I don't think you have any idea what my point was, nor do I think you know what your own point is (you start by attacking a concrete organization you style as the physical manifestation of human rights, and now you attack the abstraction of human rights, essentially decrying human rights categorically). What have I said human rights mean? How have I been exclusive in my definition? (I've been comparative but not exclusive.)
Once you go back and answer these questions, I think it will be quite clear who the idiot is. (Hint: It's you.)
I have the feeling that you read only the first paragraph of my first response, and you didn't even bother to look at the Wikipedia article, preferring instead to approach the matter like some illiterate caveman thinking 'negative bad, positive good!' Regardless of the fact that in speaking of the technical terms negative rights and positive rights, that's not what those words mean at all.
From your various posts it seems likely to me that you support negative rights more than positive rights, just as I do , but you're so stupid you can't even tell that you agree with me. In fact, the association embarrasses me. You need a lot more knowledge and a better attitude before you're qualified to discuss these matters in a way that ultimate does not embarrass the very things you advocate.
I'm so used to people disagreeing with me I was confused and disoriented. I wondered if I had shifted to an alternate universe where Slashdot norms were all reversed.
I can't believe I'm having to explain this, but the UNHRC is not 'human rights'. I said human rights are not a monolith, which refers to human rights as an abstraction. The UNHRC is not an abstraction, it is a concrete organization established to serve a purpose based on the perspectives of its operators. Just because this organization has opinions on human rights, and a measure of authority (where it is given latitude by governments who are hopefully extensions of the general will of their constituents) to act on these opinions, by no stretch of the imagination does this make the organization equivalent to the concept of human rights itself. You, sir, are a moron.
Human rights are not a monolith. It would be nice if they were, but depending on your foundational assumptions there are very conflicting views of rights. I think the most fundamental division is positive vs. negative rights. It underpins the mutual exclusivity of two of your examples: 'right to private property' and 'right to roof'. You can't have both. The right to private property is a negative right insofar as it obligates people to inaction in the form of 'you cannot take my stuff.' The 'right' to housing and/or food/medicine is a positive right because it obligates people to act in the form of 'you must provide me with housing/food/medicine.'
As far as I'm concerned, the 'you cannot' form of rights is superior to the 'you must' form of rights. As a society mandates that more productive people be slaves (that's what involuntary labor for others is) to the less productive it deincentivizes labor and the expression of talent. Where success is penalized and deficiency is rewarded it is only a matter of time before real productivity collapses.
(Note: the Wikipedia article on positive vs. negative rights includes a bullshit criticism from James Sterba who argues that poor people have a negative right to 'not be interfered with' when they take things from the rich. Ludicrous reasoning to try to camouflage the obvious implied social obligations, so simple that it can be satirized in barely more than a minute. Dr. Sterba is probably more wealthy than I am, so I think I should road trip my ass to Indiana and see how he really feels about rights when I raid his house.)
Electricity started out as a 'neat trick' too, and it took millennia by some accounts (four centuries at a minimum if you start with 17th century electrostatic generators) to understand to the point of application we have today. I'm pretty sure that Otto von Guericke would not have been able to fathom today's digital age based entirely on the sparks he made with his elektrisiermaschine. By analogy, I don't think that Dirac, Einstein, or even Feynman could ever imagine what quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics might lead to in another few centuries.
I'm much more a historian than a physicist, but I have an intuitive feeling that matter will be made to change spatial positions at speeds above c eventually, even if it's not done by pure acceleration. I think we're just dealing with both insufficient knowledge and a poverty of imagination.
After a few generations of near-instant communication and transportation on the scale of 'anywhere in the world in 24 hours' I think that a planetary monoculture is inevitable. Cultural homogenization is visible throughout history and across geography. Cultural anthropologist Wade Davis among others believes that of those 6000 languages 90% will be extinct by 2050 (though I think his estimate is extreme and unscientific). In any case, the rate of language death is increasing. There were more languages going extinct in the 18th century than the 17th, more still in the 19th than the 18th, and there were almost three times as many language extinctions in the 20th as in the 19th century. With a finite number of languages and an increasing rate of extinction, it is not unreasonable that most languages will be dead in a few generations. (Especially as contemporary knowledge and commerce increasingly focus on a very limited set of languages.)
However, there is a mitigating element in the form of the advancement of computer generated translations. I remember translating pages with early versions of BabelFish and how they were still practically impossible to understand, but now when I translate pages I can actually get most of the information that they were intended to convey. If people don't necessarily "need" to learn other languages to access information and communicate cross-culturally, it may encourage them to retain and pass on more of their native language.
If I were a betting man, I would wager that in the next century or two the number of languages in common use will reduce to one or two hundred. Where things will be after a millennium or two I won't hazard to guess. I expect that in the not-to-distant future spoken and written language will be supplanted by a purely electronic communication between people via a neural interface of some kind. It's the only natural development I can imagine for the rudimentary neural interfaces currently extant.
This ignores that we can already make light (in the form of lasers and, astonishingly, radio) "faster than light" and that in such situations the time continuum seems to be disrupted and the light arrives before it leaves. We simply don't understand the rules of the game here fully. We know relativity while brilliant is an incomplete model (as theories tend to be), and as we grow to understand more about EM, quantum mechanics and vacuums I think we'll find that relativity is much like Newtonian physics, correct insofar as it goes, but ultimately deficient as holistic model.
By the way, it's worth noting that all FTL experiments have not required infinite time or energy, though EM is not matter.
If somebody changes their personal beliefs based on a coincidental grouping with a larger portion of the bell curve I would question their sanity. You either think there is evidence for god(s) or you don't, and if you think one way but group yourself with others based on how you think others will perceive you, you're a coward willing to live a lie.
Fertility is decreasing worldwide, including in large populous muslim nations like Indonesia. It would appear that all we need to do is keep increasing the rights and independence of women and that naturally leads to fewer children per woman. Personally I believe that the unfettered flow of information via the internet will undermine Islam and equalize it socially with Christianity.
I don't disagree that 'wanting to belong' is a part of human nature that will not allow 'religious' movements of all kinds to disappear.
Atheists are not delusional that religion is the 'only' way to make good people do evil things. However it is the most extraneous way, and the most inexorably linked. With the exception of Marxism which does call for violence inherently, there are few secular paradigms of thought that explicitly command violence in the way that the Quran does. And I know of no modern secular system that is as inherently misogynist as the Bible or the Torah.
Also, the Stanford prison experiment is a terrible example unless you know for a fact that none of those involved were religious. Prisons in general offer horrible support for any kind of argument about religion and morality as less than 1% of the American prison population identifies as atheist (in contrast to over 90% of the National Science Foundation).
Atheism in the broader society statistically is more law abiding and higher achieving, and it may very well be that religions attract deficient people who "need" to be "saved", in other words people who could not actually be as "moral" without believing that some divine autocrat was watching and would kick their asses if they got out of line.
The First Amendment applies to the states through incorporation under the 14th Amendment, so no, the state legislatures cannot establish religions either.
You're starting to become incoherent... you think Catholicism is the 'dominant religion' of the US? Is that why we've had only one Catholic President, the very fact of which was considered a huge departure from the norm at the time?
You think handing out Bibles at public schools is reasonable ? And you think that the addition (it was not original) of 'under God' to the pledge to a flag of a secular state is something that should be ignored by minority who is symbolicly disenfranchised by that act?
I believe in the case of lawsuits and the like that the response should be "Too fucking bad" if there is no active and lawful policy in play to support the suit.
You really, really need to go back and read the decisions on all those court cases I mentioned. You can't just keep bumbling through arguments making baseless assertions. Laws do exist, extending from and including the establishment clause, and there is now decades of precedent upon which these rulings are made.
What if we decide that religious symbolism and ritual is offensive, and thus should be restricted to the insides of churches? Placing a cross or a statue of the Virgin on your lawn is an encroachment of religion into the public view, and must be defeated to support the rights of other religions to not be exposed to the offensive assertions of infidels.
See the slippery slop argument doesn't work here. This isn't about 'offense' or 'public view' it's about using the power and finances of the state to advance religion, the end. Unless you're asking the government to fund your rituals or buy your crosses, there is no ground to any kind of ban on rituals or displays by private persons.
Also, that bullshit Maryland law was ruled unconstitutional with regard to heterosexuals in 1990 under Schochet v. State and with regard to homosexuals in 1998 using the Schochet ruling as precedent.
Congress does not control education; that's a state function.
Tell it to the federal Dept. of Education, or any number of federal laws like No Child Left Behind. I personally don't think education should be a government matter at any level, but I'm in the minority. The federal government, right or wrong, has an undeniable role in public education in the United States. (And please don't make me lecture you about incorporation and the reality (once again, right or wrong) that state law is superceded in most cases by federal Constitutional law. I mean really, where did you go to school? Don't they teach this stuff in civics anymore?)
Congress has taken non-lawful administrative action against other branches of the government at the least though-- for example, deciding that a court house can't display the Abrahamic ten commandments (even though they use a bible to swear people in... or has that stopped?).
In the first place to address the matter in a general platitude, two wrongs don't make a right. If the federal government weaves its way around Constitutional limitations in ways that you don't like, that does not make it ok for it to do the same in cases where you would like. In the abstract, both are equally wrong.
In the second, more concrete, place, I don't think the example is a credible case of 'non-lawful administrative action' (I don't think you even know what that means) considering that where this case was argued (McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky) it was the result of a lawsuit brought against the county authority, not a matter of bureaucratic policy. So, the action was neither 'non-lawful' being handled by law in court nor was it 'administrative' as it was not a matter of bureaucratic policy.
The act of 'swearing people in' via Bibles is not a legal requirement of office, nor exclusive to the use of Bibles. It is done as extraneous ceremony only. There is also an alternative to 'swearing on' Bibles in court called 'affirmation' and it can be used in any instance which would otherwise call for an oath.
Nobody said that Congress had to act against religion, this is about various agencies of the state acting to advance religion in the most abhorrent of ways: under color of law.
Sorry, but that's bullshit. Congress would have to create those 'administrative systems' such as the Dept. of Education, and Congress passing a law to create those systems to further create bureaucratic policies that 'establish' religion in some way does not give them some magical way out. Whatever Congress creates cannot magically exceed the limits of Congressional authority. Nothing can ever grant more authority than it possesses itself, as that would create authority out of thin air.
If you're actually interested in the truth of these matters, I suggest you actually read some decisions such as Epperson v. Arkansas, Daniel v. Waters, Hendren v. Campbell, McLean v. Arkansas, Edwards v. Aguillard, and most recently Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District.
Seriously though, I say what I feel like saying, and if somebody has problems with it, I'll find somebody else to work for. If somebody refuses me a certification of some kind that I have otherwise earned because of some personal 'morality' they have, I'll sue the shit out of them. And if it doesn't work, I'll still be more satisfied for not having to live a lie in order to pander to any petty social dictators who aren't happy unless everybody conforms to their narrow-minded standards.
I was talking about standards of performance. If I can do the same job as one of my colleagues while watching YouTube videos, but if he did the same his performance goes down, that doesn't mean I should be barred from watching YouTube videos. I am not responsible for other people's deficiencies. If I can do my job to the same level expected from everybody else it should not matter that I intersperse snippets of non-work into my day. Especially considering that if I were forced to drop those to zero, my productivity would decrease rather than increase.
Luckily basically every place I've ever worked has realized this, and I wouldn't work very long at any place that didn't.
Wow, I'm glad I don't live in your world. Every place I've ever worked didn't mind some surfing, and I probably wouldn't even work in place that didn't let you surf through downtime.
Hi! Nice to meet you. I am that generation. I'm a millennial, raised in a schizophrenic constant bombardment of media chunks measured in minutes. Consequently I rarely focus on anything for more than an hour without starting to fall asleep. If I'm not able to sprinkle a few random periods of entertainment into my work day, I will lose focus and literally start to fall asleep. The upside is that I work faster than my predecessors when I do work, and I am capable of handling more work items at any given time. There may not be any net benefit, but really, would that be a reasonable expectation anyway? Is the behavior made natural by my developmental conditioning only justified if I am able to exceed the performance of previous generations? One standard or no standard I say.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you have any idea what my point was, nor do I think you know what your own point is (you start by attacking a concrete organization you style as the physical manifestation of human rights, and now you attack the abstraction of human rights, essentially decrying human rights categorically). What have I said human rights mean? How have I been exclusive in my definition? (I've been comparative but not exclusive.)
Once you go back and answer these questions, I think it will be quite clear who the idiot is. (Hint: It's you.)
I have the feeling that you read only the first paragraph of my first response, and you didn't even bother to look at the Wikipedia article, preferring instead to approach the matter like some illiterate caveman thinking 'negative bad, positive good!' Regardless of the fact that in speaking of the technical terms negative rights and positive rights, that's not what those words mean at all.
From your various posts it seems likely to me that you support negative rights more than positive rights, just as I do , but you're so stupid you can't even tell that you agree with me. In fact, the association embarrasses me. You need a lot more knowledge and a better attitude before you're qualified to discuss these matters in a way that ultimate does not embarrass the very things you advocate.
I'm so used to people disagreeing with me I was confused and disoriented. I wondered if I had shifted to an alternate universe where Slashdot norms were all reversed.
Uh, yes? Like I said, "'you cannot' [...] is superior to [...] 'you must'"
I can't believe I'm having to explain this, but the UNHRC is not 'human rights'. I said human rights are not a monolith, which refers to human rights as an abstraction. The UNHRC is not an abstraction, it is a concrete organization established to serve a purpose based on the perspectives of its operators. Just because this organization has opinions on human rights, and a measure of authority (where it is given latitude by governments who are hopefully extensions of the general will of their constituents) to act on these opinions, by no stretch of the imagination does this make the organization equivalent to the concept of human rights itself. You, sir, are a moron.
Human rights are not a monolith. It would be nice if they were, but depending on your foundational assumptions there are very conflicting views of rights. I think the most fundamental division is positive vs. negative rights. It underpins the mutual exclusivity of two of your examples: 'right to private property' and 'right to roof'. You can't have both. The right to private property is a negative right insofar as it obligates people to inaction in the form of 'you cannot take my stuff.' The 'right' to housing and/or food/medicine is a positive right because it obligates people to act in the form of 'you must provide me with housing/food/medicine.'
As far as I'm concerned, the 'you cannot' form of rights is superior to the 'you must' form of rights. As a society mandates that more productive people be slaves (that's what involuntary labor for others is) to the less productive it deincentivizes labor and the expression of talent. Where success is penalized and deficiency is rewarded it is only a matter of time before real productivity collapses.
(Note: the Wikipedia article on positive vs. negative rights includes a bullshit criticism from James Sterba who argues that poor people have a negative right to 'not be interfered with' when they take things from the rich. Ludicrous reasoning to try to camouflage the obvious implied social obligations, so simple that it can be satirized in barely more than a minute. Dr. Sterba is probably more wealthy than I am, so I think I should road trip my ass to Indiana and see how he really feels about rights when I raid his house.)
They can't be used to transfer information FTL.
Did you even read the article about FTL radio?
Electricity started out as a 'neat trick' too, and it took millennia by some accounts (four centuries at a minimum if you start with 17th century electrostatic generators) to understand to the point of application we have today. I'm pretty sure that Otto von Guericke would not have been able to fathom today's digital age based entirely on the sparks he made with his elektrisiermaschine. By analogy, I don't think that Dirac, Einstein, or even Feynman could ever imagine what quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics might lead to in another few centuries.
I'm much more a historian than a physicist, but I have an intuitive feeling that matter will be made to change spatial positions at speeds above c eventually, even if it's not done by pure acceleration. I think we're just dealing with both insufficient knowledge and a poverty of imagination.
After a few generations of near-instant communication and transportation on the scale of 'anywhere in the world in 24 hours' I think that a planetary monoculture is inevitable. Cultural homogenization is visible throughout history and across geography. Cultural anthropologist Wade Davis among others believes that of those 6000 languages 90% will be extinct by 2050 (though I think his estimate is extreme and unscientific). In any case, the rate of language death is increasing. There were more languages going extinct in the 18th century than the 17th, more still in the 19th than the 18th, and there were almost three times as many language extinctions in the 20th as in the 19th century. With a finite number of languages and an increasing rate of extinction, it is not unreasonable that most languages will be dead in a few generations. (Especially as contemporary knowledge and commerce increasingly focus on a very limited set of languages.)
However, there is a mitigating element in the form of the advancement of computer generated translations. I remember translating pages with early versions of BabelFish and how they were still practically impossible to understand, but now when I translate pages I can actually get most of the information that they were intended to convey. If people don't necessarily "need" to learn other languages to access information and communicate cross-culturally, it may encourage them to retain and pass on more of their native language.
If I were a betting man, I would wager that in the next century or two the number of languages in common use will reduce to one or two hundred. Where things will be after a millennium or two I won't hazard to guess. I expect that in the not-to-distant future spoken and written language will be supplanted by a purely electronic communication between people via a neural interface of some kind. It's the only natural development I can imagine for the rudimentary neural interfaces currently extant.
Go look up manroullette. It does exist.
Of course, because there is no medical condition that might make that possible. (durrr)
This ignores that we can already make light (in the form of lasers and, astonishingly, radio) "faster than light" and that in such situations the time continuum seems to be disrupted and the light arrives before it leaves. We simply don't understand the rules of the game here fully. We know relativity while brilliant is an incomplete model (as theories tend to be), and as we grow to understand more about EM, quantum mechanics and vacuums I think we'll find that relativity is much like Newtonian physics, correct insofar as it goes, but ultimately deficient as holistic model.
By the way, it's worth noting that all FTL experiments have not required infinite time or energy, though EM is not matter.
The Ramans do everything in threes.
But actually, although coldly amoral, that's not a bad model.
If somebody changes their personal beliefs based on a coincidental grouping with a larger portion of the bell curve I would question their sanity. You either think there is evidence for god(s) or you don't, and if you think one way but group yourself with others based on how you think others will perceive you, you're a coward willing to live a lie.
Fertility is decreasing worldwide, including in large populous muslim nations like Indonesia. It would appear that all we need to do is keep increasing the rights and independence of women and that naturally leads to fewer children per woman. Personally I believe that the unfettered flow of information via the internet will undermine Islam and equalize it socially with Christianity.
I don't disagree that 'wanting to belong' is a part of human nature that will not allow 'religious' movements of all kinds to disappear.
Atheists are not delusional that religion is the 'only' way to make good people do evil things. However it is the most extraneous way, and the most inexorably linked. With the exception of Marxism which does call for violence inherently, there are few secular paradigms of thought that explicitly command violence in the way that the Quran does. And I know of no modern secular system that is as inherently misogynist as the Bible or the Torah.
Also, the Stanford prison experiment is a terrible example unless you know for a fact that none of those involved were religious. Prisons in general offer horrible support for any kind of argument about religion and morality as less than 1% of the American prison population identifies as atheist (in contrast to over 90% of the National Science Foundation).
Atheism in the broader society statistically is more law abiding and higher achieving, and it may very well be that religions attract deficient people who "need" to be "saved", in other words people who could not actually be as "moral" without believing that some divine autocrat was watching and would kick their asses if they got out of line.
One last note (this is not me) on that Maryland law.
The First Amendment applies to the states through incorporation under the 14th Amendment, so no, the state legislatures cannot establish religions either.
You think handing out Bibles at public schools is reasonable ? And you think that the addition (it was not original) of 'under God' to the pledge to a flag of a secular state is something that should be ignored by minority who is symbolicly disenfranchised by that act?
I believe in the case of lawsuits and the like that the response should be "Too fucking bad" if there is no active and lawful policy in play to support the suit.
You really, really need to go back and read the decisions on all those court cases I mentioned. You can't just keep bumbling through arguments making baseless assertions. Laws do exist, extending from and including the establishment clause, and there is now decades of precedent upon which these rulings are made.
What if we decide that religious symbolism and ritual is offensive, and thus should be restricted to the insides of churches? Placing a cross or a statue of the Virgin on your lawn is an encroachment of religion into the public view, and must be defeated to support the rights of other religions to not be exposed to the offensive assertions of infidels.
See the slippery slop argument doesn't work here. This isn't about 'offense' or 'public view' it's about using the power and finances of the state to advance religion, the end. Unless you're asking the government to fund your rituals or buy your crosses, there is no ground to any kind of ban on rituals or displays by private persons.
Also, that bullshit Maryland law was ruled unconstitutional with regard to heterosexuals in 1990 under Schochet v. State and with regard to homosexuals in 1998 using the Schochet ruling as precedent.
Congress does not control education; that's a state function.
Tell it to the federal Dept. of Education, or any number of federal laws like No Child Left Behind. I personally don't think education should be a government matter at any level, but I'm in the minority. The federal government, right or wrong, has an undeniable role in public education in the United States. (And please don't make me lecture you about incorporation and the reality (once again, right or wrong) that state law is superceded in most cases by federal Constitutional law. I mean really, where did you go to school? Don't they teach this stuff in civics anymore?)
Congress has taken non-lawful administrative action against other branches of the government at the least though-- for example, deciding that a court house can't display the Abrahamic ten commandments (even though they use a bible to swear people in... or has that stopped?).
In the first place to address the matter in a general platitude, two wrongs don't make a right. If the federal government weaves its way around Constitutional limitations in ways that you don't like, that does not make it ok for it to do the same in cases where you would like. In the abstract, both are equally wrong.
In the second, more concrete, place, I don't think the example is a credible case of 'non-lawful administrative action' (I don't think you even know what that means) considering that where this case was argued (McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky) it was the result of a lawsuit brought against the county authority, not a matter of bureaucratic policy. So, the action was neither 'non-lawful' being handled by law in court nor was it 'administrative' as it was not a matter of bureaucratic policy.
The act of 'swearing people in' via Bibles is not a legal requirement of office, nor exclusive to the use of Bibles. It is done as extraneous ceremony only. There is also an alternative to 'swearing on' Bibles in court called 'affirmation' and it can be used in any instance which would otherwise call for an oath.
Nobody said that Congress had to act against religion, this is about various agencies of the state acting to advance religion in the most abhorrent of ways: under color of law.
Sorry, but that's bullshit. Congress would have to create those 'administrative systems' such as the Dept. of Education, and Congress passing a law to create those systems to further create bureaucratic policies that 'establish' religion in some way does not give them some magical way out. Whatever Congress creates cannot magically exceed the limits of Congressional authority. Nothing can ever grant more authority than it possesses itself, as that would create authority out of thin air.
If you're actually interested in the truth of these matters, I suggest you actually read some decisions such as Epperson v. Arkansas, Daniel v. Waters, Hendren v. Campbell, McLean v. Arkansas, Edwards v. Aguillard, and most recently Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District.
Establishment clause.
Please tell me you are not a US voter...
Fuck. That. Shit.
Seriously though, I say what I feel like saying, and if somebody has problems with it, I'll find somebody else to work for. If somebody refuses me a certification of some kind that I have otherwise earned because of some personal 'morality' they have, I'll sue the shit out of them. And if it doesn't work, I'll still be more satisfied for not having to live a lie in order to pander to any petty social dictators who aren't happy unless everybody conforms to their narrow-minded standards.
I was talking about standards of performance. If I can do the same job as one of my colleagues while watching YouTube videos, but if he did the same his performance goes down, that doesn't mean I should be barred from watching YouTube videos. I am not responsible for other people's deficiencies. If I can do my job to the same level expected from everybody else it should not matter that I intersperse snippets of non-work into my day. Especially considering that if I were forced to drop those to zero, my productivity would decrease rather than increase.
Luckily basically every place I've ever worked has realized this, and I wouldn't work very long at any place that didn't.
Wow, I'm glad I don't live in your world. Every place I've ever worked didn't mind some surfing, and I probably wouldn't even work in place that didn't let you surf through downtime.
Hi! Nice to meet you. I am that generation. I'm a millennial, raised in a schizophrenic constant bombardment of media chunks measured in minutes. Consequently I rarely focus on anything for more than an hour without starting to fall asleep. If I'm not able to sprinkle a few random periods of entertainment into my work day, I will lose focus and literally start to fall asleep. The upside is that I work faster than my predecessors when I do work, and I am capable of handling more work items at any given time. There may not be any net benefit, but really, would that be a reasonable expectation anyway? Is the behavior made natural by my developmental conditioning only justified if I am able to exceed the performance of previous generations? One standard or no standard I say.
Whoever marked this as a troll post has obviously never heard of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England (and his warts).
... the only sound that could be heard was a solitary giggle from...
PowerPoint!