On the other hand, it may not. I suspect there are other factors involved.
For one thing, not all people are made happier and healthier by increasing their sexual activity or their number of sexual partners. It's my contention that the healthy and fulfilling role of sexual intercourse is not well understood, nor well communicated, and that the failure of the abstinence-only program may be due in large part to its being presented in a vacuum.
Also, I'm not sure that the adolescent bias in favor of the more permissive, sexually promiscuous teaching, and the adolescent tendency to reject the more restrictive, contrary-to-passing-hormonal-urges teaching, is in itself indicative.
Mind you, I'm not advocating the repression of human sexuality, but rather a more thoughtful and self-controlled approach to it.
Animals act without thinking on their various urges. Humans do not, or should not, anyway.
Human sexual intimacy isn't just "animal sex with condoms", and pitching it that way won't solve all our problems.
I mean, how much of our current problems with sexual intercourse in both America and Africa can be attributed directly to a culture of sexual promiscuity? And how much of those problems can really be solved by moving to "sexual promiscuity with a condom on top"?
Millions of people, in all times and places, have lived happy, healthy, satisfying, and fulfilling lives, all the while practicing the disciplines of chastity and monogamy.
Now you pooh-pooh those disciplines, and offer a rubber sheath as a superior solution. It'll be interesting to see how the Condom Generation turns out, and if their understanding of human sexuality ends up building a better tomorrow than our parents' did.
Hey, abstinence is a guaranteed prophylactic against all kinds of horrible diseases, not to mention unwanted pregnancies and the whole cascade of social and personal ills that brings.
Are you saying that the people of Africa lack the insight to see the wisdom of such a course, and the self-control to adopt it?
Given how fragile the AIDS virus is, and how difficult it is to transmit, I'd have thought that the easiest and cheapest way to prevent the spread of AIDS in Africa would be for African governments to convince their citizens to stop behaving like asshats.
But hey, why bother trying to educate and empower your people, when you can simply blame it all on big pharma while you sit back and wait for^H^H^Hdemand handouts from the world government?
I mean, I thought you would say something like "last year, when Bush transported several million Americans to death camps in Alaska, I was powerfully reminded of the USSR under Stalin".
Or maybe, "when Bush closed our borders in 2002, to prevent any word about the horrors he was perpetrating on America from reaching the outside world, I realized this was just like when the Soviet leadership did the exact same thing."
You know, something like that. Something compelling. Something basd in reality.
Somehow, the fact that the Executive Branch is wielding the traditionally and legally broader wartime powers that are his responsibility to wield, and that his political opponents are stirring up controversy about it, and that the whole thing is being debated in public, at all levels, strikes me as clear evidence that you are completely wrong in your assessment.
If this country were in the grip of a dictatorship even remotely like the USSR, we wouldn't even be having this conversation, because you'd be dying a slow and horrible death in the Siberian Gulags, and there would be no record of your existence.
The fact that you are able to communicate your concerns freely, in wide range of public and private forums, strongly suggests that your world view is severely mistaken.
If the best you can do to support your claims is to quote one editorial, without evidence, supporting arguments, or even proper attribution, then I must conclude that you are fundamentally unserious about these issues.
The new USA is much like the stories I heard about the USSR as I was growing up.
Really? Did you have any specific stories in mind? The "new" USA strikes me as being radically different from the stories I heard about the USSR as I was growing up.
And yet driving a car and flying an airplane are both about as easy as they can be, given the current technological limitations.
I'm not claiming that an easy, intuitive name for your technology will fully meet the ease-of-use and intuitive requirements. Rather, I'm saying that naming your technology is part of the process of making it easy to use.
You still seem to be hung up on this idea that all the other aspects of the technology are important, except for the name. In fact, the ideal would be that your technology has an obvious, intuitive name, and is fully capable of being intuitively useful or else itself teaching the user how to use it properly.
This seems to be a chronic deficiency of certain software projects: most design decisions seem to favor what is interesting or amusing to software developers, while few design decisions seem to favor what is easy or useful to end-users.
Those are not technical issues; those psychological, trademark/legal, and marketing issues.
This is an excellent example of the real problem: Even though the purpose of all technology is to be used easily and intuitively by human beings, some technologists still believe that the human component is not technically relevant.
I mean, psychological, trademark/legal, and marketing issues are all technical issues, and the insistence of technologists in ignoring them is what has brought us to the current condition: technology that actively hates to be seen or touched by the humans who are its purported beneficiaries.
Doesn't European industry have the same access to the U.S. GPS system that American industry does?
And wouldn't American industry have the same access to the Galileo system as European industry?
If the first is true, than Galileo will have no impact on the current competition situation, unless the second is untrue, in which case it would be Europeans that is trying to get an exclusive competitive advantage, not the Americans. If the second is also true, then Galileo ends up having zero net effect on the current competition situation.
The USSA attacks other countries for profit and out of fear. If they attacked Europe then Europe will need its own system. Period.
Dude, if the "USSA", attacks Europe, then Europe is going to need a lot more than their own GPS system.
They'll need a world-class army, for one thing. Which raises an interesting point: a world-class army has many different methods of getting accurate-enough positioning data. Thus, if Europe had a world-class army, their own GPS system would be a useful, but not mandatory, addition to their force. Conversely, not having a world-class army, their own GPS system will do Europe little good in a violent conflict with the "USSA".
Also, was that extra "S" deliberate, or accidental? If deliberate, what does it mean? United Soviet States of America? Unilateral Super Seiyan Asshats? Underpants Still Sag Alarmingly? If accidental, please disregard and carry on.
I bet it must be nice to be the first person to understand this.
Please contact the medical research community immediately. Their ethical smarty men will greatly appreciate your revolutionary insights. It's probably not too late to apply those insights to this research!
Right, because making police work harder, and signing yourself up for bullshit jail time is much easier than taking personal responsibility to clean up your own damn neighborhood so that people don't automatically assume that everybody who lives there is a low-life criminal asshat.
I think simply removing the barriers to freedom of speech would improve things.
Fair enough. I guess the heart of our disagreement is that I think that removing barriers to free action (of any kind) improves things up to a point, and that beyond that point it actually becomes counter-productive.
I've also heard rumors that the Scandinavian countries (Sweden, at least) have much stricter hate speech laws than the U.S. does.
Heh. I made up that definition of fraud on the spur of the moment. As you've just ably demonstrated, it's not really a workable definition.
Now that you've got me thinking about it, I'd say that legal fraud has a lot to do with legal theft. Thus, libel, because it leads to material loss, tends to be less legal than adultery.
Plus, a lot of what makes a community function is an ability to recognize that there are sizeable grey areas, and that most questions of law and custom end up getting decided on a case-by-case basis, through debate on where exactly to draw the line in each case, rather than by applying a single cookie-cutter approach to all cases.
So I'm comfortable saying that my speech is free, even though there are some things I'm not free to say, in the same way that I'm comfortable saying I have freedom of movement even though there's some places I cannot go, and that I have freedom of action even though there's some things I cannot do.
Because, by and large, I am more free--better informed, wealthier, healthier, less restricted by government--than most people alive today, and much more free than most people who have ever lived prior to today.
Another reason why I'm comfortable saying that my speech is free is not because I believe it's absolutely free in the sense of Totally Free Speech, but because it is relatively quite free indeed. I'm hard-pressed to think of a political or social regime, in effect in the world today, that grants its citizens more freedom of speech than mine does. I suspect that those few that do have other glaring flaws that make them totally undesireable overall.
But I could be wrong about that. Do you have in mind any social or political systems that offer more freedom of speech, and are generally robust in other crucial areas, such that you would be proud to be a citizen under that regime instead of this one?
I think that speech is a powerful and important tool that can have very real, very tangible effects. Otherwise, why would we be so eager to preserve its freedom, and others so eager to restrict it?
And ultimately, things of power require some amount of regulation. Speech doesn't usually come in for very much regulation at all, unlike some other things of (more tangible) power. But where it has the capacity to bring tangible, quantifiable harm to people, it is regulated.
So much for libel, as far as I'm concerned. Hate speech? Not so much...
I think free speech is just like freedom of movement.
As the saying goes "your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins".
Likewise, your freedom to say what you like ends where your lies harm me and mine.
I'm not so much proud of "free speech" per se; it's an inalienable right, after all, not something I can take credit for. Rather, I'm proud of being involved in a political system that seeks to strike a reasonable balance between individual freedom and individual freedom to harm each other.
But tell us, what political system active in the world today allows for greater freedom of speech and expression, and also performs as well or better, in general, than the American one, in your opinion?
RIP freedom of speech (9/17/1787 - 9/11/2001). You will be sadly missed.
What on earth does this libel case have to do with 9/11?
Also, why pick that date?
Libel has been illegal for hundreds (if not thousands) of years, and lawsuits alleging libel have been brought many times before 2001.
Not to mention the fact that the TV networks have been self-censored and government-censored for decades (when was the last time a TV network showed full-frontal nudity during prime time; and when was the last time they could do so without being severely punished by the government?), and that private entities have always had the right to restrict speech in their venues. Even by your own bizarre Space Logic, "free speech" died some time long before the turn of the milennium
Does any part of your world view make sense or track with reality?
Last time I checked, it was the media's responsibility to report the news, and your responsibility to question government policies. Are you so lazy as to want the reporters to do your job for you? Are you so foolish as to think that the media can be trusted to discharge your responsibilities better than you can yourself?
Plus, how can a news source be simultaneously objective and questioning policy?
Plus, what makes you think that the BBC is immune from whatever market forces, black-hearted corruption, or government pressure you believe plagues CNN?
Plus, it's not like the current government administration (whether in the U.S. or in Great Britain) is the only faction with a vested interest in manipulating the media. Have you considered the possibility that the BBC is just as biased as CNN, only you don't notice because it's your own faction controlling the BBC?
We can't really get into your proof of these allegations (that the U.S. government is pressuring the U.S. media to run biased coverage) since, presumably, you'd simply point out that now that they control the media, they're hiding the proof, too!
So if I offered you a hundred million dollars to do the same thing, would that be coercion?
If I offered to pay all your bills, secure your retirement, support your family and provide for your daily needs (including entertainment), in exchange for you being injected with HIV-positive blood, would that be coercion?
I mean, it's a more generous offer than what these poor people are getting ($100 is a lot of money to a poor Indian, but it's not going to set him up for life). By your logic, that means I'm forcing you to accept the injection.
By your logic, every single bad choice you have made in life wasn't because you lacked the wisdom or the self control to make the good choice, but because society forced you to make the bad choice anyway.
Or is it your belief that other people can be stupid sheep, but never you?
Everything disgusting and offensive in this topic is pretty much confined to the drug company's actions.
Not even that, actually. From TFA, the drug company's hypothetical actions. Seriously. Go back and re-read that Wired piece. These actions aren't even alleged.
Slashdot Mirror
It might, in fact, change my mind.
On the other hand, it may not. I suspect there are other factors involved.
For one thing, not all people are made happier and healthier by increasing their sexual activity or their number of sexual partners. It's my contention that the healthy and fulfilling role of sexual intercourse is not well understood, nor well communicated, and that the failure of the abstinence-only program may be due in large part to its being presented in a vacuum.
Also, I'm not sure that the adolescent bias in favor of the more permissive, sexually promiscuous teaching, and the adolescent tendency to reject the more restrictive, contrary-to-passing-hormonal-urges teaching, is in itself indicative.
Mind you, I'm not advocating the repression of human sexuality, but rather a more thoughtful and self-controlled approach to it.
Animals act without thinking on their various urges. Humans do not, or should not, anyway.
Human sexual intimacy isn't just "animal sex with condoms", and pitching it that way won't solve all our problems.
I mean, how much of our current problems with sexual intercourse in both America and Africa can be attributed directly to a culture of sexual promiscuity? And how much of those problems can really be solved by moving to "sexual promiscuity with a condom on top"?
Millions of people, in all times and places, have lived happy, healthy, satisfying, and fulfilling lives, all the while practicing the disciplines of chastity and monogamy.
Now you pooh-pooh those disciplines, and offer a rubber sheath as a superior solution. It'll be interesting to see how the Condom Generation turns out, and if their understanding of human sexuality ends up building a better tomorrow than our parents' did.
Also, so what if the U.S. isn't paying for it?
Are you seriously arguing that the leaders of Africa cannot or should not do anything, unless the U.S. government foots the bill?
Hey, abstinence is a guaranteed prophylactic against all kinds of horrible diseases, not to mention unwanted pregnancies and the whole cascade of social and personal ills that brings.
Are you saying that the people of Africa lack the insight to see the wisdom of such a course, and the self-control to adopt it?
Given how fragile the AIDS virus is, and how difficult it is to transmit, I'd have thought that the easiest and cheapest way to prevent the spread of AIDS in Africa would be for African governments to convince their citizens to stop behaving like asshats.
But hey, why bother trying to educate and empower your people, when you can simply blame it all on big pharma while you sit back and wait for^H^H^Hdemand handouts from the world government?
I mean, I thought you would say something like "last year, when Bush transported several million Americans to death camps in Alaska, I was powerfully reminded of the USSR under Stalin".
Or maybe, "when Bush closed our borders in 2002, to prevent any word about the horrors he was perpetrating on America from reaching the outside world, I realized this was just like when the Soviet leadership did the exact same thing."
You know, something like that. Something compelling. Something basd in reality.
Somehow, the fact that the Executive Branch is wielding the traditionally and legally broader wartime powers that are his responsibility to wield, and that his political opponents are stirring up controversy about it, and that the whole thing is being debated in public, at all levels, strikes me as clear evidence that you are completely wrong in your assessment.
If this country were in the grip of a dictatorship even remotely like the USSR, we wouldn't even be having this conversation, because you'd be dying a slow and horrible death in the Siberian Gulags, and there would be no record of your existence.
The fact that you are able to communicate your concerns freely, in wide range of public and private forums, strongly suggests that your world view is severely mistaken.
If the best you can do to support your claims is to quote one editorial, without evidence, supporting arguments, or even proper attribution, then I must conclude that you are fundamentally unserious about these issues.
The new USA is much like the stories I heard about the USSR as I was growing up.
Really? Did you have any specific stories in mind? The "new" USA strikes me as being radically different from the stories I heard about the USSR as I was growing up.
And yet driving a car and flying an airplane are both about as easy as they can be, given the current technological limitations.
I'm not claiming that an easy, intuitive name for your technology will fully meet the ease-of-use and intuitive requirements. Rather, I'm saying that naming your technology is part of the process of making it easy to use.
You still seem to be hung up on this idea that all the other aspects of the technology are important, except for the name. In fact, the ideal would be that your technology has an obvious, intuitive name, and is fully capable of being intuitively useful or else itself teaching the user how to use it properly.
This seems to be a chronic deficiency of certain software projects: most design decisions seem to favor what is interesting or amusing to software developers, while few design decisions seem to favor what is easy or useful to end-users.
Those are not technical issues; those psychological, trademark/legal, and marketing issues.
This is an excellent example of the real problem: Even though the purpose of all technology is to be used easily and intuitively by human beings, some technologists still believe that the human component is not technically relevant.
I mean, psychological, trademark/legal, and marketing issues are all technical issues, and the insistence of technologists in ignoring them is what has brought us to the current condition: technology that actively hates to be seen or touched by the humans who are its purported beneficiaries.
Doesn't European industry have the same access to the U.S. GPS system that American industry does?
And wouldn't American industry have the same access to the Galileo system as European industry?
If the first is true, than Galileo will have no impact on the current competition situation, unless the second is untrue, in which case it would be Europeans that is trying to get an exclusive competitive advantage, not the Americans. If the second is also true, then Galileo ends up having zero net effect on the current competition situation.
The USSA attacks other countries for profit and out of fear. If they attacked Europe then Europe will need its own system. Period.
Dude, if the "USSA", attacks Europe, then Europe is going to need a lot more than their own GPS system.
They'll need a world-class army, for one thing. Which raises an interesting point: a world-class army has many different methods of getting accurate-enough positioning data. Thus, if Europe had a world-class army, their own GPS system would be a useful, but not mandatory, addition to their force. Conversely, not having a world-class army, their own GPS system will do Europe little good in a violent conflict with the "USSA".
Also, was that extra "S" deliberate, or accidental? If deliberate, what does it mean? United Soviet States of America? Unilateral Super Seiyan Asshats? Underpants Still Sag Alarmingly? If accidental, please disregard and carry on.
Wow.
I bet it must be nice to be the first person to understand this.
Please contact the medical research community immediately. Their ethical smarty men will greatly appreciate your revolutionary insights. It's probably not too late to apply those insights to this research!
Right, because making police work harder, and signing yourself up for bullshit jail time is much easier than taking personal responsibility to clean up your own damn neighborhood so that people don't automatically assume that everybody who lives there is a low-life criminal asshat.
I think simply removing the barriers to freedom of speech would improve things.
Fair enough. I guess the heart of our disagreement is that I think that removing barriers to free action (of any kind) improves things up to a point, and that beyond that point it actually becomes counter-productive.
I've also heard rumors that the Scandinavian countries (Sweden, at least) have much stricter hate speech laws than the U.S. does.
Heh. I made up that definition of fraud on the spur of the moment. As you've just ably demonstrated, it's not really a workable definition.
Now that you've got me thinking about it, I'd say that legal fraud has a lot to do with legal theft. Thus, libel, because it leads to material loss, tends to be less legal than adultery.
Plus, a lot of what makes a community function is an ability to recognize that there are sizeable grey areas, and that most questions of law and custom end up getting decided on a case-by-case basis, through debate on where exactly to draw the line in each case, rather than by applying a single cookie-cutter approach to all cases.
So I'm comfortable saying that my speech is free, even though there are some things I'm not free to say, in the same way that I'm comfortable saying I have freedom of movement even though there's some places I cannot go, and that I have freedom of action even though there's some things I cannot do.
Because, by and large, I am more free--better informed, wealthier, healthier, less restricted by government--than most people alive today, and much more free than most people who have ever lived prior to today.
Another reason why I'm comfortable saying that my speech is free is not because I believe it's absolutely free in the sense of Totally Free Speech, but because it is relatively quite free indeed. I'm hard-pressed to think of a political or social regime, in effect in the world today, that grants its citizens more freedom of speech than mine does. I suspect that those few that do have other glaring flaws that make them totally undesireable overall.
But I could be wrong about that. Do you have in mind any social or political systems that offer more freedom of speech, and are generally robust in other crucial areas, such that you would be proud to be a citizen under that regime instead of this one?
Libel is a kind of fraud: exploiting trust to mislead people to their detriment or to the detriment of a third party.
Are you saying you'd deregulate all forms of lying for profit?
Haw!
I can already tell which one of us is having more fun with Slashdot today, and which of us is a sad, mopy person.
Chump.
I think that speech is a powerful and important tool that can have very real, very tangible effects. Otherwise, why would we be so eager to preserve its freedom, and others so eager to restrict it?
And ultimately, things of power require some amount of regulation. Speech doesn't usually come in for very much regulation at all, unlike some other things of (more tangible) power. But where it has the capacity to bring tangible, quantifiable harm to people, it is regulated.
So much for libel, as far as I'm concerned. Hate speech? Not so much...
I think free speech is just like freedom of movement.
As the saying goes "your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins".
Likewise, your freedom to say what you like ends where your lies harm me and mine.
I'm not so much proud of "free speech" per se; it's an inalienable right, after all, not something I can take credit for. Rather, I'm proud of being involved in a political system that seeks to strike a reasonable balance between individual freedom and individual freedom to harm each other.
But tell us, what political system active in the world today allows for greater freedom of speech and expression, and also performs as well or better, in general, than the American one, in your opinion?
Maybe we could learn from it.
Or move there.
RIP freedom of speech (9/17/1787 - 9/11/2001). You will be sadly missed.
What on earth does this libel case have to do with 9/11?
Also, why pick that date?
Libel has been illegal for hundreds (if not thousands) of years, and lawsuits alleging libel have been brought many times before 2001.
Not to mention the fact that the TV networks have been self-censored and government-censored for decades (when was the last time a TV network showed full-frontal nudity during prime time; and when was the last time they could do so without being severely punished by the government?), and that private entities have always had the right to restrict speech in their venues. Even by your own bizarre Space Logic, "free speech" died some time long before the turn of the milennium
Does any part of your world view make sense or track with reality?
Last time I checked, it was the media's responsibility to report the news, and your responsibility to question government policies. Are you so lazy as to want the reporters to do your job for you? Are you so foolish as to think that the media can be trusted to discharge your responsibilities better than you can yourself?
Plus, how can a news source be simultaneously objective and questioning policy?
Plus, what makes you think that the BBC is immune from whatever market forces, black-hearted corruption, or government pressure you believe plagues CNN?
Plus, it's not like the current government administration (whether in the U.S. or in Great Britain) is the only faction with a vested interest in manipulating the media. Have you considered the possibility that the BBC is just as biased as CNN, only you don't notice because it's your own faction controlling the BBC?
We can't really get into your proof of these allegations (that the U.S. government is pressuring the U.S. media to run biased coverage) since, presumably, you'd simply point out that now that they control the media, they're hiding the proof, too!
We meet again!
How are the differences in skin between two humans "usesful"?
And shouldn't you be saying "differences are not useful... in my opinion"?
So if I offered you a hundred million dollars to do the same thing, would that be coercion?
If I offered to pay all your bills, secure your retirement, support your family and provide for your daily needs (including entertainment), in exchange for you being injected with HIV-positive blood, would that be coercion?
I mean, it's a more generous offer than what these poor people are getting ($100 is a lot of money to a poor Indian, but it's not going to set him up for life). By your logic, that means I'm forcing you to accept the injection.
By your logic, every single bad choice you have made in life wasn't because you lacked the wisdom or the self control to make the good choice, but because society forced you to make the bad choice anyway.
Or is it your belief that other people can be stupid sheep, but never you?
Everything disgusting and offensive in this topic is pretty much confined to the drug company's actions.
Not even that, actually. From TFA, the drug company's hypothetical actions. Seriously. Go back and re-read that Wired piece. These actions aren't even alleged.
What about natural divisions between human beings?
And how do you tell the difference?