If your wireless is open and you don't want it to be, you're not operating your equipment 'properly' (from your own perspective) and hoping that you can go after anybody who uses the open system by defending your own ignorance. Not a sound strategy. A deliberately open system is not distinguishable from an accidentally open system unless the network is called "PLEASE USE ME".
I dealt with this in a very long post here. Granted, this is based on a 'using a neighbor's wireless' scenario, but I think it still contains relevant points.
I agree. Google looks really a lot worse in my eyes not because they picked up some packets, but because they lied about their intent to pick up some packets. It's very Clintonesque. I could care less if Billy C. got some action from an intern, but it was the lying about it that made it heinous.
If you're caught, just admit it. Looking bad in the eyes of some dumb luddites is not worse than looking like a sleazy liar to absolutely everybody.
Each person is responsible for they way that they use, configure, or fail to maintain equipment that is in there domain and control. Ignorance is no excuse.
If I take a backhoe and cut a water/sewer/phone/fiber line in my yard, the utility company is not going to say 'oh, that's ok, you just didn't know how to use the equipment...' Fuck no, they are going to hold me liable, and any court challenge will go their way.
In addition to liability for actions there is also liability for the failure to act. If I rent a car for a long period of time and fail to perform basic maintenance like oil changes to the point where the engine is damaged, guess who's on the hook?
Ignorance does not excuse liability. If I operate a machine that I don't know how to use, I don't get a free pass if things don't turn out the way I want.
Machines under somebody's domain and control can be considered their agents. If I set up an FTP server and it accepts ftp as the login and ftp as the password, then I would have a hard time prosecuting anybody for unauthorized access when it is common knowledge to many who use FTP that such a login is considered a publicly accessible FTP server.
Mmmmm bad caps are hilarious. It warmed my heart to see so many Intel boards affected by that during the peak of it. Demonstrated once and for all that Intel was crap too on quality control regardless of their big name.
Your anecdote falls a little flat with me. At one point I sold motherboards. ASRocks came back in droves to be RMA'ed, MSIs largely didn't. I have built many systems on MSI boards, and none ever failed. Of course even good manufacturers produce some bad boards and even bad manufacturers produce some good boards, so congratulations, you won the lottery!
If you have a good UPS as you say, you should be experiencing very consistent power output regardless of what is happening on the line in. I notice you don't mention your PSU, which is a very important half of the equation for turning 'dirty' power to 'clean' for the components. Even supposedly high-end PSUs can be introducing voltage differences that ultimately wear down the components they power.
Further, ambient temperature shouldn't be any issue to the CPU if your HSF is good enough. I don't let my CPU get much more than 20-30 degrees (F) over ambient (and yes, it takes an expensive HSF to do this, my current is a Titan Amanda (rebranded MacsTek MA-7130-A)), and anything under 120-130 (F) should be able to last for years.
Quality is a watchword that should be applied not just to some components, but every component. If your UPS isn't doing its job and providing dirty power and not holding output steady in browns and failures, dump that zero and get yourself a hero or you have only yourself to blame. If the PSU can't perform to spec, dump that too. Every component requires research for every product generation. Sometimes otherwise good manufacturers don't hit the window, like Thermalright who I regularly prefer for heatsinks had some fairly weak offerings between the SLK-900U and the TRUE Copper/IFX-14, which is why I went with the MA-7130-A. (Though if I were buying an HSF right now, I'd probably go with the Noctua NH-D14.)
I respect your experience, really, I wish I had the opportunity to build in the 80s, but it doesn't change the fact that you must be diligent. Research every component, every generation, every time, and get the best or be sorry.
I have built as many systems and have had no GPU failures and only one CPU failure (and that was because it was a first generation socket 462 and the brick and mortar I was buying the parts from didn't have any HSFs for 462... he said 'oh, just use this really beefy socket 7 HSF, that will be enough!' Pff, well, it wasn't. At least the bastard replaced the chip when it died, at which time he did have 462 HSFs).
I'm willing to bet that the GP buys cheap crap like ASRock and generic PSUs that couldn't perform at a fraction of their claimed specs and then wonders why his shit dies all the time. Meanwhile I have basically every CPU, GPU, and motherboard I've ever built with over more than a decade all in working order.
I have read dozens of original texts and commentaries on each subject you have listed, except physics. Never really could quite handle physics, but then physics is rarely a political issue. One does not need to possess a PhD to have a working knowledge (I do, in fact, plan to have a PhD in history before I'm 40), but it does take a certain amount of dedication. I had to sacrifice the opportunities to engage in many petty diversions in order to integrate the knowledge of choice texts from across the length and breadth of human experience, but it has qualified me more than those many twits of the electorate whose highest appreciation of culture is American Idol, the majority of which think lasers are 'focused sound', and further wouldn't know history if Charles I materialized in front of them and smacked them upside the head with a copy of the Solemn League and Covenant.
I support the death penalty in short because it is the only way for an equivalent justice to be achieved in the case of murder. No amount of time or money or labor can be exacted from a murderer that is worth a human life, therefore he must forfeit his life itself.
I support animal testing in short because higher forms of life have always, and will always, advance themselves at the cost of the consumption (in whatever form, usually but not exclusively as food) of lower forms of life. Animals don't care about hurting each other. When insects lay their eggs in the bodies of other insects, they are not concerned with the pain it causes the hosts of their parasitic offspring. Humans are animals too, and we didn't survive to advance this far by kisses and hugs.
Human testing requires consent, purely as type of social contract, an extension of the understanding of personal rights and sovereignty that are ultimately too a social contract/abstraction. It is conceivable that during times of excessive societal stress and a breakdown of social order that this understanding would be compromised (and has been), but ultimately humans are self-organizing and self-correcting given enough time.
People who are afraid of cloning are usually a) luddites, b) people who think that clones will be mistreated, or c) people who are afraid to break a few eggs to make that omelet. Early cloning will have intrinsic problems that need to be smoothed out, but that will be well nigh impossible without actually allowing those problems to happen.
Nobody I know opposes waste disposal via the sun. For shit sake, you could toss the whole fucking planet into the sun and the star might belch for a short period and then it would be business as usual for next few billion years. The only problem with throwing things at the sun is that it is fucking expensive to get ANYTHING out of earth's gravity well. It barely makes financial sense to put the most technologically advanced and useful shit we can create into space, garbage is at the bottom of the list.
I could go through your whole list, but I have a life to live (and reading to do, fancy that).
And as for laws being passed by PhDs, that's not a bad idea. Honestly I think one side of the typical bicameral coin should be made up of specialists from various fields, but I haven't worked out how that can be accomplished while preventing the implementation from essentially being a legislature of lobbyists (as it would be if the selection were done by industry associations).
I don't care enough about any of that to educate myself.
I think you're forgetting that selections reflect wholes. Right now there are publications that have the journalistic rigor of a neighborhood gossip and they are sold at the check stands of every supermarket in christendom. Conversely there are blogs out there with more depth and research than the New York Times. Hell, Reuters published a photoshopped missile launch as the real thing not long ago. Yeah, that's worth that journalism degree and all that money.
If newspapers disappeared tomorrow they would be replaced by online media outlets both large and small. Some would be low quality, others high, but the quality of the reporting would not be directly related to size, and both groups would have audiences. People still buy the Weekly World News for chrissake, and I know some people actually think that crap is real.
Well, to be fair, adultery used to be illegal. Adultery is the private/hidden/deceptive side of the public/honest polygamy coin. Society has progressed far enough not to meddle with who people sleep with, but apparently tax incentives and insurance benefits are 'too much' yet.
If marriage remains a valid social paradigm (which I doubt it will) I think things like homosexual marriage and polygamy are inevitable. These possibilities should be welcomed, considering that it ultimately allows more people to live openly and more comfortably doing what they probably otherwise were doing anyway in secret.
Indeed. I get sick of hearing about Ayn Rand's faults as though they negate anything good she had to say. Aristotle was a misogynist, that doesn't mean that the Metaphysics or the Nichomachean Ethics deserve the trash heap. It's just a cheap tactic to dismiss the person instead of the arguments.
I don't think you really understand the ethical dimensions of what you're saying. Should you be legally prevented from travelling to North Korea to live? After all, if you were allowed to live in North Korea, your freedoms would be much more limited than if you live here, therefore you shouldn't be allowed to leave. Never mind that this is pure schizophrenia, you must be a prisoner in order to be free not to be a prisoner. Madness.
You keep trying to escape this, but when a person dies, they cease to be a person. A pile of dead flesh is not 'less free'. It is neither free nor unfree. It no longer has a will, it has no perception, nor conception. It's just a pile of dead flesh. It doesn't matter if this was predicated on a decision in their control or events that were beyond their control, only living people have, or lack, freedom.
What you continue to ignore is that you're not accounting for any difference in experience. Just as before, you make the grand assumption that everything in your experience qualifies you to understand everything in somebody else's experience. Because you can't understand or envision a life which a person considers so painful that they would rather end it than live it, you think you're entitled to demand that they live 'for their own good' even if the reality of that 'good' is to them a constant perception of pain and despair (so really, you are demanding that they live so that YOU can have a clear conscience about your abstract opinion of the net freedom of individuals. I am sure that will comfort them in their constant pain and despair).
i am against such choices
At least you're honest. You need to come to terms with the full abstraction: you are (schizophrenically) against choices that limit other choices. See the North Korea example above. Let's extrapolate this further. You shouldn't be able to choose a religion that is exclusive of other religions (which is most of them), because that choice (if followed through absolutely) limits you from choosing other things. You shouldn't be allowed to have any elective surgery that can't be reversed. Sexual reassignment surgeries should be banned, because that makes people irreversibly sterile and therefore they can no longer choose to have children. Abortion should be illegal, as it eliminates all the potential freedoms of the unborn. Monogamous marriage should be banned entirely too, because if you take the vows seriously you can then never choose to marry somebody else, and going back to the original issue some, nobody else can now choose to marry you or the person you married. Damn! Choices are getting limited all over the place.
Some choices exclude other choices. That is the nature of choice itself. There is an old platitude that fits like a glove: You cannot have your cake and eat it too. You would rather dictate to the entire world that that people should not eat their cakes, because that would prevent them from having it, because that's what you would do if it were your cake, and naturally your personal decision scales up to make sense for everybody everywhere at all times. You narrow-minded, conceited fool.
It's not up to you? You don't live in a democracy? You don't vote?
It is incredibly important to establish whether something is wrong before you start banning it, otherwise you'll be on a bullet train to tyranny.
If you are being truthful when you say you're 'not in a position intellectually to say what is or is not best for society' please stop voting immediately if you haven't already. We have enough people who don't know anything about history or anything about ethics changing the course of political events based on knee-jerk ideology at best and their opinion of who is more visually attractive at worst that we don't need people who could otherwise self-select themselves out adding to the problem.
I had a history professor of whom I was quite fond say once that he hated democracy because he knew that his well-informed, well-reasoned choice could be blotted out in a second by the near-random opinion of his cretinous neighbor. The older I get and the more I read the more inclined I am to agree.
You're glossing over quite a bit in what appears to be a desperate bid to escape the previous issue, but I'll bite.
Actually, dead people don't have limited freedom, they're just dead. Only the a living thing can be free or not free. Choosing not to live IS a freedom, after which there is no person to be free or not.
You think you're being more logically coherent? You think that the limiting of freedom is the only way to maximize it? Based of course on your own personal prejudices about limits. Your limits are right and good, others are bad, ipse dixit!
In an abstract sense, yes, in order for a person to choose things, they must first choose to choose (choose to live), but by preventing (or at least criminalizing, for what good it does!) people from choosing not to choose (choosing to die) you are still ultimately dictating the terms of their lives, in fact dictating their very lives. If somebody is unhappy to live, how can you say, who are you to say, that because your life brings you no such suffering that the other must suffer it? That seems to me a tyrannical lack of empathy, but at least that is congruent with your other opinions.
So, let's expand as you say. In the first place, there is no such thing is voluntary slavery any more than there is such a thing as consensual rape. They are mutually exclusive terms. Indentured servitude is a different matter, and is a mutually entered into business agreement, and should be no more restricted than any other.
Addiction is a behavior, and although it may later be exacerbated by a chemical dependency, it always starts with a choice in a sober state. We have a somewhat manic society when it comes to these things. Substances that can be addictive but have either no significant negative effects such as caffeine aren't given a second thought, those which can destroy some people but are manageable for most are sometimes tolerated (such as alcohol) and sometimes not (such as marijuana), and those with the worst effects are used only by people willing to marginalize themselves to the greater society.
I will fight paternalism in society wherever I find it. Rather ironic being a father, but I see my role as a father in raising and independent, responsible, and self-actualized person who doesn't need somebody else, including me (eventually) to tell them what is best for them. If a child still needs parents to make decisions for them when they are adults, those parents are failures. Society itself fails when individuals cannot make their own decisions, because society is only a collection of those individuals, and it will be only a matter of time before the deficiencies of the parts become the deficiencies of the whole.
Theory is important when you are dealing in a realm where behavior is significantly altered by millennia of social constructs. There are many reasons why polygamy is more common as polygyny than polyandry, but the primary is the role of patriarchal power throughout human history. Women historically have been completely powerless politically, disenfranchised in virtually every hierarchy and power structure whether that be government, religion, or social convention. Given that context, it's no surprise that when multiple partner relationships formed it was primarily with several women around one man.
And while there remain physiological and neurochemical differences that contribute to disparities between the sexualities of each gender, development and social acceptance play a huge role in shaping the sexuality of both genders. Females are told both publicly and privately by their parents, extended family, teachers, religious leaders, etc. over and over how sex is a dirty thing that they shouldn't want, whereas males might be told something similar in public, in private males are given the double standard that sexual prowess defines their worth and that only through many sexual 'conquests' can they be considered real manly men. Again, what sort of results do you think these social constructs will produce?
So, theory is important because we should be thinking about more than just the realities of the legacy of a diminishing patriarchal system with its inherited social and ethical inequalities of standards, but what could society be like if those things were fixed and people were freed from them. That's what this is about. You're saying that you know better than others what they should be able to decide to do with their own lives. I say let people be free to make their own choices.
occam's razor: when you hear hoofbeats, its going to be horses, not zebras
Nice try, Dr. House, but what if you're in Africa? Context is important. You gave none, so assumptions should not be made.
this is where you argue that your exotic utopian visions are possible
Two centuries ago there were millions of slaves and no women could vote. Two millennia ago there were millions of slaves and no women could vote. If we simply called that human nature, extrapolated forever, and never tried to evolve society, where would be right now? I think that if you took an ancient Roman man into the present and gave him a run down on current society, he might say 'by what miracle did you manage to do away with slavery and enfranchise women? I couldn't possibly imagine how people would behave like that on their own!'
You speak of mathematical truths that are a) based on a patriarchal assumption of human order and b) complete bullshit because individual men already take multiple women into relationships informally and these theoretical social effects remain unfelt.
you're a college kid with a lot of book reading, but no real life experience with real human beings
You're a quick-to-assume prejudiced asshole who thinks he knows what everybody else thinks before they've thought it. I am, actually, a happily married nonetheless bisexual man with a daughter and a boring full-time job with a soul-killing commute. I never finished college either, and didn't fit in when I was there.
I stand for freedom. Not things I like or don't like that people might possibly do aside from real, provable, direct harms. If x and y want to marry z, z should be able to choose to marry one or the other or both. The freedom of x, y, and z should not be limited on the abstract chance that maybe a, b, or c would rather they didn't marry because that might make them available for their own purposes. People are not commodities that have to be preserved for society's good over their own good as they see it. That's how things like mandatory military service and government assignment of employment get started.
Dismissing something out of hand because of where it is hosted is intellectually dishonest. The author is P.J.O'Rourke, the most quoted living person in The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations. The man has been to more nations and written more books than you likely have brain cells, but of course what could possibly be learned from his experience or perspective? After all, he has a speech hosted on cato.org! That negates everything, because I make all my judgments based on prejudiced associations with groups like a proper bigot.
You're assuming that polygamy exclusively refers to polygyny, which it does not. If polyandry is allowed to the same degree as polygyny, and if socially both are equally present (though whether this is likely even with further social evolution is unknown), then there is the potential that the x women per man may be balanced out by y men per woman.
You also assume that a romantic polygamous relationship is impossible based on your own prejudice, deciding that you know the minds of everybody and that you know what's best for their lives, precluding any independent choices they may want to make.
Never mind further that we're only talking about legal status here. Wealthy men already have effective harems, but those women who choose to be in those relationships have none of the legal protections of marriage. Legalizing polygamy would protect anybody formally entering into a multi-partner relationship in a way that is currently impossible. So, in fact, this would help and protect people.
That equilibrium is not perfect. The difference does stress and wear the structure over decades, centuries, millennia, especially in temperate zones where temperature can vary more than 100 degrees a year. Like I say, repeat that for 2000 years and see what things look like. You're right, the difference is very low, but when you're talking about really large structures over really long periods, ANY difference is significant. In that scenario, solid concrete stands a better chance, so long as it's not overloaded.
It's a moot point, because nobody builds anything to last for millennia. The Romans' work has done so by coincidence, but the useful life of buildings and other structures is measured primarily in decades, occasionally in centuries, but never in millennia. So rebar it is.
I mind redistribution in any direction. I don't want my tax dollars going to bankers OR beggars. Tell me, how much does somebody have to possess before taking it under the implied force of arms ceases to be theft? At what magic number does theft become 'economic justice'? It's always higher than whatever the espouser makes, coincidentally. As Cullen Hightower once said:
There's always somebody who is paid too much, and taxed too little - and it's always somebody else.
There is a reason that intrinsic qualities are likened to extrinsic qualities. They are inexorably linked. We pay the talented more because they deliver more than others even possibly could. If the talented aren't motivated to deliver that talent to the rest of society productively, society loses.
Personally, I'm an atheist and I think the Bible and Christianity as a whole is bullshit on stick, but the Tenth Commandment is ethically sound: don't bitch about what the other guy has, work until you can get your own, you lazy shitbag. (If I'm going to be called a troll, might as well act the part.)
Slashdot Mirror
If your wireless is open and you don't want it to be, you're not operating your equipment 'properly' (from your own perspective) and hoping that you can go after anybody who uses the open system by defending your own ignorance. Not a sound strategy. A deliberately open system is not distinguishable from an accidentally open system unless the network is called "PLEASE USE ME".
I dealt with this in a very long post here. Granted, this is based on a 'using a neighbor's wireless' scenario, but I think it still contains relevant points.
I agree. Google looks really a lot worse in my eyes not because they picked up some packets, but because they lied about their intent to pick up some packets. It's very Clintonesque. I could care less if Billy C. got some action from an intern, but it was the lying about it that made it heinous.
If you're caught, just admit it. Looking bad in the eyes of some dumb luddites is not worse than looking like a sleazy liar to absolutely everybody.
Each person is responsible for they way that they use, configure, or fail to maintain equipment that is in there domain and control. Ignorance is no excuse.
If I take a backhoe and cut a water/sewer/phone/fiber line in my yard, the utility company is not going to say 'oh, that's ok, you just didn't know how to use the equipment...' Fuck no, they are going to hold me liable, and any court challenge will go their way.
In addition to liability for actions there is also liability for the failure to act. If I rent a car for a long period of time and fail to perform basic maintenance like oil changes to the point where the engine is damaged, guess who's on the hook?
Ignorance does not excuse liability. If I operate a machine that I don't know how to use, I don't get a free pass if things don't turn out the way I want.
Machines under somebody's domain and control can be considered their agents. If I set up an FTP server and it accepts ftp as the login and ftp as the password, then I would have a hard time prosecuting anybody for unauthorized access when it is common knowledge to many who use FTP that such a login is considered a publicly accessible FTP server.
I am not a lawyer, nor is the above legal advice.
I'm sorry if real science just isn't all that exciting.
Mmmmm bad caps are hilarious. It warmed my heart to see so many Intel boards affected by that during the peak of it. Demonstrated once and for all that Intel was crap too on quality control regardless of their big name.
Your anecdote falls a little flat with me. At one point I sold motherboards. ASRocks came back in droves to be RMA'ed, MSIs largely didn't. I have built many systems on MSI boards, and none ever failed. Of course even good manufacturers produce some bad boards and even bad manufacturers produce some good boards, so congratulations, you won the lottery!
If you have a good UPS as you say, you should be experiencing very consistent power output regardless of what is happening on the line in. I notice you don't mention your PSU, which is a very important half of the equation for turning 'dirty' power to 'clean' for the components. Even supposedly high-end PSUs can be introducing voltage differences that ultimately wear down the components they power.
Further, ambient temperature shouldn't be any issue to the CPU if your HSF is good enough. I don't let my CPU get much more than 20-30 degrees (F) over ambient (and yes, it takes an expensive HSF to do this, my current is a Titan Amanda (rebranded MacsTek MA-7130-A)), and anything under 120-130 (F) should be able to last for years.
Quality is a watchword that should be applied not just to some components, but every component. If your UPS isn't doing its job and providing dirty power and not holding output steady in browns and failures, dump that zero and get yourself a hero or you have only yourself to blame. If the PSU can't perform to spec, dump that too. Every component requires research for every product generation. Sometimes otherwise good manufacturers don't hit the window, like Thermalright who I regularly prefer for heatsinks had some fairly weak offerings between the SLK-900U and the TRUE Copper/IFX-14, which is why I went with the MA-7130-A. (Though if I were buying an HSF right now, I'd probably go with the Noctua NH-D14.)
I respect your experience, really, I wish I had the opportunity to build in the 80s, but it doesn't change the fact that you must be diligent. Research every component, every generation, every time, and get the best or be sorry.
I have built as many systems and have had no GPU failures and only one CPU failure (and that was because it was a first generation socket 462 and the brick and mortar I was buying the parts from didn't have any HSFs for 462... he said 'oh, just use this really beefy socket 7 HSF, that will be enough!' Pff, well, it wasn't. At least the bastard replaced the chip when it died, at which time he did have 462 HSFs).
I'm willing to bet that the GP buys cheap crap like ASRock and generic PSUs that couldn't perform at a fraction of their claimed specs and then wonders why his shit dies all the time. Meanwhile I have basically every CPU, GPU, and motherboard I've ever built with over more than a decade all in working order.
MSI + Enermax + AMD + Thermalright = FTW4ever.
I support the death penalty in short because it is the only way for an equivalent justice to be achieved in the case of murder. No amount of time or money or labor can be exacted from a murderer that is worth a human life, therefore he must forfeit his life itself.
I support animal testing in short because higher forms of life have always, and will always, advance themselves at the cost of the consumption (in whatever form, usually but not exclusively as food) of lower forms of life. Animals don't care about hurting each other. When insects lay their eggs in the bodies of other insects, they are not concerned with the pain it causes the hosts of their parasitic offspring. Humans are animals too, and we didn't survive to advance this far by kisses and hugs.
Human testing requires consent, purely as type of social contract, an extension of the understanding of personal rights and sovereignty that are ultimately too a social contract/abstraction. It is conceivable that during times of excessive societal stress and a breakdown of social order that this understanding would be compromised (and has been), but ultimately humans are self-organizing and self-correcting given enough time.
People who are afraid of cloning are usually a) luddites, b) people who think that clones will be mistreated, or c) people who are afraid to break a few eggs to make that omelet. Early cloning will have intrinsic problems that need to be smoothed out, but that will be well nigh impossible without actually allowing those problems to happen.
Nobody I know opposes waste disposal via the sun. For shit sake, you could toss the whole fucking planet into the sun and the star might belch for a short period and then it would be business as usual for next few billion years. The only problem with throwing things at the sun is that it is fucking expensive to get ANYTHING out of earth's gravity well. It barely makes financial sense to put the most technologically advanced and useful shit we can create into space, garbage is at the bottom of the list.
I could go through your whole list, but I have a life to live (and reading to do, fancy that). And as for laws being passed by PhDs, that's not a bad idea. Honestly I think one side of the typical bicameral coin should be made up of specialists from various fields, but I haven't worked out how that can be accomplished while preventing the implementation from essentially being a legislature of lobbyists (as it would be if the selection were done by industry associations).
I don't care enough about any of that to educate myself.
Then stop voting. Like I said.
The kids in the second row of that picture look like they have some more work to do in order to 'man up'.
NOW SOUND OFF LIKE YOU'VE GOT A PAIR!!!
I think you're forgetting that selections reflect wholes. Right now there are publications that have the journalistic rigor of a neighborhood gossip and they are sold at the check stands of every supermarket in christendom. Conversely there are blogs out there with more depth and research than the New York Times. Hell, Reuters published a photoshopped missile launch as the real thing not long ago. Yeah, that's worth that journalism degree and all that money.
If newspapers disappeared tomorrow they would be replaced by online media outlets both large and small. Some would be low quality, others high, but the quality of the reporting would not be directly related to size, and both groups would have audiences. People still buy the Weekly World News for chrissake, and I know some people actually think that crap is real.
Well, to be fair, adultery used to be illegal. Adultery is the private/hidden/deceptive side of the public/honest polygamy coin. Society has progressed far enough not to meddle with who people sleep with, but apparently tax incentives and insurance benefits are 'too much' yet.
If marriage remains a valid social paradigm (which I doubt it will) I think things like homosexual marriage and polygamy are inevitable. These possibilities should be welcomed, considering that it ultimately allows more people to live openly and more comfortably doing what they probably otherwise were doing anyway in secret.
Indeed. I get sick of hearing about Ayn Rand's faults as though they negate anything good she had to say. Aristotle was a misogynist, that doesn't mean that the Metaphysics or the Nichomachean Ethics deserve the trash heap. It's just a cheap tactic to dismiss the person instead of the arguments.
It actually doesn't have to.
You keep trying to escape this, but when a person dies, they cease to be a person. A pile of dead flesh is not 'less free'. It is neither free nor unfree. It no longer has a will, it has no perception, nor conception. It's just a pile of dead flesh. It doesn't matter if this was predicated on a decision in their control or events that were beyond their control, only living people have, or lack, freedom.
What you continue to ignore is that you're not accounting for any difference in experience. Just as before, you make the grand assumption that everything in your experience qualifies you to understand everything in somebody else's experience. Because you can't understand or envision a life which a person considers so painful that they would rather end it than live it, you think you're entitled to demand that they live 'for their own good' even if the reality of that 'good' is to them a constant perception of pain and despair (so really, you are demanding that they live so that YOU can have a clear conscience about your abstract opinion of the net freedom of individuals. I am sure that will comfort them in their constant pain and despair).
i am against such choices
At least you're honest. You need to come to terms with the full abstraction: you are (schizophrenically) against choices that limit other choices. See the North Korea example above. Let's extrapolate this further. You shouldn't be able to choose a religion that is exclusive of other religions (which is most of them), because that choice (if followed through absolutely) limits you from choosing other things. You shouldn't be allowed to have any elective surgery that can't be reversed. Sexual reassignment surgeries should be banned, because that makes people irreversibly sterile and therefore they can no longer choose to have children. Abortion should be illegal, as it eliminates all the potential freedoms of the unborn. Monogamous marriage should be banned entirely too, because if you take the vows seriously you can then never choose to marry somebody else, and going back to the original issue some, nobody else can now choose to marry you or the person you married. Damn! Choices are getting limited all over the place.
Some choices exclude other choices. That is the nature of choice itself. There is an old platitude that fits like a glove: You cannot have your cake and eat it too. You would rather dictate to the entire world that that people should not eat their cakes, because that would prevent them from having it, because that's what you would do if it were your cake, and naturally your personal decision scales up to make sense for everybody everywhere at all times. You narrow-minded, conceited fool.
It's not up to you? You don't live in a democracy? You don't vote?
It is incredibly important to establish whether something is wrong before you start banning it, otherwise you'll be on a bullet train to tyranny.
If you are being truthful when you say you're 'not in a position intellectually to say what is or is not best for society' please stop voting immediately if you haven't already. We have enough people who don't know anything about history or anything about ethics changing the course of political events based on knee-jerk ideology at best and their opinion of who is more visually attractive at worst that we don't need people who could otherwise self-select themselves out adding to the problem.
I had a history professor of whom I was quite fond say once that he hated democracy because he knew that his well-informed, well-reasoned choice could be blotted out in a second by the near-random opinion of his cretinous neighbor. The older I get and the more I read the more inclined I am to agree.
You're glossing over quite a bit in what appears to be a desperate bid to escape the previous issue, but I'll bite.
Actually, dead people don't have limited freedom, they're just dead. Only the a living thing can be free or not free. Choosing not to live IS a freedom, after which there is no person to be free or not.
You think you're being more logically coherent? You think that the limiting of freedom is the only way to maximize it? Based of course on your own personal prejudices about limits. Your limits are right and good, others are bad, ipse dixit!
In an abstract sense, yes, in order for a person to choose things, they must first choose to choose (choose to live), but by preventing (or at least criminalizing, for what good it does!) people from choosing not to choose (choosing to die) you are still ultimately dictating the terms of their lives, in fact dictating their very lives. If somebody is unhappy to live, how can you say, who are you to say, that because your life brings you no such suffering that the other must suffer it? That seems to me a tyrannical lack of empathy, but at least that is congruent with your other opinions.
So, let's expand as you say. In the first place, there is no such thing is voluntary slavery any more than there is such a thing as consensual rape. They are mutually exclusive terms. Indentured servitude is a different matter, and is a mutually entered into business agreement, and should be no more restricted than any other.
Addiction is a behavior, and although it may later be exacerbated by a chemical dependency, it always starts with a choice in a sober state. We have a somewhat manic society when it comes to these things. Substances that can be addictive but have either no significant negative effects such as caffeine aren't given a second thought, those which can destroy some people but are manageable for most are sometimes tolerated (such as alcohol) and sometimes not (such as marijuana), and those with the worst effects are used only by people willing to marginalize themselves to the greater society.
I will fight paternalism in society wherever I find it. Rather ironic being a father, but I see my role as a father in raising and independent, responsible, and self-actualized person who doesn't need somebody else, including me (eventually) to tell them what is best for them. If a child still needs parents to make decisions for them when they are adults, those parents are failures. Society itself fails when individuals cannot make their own decisions, because society is only a collection of those individuals, and it will be only a matter of time before the deficiencies of the parts become the deficiencies of the whole.
So you think using the metabolism of animals to grow human organs for desperate, mortally ill transplant candidates is 'bad'?
And while there remain physiological and neurochemical differences that contribute to disparities between the sexualities of each gender, development and social acceptance play a huge role in shaping the sexuality of both genders. Females are told both publicly and privately by their parents, extended family, teachers, religious leaders, etc. over and over how sex is a dirty thing that they shouldn't want, whereas males might be told something similar in public, in private males are given the double standard that sexual prowess defines their worth and that only through many sexual 'conquests' can they be considered real manly men. Again, what sort of results do you think these social constructs will produce?
So, theory is important because we should be thinking about more than just the realities of the legacy of a diminishing patriarchal system with its inherited social and ethical inequalities of standards, but what could society be like if those things were fixed and people were freed from them. That's what this is about. You're saying that you know better than others what they should be able to decide to do with their own lives. I say let people be free to make their own choices.
occam's razor: when you hear hoofbeats, its going to be horses, not zebras
Nice try, Dr. House, but what if you're in Africa? Context is important. You gave none, so assumptions should not be made.
this is where you argue that your exotic utopian visions are possible
Two centuries ago there were millions of slaves and no women could vote. Two millennia ago there were millions of slaves and no women could vote. If we simply called that human nature, extrapolated forever, and never tried to evolve society, where would be right now? I think that if you took an ancient Roman man into the present and gave him a run down on current society, he might say 'by what miracle did you manage to do away with slavery and enfranchise women? I couldn't possibly imagine how people would behave like that on their own!'
You speak of mathematical truths that are a) based on a patriarchal assumption of human order and b) complete bullshit because individual men already take multiple women into relationships informally and these theoretical social effects remain unfelt.
you're a college kid with a lot of book reading, but no real life experience with real human beings
You're a quick-to-assume prejudiced asshole who thinks he knows what everybody else thinks before they've thought it. I am, actually, a happily married nonetheless bisexual man with a daughter and a boring full-time job with a soul-killing commute. I never finished college either, and didn't fit in when I was there.
I stand for freedom. Not things I like or don't like that people might possibly do aside from real, provable, direct harms. If x and y want to marry z, z should be able to choose to marry one or the other or both. The freedom of x, y, and z should not be limited on the abstract chance that maybe a, b, or c would rather they didn't marry because that might make them available for their own purposes. People are not commodities that have to be preserved for society's good over their own good as they see it. That's how things like mandatory military service and government assignment of employment get started.
Dismissing something out of hand because of where it is hosted is intellectually dishonest. The author is P.J.O'Rourke, the most quoted living person in The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations. The man has been to more nations and written more books than you likely have brain cells, but of course what could possibly be learned from his experience or perspective? After all, he has a speech hosted on cato.org! That negates everything, because I make all my judgments based on prejudiced associations with groups like a proper bigot.
You're assuming that polygamy exclusively refers to polygyny, which it does not. If polyandry is allowed to the same degree as polygyny, and if socially both are equally present (though whether this is likely even with further social evolution is unknown), then there is the potential that the x women per man may be balanced out by y men per woman.
You also assume that a romantic polygamous relationship is impossible based on your own prejudice, deciding that you know the minds of everybody and that you know what's best for their lives, precluding any independent choices they may want to make.
Never mind further that we're only talking about legal status here. Wealthy men already have effective harems, but those women who choose to be in those relationships have none of the legal protections of marriage. Legalizing polygamy would protect anybody formally entering into a multi-partner relationship in a way that is currently impossible. So, in fact, this would help and protect people.
Sounds like something a terrorist pedophile would say...
Sarcasm aside, this is already happening in many Western nations. Just look at the censorship in Australia.
That equilibrium is not perfect. The difference does stress and wear the structure over decades, centuries, millennia, especially in temperate zones where temperature can vary more than 100 degrees a year. Like I say, repeat that for 2000 years and see what things look like. You're right, the difference is very low, but when you're talking about really large structures over really long periods, ANY difference is significant. In that scenario, solid concrete stands a better chance, so long as it's not overloaded.
It's a moot point, because nobody builds anything to last for millennia. The Romans' work has done so by coincidence, but the useful life of buildings and other structures is measured primarily in decades, occasionally in centuries, but never in millennia. So rebar it is.
There's always somebody who is paid too much, and taxed too little - and it's always somebody else.
There is a reason that intrinsic qualities are likened to extrinsic qualities. They are inexorably linked. We pay the talented more because they deliver more than others even possibly could. If the talented aren't motivated to deliver that talent to the rest of society productively, society loses.
Personally, I'm an atheist and I think the Bible and Christianity as a whole is bullshit on stick, but the Tenth Commandment is ethically sound: don't bitch about what the other guy has, work until you can get your own, you lazy shitbag. (If I'm going to be called a troll, might as well act the part.)
Works for me. When I see something with "Caffeine Free!" plastered all over it I dump that zero and get myself an xx milligram hero.