People in positions of authority, or with public profiles of some sort, learn early on (especially if they've been raised to expect it) that they need to lead two lives: that things they write, say, and record are part of a public persona, and that they have to consider the impact of them at all times.
Sure, and that would be justified if this was a case of that, but it's not. The kid wasn't even expelled because of anything on his profile. He was expelled because an ad that Facebook displayed with his profile, without the kid's knowledge or permission, had the word "shoot" in it, because it was an ad for a photography website, and some supercilious paperpushing pissant saw a tenuous excuse to discredit, slander, and expel a student who had drawn attention to his financial malfeasance.
If it hadn't been Facebook, it would have been something else. This was about people in power bullying the powerless to avoid oversight of their actions. They would have made something up either way.
It doesn't have anything to do with self-expression or pictures of pot smoking on Facebook. It has everything to do with asshole bureaucrats manufacturing fictitious "threats" to discredit obstacles to power.
One does have trouble imagining how organs like the eye developed through mutation.
Nobody has trouble imagining how a less-effective eye (say, with no focusing lens) is more effective than no eye at all. One does have trouble imagining why God would create the human eye with the retina pointing backwards, into the skull.
Some think we came from pigs, some thing we came from primordial ooze through another mammal.
No scientist thinks we came from pigs. There's absolutely no scientific doubt that human beings are members of the primate order.
It's that one specific take on it dominates High School science classes and is taught as though concensus exists on it even though it does not.
But there is a consensus. The greatest fraud of the ID/creationism movement is to assert that there's no scientific consensus on evolution. That's simply not true - the consensus is there and is universal. There's some dispute at low-levels about who's precisely related to what when the genetic information, the stratiography, and the taxonomic cladistics don't quite match up - as they occasionally don't - but the consensus is there.
People do have a problem with Evolution trying to take on speciation though.
People who don't understand it have a problem. That's the fault of the abysmal teaching of biology in high school, which honestly is the best biology most people ever get. People who actually sit down and try to understand evolution understand easily how random mutation and natural selection create new species when subpopulations are separated, genetically, from their parent populations. Speciation is a population-level change in organization. It's not something that happens to individuals.
In fact that's true of all evolution. It's a population-level phenomenon.
Or maybe species started out very similar to what they are now and only changed a little over all that time.
That, at least, is a testable idea. As it turns out we have a dated record of the physical bodies of a lot of different organisms over Earth's history - the fossil record. And we can compare your idea to that fossil record and see that species have changed dramatically over the course of history.
The exit polls were made to match - "corrected" - with the results of the vote. Because of the untestable, ever-present assumption in the US that any discrepancy between exit polls and the election results represent bad polling.
If there's any argument for the legitimacy of these results that doesn't depend on simply assuming that our elections are always accurate, I haven't seen it. So who's the gullible idiot, again?
Obama genuinely did better than Clinton in the smaller, more rural towns where votes were hand-counted.
That makes sense to you? That it was the voters in rural, more conservative towns that primarily broke for the black candidate? At the same time that you're proposing that:
There is the issue that voters will say they're willing to vote for an African-American candidate, but once in the voting booth, find that they actually can't.
But that doesn't make any sense either. Why would Bradley-affected voters only succumb when faced with an optical-scan ballot? After all the hand-counted ballots went to Obama, nearly precisely in the proportions the polling said it would. You're suggesting a kind of Bradley effect that only affects people with optical scan ballots, which doesn't make any sense.
Again, when exit polls don't match the results, there's a problem.
They didn't, though. The exit polls - until they were "corrected" to match the actual vote "results" - showed the same Obama lead that everybody saw going in. The same lead that Obama held on the essentially-unhackable paper vote. The same lead that completely disappeared when the optical scan ballots were tabulated by computer.
When you assume that any discrepancy between the polling and the vote is simply the result of bad polling, that's an unsupportable assumption. I don't understand how many Diebold machines have to be shown to be hacked with a flash drive and a paper clip (or whatever) before people stop simply assuming that their elections are operating according to plan. At this point, what evidence is there that the vote was legitimate?
To suggest that a person wouldn't want their child to be like them would seem to be a deeper prejudice to me. Deaf parents are requesting deaf children after all. Once you remove the idea that these people are somehow "broken" it makes a lot of sense.
But a person who is deaf is broken, objectively. They have a hearing impediment, a disability. And it's monstrous - an absolute barbarity, like the sexual abuse of a child - for a deaf person to deafen their child just so that it'll be "more like them."
If a soldier came back from Iraq missing a leg, there's no way as a culture we would sit still as he took a saw and mutilated his child - amputated a leg - to make his child "more like him." And I don't see a single bit of difference between a man disabled by the loss of a limb and a person disabled by the loss of their hearing. Why on Earth would we allow parents to mutilate their children - regardless of whether its by surgery or by knowingly transmitting genetic, congenital disabilities - just to make children "more like them?"
I mean, for fuck's sake, how far does "more like us" go? Is there nothing a parent should be allowed to inflict on their child to make them "more like them"?
So if I burn a cross on a black persons front lawn even though I am a black person and presumably I hate you, not your race, I deserve less punishment than a white person?
I don't see what your race has to do with it, so, no, you don't deserve less punishment. The harm is the same in both cases.
Does that mean you deserve no punishment?
If I burn a cross on your lawn, my punishment should be commensurate to the harm it caused you. If you don't care at all, it's not quite clear in your example how it becomes a matter for the police at all. If you don't care, why would I be arrested?
Are their gradations of hate?
Clearly there are graduations of harm, I mean, that's so obvious that I can't understand why you don't get that.
It might be wrong to hate, and we should bring down societal ire and shame on many kinds, but it is your right to do so.
Sure. Hate all you like. But there's no right to harm other people, and the basis of law and order in a society is that when people harm others, we punish them for it. The greater the harm, the greater degree of punishment.
As long as it is your right to hate, we shouldn't punish you for doing it just because you happen to commit a crime.
That's not what's being punished. What's being punished is that some acts are more harmful to some victims than to others, and the greater degree of harm mandates a stronger punishment.
I think the goal of the legal system (we don't have a justice system) is to try to minimize crime.
It's "Crime and Punishment", not "Crime and Education." The purpose of the justice system is justice, not education. Education is the purpose of the educational system (just to clear up your confusion, there.)
If the purpose of the justice system were to prevent crime, why not simply imprison all citizens in advance? That'd certainly reduce crimes. Or why doesn't every crime have the same punishment - execution? That would certainly deter crime, don't you think? Execution for every infraction?
So it's obvious that you're wrong. The purpose of a sentence is to punish someone for their own crimes, and the punishment is commensurate with the severity of the crime, where by "severity" we mean "how much harm was caused." And it would certainly be unfair and unconstitutional for someone to experience a harsher punishment not for anything that they did, but to deter unspecified other individuals from criminal acts. Deterrent is cruel and unusual, not to mention unfair.
Can I infer that you support the death penalty if you believe that "Criminals should be punished commensurate with the severity of the harm they've caused their victims."
No, you can't, because that's not what "commensurate" means. A dictionary might help you here. At any rate my views on the DP are hardly relevant to my argument, which is that more harmful crimes should have harsher sentences, a principle that clearly underpins the entire criminal justice system.
The crime of burning a cross on someones yard should be punished the same regardless of race, religion, sexuality, ect.
Why? Why should the same act receive the same punishment in all situations? That doesn't make any sense. Under your logic discharging a firearm should carry the same punishment regardless of whether or not the bullet flies harmlessly into the air or lodges in someone's chest, killing them.
That's not how our system works at all. We punish infractions of the law commensurate with the harm those actions caused, in that specific situation; and it's simply indisputable that an American black family and their community is going to be harmed a great deal more by a burning cross on their lawn than a white family with the same lawn and the same cross.
Your argument falls to pieces when proper comparisons are made. Is burning a cross on a black families lawn nastier than burning a cross on an Asian families lawn?
Yes, because of the harm it does to the victims. The black family - indeed, their whole community - is more harmed by the burning cross than the asian family would be (although I think the asian family might be pretty freaked, too.)
It doesn't have anything to do with the criminals thoughts, it has everything to do with the amount of harm his actions caused his victim. Not a generic victim, but his actual victim. The fact that a burning cross on a white family's law might not be as big a deal is irrelevant if it was a black family's lawn where he burned the cross.
Criminals should be punished commensurate with the harm their actions cause. The fact that you can imagine the same act causing less harm if some other victim were substituted isn't a defense. It's like defending yourself at a murder trial by saying "sure, I shot that guy in the face; but I shouldn't be punished for it because if the victim had been a midget, instead, the bullet would have passed harmlessly overhead. It's his fault for being so tall."
It doesn't make any sense. There's no provision in criminal law that I'm aware of for "affirmative defense by substitution of hypothetical victim who would have been harmed less by the same action."
Hate crime legislation is thought crime legislation.
No, it's not. It's the recognition that the harm caused by burning a cross on a black family's lawn (for instance) is a whole lot more harmful to the victims than, say, burning some garbage out back behind your neighbor's house.
Criminals should be punished commensurate with the severity of the harm they've caused their victims. Clearly that's an indisputable goal of the justice system. Things that fall under the level of "hate crime" represent acts that harm their victims far, far more than the basic act (just burning something on somebody else's property) might suggest.
Hate crime legislation doesn't have anything to do with thought. It has everything to do with action. It's the actions that are being punished commensurate with the harm they caused. Completely consistent with the aims of the justice system.
not like we get months off to have children or have the option of leaving our career for a few years, then going back, then leaving again, then going back as whimsy strikes us
Pfft. If only women had this option in most fields. The truth of the matter is that taking some time off to have children looks as bad on her resume as taking the same period of unemployment looks like on yours, children or not. And while your family is looked on as a positive quality by your employers - it connotes stability, maturity, reliability, and long-term commitment - the exact same family is a big mark against your partner to her potential employers, because it looks like divided loyalties and commitments that interfere with work.
If I'm bringing home most of the money, doing most of the earner-work and spending more of my life working
You must live in Saudi Arabia, or something, because here in the US the average family has two parents working full-time. And, no, your salary isn't a reflection of how much effort you put into your job. I mean, come the fuck on. In a situation where each partner puts in full-time hours, it's not unreasonable to expect an equitable division of domestic tasks, too.
This idea where men are "primary breadwinners" or whatever is delusional, unless you're somehow posting to Slashdot from 1950.
AND 50% of the domestic work?
It's your house too, isn't it? Maybe you had a long day at work. But the trash still needs to go out, and no, you don't deserve a medal for the herculean effort of walking it out to the cans.
It's a story about a Doctor who sacrifices every earthly possession to go rescue his sister.
Again, that story could have happened anywhere. When Whedon cribbed parts of it from The Painted Veil it happened in China. And it would have been a better story without the inclusion of distractingly lame elements like laser popguns that look like peacemakers, etc.
Look, you're a fanboy. I get it. A brownshirt- oops, excuse me, browncoat. It's not going to be possible for you to genuinely grapple with any criticism of the show because your head is too far up Joss Whedon's ass. But when you finally pull it out you'll find that there's been an awful lot of good story-telling on TV that didn't rely on a hackneyed premise and generic characters.
Should we go on? Book is Preacher with a Mysterious Past no. 410, River is Rogue Psychic Assassin escaped from Government Program no. 60, Zoe is Tough Sassy Black Woman no. 2304, Wash is Wiseass Sidekick no. 1,000,000, and Kaylee is Sheltered Engineer no. 230. (Oh, but at least Joss came up with one unique quality - she's easy! Sure, never seen a woman portrayed that way, no. Very progressive.)
Was there a single character on that fucking stupid show that wasn't the cheesiest, most direct rip-off of a character that was a thousand times better in its original source?
We could spend hours debating precisely what Joss ripped off to make Firefly. The conversation about what he actually came up with himself would be a pretty fucking short one.
Pchiw! Pchiw! You've never watched sci-fi TV? Yeah, I guess if that's true, you'd think "Firefly" was pretty good.
And I serious doubt that *you* knew River's back story by the second episode.
Bullshit. The second the character was introduced, I turned to my wife and said "I bet she's a trained assassin escaped from a shadowy government program, probably with psychic powers or something." Hand to God that's what I said.
And, hey, I was exactly right, because it was telegraphed from the get-go. If you didn't pick up on it you need to pay more attention when you watch TV.
Love is a timeless, universal theme. If Joss Whedon wanted to have a show about love, he could have set it in Los Angeles. If he wanted to tell a story about love than that's what he should have done, not obscured the story with bad choices that failed the genres he tried to draw upon.
Yeah, count me another one who never saw the series until the DVD, saw them in order, whatever. I found it hackneyed and corny. Space-guns that make laser sounds, but look exactly like period Western firearms? Every space hooker has a heart of gold, particularly if they work at the Heart of Gold in an episode called "Heart of Gold"? And what the hell was with that assassin dude in the last episode? ("Am I a lion"? What? I was as confused as the doctor guy. Who the hell wrote that shit?)
Space/western fusion could be cool, and is, but Whedon seemed to only combine the parts of space opera and westerns that were lame and didn't make any sense outside of their genre. And also - yes, we've all seen Gina Davis in "The Long Kiss Goodnight" and watched "Dark Angel." We know that crazy amnesiac chicks who escape from government facilities have always been trained as assassins. Was there anybody in the entire world who didn't guess everything about River's back story after the second episode? That person is an idiot, if so.
Hackneyed, predictable, cliched, generic. There was nothing about Firefly that ever deserved its praise, which is why it had one season and BSG's coming back for a fourth. Cowboy Bebop is still the best space western show out there.
Very good. We shouldn't even ask the question, because software engineers aren't smart enough to solve it. Are your colleagues aware what morons you seem to think they are?
it looks like dog shit compared to a modern FPS.
Except that it doesn't. It looks great, particularly compared to games that run on the same hardware, because the developers realized that more polygons isn't always the same as better looking. WoW looks ten times better than a game like Neverwinter Nights 2, despite NWN2's technological advancements; and I don't trigger the need to load a new module four times when I cross a city.
And it's because developers didn't simply blame made-up tech limitations, or a "need to segment the story"; they did what it took to create an immersive experience that works on a wide variety of hardware and doesn't take you out of the action for no good reason.
More polys doesn't mean the game looks better, and it would be better for the rest of us if devs worked harder on games that perform well and provide a fun game experience, rather than simply cramming more polys into a game engine that still won't run faster than 15 fps on midrange hardware.
No, it's a reasonable question. While it's true that not every story needs to happen in real-time - imagine how much different a movie Raiders of the Lost Ark would be if it was 2 days of Harrison Ford looking out the window of a train - that doesn't have anything to do with the game being divided into levels. That is, discreet game files that have to be loaded, individually, during gameplay.
Somehow I can fly from the top of one continent to the bottom in World of Warcraft without triggering a loading screen, but traveling to a different neighborhood in City of Heroes triggers 45 seconds of loading. WTF?
Sure, sometimes I need to be taken out of the action for justifiable story reasons, but is that what we're talking about here? Or are we talking about being taken out of the game because of technical shortcomings that, honestly, shouldn't be issues in 2007? There's every reason to question that in an age of PC's with 4 gig of memory.
In France i saw many business men in suits riding the bicycles around with their brief case on the back. Without the social stigma of riding a bike in Europe they can do it.
Is that why people generally smell worse in Europe? (I've been there, too.) Because they're riding bicycles around in sweaty woolen suits?
I'm all for biking, but I just can't see it being a solution for business commuters who can't change or shower when they get to work.
It is a difference in attitude, but there's advantages to both sides. Europeans save a fortune in gas money. Americans don't arrive at work smelling like a gym sock all day long.
It doesn't have anything to do with "priorities." It has everything to do with not throwing my money down rat holes for no reason at all.
You seem to think that there's something wrong with that. I still don't understand what you think I'm missing. There's one store that will sell me the part I need, and then there's another store, where I get exactly the same part, the same service, the same everything, only I pay double.
You seem to think paying extra for the same thing is completely reasonable. Can you explain how that works for you? And can I suggest that, if you're so willing to part with your money for no reason at all, you put some in an envelope and send it to me?
The people who still shop at those places are looking for what every other red-blooded American wants: CHEAP! Those people don't care about service, quality, reputation, where their money is going, etc.
Well, shit, buddy, how much "service" do you think I need to walk myself over to the part of the store where they keep what I want to buy, pick it up off the shelf, and walk it over to the cashier? The store doesn't have anything to do with the quality of the goods; the quality of the same manufacturer's same product is identical regardless of whether I pay one price at Best Buy or $50 more at Joe Q. Lil' Computer Shop. And I assure you that the money that both businesses make goes to the exact same things - stocking inventory, paying rent and utilities, paying employees.
If anything Joe Q's smaller margins (from smaller sales volume) means that they're even less likely to cut me a break in a "weird" return situation. They just don't have the freedom to do so. Service? Reputation? Those things gain me nothing, certainly nothing worth the 30-100 dollar difference between BB and Joe's on the same components. I'd love to support local businesses, and all that, but if they don't offer anything worthwhile to justify the higher price, why should I support their failing business model?
However, offering it as an added fee gives the appearance of lower prices, which, if you're trying to stay competitive, is important. Removing meals from planes is the same thing.
It seems relevant to point out that prices didn't seem to go down any when the airlines started these practices, but rather, the same dollar amount (even adjusted for inflation) seems to buy less and less service on the airplane.
Slashdot Mirror
People in positions of authority, or with public profiles of some sort, learn early on (especially if they've been raised to expect it) that they need to lead two lives: that things they write, say, and record are part of a public persona, and that they have to consider the impact of them at all times.
Sure, and that would be justified if this was a case of that, but it's not. The kid wasn't even expelled because of anything on his profile. He was expelled because an ad that Facebook displayed with his profile, without the kid's knowledge or permission, had the word "shoot" in it, because it was an ad for a photography website, and some supercilious paperpushing pissant saw a tenuous excuse to discredit, slander, and expel a student who had drawn attention to his financial malfeasance.
If it hadn't been Facebook, it would have been something else. This was about people in power bullying the powerless to avoid oversight of their actions. They would have made something up either way.
It doesn't have anything to do with self-expression or pictures of pot smoking on Facebook. It has everything to do with asshole bureaucrats manufacturing fictitious "threats" to discredit obstacles to power.
One does have trouble imagining how organs like the eye developed through mutation.
Nobody has trouble imagining how a less-effective eye (say, with no focusing lens) is more effective than no eye at all. One does have trouble imagining why God would create the human eye with the retina pointing backwards, into the skull.
Some think we came from pigs, some thing we came from primordial ooze through another mammal.
No scientist thinks we came from pigs. There's absolutely no scientific doubt that human beings are members of the primate order.
It's that one specific take on it dominates High School science classes and is taught as though concensus exists on it even though it does not.
But there is a consensus. The greatest fraud of the ID/creationism movement is to assert that there's no scientific consensus on evolution. That's simply not true - the consensus is there and is universal. There's some dispute at low-levels about who's precisely related to what when the genetic information, the stratiography, and the taxonomic cladistics don't quite match up - as they occasionally don't - but the consensus is there.
People do have a problem with Evolution trying to take on speciation though.
People who don't understand it have a problem. That's the fault of the abysmal teaching of biology in high school, which honestly is the best biology most people ever get. People who actually sit down and try to understand evolution understand easily how random mutation and natural selection create new species when subpopulations are separated, genetically, from their parent populations. Speciation is a population-level change in organization. It's not something that happens to individuals.
In fact that's true of all evolution. It's a population-level phenomenon.
Or maybe species started out very similar to what they are now and only changed a little over all that time.
That, at least, is a testable idea. As it turns out we have a dated record of the physical bodies of a lot of different organisms over Earth's history - the fossil record. And we can compare your idea to that fossil record and see that species have changed dramatically over the course of history.
And the bradblog is a reliable source of hard information?
Bradblog is simply relaying what Chris Matthews is reporting on MSNBC. What's your evidence that the exit polling actually was accurate?
The exit polls did not match the results.
The exit polls were made to match - "corrected" - with the results of the vote. Because of the untestable, ever-present assumption in the US that any discrepancy between exit polls and the election results represent bad polling.
If there's any argument for the legitimacy of these results that doesn't depend on simply assuming that our elections are always accurate, I haven't seen it. So who's the gullible idiot, again?
Yes, but in this case, the exit polls matched the final results.
Apparently it didn't.
Obama genuinely did better than Clinton in the smaller, more rural towns where votes were hand-counted.
That makes sense to you? That it was the voters in rural, more conservative towns that primarily broke for the black candidate? At the same time that you're proposing that:
There is the issue that voters will say they're willing to vote for an African-American candidate, but once in the voting booth, find that they actually can't.
But that doesn't make any sense either. Why would Bradley-affected voters only succumb when faced with an optical-scan ballot? After all the hand-counted ballots went to Obama, nearly precisely in the proportions the polling said it would. You're suggesting a kind of Bradley effect that only affects people with optical scan ballots, which doesn't make any sense.
Again, when exit polls don't match the results, there's a problem.
They didn't, though. The exit polls - until they were "corrected" to match the actual vote "results" - showed the same Obama lead that everybody saw going in. The same lead that Obama held on the essentially-unhackable paper vote. The same lead that completely disappeared when the optical scan ballots were tabulated by computer.
When you assume that any discrepancy between the polling and the vote is simply the result of bad polling, that's an unsupportable assumption. I don't understand how many Diebold machines have to be shown to be hacked with a flash drive and a paper clip (or whatever) before people stop simply assuming that their elections are operating according to plan. At this point, what evidence is there that the vote was legitimate?
The exit polls were as accurate as usual.
That doesn't seem to be the case.
To suggest that a person wouldn't want their child to be like them would seem to be a deeper prejudice to me. Deaf parents are requesting deaf children after all. Once you remove the idea that these people are somehow "broken" it makes a lot of sense.
But a person who is deaf is broken, objectively. They have a hearing impediment, a disability. And it's monstrous - an absolute barbarity, like the sexual abuse of a child - for a deaf person to deafen their child just so that it'll be "more like them."
If a soldier came back from Iraq missing a leg, there's no way as a culture we would sit still as he took a saw and mutilated his child - amputated a leg - to make his child "more like him." And I don't see a single bit of difference between a man disabled by the loss of a limb and a person disabled by the loss of their hearing. Why on Earth would we allow parents to mutilate their children - regardless of whether its by surgery or by knowingly transmitting genetic, congenital disabilities - just to make children "more like them?"
I mean, for fuck's sake, how far does "more like us" go? Is there nothing a parent should be allowed to inflict on their child to make them "more like them"?
So if I burn a cross on a black persons front lawn even though I am a black person and presumably I hate you, not your race, I deserve less punishment than a white person?
I don't see what your race has to do with it, so, no, you don't deserve less punishment. The harm is the same in both cases.
Does that mean you deserve no punishment?
If I burn a cross on your lawn, my punishment should be commensurate to the harm it caused you. If you don't care at all, it's not quite clear in your example how it becomes a matter for the police at all. If you don't care, why would I be arrested?
Are their gradations of hate?
Clearly there are graduations of harm, I mean, that's so obvious that I can't understand why you don't get that.
It might be wrong to hate, and we should bring down societal ire and shame on many kinds, but it is your right to do so.
Sure. Hate all you like. But there's no right to harm other people, and the basis of law and order in a society is that when people harm others, we punish them for it. The greater the harm, the greater degree of punishment.
As long as it is your right to hate, we shouldn't punish you for doing it just because you happen to commit a crime.
That's not what's being punished. What's being punished is that some acts are more harmful to some victims than to others, and the greater degree of harm mandates a stronger punishment.
I think the goal of the legal system (we don't have a justice system) is to try to minimize crime.
It's "Crime and Punishment", not "Crime and Education." The purpose of the justice system is justice, not education. Education is the purpose of the educational system (just to clear up your confusion, there.)
If the purpose of the justice system were to prevent crime, why not simply imprison all citizens in advance? That'd certainly reduce crimes. Or why doesn't every crime have the same punishment - execution? That would certainly deter crime, don't you think? Execution for every infraction?
So it's obvious that you're wrong. The purpose of a sentence is to punish someone for their own crimes, and the punishment is commensurate with the severity of the crime, where by "severity" we mean "how much harm was caused." And it would certainly be unfair and unconstitutional for someone to experience a harsher punishment not for anything that they did, but to deter unspecified other individuals from criminal acts. Deterrent is cruel and unusual, not to mention unfair.
Can I infer that you support the death penalty if you believe that "Criminals should be punished commensurate with the severity of the harm they've caused their victims."
No, you can't, because that's not what "commensurate" means. A dictionary might help you here. At any rate my views on the DP are hardly relevant to my argument, which is that more harmful crimes should have harsher sentences, a principle that clearly underpins the entire criminal justice system.
The crime of burning a cross on someones yard should be punished the same regardless of race, religion, sexuality, ect.
Why? Why should the same act receive the same punishment in all situations? That doesn't make any sense. Under your logic discharging a firearm should carry the same punishment regardless of whether or not the bullet flies harmlessly into the air or lodges in someone's chest, killing them.
That's not how our system works at all. We punish infractions of the law commensurate with the harm those actions caused, in that specific situation; and it's simply indisputable that an American black family and their community is going to be harmed a great deal more by a burning cross on their lawn than a white family with the same lawn and the same cross.
Burning a giant cross and burning garbage are two separate things.
Not at the rate I go through disposable giant crosses, actually.
Your argument falls to pieces when proper comparisons are made. Is burning a cross on a black families lawn nastier than burning a cross on an Asian families lawn?
Yes, because of the harm it does to the victims. The black family - indeed, their whole community - is more harmed by the burning cross than the asian family would be (although I think the asian family might be pretty freaked, too.)
It doesn't have anything to do with the criminals thoughts, it has everything to do with the amount of harm his actions caused his victim. Not a generic victim, but his actual victim. The fact that a burning cross on a white family's law might not be as big a deal is irrelevant if it was a black family's lawn where he burned the cross.
Criminals should be punished commensurate with the harm their actions cause. The fact that you can imagine the same act causing less harm if some other victim were substituted isn't a defense. It's like defending yourself at a murder trial by saying "sure, I shot that guy in the face; but I shouldn't be punished for it because if the victim had been a midget, instead, the bullet would have passed harmlessly overhead. It's his fault for being so tall."
It doesn't make any sense. There's no provision in criminal law that I'm aware of for "affirmative defense by substitution of hypothetical victim who would have been harmed less by the same action."
Hate crime legislation is thought crime legislation.
No, it's not. It's the recognition that the harm caused by burning a cross on a black family's lawn (for instance) is a whole lot more harmful to the victims than, say, burning some garbage out back behind your neighbor's house.
Criminals should be punished commensurate with the severity of the harm they've caused their victims. Clearly that's an indisputable goal of the justice system. Things that fall under the level of "hate crime" represent acts that harm their victims far, far more than the basic act (just burning something on somebody else's property) might suggest.
Hate crime legislation doesn't have anything to do with thought. It has everything to do with action. It's the actions that are being punished commensurate with the harm they caused. Completely consistent with the aims of the justice system.
not like we get months off to have children or have the option of leaving our career for a few years, then going back, then leaving again, then going back as whimsy strikes us
Pfft. If only women had this option in most fields. The truth of the matter is that taking some time off to have children looks as bad on her resume as taking the same period of unemployment looks like on yours, children or not. And while your family is looked on as a positive quality by your employers - it connotes stability, maturity, reliability, and long-term commitment - the exact same family is a big mark against your partner to her potential employers, because it looks like divided loyalties and commitments that interfere with work.
If I'm bringing home most of the money, doing most of the earner-work and spending more of my life working
You must live in Saudi Arabia, or something, because here in the US the average family has two parents working full-time. And, no, your salary isn't a reflection of how much effort you put into your job. I mean, come the fuck on. In a situation where each partner puts in full-time hours, it's not unreasonable to expect an equitable division of domestic tasks, too.
This idea where men are "primary breadwinners" or whatever is delusional, unless you're somehow posting to Slashdot from 1950.
AND 50% of the domestic work?
It's your house too, isn't it? Maybe you had a long day at work. But the trash still needs to go out, and no, you don't deserve a medal for the herculean effort of walking it out to the cans.
Therefore evolution has been irrelevant as a factor of survival since humans learned to use tools.
Hi, I'd like to introduce your second-grade understanding of evolution to a little friend I like to call "sexual selection."
Oh, you thought human beings mated at random? How cute.
It's a story about a Doctor who sacrifices every earthly possession to go rescue his sister.
Again, that story could have happened anywhere. When Whedon cribbed parts of it from The Painted Veil it happened in China. And it would have been a better story without the inclusion of distractingly lame elements like laser popguns that look like peacemakers, etc.
Look, you're a fanboy. I get it. A brownshirt- oops, excuse me, browncoat. It's not going to be possible for you to genuinely grapple with any criticism of the show because your head is too far up Joss Whedon's ass. But when you finally pull it out you'll find that there's been an awful lot of good story-telling on TV that didn't rely on a hackneyed premise and generic characters.
Who's Mal a copy of?
Generic Hardass Space Captain no. 225.
How about Inara?
Hooker w/ Heart of Gold no 3256.
Bebop doesn't have Jayne
Unintentionally Humorous Thug no. 123.
Should we go on? Book is Preacher with a Mysterious Past no. 410, River is Rogue Psychic Assassin escaped from Government Program no. 60, Zoe is Tough Sassy Black Woman no. 2304, Wash is Wiseass Sidekick no. 1,000,000, and Kaylee is Sheltered Engineer no. 230. (Oh, but at least Joss came up with one unique quality - she's easy! Sure, never seen a woman portrayed that way, no. Very progressive.)
Was there a single character on that fucking stupid show that wasn't the cheesiest, most direct rip-off of a character that was a thousand times better in its original source?
We could spend hours debating precisely what Joss ripped off to make Firefly. The conversation about what he actually came up with himself would be a pretty fucking short one.
What the hell is a "laser sound"?
Pchiw! Pchiw! You've never watched sci-fi TV? Yeah, I guess if that's true, you'd think "Firefly" was pretty good.
And I serious doubt that *you* knew River's back story by the second episode.
Bullshit. The second the character was introduced, I turned to my wife and said "I bet she's a trained assassin escaped from a shadowy government program, probably with psychic powers or something." Hand to God that's what I said.
And, hey, I was exactly right, because it was telegraphed from the get-go. If you didn't pick up on it you need to pay more attention when you watch TV.
Firefly is about Love.
Love is a timeless, universal theme. If Joss Whedon wanted to have a show about love, he could have set it in Los Angeles. If he wanted to tell a story about love than that's what he should have done, not obscured the story with bad choices that failed the genres he tried to draw upon.
Yeah, count me another one who never saw the series until the DVD, saw them in order, whatever. I found it hackneyed and corny. Space-guns that make laser sounds, but look exactly like period Western firearms? Every space hooker has a heart of gold, particularly if they work at the Heart of Gold in an episode called "Heart of Gold"? And what the hell was with that assassin dude in the last episode? ("Am I a lion"? What? I was as confused as the doctor guy. Who the hell wrote that shit?)
Space/western fusion could be cool, and is, but Whedon seemed to only combine the parts of space opera and westerns that were lame and didn't make any sense outside of their genre. And also - yes, we've all seen Gina Davis in "The Long Kiss Goodnight" and watched "Dark Angel." We know that crazy amnesiac chicks who escape from government facilities have always been trained as assassins. Was there anybody in the entire world who didn't guess everything about River's back story after the second episode? That person is an idiot, if so.
Hackneyed, predictable, cliched, generic. There was nothing about Firefly that ever deserved its praise, which is why it had one season and BSG's coming back for a fourth. Cowboy Bebop is still the best space western show out there.
Very good. We shouldn't even ask the question, because software engineers aren't smart enough to solve it. Are your colleagues aware what morons you seem to think they are?
it looks like dog shit compared to a modern FPS.
Except that it doesn't. It looks great, particularly compared to games that run on the same hardware, because the developers realized that more polygons isn't always the same as better looking. WoW looks ten times better than a game like Neverwinter Nights 2, despite NWN2's technological advancements; and I don't trigger the need to load a new module four times when I cross a city.
And it's because developers didn't simply blame made-up tech limitations, or a "need to segment the story"; they did what it took to create an immersive experience that works on a wide variety of hardware and doesn't take you out of the action for no good reason.
More polys doesn't mean the game looks better, and it would be better for the rest of us if devs worked harder on games that perform well and provide a fun game experience, rather than simply cramming more polys into a game engine that still won't run faster than 15 fps on midrange hardware.
Sheesh what a douchebag.
No, it's a reasonable question. While it's true that not every story needs to happen in real-time - imagine how much different a movie Raiders of the Lost Ark would be if it was 2 days of Harrison Ford looking out the window of a train - that doesn't have anything to do with the game being divided into levels. That is, discreet game files that have to be loaded, individually, during gameplay.
Somehow I can fly from the top of one continent to the bottom in World of Warcraft without triggering a loading screen, but traveling to a different neighborhood in City of Heroes triggers 45 seconds of loading. WTF?
Sure, sometimes I need to be taken out of the action for justifiable story reasons, but is that what we're talking about here? Or are we talking about being taken out of the game because of technical shortcomings that, honestly, shouldn't be issues in 2007? There's every reason to question that in an age of PC's with 4 gig of memory.
In France i saw many business men in suits riding the bicycles around with their brief case on the back. Without the social stigma of riding a bike in Europe they can do it.
Is that why people generally smell worse in Europe? (I've been there, too.) Because they're riding bicycles around in sweaty woolen suits?
I'm all for biking, but I just can't see it being a solution for business commuters who can't change or shower when they get to work.
It is a difference in attitude, but there's advantages to both sides. Europeans save a fortune in gas money. Americans don't arrive at work smelling like a gym sock all day long.
I can see where your priorities lie.
It doesn't have anything to do with "priorities." It has everything to do with not throwing my money down rat holes for no reason at all.
You seem to think that there's something wrong with that. I still don't understand what you think I'm missing. There's one store that will sell me the part I need, and then there's another store, where I get exactly the same part, the same service, the same everything, only I pay double.
You seem to think paying extra for the same thing is completely reasonable. Can you explain how that works for you? And can I suggest that, if you're so willing to part with your money for no reason at all, you put some in an envelope and send it to me?
The people who still shop at those places are looking for what every other red-blooded American wants: CHEAP! Those people don't care about service, quality, reputation, where their money is going, etc.
Well, shit, buddy, how much "service" do you think I need to walk myself over to the part of the store where they keep what I want to buy, pick it up off the shelf, and walk it over to the cashier? The store doesn't have anything to do with the quality of the goods; the quality of the same manufacturer's same product is identical regardless of whether I pay one price at Best Buy or $50 more at Joe Q. Lil' Computer Shop. And I assure you that the money that both businesses make goes to the exact same things - stocking inventory, paying rent and utilities, paying employees.
If anything Joe Q's smaller margins (from smaller sales volume) means that they're even less likely to cut me a break in a "weird" return situation. They just don't have the freedom to do so. Service? Reputation? Those things gain me nothing, certainly nothing worth the 30-100 dollar difference between BB and Joe's on the same components. I'd love to support local businesses, and all that, but if they don't offer anything worthwhile to justify the higher price, why should I support their failing business model?
However, offering it as an added fee gives the appearance of lower prices, which, if you're trying to stay competitive, is important. Removing meals from planes is the same thing.
It seems relevant to point out that prices didn't seem to go down any when the airlines started these practices, but rather, the same dollar amount (even adjusted for inflation) seems to buy less and less service on the airplane.