RE: Your sig - I started doing your poll, but I stopped a few questions in. I can recognize a loaded poll when I see one. It sets up strawmen, most questions do NOT include the OBVIOUS right answer proposed by people who believe in gun-control, all of them IGNORE the problems we point out with those scenarios as if they do not exist (in my country more than 50% of all shootings occur to steal the fire-arms of the victims - most common TARGET for such attacks are policemen. Shoot him in the head from behind while on patrol, steal his gun to use in other crimes) or force you to choose one answer when CLEARLY there are two that BOTH matter.
To take two examples: for the question - "The proper response to an arson is..." Well obviously is option 3... but that doesn't mean we do NOT require a pyrotechnics license to possess dynamite - and we damn well should. Assuming all arson is committed with fuel that is primarily used for a legal and safe purpose is a flawed assumption. So is assuming that all guns are used primarily for legal and safe purposes. Only a criminal would ever have any use for an assault pistol with finger-print resistant grips. It's utterly stupid to imagine that such a weapon should be classified and legal treated the SAME way as a deerhunting shotgun since the two have completely different design-goals.
2nd: If I choose to resist, my primary concern would be...
Well this was the one I stopped on. It forces me to choose between "my safety" or "my attacker's safety" as if they are mutually exclusive. The law in the full developed world for THOUSANDS of years have CLEARLY felt differently. It says "self defense with MINIMUM NECESSARY FORCE" is justifiable. That's a clear requirement to priorities BOTH those factors - equally. It's the same restriction we put on police officers. Shooting an attacker who has a knife is STILL murder - it would only become self-defense if he is already in knife range. Gun-against-Gun - that's justifiable.
In reality of course, guns for self-defense is a myth. People who really KNOW guns (my dad is an ex-cop - he owns several firearms ranging from a 9mm glock through a number of hunting rifles to a full-military.33) tend to advise against even trying - and certainly against carrying or owning - as he does. In very situational cases, a gun could be a good defense, if you're driving through a hijack-notorious area, and give it to a passenger who may get a shot off and let him drive BEFORE the 4 other hijackers can fire a killing shot, maybe.
The reality though - being armed means that you now FORCE the attacker to use deadly force, when he would usually be quite satisfied to use threats to get what he wants - and chances are, he's better at it than you.
That guns for self defense is stupid, and in fact people who carry fire-arms have a greatly reduced survival rate during crimes is beside the point of gun control though. That's a matter of choosing ones safety planning as smartly as possible.
Having laws that mean before you can get a gun you have to proof you can use it, and use it safely. Having laws that restrict the kind of guns that exist exclusively to kill people and commit crimes with... well that's a legal concern the two are barely even related so using the one to justify the other (pro or con) is a fallacy.
I am personally still a borderilne case. I believe that gun-ownership is a right - but I also believe that it should be a limited right. We license people to drive and require them to drive road-worthy vehicles. Licensing people to own a gun,and requiring them to own an approved one is in the same book for me - besides NOBODY hunts deer with a submachine gun.
This post is now utterly offtopic but what the hell, I got karma to burn - I wanted to tell you, you may have convinced me with a well-researched article, or a balanced poll with fair options if it made me ask critical questions of my philosophy - and forced me to revise it... instead the poll was so clear
Wow, I've had multiple debates with libertarians and usually - I DESPISE their social views as much as I admire their views on limited government. You are quite a pleasant surprise... the idea of a libertarian with that much humanity irks something terrible in me.
I don't fully agree with your views - or rather I think they run into most of the same problems that all wellfare reform runs into - recreating the very problems that led to needing wellfare in the first place, but I appreciate that you at least consider the reality of those problems.
But that is why my solution is based on making even the worst possible job so much more attractive than wellfare that you take away the MOTIVATION to leach on it. The single parent who THEN chooses to live on wellfare is the one who believes his child needs his presence MORE than he needs the (significant) extra money. It's also why my idea makes outsourcing effectively impossible while also removing the "hire an illegal and pay less than minimum wage" problem.
Don't remove the wellfare, remove the desire for it. And the only way to do that - is to make working more attractive than sitting at home for wellfare. That requires a certain minimum amount job satisfaction and income even for the janitor or it just won't happen.
When you make working that attractive, and ensure there IS work - you'll great reduce your wellfare burden -and still have it available for those who cannot work - whether from an injury, disability or social difficulty of some sort (like a single parent who actually wants to see her child a few hours a day).
Sorry, missing comma in the sentence. Orin Hatch started it in Utah, then I related events that occurred in Michigan after they copied the idea. First part was about original credit, second was about events. I can see it's a bit unclear from my sentence structure what I meant so I apologize but I rather assumed most slashdotters would be familiar enough with their own government systems to know what I meant.
Either way -yes you are correct, it doesn't actually change anything about the point I made - that wellfare-to-work is inhumane and it's consequences significantly worse than the problem it tries to address.
That wellfare leeching is always a problem in wellfare states is true, but wellfare-to-work (which has been tried in most republican states) has caused far bigger problems than the wellfare-leeching was.
Right and the fact that with a single parent there is only half as much parental time to go around has nothing to do with why that might be right ? The fact that having a single parent gives you more challenges in life is an excuse for society/the government to make things WORSE ?
If you're not saying either of those things.... then how is your post in the least bit relevent to anything I said ?
Oh - and somehow, I don't think juvenile crime statistics APPLY to trying to figure out how an 8 year old boy got access to an unsupervised gun and shot a little. Chances are - he had no idea that it was a real gun, no real understanding of the concepts of death or murder and the shooting was more likely a case of playing gone bad than malice. But ALL of it preventable by a a parent able to spend time with her child.
There was a case here in my country a few years ago where a 6 year old boy picked up a pistol which his father had forgotten to put in the safe, pointed it as his dad and said "Daddy, I'm robocop, you're under arrest"... and then shot his father.
I don't think you can blame either the child or the parents here - the specific example I cited is just one typical of the disaster that is wellfare-to-work. I would, in fact, be incredibly surprised if wellfare-to-work states do not contribute the vast majority of the statistics your summarized anyway.
I agree completely with that. I merely pointed out that taxing illegal activities isn't in fact anything unusual. But the logic that you pay a charge because of copying should entitle you to make those copies is something I have no problem with.
>>We got really lucky - we didn't have a civil war (though it was close) - YET
>Fixed that for you
On a long enough timeframe the probability of any possible event occuring approaches one. In other words, yeah it's possible, and it WILL come - if you are prepared to wait long enough. Right now there is exactly ZERO evidence suggesting one in our lifetime.
>>, and we got one of the most wonderful and forgiving leaders in world history so we didn't get a destructive, vengeful time >>afterwards... >Wait wait, when did that "afterwards" of yours end??? Because where I live, people still get killed just for being white. You >probably also haven't heard Mal Ema recently. I suggest you wake out of your 1994-induced euphoria.
It hasn't ended. It's true that we got a less adequate government now -actually we're TWO less wonderful governments later. So ? Did you expect to get somebody of the calibre of De Klerk and Mandela every time ? Nations are rarely lucky enough to get ONE such leader, we had two. STFU and count your blessings. So there's a loudmouth youngster who says horrible things and get in the news... nothing new there. Peter Mokaba used to do everything Malema does... where is he now ? What did it ever lead to ? The loudmouths get enough youth support to cement themselves some money, they never have any real power because the big bosses prefer not to shoot themselves in the foot (or should I say wallet).
Yes there is racial violence sometimes... nowhere in the world is THAT not true, and it's not particularly worse here. Statistically black people are STILL the victims of crime 5 times more often than white people... now seeing as they outnumber us 5 to 1... that suggests that the very large majority of crimes choose their victims for convenience, not skincolour.
I despise the current government. But I am sufficiently liberated to see it as a government that is incompetent and corrupt, nothing more. Race doesn't exist- it's a scientific fact (the genetics have proven it beyond all doubt) the differences between "races" are as minor as that between two dogs of the SAME breed, where one happens to be a different color. Dog breeds are MORE different than human races... So stop thinking in terms of race. I was MARRIED outside my race (and the fact that I'm not married anymore was because of other unrelated issues - race and culture was never a problem - if anything it added spice to our sexlife).
Cut out the irrational white fear bullshit you get fed by the papers. The papers write what sells, there is NO truth to it. You are NOT being targetted or victimized. In a country with a 40% unemployment rate DESPITE the (racist) affirmative action laws white people STILL have only 5% unemployment, still fill the top 20% of salaried jobs, still make up 60% of business owners (and the next 30% are Indians - not Blacks).
The only victimization you're experiencing is in your head. This country is doing just great. It has problems and we need to recognize them, be aware of them and fix them - but your kind of bullshit white-complaining is not only blatantly untrue, it makes things worse. The rest of us are trying to make this country better and crap like the shit you talk makes that harder to do.
You wanna complain ? Complain about the amount of street children starving tonight. NOT about the fact that the cops don't beat them up so they may steal your wallet to survive. Complain about the 40% of people here who have no skills, cannot read or write and have no jobs and are on the verge of starvation every day. Complain about the fact that we pay massive taxes to try and save those lives - and corrupt politicians stick that money in their backpockets. But don't come to me with fucked up bullshit about "evil black guys wanna kill me".
It's funny - a helluva lot of white AMERICAN's say the exact same thing... and THEY outnumber their black counterparts more than 9 to 1... it's irrational racist fear and it's just
>Do you force people to move to rural areas? What if they have kids, do we forcibly separate them from their kids? Their spouses? How >are you supposed to look for a job if you are enslaved (call it what it is) and transported around the country pollinating plants?
Thanks for spelling that out. We TRIED that in South Africa (except it was mineworkers, not plant polinators)... it didn't work. Of course if you would LIKE your next president to come to power via an armed struggle, feel free not to learn from my ancestors mistakes.
We got really lucky - we didn't have a civil war (though it was close), and we got one of the most wonderful and forgiving leaders in world history so we didn't get a destructive, vengeful time afterwards... do you really want to wager on being as lucky ?
(Note the first "you" is personal to the parent -the others are plural to the various GP's).
Orin Hatch tried that in Michigan... what was it called again... oh right "wellfare to work". You have to hold down a job earning a certain amount of money before you can get foodstamps. Generally, the jobs available to W2W paying so low that most people had to hold down TWO 8-hour-a-day jobs, meaning 16 hours a day of work just to qualify for wellfare... all that work and you still earn so little that you can't feed your kids without help...
That's not helping the economy (which is supposed to serve the population, not just the business OWNERS). And of course, it has obvious and logical side effects... when a single mother doesn't get to see her kid AT ALL, because she's working 16-hours a day to give him a roof and food, does it surprise you that he ends up shooting a classmate at the age of 7 ?
It's easy to say "where were the parents ?" apparently they were spending 4 hours a day on busses, to do 16 hours a day of work, and sleep 4 hours a day... for practically nothing.
And will you be paying them ? A fair wage ? When they aren't legally allowed to quit their jobs that is ALREADY slavery. Quite frankly most unfair-wage jobs pay worse than wellfare, or so little more that even the most BASIC profit/effort assesement have people choosing wellfare over them.
You can't blame them for that.
You want to solve the problem here ? The answer is not to take away wellfare and it sure as HELL isn't forced labour.
How about this. Make it really TOUGH to outsource -like say, if you build an offshore factory, it's illegal to import the products there produced back into the corporate host country. Voila - end of offshoring WITHOUT removing the viability of local factories for big overseas markets.
Make labor law have REAL teeth. Set minimum wage to maximum welfare times 3. Declare that any business caught paying less than it, to anybody, ever for ANY job will immediately lose it's business license REGARDLESS OF ALL OTHER FACTORS and that INCLUDES if the workers are illegal immigrants. Same rule goes for safe working conditions etc.
Suddenly - companies will have no CHOICE but to actually employ workers under decent conditions, local ones too. Employing illegals will lose all appeal. Don't tell me "but we can't risk closing down so many big businesses - think of the poor economy"... you won't NEED to. You'll close one -and the others will be far too scared to ever risk violating a single clause.
There will be a catch - corporate profits, share-values and probably executive salaries will take a massive cut... only it won't - that's an illusion. The money STILL went into the corporation - it's STILL being recirculated. It's just that now it's being much more democratically shared by the people who allowed the company to make that money in the first place.
The economy will take a major hit when you first introduce it, then it will adapt... and then you'll see the biggest growth era in world history, because all those wellpaid workers will be buying products made by the wellpaid workers of the other companies, back and forth. Better salaries and happy, healthy, wealthy employees equals more customers. It's the single most profitable investment a company can make. Henry Ford understood that... how come nobody remembers it ? Since they don't and the market has CLEARLY failed the workforce (which is... what 95% of the population)... we have to remind them, by force of law.
It would be even BETTER if there could be a U.N. resolution to that effect, which effectively makes it international law any country not enacting compliant legislation face guaranteed economic sanctions - 100% ban on trade unless your labor laws meet requirements...
>Format shifting is illegal with DMCA. >So, we got a tax which has an illegal source.
Nothing new about that, profit from illegal activities is still taxable for example. Remember, they couldn't nail Al Capone for his drink smuggling during prohibition - but they nailed him for not declaring the income he made from it on his tax return.
I agree with your post - but you used a really terrible choice of analogy. The biggest threat to the elephant (and ALL other African wildlife right now) is not hunting for ivory - it's overpopulation in the national parks (which I suppose you COULD call lack of suitable habitat).
Too many ecowarriors who let emotions rule over scientiffic knowledge means there's a huge problem now. As we speak - the rate of population growth in Elephants in the Kruger park is such it's no longer POSSIBLE to reverse it. If we were to shoot them out at the highest rate we can (which is not as high as you think - in a park you have no CHOICE but to shoot a HERD in one go, so that takes days to plan, and if you don't do it that way - you end up with a massive disaster in the elephant population)... They still don't have permission to cull, and even if they did - it's already too late.
If you ever wanted to see the largest and most famous wildlife reserve in the world - go now, you got a 5 years, maybe 10 if we get permission to cull now. After that, no elephants. No antelope. No buffalo. No lions either. The kruger park (and remember it's transnational, so it's already so big it needs three countries cooperation for it to exist -there is nowhere LEFT to make it bigger to) is on the verge of a mass extinction caused by Elephant overpopulation. Elephants eat a LOT - too many and there's nothing left for anything else to eat, and soon enough, nothing left for THEM to eat.
Sad thing is. When a dog gets cancer, we put it down because it's a more humane way to die. That dog could have been like a child in your house - out of love we do that... but apparently we'd rather let a 40 thousand elephants starve to death than shoot a two thousand. Ultimately those ecowarriors as you call them did not spare the elephants - they just doomed them too a much worse fate.
Well, I'm not from the EU, I'm from Africa. I lived for five years in what is officially the most dangerous not-at-war city in the world, in the country with the highest violent crime rate, and the highest general severity of violence in the world - where there really ARE people who will shoot somebody for his car.
I was a victim of crime twice. Once I got kidnapped at gunpoint by three assailants (two men, one woman, all white). You don't try to martial arts when you're unarmed against three people with semi-automatics. I got out of that one with sleight of hand instead. I had been on the way to go pick up my new bike, I had the deposit for it in the side pocket of my wallet, about R3000 (at the time, that was a months rent and food). I had a R10 note in the front pocket, moving really carefully I took out my wallet opened it and made a great show of taking out the R10 while holding it so the rest was hidden, and making a remark about a man being robbed of his last bit of taxi money.
They took the R10 and my cellphone and rushed off in a car. Even if I had, had a gun - people who will threaten your life (in a city where there's a genuine risk they'll kill you) for the cash in your wallet, three against one... I'd have been a idiot not to just give it to them.
But at least I didn't lose the small fortune I was carrying (normally, I would never have so much cash on me - too dangerous).
By cooperating, I didn't get killed, instead they just made sure they dropped me in a deserted road so it would take hours before I could find help and get the cops after them.
The other time I was walking my girlfriend to a buss stop in broad daylight, three men came walking the other way, as they passed me - one stabbed me. No word, no threat. Just random stranger with a switchblade knife on the side of a busy public road. With me disabled, they grabbed her handbag...
Again - what good would a weapon have done me ? I am just glad the sun shone of the blade at the last second and I instinctively dodged... so instead of stabbing me in the heart, he stabbed me in the shoulder. I got the scar to remind me every day to be vigilant.
So I've lost as often as I've won. But the thing is - I believe from that and other much more personal experience (I was married to violently abusive wife - that's why I'm divorced now) that violence ALWAYS begets more violence. If you hit back, you just escalate things, and then it doesn't stop until one of you is incapacitated. The fact that I COULD fight the second guy had nothing to do with him not hurting me much, me calling the security guards first did. The fact that I refused to fight the guy in school - gave me a victory far greater than I could have gotten if I did. If I had hit him into hospital, it would be something I'd be ashamed of, instead it's a matter of pride.
What I learned in Martial arts wasn't how to fight -but how NOT to fight. Mister Miyagi said it so nicely in the movie: "Fighting not good, but if must fight - win." That's my kind of pacifism. Least possible amount of force - by which I acknowledge that it isn't ALWAYS 0. But it's 0 far more often than we give credit for.
Finally, regarding your remarks about Europe - as evidenced above, I live in what human nature CAN be like when it's bad- it's only made my beliefs stronger. Discipline is an illusion. People cannot BE disciplined, but they can APPEAR to be. Discipline is when you teach people to do the right thing because of the consequences of the wrong thing. All that does, is to teach them that when you do a bad thing, you have to get away with it. Self discipline I can believe in. Do the right thing because it's right and damn the consequences.
Europe seems to have learned the same lesson. Europe hasn't forgotten how bad war can be, on the contrary - they have it's horrors far more clearly etched in their minds. That's why THEY haven't been making war all the time ever since. Small or big, America is basically always at war with SOMEBODY. America has manag
Okay, fair enough comparison then, but notice the word "immediate" -that is to EXCLUDE those who died of radiation poisoning afterward. Considering how severe the fall-out was, how radiation poisoning progresses and how long it went on for, I would be quite astonished if the overall deaths from either A-bomb wasn't significantly higher than of those who died in the firebombing. Orders of magnitude would be utterly unsurprising.
I want to tell you another story from my life. See I grew up BEFORE geeks were cool, in a country that had made military discipline the foundation of all live - civilians included. School kids had to march to class - and have drill practice. EVERY school was a military academy.. and I never fit in. So I was bullied, badly. I got into fights -all the time, sometimes more than once day. And I was strong, I did gymnastics and martial arts - I wasn't the puny kind of geek... ALWAYS won the fights... and it only got worse. You see real bullies aren't cowards who leave you alone if you stand up to them - they are obsessed with image and if you beat them they feel humiliated and seek revenge. The more times you beat them, the worse they get.
I learned from this, I took to heart the philosophy from my sensei: not discipline but SELF discipline. And learned to control my rage. I stopped hitting back, I stopped snapping at insults... and gradually the bullying stopped as we got older.
I didn't get into any fight after I turned 15... until my final weeks in school. Just before graduating (or as we call it here matriculating) one of them... whom I had fought more than once a few years earlier decided for some reason that I needed a beating. He insisted on fighting. Finally I told him... fight then if you must, hit me and get it out of your system. I never once hit him back. He hit over and over, he tried to kick me... I dodged, I parried, I blocked - I defended myself, but I NEVER hit back. Finally he was standing there, out of breath, panting, humiliated beyond belief...and I was smiling at him, barely exerted. Finally teachers showed up, we were dragged before the principle. I told him what happened, including my refusal to fight - how I only deflected the attacks and never countered. A bunch of witnesses confirmed the story (because otherwise - I would never have been believed), and I was let go without so much as a warning while he got severely punished and his parents informed.
That alone was a victory that was truly sweet, but it would get sweeter still. The next day he showed up at school with his arm in cast. With one of those deflected punches of his, he had managed to break his own thumb on my parry. Such poetic justice that was.
THAT is the day I became a pacifist, when I realized that self defense DOESN'T mean hitting BACK. It means NOT letting yourself be hit. Nothing more. And I stood before the evidence that such self defense, with such self discipline is MORE effective.
If I HAD hit him back, maybe he'd have had a black eye, perhaps a tooth out... instead, he was in a cast, and I had a perfectly clean conscience... that's they day I learned that violence only begets MORE violence. The only true defense is not an offense... as wargames put it, the only way to win is not to play.
I believe the same lesson I learned there, as it applies to a single aggressor, applies to an entire army of them too.
>That's great. It's totally wonderful that you hold yourself superior to a tyrant as his panzers roll down the main street of >Amsterdam. All those Jewish families who will be annihilated in the next four years in his death camps will THANK YOU for your >"bravery" in taking the high ground here.
That is not what I said, and I wasn't talking about those cases - I REPEATEDLY said that when you are invaded you have not just a right but a DUTY to repel the invasion. The methods of doing say isn't always force, and in fact force is often not the most effective method - but sometimes, it's the only remaining one. I am saying that wars like the one in Iraq now are utterly unjust and should never be allowed to happen. The Afghanistan war before that, I could understand - even if I disagreed with it, I had sympathy with your nation in their actions. Ironically though, you made things MUCH worse by declaring WAR on terror. In so doing you elevated it's status, gave the terrorist far more power and notoriety than they deserved. In history we find a few truly wise leaders - who would have recognized this, and treated this 9/11 NOT as a military event but as a crime, to be investigated by the police, the criminals brought to justive and punished in accordance with the severity of their crime.
Had you done that - you'd have had your victory, with no further loss of life on your own part and no innocent Iraqi schoolchildren blown to bits. You would have retained the sympathy of the world (you had it at the time, and managed to destroy it all), you'd have demoralized Al Quada and seen them come apart at the seams.
Instead, you did exactly what they wanted you to. My favorite scene in any Terry Pratchett book is the climax of Jingo... when commander Samuel Vimes arrests the high-commands and soldiers of not one but TWO armies, ON the battlefield and charges them with "Behavior likely to cause a disturbance of the peace"... also "loitering with intent", "loitering within tent", "going equipped to commit a crime" and "traveling for the purpose of committing a crime".
Now THAT is a police action - after all, his sworn duty is to keep the peace. I understand the need for defense at times, I object to military authority, military TRAINING methods (And their known consequences - teach people to see somebody else as less than human so they can kill without concern - and you create very sick people) and the way militaries are structured. A defense force is sometimes needed. That's the last thing any military in the world is (especially yours). A true defense force should be swearing the same oath as a police force does: to uphold the peace. To take the goal, if they have to fight, NOT of trying to WIN the fight - but of restoring a state of peace as fast as possible. You don't need to beat the other guy - you just need to make him go back to his side of the border.
>That's the point Heinlein was making. Pacifists are willing to let other people die for them, but offer nothing in return. It's a sad philosophy.
That isn't true. Pacifists object to ANYBODY being killed. And most pacifist accept that there are times when a war is the only remaining form of defense, we just consider it a last and final resort - because once you go there, people WILL die. Since we're throwing quotes around. John Lennon said of Che Guevara: "In theory, I agree with his philosophy and with what he wants to achieve. Ending the poverty in South America, and uniting the Latin peoples into one common nation based on their common heritage rather than squabbling little countries, but if think you need a gun to help people, then you have failed before you even started."
He had a point.
>I agree with you it's not just to fight in a war just to conquer another country, but it's (usually) just to defend your homeland from invasion.
So what the fuck is America doing in Iraq ? I'll tell you. You get a few million guys sitting in barracks with guns, a government driven by greed (corporatism as pra
>A lot of 30-something Japanese girls still look like teenagers... and behave accordingly
You can say the same about a great many 30-something Western girls, especially the second part. I think it's WORSE to keep acting (and dressing) like a teenager when you DON'T have the looks for it anymore.
>Tokyo was firebombed (which was worse than the nuke).
By what metric exactly ? I'm quite curious ? Total deaths ? If so are you comparing several months of bombing raids to one bomb and saying they were worse together ? In fairness then you ought to count BOTH the A-Bombs if you count ALL the firebombing runs. Does your figure include people who died AFTER the fact from radiation poisoning ?
Or were you measuring something other than fatalities ? Perhaps just non-combatant deaths ? Property damage ?
Sorry, but a statement as loaded as that requires clarification.
> > And they're smarter than you are. > > > Now that requires some serious references, please. Unless you were flamebaiting, of course.
>Actually, according to David Brin (of the 2 Uplift Trilogies), whales and dolphins are only about as smart as dogs. Although how >they got a blue or sperm whale to sit down and take an IQ test is beyond me.
Well dogs, especially house dogs are very intelligent much moreso than wolves - a consequence of the mental stimulation inherent in living with humans. We constantly challenge their minds, force them to learn and solve and figure things out..moreso than some people challenge themselves. Dogs learn to understand a very large vocabulary, which is all the more impressive when you consider they lack the organs to be able to speak. Speaking and listening is (much) easier than either alone. So to say that is in fact to call them among the most intelligent non human beings on the planet. Pigs are very intelligent too, though I don't think as intelligent as dogs - because (mostly) they don't get that kind of stimulation.
>Anyway, if anyone would be in favor of smart cetaceans, one would expect that he would, so I expect that he bothered to double-check.
LOL, true.
Consider though, Octopi have a brain the size of a housecat and have proven to be very skilled at solving puzzles. Their problem solving skills are at least on part with that of cats, as pets they learn to recognize humans and form a bond, despite being from incompatible parts of the ecosystem, while there was a/. story a while ago about studies showing birds able to learn things which require a part of the brain (in humans) that they do not possess - they must be compensating with other parts. Intelligence is one of evolution's most generic survival traits and it has evolved independently in many lineages many times (whatever common ancestor humans and moluscs (Octopi are moluscs) have - it was probably no more intelligent than clam is).
So being smart is nothing special. Octopus soup is delicious. So is porkchops. What made humans special isn't inteligence, it's exteligence. Whales lack exteligence, though they may be showing the beginning stages of what becomes exteligence in time.
Chimps are our closest relatives and we've hunted THEM to near extinction as well... but nobody cares about unique-on-the-planet treesnails in Hawai being wiped out by human introduced parasites. The truth is - whales are cute to us. To cultures who don't see them that way. They are lunch. We do the same thing all the time. Every human being fawns over lambs and consider them wonderfully cute... yet we also think lamb-ribs is very tasty.
I don't like the idea of whale hunting, but I do recognize that my cultural background and biasses have a lot to do with that. Parent however is attempting to enforce his cultural bias on a culture that does not share it. Whether he is right or not - that NEVER works. If you really want to save the whales, you need a better answer than to ban whaling. Frankly whale-farming is probably the only practical way (even if you hate the idea of people eating them). Chimps catch baby antelope for food (so much for our vegetarian ancestory), but then they catch monkeys for food as well - apparently oblivious to their kinship.
I am much more concerned with Rhino poaching - there we're dealing with senseless slaughter. It's completely so, the meat and carcass is left to rot, and the only bit they take is proven not to be any use. Living in Africa I remember when the white rhino was critically endangered. We actually became the first country to develop workable methods for migrating rhino's so we could spread them across various national parks, and in so doing had a great deal to do with moving them out of the "Critical" list [note: I am in this paragraph in part quoting something told to me by a game ranger, I make no claims about the absolute factualness, potential oversimplifications or possibility that I remembered a detail wrong - none of those things are important for my point however].
Either way - I think the parent was not to trying to claim that whales are smarter than humans, just smarter than the specific human who posted the GP.
>>If a person can't innocently infringe because there is information out there that the material is copyrighted, it should follow >>that an artist (or distributor) should expect that somewhere out there is a person who will pirate the material and not pay. So why >>don't they just drop the case and accept that people pirate music? What you think you've got a monopoly on being unreasonable?
>I've read this paragraph three times and can't see the logic. It seems to be a claim that some people will break a law, therefore >there should be no attempt to enforce it?
While I agree that such a logic would be fundamentally flawed - it wasn't how I read it. I read the parent as saying that he RIAA's position here is as unreasonable as that proposition would be.
Having said that - there is a strong philosophical case to be made that a government by consent of the governed LACKS the authority to make a law that the (vast) majority of the citizenry disagree with. When the vast majority of citizens routinely ignore a law, it's clear that they are not in agreement that it should be a law. There are obvious and reasonable exceptions. Most people break speed limits, but speed limits exist to protect the lives of innocent road users, there the goal demands that despite this we keep the law -and enforce it better.
But where there is no victim (examples would be prostitution or marijuana use) and the vast majority of people have broken the law at least once and a smaller but still significant majority do i routinely (no point denying it, if there wasn't a market there wouldn't be hookers or dope dealers) - then I think good old George Washington's principle dictates the government does not have the consent of the governed, and thus CANNOT but revoke that law.
File-sharing here is a tricky one. It feels like a victimless crime, most people (at least in certain age brackets) routinely partake of it and the few among them who even realises it's illegal clearly don't think it ought to be. The question is whether it IS victimless. It may well cost the RIAA a bit of money... but that doesn't make them a victim. They can only BE a victim if copyright covering non-commercial activity is a just law in the first place. So if the only "victim" only HAS something to lose because an unjust law gives it to them, is that not a victimless crime ? Almost, in fact, an extreme form of one. By analogy, if a government legalized racketeering, and people routinely started refusing to pay protection money (the mob now being good honest taxpaying citizens can't break legs anymore really), would you call the mob a victim of a crime by the people ? Or say that the law is unjust, that most citizens believe it shouldn't be as it stands and demand it be changed ?
The major flaw in this analogy is that the mob generally don't bankrupt the people, they charge just enough to make sure the people stay in bussiness to pay again next month. The RIAA is quite happy to take everything you ever had and ever will own, and destroy your life in the process... I'll take my chances with the mob.
I said he didn't read my post because he didn't address any of my points. That's how a debate works. "I don't agree" is meaningless if you can't tell me WHY.
>You have a right to news, but you don't have a right to make me pay your bill. Take it out of your own pocket, instead of picking mine.
Typical conservative "didn't read the post" response. I made a very strong argument about why it's SOUND ECONOMIC POLICY to make people subsidize news so everyone can get it. That you GET more than you GIVE when you "pay the bill". In short, I gave a logical argument that you are NOT "paying the bill" but INVESTING the money on a scheme with solid returns. As we share the burden of the investment, so we get to share the benefits of the payout. But conservatives never figure that out. When a thousand people buy shares in a company - they are paying the companies bills by your logic - and making the CEO rich by raising the share price. But if the company succeeds, they get a massive return on their investment, that's why they do it. Some things are so valuable, and have such a NEEDED return that we cannot afford the RISK of letting it up to the market, we NEED to make sure it's there EVEN IF IT WON'T MAKE A PROFIT THAT JUSTIFIES THE LEVEL OF INVESTMENT. Things like public roads - even conservatives generally don't think all roads should be privately run toll roads (only the most extreme of libertarians think that). Why ? Because lots of people being able to get to work easily makes the whole economy stronger, all of them paying toll-fees makes it weaker and makes EVERYONE poorer. Qualitatively, the gain in the economy from having a road is huge, but smaller than the loss if all roads were toll roads, so it's better to build public roads except in rare cases where the sum on that particular road works out the other way around.
Same thing here - providing news that doesn't cost cash right now, which even an unemployed student can get access to (the people who will be contributing to the economy when you expect it to be growing so your retirement investment doesn't go up in smoke) has massive benefits for society. Denying even one citizen that access can have huge detrimental effects - one vote STILL makes a difference. Voting right, investing right and knowing when to borrow and when to save - are all things we can ONLY know if we have access to news. The more people have this access, the better the country and the economy is doing - and the benefit of that reaches every member of society. It's not a subsidy in the long run, it just looks like one if you are as shortsighted as the average American republican. It's an investment.
>You also have a right to a free press, which is not possible when government controls the funds (as is the case with pro-government-leaning PBS). He who holds the funding holds the reins.
That is a false dichotomy. A government funded news source is only detrimental to the availability of a free press if there are laws to prevent competition with it. If private news is available, people who can afford it - will buy it and rightfully expect better quality news. So the impact on "freedom of the press" is non existent. Your second statement has nothing to DO with that. That is a DESIRE for unbiassed reporting. Which is stupid because it's impossible. Everybody has bias. The government run news will (usually - there are ways to mitigate this into near non-existence) have a pro-government bias. But the corporate run news will have a corporate bias. Only a faux news believer will imagine that either is unbiassed. The Corporate News will want you to believe that all market regulation is always a bad idea, and suggest that the "hidden hand of the market" (it's not hidden, it's mythological) will somehow prevent things like corporations dumping toxic waste in our drinking water - when history shows that it doesn't. When there wasn't regulation, they did it. Even after regulation they still do it - but a lot less. Why ? Because the market demands they do it if that's whats cheapest and makes most profit. Because the market's "hand" is extremely shortsighted. We have a thousand corporate scandals a year proving jus
>He will be undercut by others, but he'll also use his business model failure to attack the BBC: "Unfair competition! An honest >businessman like me can't make a go of it with the likes of the BBC supplying news, with it's massive and unfair state subsidy! Do >something about it Dave [Cameron (UK PM)] or I'll say nasty things about your party in my many, many [still bought, for some reason] >print newspapers! Ya Fuckin' bitch! [The PMs of the UK all want to wiggle their bottoms suggestively for Murdoch].
Dear $LEADER, The idea behind the BBC, as with similar channels provided by many governments worldwide is that access to important information (like the news) is a basic human right, and more importantly is a crucial factor of a successful democracy. One cannot expect citizens to be informed voters unless they have the ability to be informed after all. In that regard it is quite akin to providing state-subsidized public schools. The benefit of ensuring as many children as possible get at least a minimal education to society and the economy is significantly larger than the actual cost in tax-payer money, which is why no government in a free country would dare to try and stop this, even if a coalition of private schools were to form and demand that the "unfair competition" be removed in the education industry. By the same token, should Mister Murdouche attempt such a thing, please feel free to use the analogy in this letter to politely tell him where he can stick it. As you well know, public schools are incredibly popular with the vast section of the population and for many, it's the only possibility they have of affording any education at all. Any attempt to remove it would be political career suicide.
So will any attempt to shut down state-subsidized independent news in any country where the voters have gotten used to it.
Yours Truly $CITIZEN
--- If you expect this to happen in the UK - send a letter like that to the prime minister, and make it an open letter widely published so he looks bad if he ignores it. It's hard to beat the corporations on subtle matters, but this would be an example where the risk, I believe would so hugely outweigh the potential gain that not even a politician if dumb enough to choose wrong.
Camera's do indeed, the exif data for one - which by default contains the camera's serial number. Some add other formats of metadata as well. Generally this is not particularly nefarious in intent - the reason for exif data is to allow photographers to recheck what settings they had used for a photo at a later date, and allow the picture to be identifiable to the photographer for credit/copyright purposes. But it can be dangerous - political activist taking picture of police beating subject for example, may well not be aware that his camera's serial code (and depending setup - his name and contact details ) are embedded in the picture. Even just the serial code can be enough to trace you - if you paid with a credit card - it's all on record somewhere who owns the phone that took the picture.
For this reason there exists software (shipped for example with paranoid linux) that can strip exif data, either entirely or selectively for dangerous fields automatically. Or you can just do it on specific points using exiftool or one of the many gui's that interact with it. But suffice to say - if you don't KNOW that they do it, you won't know to strip out the information and the same information that is an incredibly useful photographers tool in one setting can be a very dangerous privacy or even safety risk in another.
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RE: Your sig - I started doing your poll, but I stopped a few questions in. I can recognize a loaded poll when I see one. It sets up strawmen, most questions do NOT include the OBVIOUS right answer proposed by people who believe in gun-control, all of them IGNORE the problems we point out with those scenarios as if they do not exist (in my country more than 50% of all shootings occur to steal the fire-arms of the victims - most common TARGET for such attacks are policemen. Shoot him in the head from behind while on patrol, steal his gun to use in other crimes) or force you to choose one answer when CLEARLY there are two that BOTH matter.
To take two examples: for the question - "The proper response to an arson is..."
Well obviously is option 3... but that doesn't mean we do NOT require a pyrotechnics license to possess dynamite - and we damn well should. Assuming all arson is committed with fuel that is primarily used for a legal and safe purpose is a flawed assumption. So is assuming that all guns are used primarily for legal and safe purposes.
Only a criminal would ever have any use for an assault pistol with finger-print resistant grips. It's utterly stupid to imagine that such a weapon should be classified and legal treated the SAME way as a deerhunting shotgun since the two have completely different design-goals.
2nd: If I choose to resist, my primary concern would be...
Well this was the one I stopped on. It forces me to choose between "my safety" or "my attacker's safety" as if they are mutually exclusive. The law in the full developed world for THOUSANDS of years have CLEARLY felt differently.
It says "self defense with MINIMUM NECESSARY FORCE" is justifiable.
That's a clear requirement to priorities BOTH those factors - equally. It's the same restriction we put on police officers. Shooting an attacker who has a knife is STILL murder - it would only become self-defense if he is already in knife range. Gun-against-Gun - that's justifiable.
In reality of course, guns for self-defense is a myth. People who really KNOW guns (my dad is an ex-cop - he owns several firearms ranging from a 9mm glock through a number of hunting rifles to a full-military .33) tend to advise against even trying - and certainly against carrying or owning - as he does.
In very situational cases, a gun could be a good defense, if you're driving through a hijack-notorious area, and give it to a passenger who may get a shot off and let him drive BEFORE the 4 other hijackers can fire a killing shot, maybe.
The reality though - being armed means that you now FORCE the attacker to use deadly force, when he would usually be quite satisfied to use threats to get what he wants - and chances are, he's better at it than you.
That guns for self defense is stupid, and in fact people who carry fire-arms have a greatly reduced survival rate during crimes is beside the point of gun control though. That's a matter of choosing ones safety planning as smartly as possible.
Having laws that mean before you can get a gun you have to proof you can use it, and use it safely. Having laws that restrict the kind of guns that exist exclusively to kill people and commit crimes with... well that's a legal concern the two are barely even related so using the one to justify the other (pro or con) is a fallacy.
I am personally still a borderilne case. I believe that gun-ownership is a right - but I also believe that it should be a limited right. We license people to drive and require them to drive road-worthy vehicles. Licensing people to own a gun ,and requiring them to own an approved one is in the same book for me - besides NOBODY hunts deer with a submachine gun.
This post is now utterly offtopic but what the hell, I got karma to burn - I wanted to tell you, you may have convinced me with a well-researched article, or a balanced poll with fair options if it made me ask critical questions of my philosophy - and forced me to revise it... instead the poll was so clear
Wow, I've had multiple debates with libertarians and usually - I DESPISE their social views as much as I admire their views on limited government.
You are quite a pleasant surprise... the idea of a libertarian with that much humanity irks something terrible in me.
I don't fully agree with your views - or rather I think they run into most of the same problems that all wellfare reform runs into - recreating the very problems that led to needing wellfare in the first place, but I appreciate that you at least consider the reality of those problems.
But that is why my solution is based on making even the worst possible job so much more attractive than wellfare that you take away the MOTIVATION to leach on it. The single parent who THEN chooses to live on wellfare is the one who believes his child needs his presence MORE than he needs the (significant) extra money. It's also why my idea makes outsourcing effectively impossible while also removing the "hire an illegal and pay less than minimum wage" problem.
Don't remove the wellfare, remove the desire for it. And the only way to do that - is to make working more attractive than sitting at home for wellfare. That requires a certain minimum amount job satisfaction and income even for the janitor or it just won't happen.
When you make working that attractive, and ensure there IS work - you'll great reduce your wellfare burden -and still have it available for those who cannot work - whether from an injury, disability or social difficulty of some sort (like a single parent who actually wants to see her child a few hours a day).
Sorry, missing comma in the sentence. Orin Hatch started it in Utah, then I related events that occurred in Michigan after they copied the idea. First part was about original credit, second was about events. I can see it's a bit unclear from my sentence structure what I meant so I apologize but I rather assumed most slashdotters would be familiar enough with their own government systems to know what I meant.
Either way -yes you are correct, it doesn't actually change anything about the point I made - that wellfare-to-work is inhumane and it's consequences significantly worse than the problem it tries to address.
That wellfare leeching is always a problem in wellfare states is true, but wellfare-to-work (which has been tried in most republican states) has caused far bigger problems than the wellfare-leeching was.
Right and the fact that with a single parent there is only half as much parental time to go around has nothing to do with why that might be right ? The fact that having a single parent gives you more challenges in life is an excuse for society/the government to make things WORSE ?
If you're not saying either of those things.... then how is your post in the least bit relevent to anything I said ?
Oh - and somehow, I don't think juvenile crime statistics APPLY to trying to figure out how an 8 year old boy got access to an unsupervised gun and shot a little. Chances are - he had no idea that it was a real gun, no real understanding of the concepts of death or murder and the shooting was more likely a case of playing gone bad than malice. But ALL of it preventable by a a parent able to spend time with her child.
There was a case here in my country a few years ago where a 6 year old boy picked up a pistol which his father had forgotten to put in the safe, pointed it as his dad and said "Daddy, I'm robocop, you're under arrest" ... and then shot his father.
I don't think you can blame either the child or the parents here - the specific example I cited is just one typical of the disaster that is wellfare-to-work.
I would, in fact, be incredibly surprised if wellfare-to-work states do not contribute the vast majority of the statistics your summarized anyway.
I agree completely with that. I merely pointed out that taxing illegal activities isn't in fact anything unusual. But the logic that you pay a charge because of copying should entitle you to make those copies is something I have no problem with.
>>We got really lucky - we didn't have a civil war (though it was close) - YET
>Fixed that for you
On a long enough timeframe the probability of any possible event occuring approaches one. In other words, yeah it's possible, and it WILL come - if you are prepared to wait long enough. Right now there is exactly ZERO evidence suggesting one in our lifetime.
>>, and we got one of the most wonderful and forgiving leaders in world history so we didn't get a destructive, vengeful time >>afterwards...
>Wait wait, when did that "afterwards" of yours end??? Because where I live, people still get killed just for being white. You >probably also haven't heard Mal Ema recently. I suggest you wake out of your 1994-induced euphoria.
It hasn't ended. It's true that we got a less adequate government now -actually we're TWO less wonderful governments later. So ?
Did you expect to get somebody of the calibre of De Klerk and Mandela every time ? Nations are rarely lucky enough to get ONE such leader, we had two. STFU and count your blessings.
So there's a loudmouth youngster who says horrible things and get in the news... nothing new there. Peter Mokaba used to do everything Malema does... where is he now ? What did it ever lead to ?
The loudmouths get enough youth support to cement themselves some money, they never have any real power because the big bosses prefer not to shoot themselves in the foot (or should I say wallet).
Yes there is racial violence sometimes... nowhere in the world is THAT not true, and it's not particularly worse here. Statistically black people are STILL the victims of crime 5 times more often than white people... now seeing as they outnumber us 5 to 1... that suggests that the very large majority of crimes choose their victims for convenience, not skincolour.
I despise the current government. But I am sufficiently liberated to see it as a government that is incompetent and corrupt, nothing more. Race doesn't exist- it's a scientific fact (the genetics have proven it beyond all doubt) the differences between "races" are as minor as that between two dogs of the SAME breed, where one happens to be a different color. Dog breeds are MORE different than human races...
So stop thinking in terms of race. I was MARRIED outside my race (and the fact that I'm not married anymore was because of other unrelated issues - race and culture was never a problem - if anything it added spice to our sexlife).
Cut out the irrational white fear bullshit you get fed by the papers. The papers write what sells, there is NO truth to it. You are NOT being targetted or victimized. In a country with a 40% unemployment rate DESPITE the (racist) affirmative action laws white people STILL have only 5% unemployment, still fill the top 20% of salaried jobs, still make up 60% of business owners (and the next 30% are Indians - not Blacks).
The only victimization you're experiencing is in your head. This country is doing just great. It has problems and we need to recognize them, be aware of them and fix them - but your kind of bullshit white-complaining is not only blatantly untrue, it makes things worse. The rest of us are trying to make this country better and crap like the shit you talk makes that harder to do.
You wanna complain ? Complain about the amount of street children starving tonight. NOT about the fact that the cops don't beat them up so they may steal your wallet to survive. Complain about the 40% of people here who have no skills, cannot read or write and have no jobs and are on the verge of starvation every day. Complain about the fact that we pay massive taxes to try and save those lives - and corrupt politicians stick that money in their backpockets.
But don't come to me with fucked up bullshit about "evil black guys wanna kill me".
It's funny - a helluva lot of white AMERICAN's say the exact same thing ... and THEY outnumber their black counterparts more than 9 to 1... it's irrational racist fear and it's just
>Do you force people to move to rural areas? What if they have kids, do we forcibly separate them from their kids? Their spouses? How >are you supposed to look for a job if you are enslaved (call it what it is) and transported around the country pollinating plants?
Thanks for spelling that out. We TRIED that in South Africa (except it was mineworkers, not plant polinators)... it didn't work. Of course if you would LIKE your next president to come to power via an armed struggle, feel free not to learn from my ancestors mistakes.
We got really lucky - we didn't have a civil war (though it was close), and we got one of the most wonderful and forgiving leaders in world history so we didn't get a destructive, vengeful time afterwards... do you really want to wager on being as lucky ?
(Note the first "you" is personal to the parent -the others are plural to the various GP's).
Orin Hatch tried that in Michigan... what was it called again... oh right "wellfare to work". You have to hold down a job earning a certain amount of money before you can get foodstamps. Generally, the jobs available to W2W paying so low that most people had to hold down TWO 8-hour-a-day jobs, meaning 16 hours a day of work just to qualify for wellfare... all that work and you still earn so little that you can't feed your kids without help...
That's not helping the economy (which is supposed to serve the population, not just the business OWNERS). And of course, it has obvious and logical side effects... when a single mother doesn't get to see her kid AT ALL, because she's working 16-hours a day to give him a roof and food, does it surprise you that he ends up shooting a classmate at the age of 7 ?
It's easy to say "where were the parents ?" apparently they were spending 4 hours a day on busses, to do 16 hours a day of work, and sleep 4 hours a day... for practically nothing.
And will you be paying them ? A fair wage ? When they aren't legally allowed to quit their jobs that is ALREADY slavery. Quite frankly most unfair-wage jobs pay worse than wellfare, or so little more that even the most BASIC profit/effort assesement have people choosing wellfare over them.
You can't blame them for that.
You want to solve the problem here ? The answer is not to take away wellfare and it sure as HELL isn't forced labour.
How about this. Make it really TOUGH to outsource -like say, if you build an offshore factory, it's illegal to import the products there produced back into the corporate host country.
Voila - end of offshoring WITHOUT removing the viability of local factories for big overseas markets.
Make labor law have REAL teeth. Set minimum wage to maximum welfare times 3. Declare that any business caught paying less than it, to anybody, ever for ANY job will immediately lose it's business license REGARDLESS OF ALL OTHER FACTORS and that INCLUDES if the workers are illegal immigrants. Same rule goes for safe working conditions etc.
Suddenly - companies will have no CHOICE but to actually employ workers under decent conditions, local ones too. Employing illegals will lose all appeal. Don't tell me "but we can't risk closing down so many big businesses - think of the poor economy"... you won't NEED to.
You'll close one -and the others will be far too scared to ever risk violating a single clause.
There will be a catch - corporate profits, share-values and probably executive salaries will take a massive cut... only it won't - that's an illusion. The money STILL went into the corporation - it's STILL being recirculated. It's just that now it's being much more democratically shared by the people who allowed the company to make that money in the first place.
The economy will take a major hit when you first introduce it, then it will adapt... and then you'll see the biggest growth era in world history, because all those wellpaid workers will be buying products made by the wellpaid workers of the other companies, back and forth.
Better salaries and happy, healthy, wealthy employees equals more customers. It's the single most profitable investment a company can make.
Henry Ford understood that... how come nobody remembers it ? Since they don't and the market has CLEARLY failed the workforce (which is... what 95% of the population)... we have to remind them, by force of law.
It would be even BETTER if there could be a U.N. resolution to that effect, which effectively makes it international law any country not enacting compliant legislation face guaranteed economic sanctions - 100% ban on trade unless your labor laws meet requirements...
Now THAT's a world I want to live in.
>Format shifting is illegal with DMCA.
>So, we got a tax which has an illegal source.
Nothing new about that, profit from illegal activities is still taxable for example. Remember, they couldn't nail Al Capone for his drink smuggling during prohibition - but they nailed him for not declaring the income he made from it on his tax return.
I agree with your post - but you used a really terrible choice of analogy. The biggest threat to the elephant (and ALL other African wildlife right now) is not hunting for ivory - it's overpopulation in the national parks (which I suppose you COULD call lack of suitable habitat).
Too many ecowarriors who let emotions rule over scientiffic knowledge means there's a huge problem now. As we speak - the rate of population growth in Elephants in the Kruger park is such it's no longer POSSIBLE to reverse it. If we were to shoot them out at the highest rate we can (which is not as high as you think - in a park you have no CHOICE but to shoot a HERD in one go, so that takes days to plan, and if you don't do it that way - you end up with a massive disaster in the elephant population)...
They still don't have permission to cull, and even if they did - it's already too late.
If you ever wanted to see the largest and most famous wildlife reserve in the world - go now, you got a 5 years, maybe 10 if we get permission to cull now. After that, no elephants. No antelope. No buffalo. No lions either.
The kruger park (and remember it's transnational, so it's already so big it needs three countries cooperation for it to exist -there is nowhere LEFT to make it bigger to) is on the verge of a mass extinction caused by Elephant overpopulation.
Elephants eat a LOT - too many and there's nothing left for anything else to eat, and soon enough, nothing left for THEM to eat.
Sad thing is. When a dog gets cancer, we put it down because it's a more humane way to die. That dog could have been like a child in your house - out of love we do that... but apparently we'd rather let a 40 thousand elephants starve to death than shoot a two thousand. Ultimately those ecowarriors as you call them did not spare the elephants - they just doomed them too a much worse fate.
Well, I'm not from the EU, I'm from Africa. I lived for five years in what is officially the most dangerous not-at-war city in the world, in the country with the highest violent crime rate, and the highest general severity of violence in the world - where there really ARE people who will shoot somebody for his car.
I was a victim of crime twice. Once I got kidnapped at gunpoint by three assailants (two men, one woman, all white). You don't try to martial arts when you're unarmed against three people with semi-automatics.
I got out of that one with sleight of hand instead. I had been on the way to go pick up my new bike, I had the deposit for it in the side pocket of my wallet, about R3000 (at the time, that was a months rent and food). I had a R10 note in the front pocket, moving really carefully I took out my wallet opened it and made a great show of taking out the R10 while holding it so the rest was hidden, and making a remark about a man being robbed of his last bit of taxi money.
They took the R10 and my cellphone and rushed off in a car. Even if I had, had a gun - people who will threaten your life (in a city where there's a genuine risk they'll kill you) for the cash in your wallet, three against one... I'd have been a idiot not to just give it to them.
But at least I didn't lose the small fortune I was carrying (normally, I would never have so much cash on me - too dangerous).
By cooperating, I didn't get killed, instead they just made sure they dropped me in a deserted road so it would take hours before I could find help and get the cops after them.
The other time I was walking my girlfriend to a buss stop in broad daylight, three men came walking the other way, as they passed me - one stabbed me. No word, no threat. Just random stranger with a switchblade knife on the side of a busy public road. With me disabled, they grabbed her handbag...
Again - what good would a weapon have done me ? I am just glad the sun shone of the blade at the last second and I instinctively dodged... so instead of stabbing me in the heart, he stabbed me in the shoulder. I got the scar to remind me every day to be vigilant.
So I've lost as often as I've won. But the thing is - I believe from that and other much more personal experience (I was married to violently abusive wife - that's why I'm divorced now) that violence ALWAYS begets more violence. If you hit back, you just escalate things, and then it doesn't stop until one of you is incapacitated.
The fact that I COULD fight the second guy had nothing to do with him not hurting me much, me calling the security guards first did. The fact that I refused to fight the guy in school - gave me a victory far greater than I could have gotten if I did. If I had hit him into hospital, it would be something I'd be ashamed of, instead it's a matter of pride.
What I learned in Martial arts wasn't how to fight -but how NOT to fight. Mister Miyagi said it so nicely in the movie: "Fighting not good, but if must fight - win."
That's my kind of pacifism. Least possible amount of force - by which I acknowledge that it isn't ALWAYS 0. But it's 0 far more often than we give credit for.
Finally, regarding your remarks about Europe - as evidenced above, I live in what human nature CAN be like when it's bad- it's only made my beliefs stronger. Discipline is an illusion. People cannot BE disciplined, but they can APPEAR to be. Discipline is when you teach people to do the right thing because of the consequences of the wrong thing. All that does, is to teach them that when you do a bad thing, you have to get away with it.
Self discipline I can believe in. Do the right thing because it's right and damn the consequences.
Europe seems to have learned the same lesson. Europe hasn't forgotten how bad war can be, on the contrary - they have it's horrors far more clearly etched in their minds. That's why THEY haven't been making war all the time ever since. Small or big, America is basically always at war with SOMEBODY.
America has manag
Okay, fair enough comparison then, but notice the word "immediate" -that is to EXCLUDE those who died of radiation poisoning afterward. Considering how severe the fall-out was, how radiation poisoning progresses and how long it went on for, I would be quite astonished if the overall deaths from either A-bomb wasn't significantly higher than of those who died in the firebombing. Orders of magnitude would be utterly unsurprising.
I want to tell you another story from my life.
See I grew up BEFORE geeks were cool, in a country that had made military discipline the foundation of all live - civilians included. School kids had to march to class - and have drill practice. EVERY school was a military academy.. and I never fit in. So I was bullied, badly. I got into fights -all the time, sometimes more than once day.
And I was strong, I did gymnastics and martial arts - I wasn't the puny kind of geek... ALWAYS won the fights... and it only got worse. You see real bullies aren't cowards who leave you alone if you stand up to them - they are obsessed with image and if you beat them they feel humiliated and seek revenge. The more times you beat them, the worse they get.
I learned from this, I took to heart the philosophy from my sensei: not discipline but SELF discipline.
And learned to control my rage. I stopped hitting back, I stopped snapping at insults... and gradually the bullying stopped as we got older.
I didn't get into any fight after I turned 15... until my final weeks in school. Just before graduating (or as we call it here matriculating) one of them... whom I had fought more than once a few years earlier decided for some reason that I needed a beating. He insisted on fighting.
Finally I told him... fight then if you must, hit me and get it out of your system.
I never once hit him back. He hit over and over, he tried to kick me... I dodged, I parried, I blocked - I defended myself, but I NEVER hit back. Finally he was standing there, out of breath, panting, humiliated beyond belief...and I was smiling at him, barely exerted.
Finally teachers showed up, we were dragged before the principle. I told him what happened, including my refusal to fight - how I only deflected the attacks and never countered. A bunch of witnesses confirmed the story (because otherwise - I would never have been believed), and I was let go without so much as a warning while he got severely punished and his parents informed.
That alone was a victory that was truly sweet, but it would get sweeter still. The next day he showed up at school with his arm in cast. With one of those deflected punches of his, he had managed to break his own thumb on my parry. Such poetic justice that was.
THAT is the day I became a pacifist, when I realized that self defense DOESN'T mean hitting BACK. It means NOT letting yourself be hit. Nothing more. And I stood before the evidence that such self defense, with such self discipline is MORE effective.
If I HAD hit him back, maybe he'd have had a black eye, perhaps a tooth out... instead, he was in a cast, and I had a perfectly clean conscience... that's they day I learned that violence only begets MORE violence. The only true defense is not an offense... as wargames put it, the only way to win is not to play.
I believe the same lesson I learned there, as it applies to a single aggressor, applies to an entire army of them too.
>That's great. It's totally wonderful that you hold yourself superior to a tyrant as his panzers roll down the main street of >Amsterdam. All those Jewish families who will be annihilated in the next four years in his death camps will THANK YOU for your >"bravery" in taking the high ground here.
That is not what I said, and I wasn't talking about those cases - I REPEATEDLY said that when you are invaded you have not just a right but a DUTY to repel the invasion. The methods of doing say isn't always force, and in fact force is often not the most effective method - but sometimes, it's the only remaining one.
I am saying that wars like the one in Iraq now are utterly unjust and should never be allowed to happen. The Afghanistan war before that, I could understand - even if I disagreed with it, I had sympathy with your nation in their actions. Ironically though, you made things MUCH worse by declaring WAR on terror.
In so doing you elevated it's status, gave the terrorist far more power and notoriety than they deserved. In history we find a few truly wise leaders - who would have recognized this, and treated this 9/11 NOT as a military event but as a crime, to be investigated by the police, the criminals brought to justive and punished in accordance with the severity of their crime.
Had you done that - you'd have had your victory, with no further loss of life on your own part and no innocent Iraqi schoolchildren blown to bits. You would have retained the sympathy of the world (you had it at the time, and managed to destroy it all), you'd have demoralized Al Quada and seen them come apart at the seams.
Instead, you did exactly what they wanted you to. My favorite scene in any Terry Pratchett book is the climax of Jingo... when commander Samuel Vimes arrests the high-commands and soldiers of not one but TWO armies, ON the battlefield and charges them with "Behavior likely to cause a disturbance of the peace"... also "loitering with intent", "loitering within tent", "going equipped to commit a crime" and "traveling for the purpose of committing a crime".
Now THAT is a police action - after all, his sworn duty is to keep the peace. I understand the need for defense at times, I object to military authority, military TRAINING methods (And their known consequences - teach people to see somebody else as less than human so they can kill without concern - and you create very sick people) and the way militaries are structured.
A defense force is sometimes needed. That's the last thing any military in the world is (especially yours).
A true defense force should be swearing the same oath as a police force does: to uphold the peace. To take the goal, if they have to fight, NOT of trying to WIN the fight - but of restoring a state of peace as fast as possible. You don't need to beat the other guy - you just need to make him go back to his side of the border.
>That's the point Heinlein was making. Pacifists are willing to let other people die for them, but offer nothing in return. It's a sad philosophy.
That isn't true. Pacifists object to ANYBODY being killed. And most pacifist accept that there are times when a war is the only remaining form of defense, we just consider it a last and final resort - because once you go there, people WILL die.
Since we're throwing quotes around. John Lennon said of Che Guevara: "In theory, I agree with his philosophy and with what he wants to achieve. Ending the poverty in South America, and uniting the Latin peoples into one common nation based on their common heritage rather than squabbling little countries, but if think you need a gun to help people, then you have failed before you even started."
He had a point.
>I agree with you it's not just to fight in a war just to conquer another country, but it's (usually) just to defend your homeland from invasion.
So what the fuck is America doing in Iraq ? I'll tell you. You get a few million guys sitting in barracks with guns, a government driven by greed (corporatism as pra
>A lot of 30-something Japanese girls still look like teenagers... and behave accordingly
You can say the same about a great many 30-something Western girls, especially the second part. I think it's WORSE to keep acting (and dressing) like a teenager when you DON'T have the looks for it anymore.
>Tokyo was firebombed (which was worse than the nuke).
By what metric exactly ? I'm quite curious ? Total deaths ? If so are you comparing several months of bombing raids to one bomb and saying they were worse together ? In fairness then you ought to count BOTH the A-Bombs if you count ALL the firebombing runs. Does your figure include people who died AFTER the fact from radiation poisoning ?
Or were you measuring something other than fatalities ? Perhaps just non-combatant deaths ? Property damage ?
Sorry, but a statement as loaded as that requires clarification.
> > And they're smarter than you are.
>
> > Now that requires some serious references, please. Unless you were flamebaiting, of course.
>Actually, according to David Brin (of the 2 Uplift Trilogies), whales and dolphins are only about as smart as dogs. Although how >they got a blue or sperm whale to sit down and take an IQ test is beyond me.
Well dogs, especially house dogs are very intelligent much moreso than wolves - a consequence of the mental stimulation inherent in living with humans. We constantly challenge their minds, force them to learn and solve and figure things out..moreso than some people challenge themselves.
Dogs learn to understand a very large vocabulary, which is all the more impressive when you consider they lack the organs to be able to speak. Speaking and listening is (much) easier than either alone. So to say that is in fact to call them among the most intelligent non human beings on the planet. Pigs are very intelligent too, though I don't think as intelligent as dogs - because (mostly) they don't get that kind of stimulation.
>Anyway, if anyone would be in favor of smart cetaceans, one would expect that he would, so I expect that he bothered to double-check.
LOL, true.
Consider though, Octopi have a brain the size of a housecat and have proven to be very skilled at solving puzzles. Their problem solving skills are at least on part with that of cats, as pets they learn to recognize humans and form a bond, despite being from incompatible parts of the ecosystem, while there was a /. story a while ago about studies showing birds able to learn things which require a part of the brain (in humans) that they do not possess - they must be compensating with other parts.
Intelligence is one of evolution's most generic survival traits and it has evolved independently in many lineages many times (whatever common ancestor humans and moluscs (Octopi are moluscs) have - it was probably no more intelligent than clam is).
So being smart is nothing special. Octopus soup is delicious. So is porkchops. What made humans special isn't inteligence, it's exteligence.
Whales lack exteligence, though they may be showing the beginning stages of what becomes exteligence in time.
Chimps are our closest relatives and we've hunted THEM to near extinction as well... but nobody cares about unique-on-the-planet treesnails in Hawai being wiped out by human introduced parasites.
The truth is - whales are cute to us. To cultures who don't see them that way. They are lunch. We do the same thing all the time. Every human being fawns over lambs and consider them wonderfully cute... yet we also think lamb-ribs is very tasty.
I don't like the idea of whale hunting, but I do recognize that my cultural background and biasses have a lot to do with that. Parent however is attempting to enforce his cultural bias on a culture that does not share it. Whether he is right or not - that NEVER works. If you really want to save the whales, you need a better answer than to ban whaling.
Frankly whale-farming is probably the only practical way (even if you hate the idea of people eating them). Chimps catch baby antelope for food (so much for our vegetarian ancestory), but then they catch monkeys for food as well - apparently oblivious to their kinship.
I am much more concerned with Rhino poaching - there we're dealing with senseless slaughter. It's completely so, the meat and carcass is left to rot, and the only bit they take is proven not to be any use. Living in Africa I remember when the white rhino was critically endangered. We actually became the first country to develop workable methods for migrating rhino's so we could spread them across various national parks, and in so doing had a great deal to do with moving them out of the "Critical" list [note: I am in this paragraph in part quoting something told to me by a game ranger, I make no claims about the absolute factualness, potential oversimplifications or possibility that I remembered a detail wrong - none of those things are important for my point however].
Either way - I think the parent was not to trying to claim that whales are smarter than humans, just smarter than the specific human who posted the GP.
>>If a person can't innocently infringe because there is information out there that the material is copyrighted, it should follow >>that an artist (or distributor) should expect that somewhere out there is a person who will pirate the material and not pay. So why >>don't they just drop the case and accept that people pirate music? What you think you've got a monopoly on being unreasonable?
>I've read this paragraph three times and can't see the logic. It seems to be a claim that some people will break a law, therefore >there should be no attempt to enforce it?
While I agree that such a logic would be fundamentally flawed - it wasn't how I read it. I read the parent as saying that he RIAA's position here is as unreasonable as that proposition would be.
Having said that - there is a strong philosophical case to be made that a government by consent of the governed LACKS the authority to make a law that the (vast) majority of the citizenry disagree with. When the vast majority of citizens routinely ignore a law, it's clear that they are not in agreement that it should be a law.
There are obvious and reasonable exceptions. Most people break speed limits, but speed limits exist to protect the lives of innocent road users, there the goal demands that despite this we keep the law -and enforce it better.
But where there is no victim (examples would be prostitution or marijuana use) and the vast majority of people have broken the law at least once and a smaller but still significant majority do i routinely (no point denying it, if there wasn't a market there wouldn't be hookers or dope dealers) - then I think good old George Washington's principle dictates the government does not have the consent of the governed, and thus CANNOT but revoke that law.
File-sharing here is a tricky one. It feels like a victimless crime, most people (at least in certain age brackets) routinely partake of it and the few among them who even realises it's illegal clearly don't think it ought to be. The question is whether it IS victimless. It may well cost the RIAA a bit of money... but that doesn't make them a victim. They can only BE a victim if copyright covering non-commercial activity is a just law in the first place.
So if the only "victim" only HAS something to lose because an unjust law gives it to them, is that not a victimless crime ? Almost, in fact, an extreme form of one.
By analogy, if a government legalized racketeering, and people routinely started refusing to pay protection money (the mob now being good honest taxpaying citizens can't break legs anymore really), would you call the mob a victim of a crime by the people ? Or say that the law is unjust, that most citizens believe it shouldn't be as it stands and demand it be changed ?
The major flaw in this analogy is that the mob generally don't bankrupt the people, they charge just enough to make sure the people stay in bussiness to pay again next month. The RIAA is quite happy to take everything you ever had and ever will own, and destroy your life in the process... I'll take my chances with the mob.
I said he didn't read my post because he didn't address any of my points. That's how a debate works. "I don't agree" is meaningless if you can't tell me WHY.
>>But it can be dangerous - political activist taking picture of police beating subject for example,
>Out of curiosity, is that theoretical, or are there examples of police beatings being documented and then traced like this?
The technology is simple practical reality. Whether it's actually been done I don't know.
>You have a right to news, but you don't have a right to make me pay your bill. Take it out of your own pocket, instead of picking mine.
Typical conservative "didn't read the post" response. I made a very strong argument about why it's SOUND ECONOMIC POLICY to make people subsidize news so everyone can get it. That you GET more than you GIVE when you "pay the bill". In short, I gave a logical argument that you are NOT "paying the bill" but INVESTING the money on a scheme with solid returns. As we share the burden of the investment, so we get to share the benefits of the payout.
But conservatives never figure that out. When a thousand people buy shares in a company - they are paying the companies bills by your logic - and making the CEO rich by raising the share price. But if the company succeeds, they get a massive return on their investment, that's why they do it.
Some things are so valuable, and have such a NEEDED return that we cannot afford the RISK of letting it up to the market, we NEED to make sure it's there EVEN IF IT WON'T MAKE A PROFIT THAT JUSTIFIES THE LEVEL OF INVESTMENT.
Things like public roads - even conservatives generally don't think all roads should be privately run toll roads (only the most extreme of libertarians think that). Why ? Because lots of people being able to get to work easily makes the whole economy stronger, all of them paying toll-fees makes it weaker and makes EVERYONE poorer.
Qualitatively, the gain in the economy from having a road is huge, but smaller than the loss if all roads were toll roads, so it's better to build public roads except in rare cases where the sum on that particular road works out the other way around.
Same thing here - providing news that doesn't cost cash right now, which even an unemployed student can get access to (the people who will be contributing to the economy when you expect it to be growing so your retirement investment doesn't go up in smoke) has massive benefits for society. Denying even one citizen that access can have huge detrimental effects - one vote STILL makes a difference.
Voting right, investing right and knowing when to borrow and when to save - are all things we can ONLY know if we have access to news. The more people have this access, the better the country and the economy is doing - and the benefit of that reaches every member of society.
It's not a subsidy in the long run, it just looks like one if you are as shortsighted as the average American republican. It's an investment.
>You also have a right to a free press, which is not possible when government controls the funds (as is the case with pro-government-leaning PBS). He who holds the funding holds the reins.
That is a false dichotomy. A government funded news source is only detrimental to the availability of a free press if there are laws to prevent competition with it. If private news is available, people who can afford it - will buy it and rightfully expect better quality news.
So the impact on "freedom of the press" is non existent.
Your second statement has nothing to DO with that. That is a DESIRE for unbiassed reporting. Which is stupid because it's impossible. Everybody has bias. The government run news will (usually - there are ways to mitigate this into near non-existence) have a pro-government bias. But the corporate run news will have a corporate bias. Only a faux news believer will imagine that either is unbiassed. The Corporate News will want you to believe that all market regulation is always a bad idea, and suggest that the "hidden hand of the market" (it's not hidden, it's mythological) will somehow prevent things like corporations dumping toxic waste in our drinking water - when history shows that it doesn't.
When there wasn't regulation, they did it. Even after regulation they still do it - but a lot less. Why ? Because the market demands they do it if that's whats cheapest and makes most profit. Because the market's "hand" is extremely shortsighted. We have a thousand corporate scandals a year proving jus
>He will be undercut by others, but he'll also use his business model failure to attack the BBC: "Unfair competition! An honest >businessman like me can't make a go of it with the likes of the BBC supplying news, with it's massive and unfair state subsidy! Do >something about it Dave [Cameron (UK PM)] or I'll say nasty things about your party in my many, many [still bought, for some reason] >print newspapers! Ya Fuckin' bitch! [The PMs of the UK all want to wiggle their bottoms suggestively for Murdoch].
Dear $LEADER,
The idea behind the BBC, as with similar channels provided by many governments worldwide is that access to important information (like the news) is a basic human right, and more importantly is a crucial factor of a successful democracy. One cannot expect citizens to be informed voters unless they have the ability to be informed after all.
In that regard it is quite akin to providing state-subsidized public schools. The benefit of ensuring as many children as possible get at least a minimal education to society and the economy is significantly larger than the actual cost in tax-payer money, which is why no government in a free country would dare to try and stop this, even if a coalition of private schools were to form and demand that the "unfair competition" be removed in the education industry.
By the same token, should Mister Murdouche attempt such a thing, please feel free to use the analogy in this letter to politely tell him where he can stick it.
As you well know, public schools are incredibly popular with the vast section of the population and for many, it's the only possibility they have of affording any education at all. Any attempt to remove it would be political career suicide.
So will any attempt to shut down state-subsidized independent news in any country where the voters have gotten used to it.
Yours Truly
$CITIZEN
---
If you expect this to happen in the UK - send a letter like that to the prime minister, and make it an open letter widely published so he looks bad if he ignores it. It's hard to beat the corporations on subtle matters, but this would be an example where the risk, I believe would so hugely outweigh the potential gain that not even a politician if dumb enough to choose wrong.
Mod parent up - it's so rare to see somebody who actually KNOWS that around here.
Camera's do indeed, the exif data for one - which by default contains the camera's serial number. Some add other formats of metadata as well. Generally this is not particularly nefarious in intent - the reason for exif data is to allow photographers to recheck what settings they had used for a photo at a later date, and allow the picture to be identifiable to the photographer for credit/copyright purposes.
But it can be dangerous - political activist taking picture of police beating subject for example, may well not be aware that his camera's serial code (and depending setup - his name and contact details ) are embedded in the picture. Even just the serial code can be enough to trace you - if you paid with a credit card - it's all on record somewhere who owns the phone that took the picture.
For this reason there exists software (shipped for example with paranoid linux) that can strip exif data, either entirely or selectively for dangerous fields automatically. Or you can just do it on specific points using exiftool or one of the many gui's that interact with it.
But suffice to say - if you don't KNOW that they do it, you won't know to strip out the information and the same information that is an incredibly useful photographers tool in one setting can be a very dangerous privacy or even safety risk in another.