow intrinsically inferior, regardless of how sound, relevant or even correct the reference made might be.
If that comment is based on my vote on Prop. 8, well, you have proved yourself a bigot by daring to judge someone by his vote on a single proposition.
In a strict, technical sense, yes, I am intolerant of your intolerance. Intolerance is like force, it's only wrong to initiate it. Once force is initiated, frequently the only rational response is force.
1. Prop. 8 was an effort to reverse the legislation-from-bench by San Francisco judges who ruled gay marriage valid, in the absence of any legal support for such decision
Being somebody who's used the 'legislation-from-bench' chestnut myself, I can appreciate that you think it was a bad, activist decision, but it goes too far to say 'absence of legal support'. That's not how the judiciary works. That's why it's called 'case law'. When a court rules on a code or law, that becomes the standard (stare decisis) of interpreting that law until such time as future legislation changes it. Whether you agree with it or not is immaterial.
2. The campaign for "No on Prop. 8" was dishonest or disingenuous at best in framing this an "equal rights" issue . No, this is about the name and definition of "marriage". The real, and more realistically achievable equal rights issue would be making the legal force of domestic partnership for gay couples equal of marriage (thanks to my gay friends, I do know now that domestic partnership doesn't quite carry the same rights and privileges as marriage ).
You do realize the only dishonesty here is with yourself? You literally say that it wasn't about equal rights, and then say that you know that their rights aren't equal. How the hell do you rationalize that? The court decision gave them equal rights under the law, you voted for something that returned them to an unequal state under the law.
A lot of people, including me, who voted yes on Prop. 8 would have voted yes on another proposition that declared domestic partnership legally equal to marriage (such as in hospital visitation rights or inheritance) without carrying the name "marriage".
3. You know what, I wasn't comfortable of changing the definition of "marriage" to somehow have it mean any coupling of any two (or more, I guess) human beings. It has always meant binding of a man and a woman, and I didn't see any reason that the meaning of this familiar word should be changed. Equal rights issue can be resolved without having to explicitly re-define marriage to include same-sex union, which has never been done in the recorded history, even in cultures like that of ancient Greece that accepted certain kinds of homosexual relationships without stigma.
I wish I could say that this weird core argument was unique, but it seems to be the common last bastion coping mechanism for people who can't be honest with themselves about their dislike for gay people. Really? You think the definition of a word is sooooo fucking important that it justifies legislating away the right of people to be treated equally under the law? These semantics are the best excuse you can muster for your easy betrayal of somebody else's liberty? You want people, to use examples you've cited yourself, to be unable to see their loved ones when they are scared, in pain, or dying in a hospital, so that you can rest easy that a couple words in your personal dictionary don't have to change?!?! You're scum. You're as bad as any open homophobe who launches into tirades about killing all the gays because you voted the same way they did. I don't care how many gay 'friends' you claim to have, or what laws you would vote for if they were on the ballot, you threw away a chance for a real positive change just to keep some silly, abstract definition narrower. That's sick.
As a libertarian, my deepest wish is that the government not be dragged into this issue, or acceptance be forced on those who are not willing to a
Slashdot Mirror
The internet is international because everybody in the world said to themselves, 'look at that fucking awesome network the US runs, I want to access that!' Outside interest in a network does not magically transfer control to the outside. Just like every pilot who flies a plane must learn English because we invented powered flight. Suck it up. I'm sure when China gets around to building a base on the moon, all the world's scientists will want a piece of it, and the Chinese will rightly say, 'you'll be happy with whatever we give you, because we will dictate the terms by which any, if any, external access is allowed to our facilities.'
Besides which, the UN is made up mostly of petty corrupt dictatorships in the developing world. That's why the security council has permanent seats for first world nations, otherwise there would never be any intervention every time one of the petty dictatorships decides an ethnic/religious/political genocide sounds like a fun way to round out the season. The internet has enjoyed a laissez faire existence thanks to the fact that the US rarely engages in censorship. UN ownership would almost certainly end that, with China and other authoritarian regimes (now including even Australia for chrissake) vying for any excuse to exert control over the internet through filters. But it will be ok to crush dissent and prevent access to (Islamically) immoral ideas like equality for women and people with non-heterosexual lifestyles because that will be done for the children.
Sadly, appeasement in the US and pressure from major international powers will eventually make the internet and internationally governed entity. I wish I were naive enough to believe it wasn't inevitable. It'll just take some idiot President to give it away just like Panama. However, mark my words, that day freedom on the internet will begin a rapid decline. Even with the First Amendment we have enough trouble keeping the laws off of discourse, without even that semblance of protection, free discourse is doomed.
What, you think DRM-processing is somehow resource-free? The cycles and memory that must be allocated to do it come from magical land instead of system resources? Please. As talked about at length here, Flatout 2 plays 15% slower with DRM than without. DRM can also decrease battery life by 25% because of the additional processor load creating more heat.
The GP was saying that N. Korea's isolation was The Great Satan's fault as opposed to the crazy despot that runs N. Korea who repeatedly rebuffs efforts to diminish isolation by all the other members of the six party talks. The parent post was talking about Bush sarcastically, because he's become the scapegoat for anything possibly perceived as wrong in American policy.
While I'm not the sort to look to regulation as the answer, you've basically said that the POTS is reliable because it was made illegal for it not to be. Everybody seems to be forgetting that when phones came into existence a century ago that system was not reliable either. However people didn't throw up their hands and stick with the telegraph.
These systems that work for corporate offices can be scaled down into new residential construction. The primary reasons that it's infrequently done today are a) it's somewhat more expensive and b) while some overlap exists, the vendors who do residential construction are frequently wholly different in skillset and method from those who do large-scale commercial construction.
You're comparing a real, practical and deployed technology to FTL travel theory. Really? It's like you're trying to win a 'worst possible analogy' competition.
'VOIP will never be as reliable' is the sort of absolute phrase a luddite would use. Why dagnabit, those first generation diesel engines will never develop to be as reliable as these 10th generation steam engines! The sort of sentiment which reprised itself I'm sure in the minds of luddites when diesel-electric was replaced by nuclear on submarines. And let's not forget that steam too was first thought of as ludicrous, as Napoleon Bonaparte once said: "What, sir, would you make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck; I pray you excuse me. I have no time to listen to such nonsense."
You call me an uneducated consumer. I support a successfully deployed VOIP system as part of my job function. Out of the last year, I believe there hasn't been more than an hour of system-wide downtime. Not perfect, but far from impractical.
Like any other technology, development will solve problems. I can't understand the mindset of people who think that some technology is so special that it will never be replaced and that no newer technology 'will ever' be developed and refined enough to be useful. It's like looking back at the history of human progress, sticking your fingers in your ears and going LALALALA.
You should really join the real world already. Computer networks have moved beyond the 80s and 90s. When the power cuts out at my office, our generator kicks in and all the VOIP phones and wireless APs stay running by way of POE. Thanks to my docked laptop's battery I could be in the middle of a call remoted into a server somewhere and I wouldn't even notice anything other than the main lighting go out. And we have both a physical internet connection as well as a wireless point-to-point, so if one fails the other doesn't.
The technology exists to make infrastructure more failure resistant and redundant. People are too lazy and/or afraid of the cost. POE could make networks and VOIP just as independent of the main power grid as POTS is.
I hope you get moderated funny, because Christ man, you're talking about an organization that completely destroyed the very expensive Mars Climate Orbiter because they screwed up converting between imperial and metric.
Mod parent up.
That is a very, very isolated scenario. There isn't anything like that in my entire time zone.
The nice thing about 'wireless broadband' is that every major carrier has its own version with fairly decent coverage. So it's a real possibility for people to say to a carrier with a stupid TOS, 'Screw you guys, I'm going to the competition.'
Yeah, the 1830s... could you imagine the look on that prima donna Andrew Jackson's face? Or Martin Van Buren?
Sadly that's the library system of the town I grew up in. How embarrassing.
Mod parent up.
Yeah, real cute. We're talking about sentences with a dozen or more words without any verbs.
I would expect some people to look at it practically, as English is the de facto universal language of the present era, just as French, Latin, and Greek once were in past eras. I would also expect others, both English speakers with white guilt and ESL speakers who resent that their first language isn't relevant, to bitch and moan about how arrogant it is to expect people to learn English. Never mind that each person does it more or less voluntarily (I understand it's part of mandatory schooling in many countries) for their own benefit.
It's a Latin rendition of 'French language'. French is a Romance Language, not Germanic.
Common sense because Americans invented powered flight. To use a 4chanism, NEVAR FORGET.
You too? I was homeschooled from 4th-12th, went into the Honors Program at Seattle University, and I still saw a lot of egregious errors when we were asked to review each other's papers. I somewhat 'lost it' at one point and started diagramming one guy's sentences on the back because it was so terrible. We're talking about an exclusive, Socratic method program that takes only 25 students each year, and they're writing sentences WITHOUT VERBS. I shit you not.
If you'll excuse my pedantic response (and this is Slashdot, so you have to), the 'u's aren't always extraneous. Sure, 'colour' is stupid because it's never handled as a diphthong, but 'attourney' makes more sense than 'attorney' because it's pronounced much closer to 'turn' than 'torn'.
Be careful whom you call historically uninformed. I was a Baptist for 15 years, and homeschooled in time-wasting Bible studies by fundamentalist parents every weekday nine months out of the the year for NINE YEARS. The Bible is ambiguous about polygamy (even in the Old Testament, so Judaism too), alternately tacitly accepting/ignoring it, condemning it, and just saying monogamy is better. Because of the importance to organized Christianity of the image of marriage as a reflection of Christ and the church, after the religion had established its dominance over Europe, any Biblical doctrine that might have viewed polygamy as not necessarily sinful was conveniently forgotten. There was also a certain degree of syncresis between the monogamy of the Roman world and emphasis of monogamy as a symbol in the New Testament. There are also, supposedly, parts of the Quran that say monogamy is better than polygamy, but I can't find them, and in Islam the acceptance of polygamy won out in the ambiguity.
I also never said you couldn't be considered a libertarian just because you don't agree to every plank in the LP platform. I just wanted to make sure you knew about the difference.
The crux of this seems to be that you have drawn very, very weird boundaries for things like tolerance, acceptance, and compulsion. In the realm of law, compulsory acceptance is almost always a physical thing that impacts somebody directly. Take for example the frequently forgotten Third Amendment outlawing compulsory acceptance of boarding soldiers as was common under British rule. Under colonial rule, if you didn't accept soldiers in your house, you were brought up on charges. When it comes to non-physical or 'mental' compulsion, the category becomes extremely narrow. Basically the only real history there is in law that I can think of is a) state-madated religion and b) the loyalty oath. That is as far as any state seems to go in compulsory acceptance of ideas or beliefs.
Nobody and no law can force somebody to 'accept' (hold it as a good thing) something under US law. If gay marriage were legalized, that wouldn't mean the thought police would go door to door saying 'SWEAR YOU LIKE IT OR GO TO JAIL'. That would be real compulsory acceptance. Everybody would of course be permitted to their own opinions about it, but would be expected to not interfere and be civil about it, which brings us to tolerance. That's what tolerance is. Understanding that people can do things that others might believe are morally but not legally wrong. You speak of being 'satisfied with tolerance' but yet you won't allow the legalization of the act so that it can be tolerated.
You say there is no right to marriage, which is ironic after voicing the opinion that government should not be involved, but nonetheless your challenge for 'honest scholarly analysis' is amusing. Apparently you're not familiar with the Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia wherein it was noted:
"Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resi
But if that happens, will that mean the standard of measurement will become 'how many Wikipedias is that?'
If this can be given some momentum by other scions of Wikipedia following the model and pushing for similar arrangements with archives around the world based on referencing the WikiDE arrangements, maybe this could be turned into a tidal wave trend. The time has come for the artificial scarcity of knowledge in the modern era to end.
Wrong. I'm not trying to stereotype (unlike yourself right now).
I guess the keyword is 'trying'? Because you were stereotyping. 'I see this a lot in arguments against libertarians' is a generalization of observation about a group. It is objectively equivalent in meaning to 'I see Jews being miserly a lot' or what have you. It's an oversimplified negative observation (albeit the negative is a later referenced antecedent) that you're trying to apply to a group of people. Textbook denotation of a stereotype. So, if the keyword is 'trying' then I guess I have to accept that your stereotyping is an accident, but if you're arguing that you're not stereotyping, you might as well be pointing at a cat and calling it a dog.
As for me, only by a very subjective standard (specifically how much is something oversimplified) could my argument be considered a stereotype. Even that would be a stretch, since stereotyping connotes assumptions about groups much more than individuals, and I was talking only about you and what you said, never once saying 'you fall into group X, which is bad'.
(If I might borrow your own logic momentarily, I must say I've seen a pattern in the behavior of Slashdot 'intellectuals' to knee jerk about the first assigned negative and assign it back to the accuser whether it's the least bit rational or not.)
... but they're at a rhetorical disadvantage for ignoring the other guy's arguments, and quoting the one-size-fits-all phrase instead.
I can see and accept this as a reasonable perspective for your original post.
Another example: it's a fairly common argument to say "Stereotyping is wrong". This too has conditions attached to it. It's great (mostly) if someone is stereotyping a group. It's not so great if someone is passively observing a trend.
Too bad observations about a group, such as you made, are within the definition of stereotyping. The observations may be true, but it is an oversimplification (by nature) of the attributes or behavior of a group.
See how it works?
Another Slashdot favorite. Now ask yourself.
I forgot to mention, since you brought it up as a parenthetical tangent, marriage has not been exclusive to one man and one woman. Many cultures have accepted polygamist marriage. The Bible itself records many arrangements, most notably the wives of one of the Patriarchs, Jacob.
Monogamy vs. polygamy in marriage is purely cultural, and anthropological studies suggest that in prehistory most/all societies were polygamist.
Only since crusading monotheism started destroying the de facto pluralities that existed in earlier times did monogamy start to become anything more than a matter of taste, means, or convenience.
You should probably worry more about whether a concept is right or wrong than trying to stereotype the style in which it is presented like that's some kind of insight. In fact, I would go further to say that the reasoning of 'you're wrong because the pithy phrase said so' is actually more sound than 'you're wrong because you quoted somebody'. A phrase can itself be right or wrong, sound or unsound, relevant or irrelevant, but categorically dismissing arguments because they center on one is irrational.
I will grant you didn't explicitly say that this is how such arguments should be handled, but at the very least you imply that they are somehow intrinsically inferior, regardless of how sound, relevant or even correct the reference made might be.
If that comment is based on my vote on Prop. 8, well, you have proved yourself a bigot by daring to judge someone by his vote on a single proposition.
In a strict, technical sense, yes, I am intolerant of your intolerance. Intolerance is like force, it's only wrong to initiate it. Once force is initiated, frequently the only rational response is force.
1. Prop. 8 was an effort to reverse the legislation-from-bench by San Francisco judges who ruled gay marriage valid, in the absence of any legal support for such decision
Being somebody who's used the 'legislation-from-bench' chestnut myself, I can appreciate that you think it was a bad, activist decision, but it goes too far to say 'absence of legal support'. That's not how the judiciary works. That's why it's called 'case law'. When a court rules on a code or law, that becomes the standard (stare decisis) of interpreting that law until such time as future legislation changes it. Whether you agree with it or not is immaterial.
2. The campaign for "No on Prop. 8" was dishonest or disingenuous at best in framing this an "equal rights" issue . No, this is about the name and definition of "marriage". The real, and more realistically achievable equal rights issue would be making the legal force of domestic partnership for gay couples equal of marriage (thanks to my gay friends, I do know now that domestic partnership doesn't quite carry the same rights and privileges as marriage ).
You do realize the only dishonesty here is with yourself? You literally say that it wasn't about equal rights, and then say that you know that their rights aren't equal. How the hell do you rationalize that? The court decision gave them equal rights under the law, you voted for something that returned them to an unequal state under the law.
A lot of people, including me, who voted yes on Prop. 8 would have voted yes on another proposition that declared domestic partnership legally equal to marriage (such as in hospital visitation rights or inheritance) without carrying the name "marriage".
3. You know what, I wasn't comfortable of changing the definition of "marriage" to somehow have it mean any coupling of any two (or more, I guess) human beings. It has always meant binding of a man and a woman, and I didn't see any reason that the meaning of this familiar word should be changed. Equal rights issue can be resolved without having to explicitly re-define marriage to include same-sex union, which has never been done in the recorded history, even in cultures like that of ancient Greece that accepted certain kinds of homosexual relationships without stigma.
I wish I could say that this weird core argument was unique, but it seems to be the common last bastion coping mechanism for people who can't be honest with themselves about their dislike for gay people. Really? You think the definition of a word is sooooo fucking important that it justifies legislating away the right of people to be treated equally under the law? These semantics are the best excuse you can muster for your easy betrayal of somebody else's liberty? You want people, to use examples you've cited yourself, to be unable to see their loved ones when they are scared, in pain, or dying in a hospital, so that you can rest easy that a couple words in your personal dictionary don't have to change?!?! You're scum. You're as bad as any open homophobe who launches into tirades about killing all the gays because you voted the same way they did. I don't care how many gay 'friends' you claim to have, or what laws you would vote for if they were on the ballot, you threw away a chance for a real positive change just to keep some silly, abstract definition narrower. That's sick.
As a libertarian, my deepest wish is that the government not be dragged into this issue, or acceptance be forced on those who are not willing to a