As I see it, if you don't like it, work to change it. Until it's changed, however, it is still a law.
I used to feel that way. But as I've grown older, I've increasingly realised that bad laws are only changed because they are repeatedly violated; without that pressure the law will remain cheerily on the books. The history of, say, squatter's rights gives some examples.
If you believe the police in the United States are "the local gestapo" who simply "pistol whip" people on a whim, it's probably past time for your medication.
If you believe there are no police in the US who are "the local gestapo", then it's long past time you took a good look at your country. Try googling "Arpaio".
When you're a victim of a violent or prejudiced cop, knowing "hey, 85% of cops wouldn't have done that" is no help whatsoever. And it's much worse with immigration authorities, who often have effective license to detain arbitrarily without trial, crime or access to a lawyer. US citizen or not.
It's more complicated than that. Remember, the EU takes it's orders (in principle, at least) from the MEPs we elect. Frequently when the government objects to 'the EU' telling us what to do, they mean "Thank god our party managed to get this useful but unpopular policy passed in Europe, where we can get all the benefits but blame other countries when the voters ask."
See also: US handling of ACTA. (Oh no, we're not passing any stupid laws without involving the actual legislators. It's those foreigners. It's just a trade treaty.)
This, exactly. The stupidity and tyranny of the majority is at least direct; you can fix it by working to educate the majority. The tyranny of the clique is much harder to break.
The minaret ban is perfectly okay - it's a democratic decision to set a sign against a fascist ideology disguised as religion.
No, it's not. It's typical tyranny-of-moral-panic prejudice. By 'set a sign' you mean, of course, 'posture and draw lines in the sand'. Sometimes it's depressing how much democratic politics resembles 14-year-old-school-bullies.
It will not prevent Islam from spreading further through Europe and erode our basic values of freedom.
So now you don't even have freedom of architecture. Bad guys can't destroy our basic values, lukas84, because they were never part of the community that subscribed to them. Only we can destroy our 'basic values of freedom'. (Personally? "Don't hate religions, don't hate people, hate the actions you hate" is my basic value. Neither immigrants, criminals or fascists can destroy that, and nor can you, though you've declared an intent to.)
In general, solving nasty social problems - like honour killings - is more complicated than 'intensely dislike a religion until it goes away'. The first requires hard work, but can actually be achieved. The second is pointless, ineffectual and usually aggravates the problem you're trying to solve.
In Europe, the situation is different. The muslim immigrants here are uneducated and would kill their daughter if she had sex with a non-muslim (happens almost every week in Europe). Up until the Minaret vote, political correctness forbade from speaking about honor killings - luckily, this has now changed.
No, nothing 'forbade' speaking about honor killings. Unless moral cowardice counts as 'forbidding' now.
But I'm not an expert on violence against women. So I found one, and asked "what are the things we could be doing to reduce domestic murders of women in immigrant communities?" Guess what? "Ban turreted buildings" and "scream about the evils of Islam" weren't on the list.
No, that's evil. Brilliantly, entertainingly evil, but evil. There's not much ambiguity there.
A morally ambiguous version: if it was clear in advance that neither Alistair nor Loghain has the leadership skills to stop the darkspawn, so the easiest way to save life was to seize power for yourself.
An even better morally ambiguous version: if Loghain did have the skill and sense to rally the army and stop the blight, and was the only one who did. Then the player would have to consider betraying their allies and letting the Redcliff forces be executed as traitors, in order to have a unified kingdom to resist the darkspawn. (The least coherent part of the game plot is Loghain's claim that there's no blight. This is done in order to give the player motive and means to stop him, of course, but it's blatantly ridiculous. Newly crowned usurpers or dictators love having a clear threat that demands the kingdom rally under their military leadership immediately, and here he's got a real one to work with!)
Dragon Age's story isn't great; if they were going to ditch the whole AD&D/Forgotten Realms setting that was at the heart of the Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights games, then I would have hoped that they would actually do something a bit more... well... different with it. Compared to... say... Mass Effect, it felt very much like they were playing it safe and sticking to a well-trodden path with Dragon Age. If that's what they're doing, then a part of me would actually have preferred to have a more familiar Forgotten Realms setting (not least because of the potential for Miniature Giant Space Hamsters). If, on the other hand, they were trying to produce a genuinely different "dark" fantasy story, then I'm sorry, but The Witcher got there first and did it better.
Everything parent said. Mass Effect does the style of star wars, but uses every bit of the freedom they gained from leaving KotOR behind, both in mechanics and in the universe, to do bigger and cooler stuff that Lucas would never touch.
With DA Bioware put a lot of effort into getting away from D&D, in order to produce... a stat/skill/feat based fantasy RPG system. I love DA, but there's nothing in it that wouldn't have worked fine in D&D rules. And DA has some genuinely interesting good/evil/nice/harsh character choices, but there's none of the Witcher's moral ambiguity. (The closest approach I can think of is Jowan in the Mage intro... a genuine moral choice there, but it doesn't actually change the outcome.) DA may be dark, but it always know who its good guys are.
Force wins. Then it is transferred. Then the transferred force wins. So, force is still winning, isn't it? Only the person wielding it has changed. This is consistent with the idea that force wins. Not just in the short term, but always.
That's what I get for over-simplifying to forum-comment length; impossible not to introduce obvious weak spots in any argument. Short form: Sorry, not so - mutual losses by multiple different parties do not constitute a win, for anyone. But you're right that the argument I presented is flawed; that's because I oversimplified it. A not-ridiculously-oversimplified version of the argument requires some actual facts, several pages of reasoning, and some sources. I didn't feel like doing that much typing.
In the movie too, force won. The human army was routed by force. This may be unexpected, but that does not mean force does not win.
True, but irrelevant, as Cameron-land != life. Pity, as it would only have taken a couple of easy additions to give the movie actual plot, moral dilemmas and hence convincing characters, as well as pretty beasties and elves.
Fun movie though. Look, pretty beasties! With elves!
(Would be nice to live in movie-land, as might really would make right; by movie-rules it actually is so. Also, cars would explode when shot, torture would actually produce intel because torturers would have magic lie-detection powers (as long as they were white), I'd be guaranteed to resolve all of my issues with dying relatives before they went, and it would only rain when I was already miserable anyway. But women would be incapable of having conversations that weren't entirely about men, so on the whole I think I prefer living in this universe. Hmmm... must run an RPG set in movie-land sometime.)
If you do not obey the laws, what will happen to you?
Usually nothing. Most citizens of most modern societies break some laws routinely, frequently through ignorance. Ask any cop; if he follows you around for a couple of hours, he can find something to arrest you for. Lawmaking being pretty inefficient, much law is badly written and widely ignored in both directions.
But you could rightly call that evasive nitpicking on my part; you meant "government power over individual citizens is backed by overwhelming force." This is completely true... and does not refute my point. A government possesses stability and security precisely to the extent that they do not use this power. Laws are either made with the consent of the governed... or they demand increasing escalation of enforcement. This only works until you've escalated so far that the force undermines the structures that you're using to deliver force with... at which point the country usually collapses.
(Zimbabwe's a pretty good near-worst-possible-case example.)
Short form: The government does not have the power to escalate indefinitely... because indefinite escalation tends towards destroying the society that the government is part of. Governments that survive do so in part because they know this, and limit their use of force to well below this point.
This is a statistical process, not an absolute one. Large and important results can be achieved by force, and injustice based on massive use of force can and does exist. But the trend is away: the more a law depends on force to execute it, the less popular it is, the greater the pressure away.
(My government has the ability to escalate any dispute with me until I am in prison or dead. But it doesn't have the ability to escalate a dispute with the population as a whole until the entire population is in prison or dead.)
Authoritarian states, backed entirely by use of force, are less stable and, ultimately, less successful. Force is the short-termm solution; long term it loses out.
Nonsense. Force wins out in the short term, always. Force loses miserably in the long term, always. Force-based systems are unstable as hell, because force is easily transferred.
Consider this: Every significant war of the twentieth century - I'm reserving judgement on the twenty-first, too soon to tell - was started by the side that then lost. Peaceful revolutions had a poor but decidedly non-zero success rate. (Yes, this is a gross oversimplification, I know. But it's not a meritless point.)
Consider this also: The gross long-term trend in human-on-human violence is down, and has been so for centuries, at the least. Yes, that's an extreme macro trend, and local exceptions are abundant. But it is a trend.
To be fair to Obama, his acceptance speech made it pretty clear he knows that the prize is a political gift for not-being-Bush; he openly admitted that he hadn't earned it himself and the committee was just trying to lend its weight to a future of please-God-anything-but-another-Bush-ever-again.
I'm having trouble with my opinion on this. On the one hand, it does kinda devalue the prize. On the other hand, the Peace prize has frequently been used to make political statements; this isn't new. And I can sort of see the committee's point. Not-being-Bush is pretty praiseworthy in itself, in the cesspit of current US politics.
True, but social behaviour can - and does - change over time. It is, demonstrably, useful to fight for less-unjust patterns of behaviour - if you've identified one. Is life fair? Obviously not. Can it be made less-unfair, with effort? Yes.
Yes, but Acadia's an IMF. Full crew complement's about 1600 - big enough to be a flexible community in her own right.
Relevant, but hardly a comparable problem.
Why can't you just use exclamation points? All-caps may be yelling... for idiots. English already has a convention for that. Besides, it would be more effective if you expressed it more artfully through your writing, rather than resorting the the cheapest possible method.
And there's the point. Nobody on/. is on Allen's side, syousef; you're preaching to the converted. Loudly, and badly. If we want to win, at some point we need to convince people who don't already agree with us.
Why is copyright law so bad? Because 99% of people don't know anything about it, and don't give a fuck. These are the people we need to win over, and it can't be done by yelling. I don't need to mud-wrestle Allen to beat her... and the more people do, the more it hurts our case. This is a media war, and the bad guys own the media... so why give them free boxes of ammo?
Sorry all; tired today. Code monkey not preview so good.
When we speak like this, people caring caring how right...
That's 'people stop caring', of course.
Which has been completely wasted in favour of people helling cheap insults on her blog.
yelling. Although, now I'd like this to be a verb. "To send [person] to hell, by the magical application of the proper insults on their blog, and invocation of the rituals of the BoingBoing criticism."
How on earth did this get modded interesting? It's not even an A-grade insulting rant.
When we speak like this, people caring caring how right our argument is. You are yelling disgusting abuse at a woman you've never even met and about whom you know nothing. (Celebrity headlines do not constitute knowledge.) If we want sane copyright law, if we want to win this, then step one is making the case.
Allen's hypocritical rant was an opportunity to air our arguments. Which has been completely wasted in favour of people helling cheap insults on her blog. Let's make this clear: I don't care how stupid Allen is being. I care about winning the argument, getting better copyright laws, and fighting this 3-strikes bullshit.
(She's ignorant of the issues. So educate her.)
So: big media gets a major, free win, which for once they deserve - we handed it to them on a silver platter. Right now, in media perception, 'opponents of Lily Allen's idiotic opinion' == 'bunch of rude screaming foul-mouthed teenagers yelling insults'.
Getting better copyright law in future will need the support of musicians. Many are already onside; you won't convince the others by calling them stupid or greedy, much less calling them 'human trash'. Insulting the enemy is inflating our egos... at the expense of actually accomplishing anything.
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Modding up to promote yelling at people you don't like doesn't make it wise, but does make you look foolish.
Sadly, JosKarith is right. Thanks to Blair's long-standing default position on Anglo-American relations ("Would you like your shoes shined more, Mr. Bush?), the US can demand extradition of UK citizens, even on charges that are not crimes in the UK.
The US hasn't ratified the extradition treaty because, apparently, even Congress isn't that dumb.
In Science we try to communicate in the most precise and least ambiguous manner possible. Journalists don't have a reputation for that.
Journalists certainly don't, but to be fair, Singh does.
Most science journalism is bad because it is disastrously sensationalist (MMR vaccine), or far too gullible (most articles on alternative medicine), or both. Libel law cannot prevent either of these, as gullibly accepting claims that something is effective does not lead to libel suits. The journalism debunking nonsense, however, is easily threatened.
"The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments."
It doesn't seem like that big a leap to go from "[BCA] happily promotes bogus treatments" to "chiropractors as a group are intentionally deceitful"
It seems to me to be a huge leap. It is precisely the leap from 'Tynam is blatantly completely wrong about this' to 'Tynam is deliberately lying about this'. Nowhere in the article does Singh claim that the BCA knows the treatments are bogus; indeed, his objection is precisely that they don't know, and ought to.
What if he wrote what I substitute here in bold?
"The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, but they have not provided verifiable proof for any of these claims. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes scientifically unfounded treatments."
Then in all probability it would have made no difference. The judgement made against Singh doesn't have much to do with the dictionary definition of 'bogus', and he pretty my ignored all text submissions made by either party on the subject; it seems unlikely that paraphrasing in a more clinical way would have avoided the judgement. Indeed, it ignores the following paragraph in Singh's article, it which it is made clear that by 'bogus' he means exactly what you (correctly) assume he meant above.
Paraphrasing certainly wouldn't have avoided the lawsuit itself.
My point is that the cost of defending the suit is ruinous even if Singh wins. Critical science journalism is silenced by fear-of-lawsuit; the merits and flaws of this specific case are almost irrelevant. To be blunt: people like Singh and Goldacre are only able to perform journalism on medical issues at all because they have financial resources available, and have acted fearlessly in the face of large, unearned risks.
The current state of British libel law is such that only a rich person, or one with a large organisation's resources backing him, dare even try to write an article critical of poor (but profitable) pseudoscience.
...the law hasn't been described well enough.
That may well be. I don't see a link to the law, so I don't know how to verify this directly. Bad laws are written all the time, and this is probably one of them. But the complaints I've seen so far don't really sound hostile to scientific journalism.
British libel law is hostile to pretty much everybody; the damage it does to science journalism is simply an egregrious example.
Sadly I haven't found a good summary of our libel law online anwhere; just fluffy newspaper summaries of little evidential value. However, Google Books lets you preview the International Libel and Privacy Handbook; the Engl
The law as described here sounds very much on the side of good science.
Unfortunately, that just means the law hasn't been described well enough.
British libel law is abominably poor, and entirely on the side of the plaintiff. For a start, it's easy and cheap to bring a case, but ridiculously expensive - cost often two full orders of magnitude greater than the European average - to defend it. And the judge can easily hammer you with ridiculous interpretations of the original statement, which you're then required to accept. (For example, Singh has been required to prove a claim obviously incapable of proof - that chiropractors as a group are intentionally deceitful, not just wrong. It's certainly not what he intended to claim!)
This is disastrous for science journalism - because any attempt to debunk the pseudoscientific nonsense of fools, homeopaths, scientologists, scam artists or outright crooks is subject to immediate censorship-by-libel-law. (Even if it occurs elsewhere - London courts are notoriously willing to accept jurisdiction over libel cases that have no connection to the UK whatsoever.)
So... intercourse is not required for european sex?! Ridiculous.
Possibly ridiculous, but definitely true. I offer an easy proof-by-experiment: go down on, say, a French girl, then ask her whether you've had sex.
There is foreplay, and there is sex. These acts may happen within proximity to each other, but a person having an orgasm in a room by themselves is not having sex, that much is clear.
Yep, clearly. But that's not the discussion. A person having an orgasm in a room with somebody else, in one of their orifices, is clearly having sex regardless of which hole they use.
On the other hand, this european standard may explain why american girls have had this reputation for being easy... they thought they were merely being friendly when all the while, unbeknownst to them, they were being euro-raped.
Hmmm... this almost makes a bizarre sense. An American girl can, apparently, have anal sex while blowing another man, and then tell herself there wasn't any sex. Anal is the new heavy petting.
Huh.
This entire discussion is getting silly, even by my generous standards, so I'll finish on that thought.
Yes, it's been known to happen. Mostly in infertility clinics.;)
For those who missed it: Europeans don't think you have to have babies to be having sex. We find these two situations easy to distinguish. Hint: It's also still sex if you're using a condom.
I agree there's a significant difference here. But I don't think it's impossible to unseat ebay, just very difficult... because ebay is deteriorating to the point where it's, effectively, no longer an auction site for casual users, who they're actively discouraging.
The more ebay becomes a store front, the more the network size no longer provides it with a lock-in.
Slashdot Mirror
As I see it, if you don't like it, work to change it. Until it's changed, however, it is still a law.
I used to feel that way. But as I've grown older, I've increasingly realised that bad laws are only changed because they are repeatedly violated; without that pressure the law will remain cheerily on the books. The history of, say, squatter's rights gives some examples.
Seconded. GP is wrong, not by any stretch a troll.
If you believe the police in the United States are "the local gestapo" who simply "pistol whip" people on a whim, it's probably past time for your medication.
If you believe there are no police in the US who are "the local gestapo", then it's long past time you took a good look at your country. Try googling "Arpaio". When you're a victim of a violent or prejudiced cop, knowing "hey, 85% of cops wouldn't have done that" is no help whatsoever. And it's much worse with immigration authorities, who often have effective license to detain arbitrarily without trial, crime or access to a lawyer. US citizen or not.
See also: US handling of ACTA. (Oh no, we're not passing any stupid laws without involving the actual legislators. It's those foreigners. It's just a trade treaty.)
This, exactly. The stupidity and tyranny of the majority is at least direct; you can fix it by working to educate the majority. The tyranny of the clique is much harder to break.
The minaret ban is perfectly okay - it's a democratic decision to set a sign against a fascist ideology disguised as religion.
No, it's not. It's typical tyranny-of-moral-panic prejudice. By 'set a sign' you mean, of course, 'posture and draw lines in the sand'. Sometimes it's depressing how much democratic politics resembles 14-year-old-school-bullies.
It will not prevent Islam from spreading further through Europe and erode our basic values of freedom.
So now you don't even have freedom of architecture. Bad guys can't destroy our basic values, lukas84, because they were never part of the community that subscribed to them. Only we can destroy our 'basic values of freedom'. (Personally? "Don't hate religions, don't hate people, hate the actions you hate" is my basic value. Neither immigrants, criminals or fascists can destroy that, and nor can you, though you've declared an intent to.)
In general, solving nasty social problems - like honour killings - is more complicated than 'intensely dislike a religion until it goes away'. The first requires hard work, but can actually be achieved. The second is pointless, ineffectual and usually aggravates the problem you're trying to solve.
In Europe, the situation is different. The muslim immigrants here are uneducated and would kill their daughter if she had sex with a non-muslim (happens almost every week in Europe). Up until the Minaret vote, political correctness forbade from speaking about honor killings - luckily, this has now changed.
No, nothing 'forbade' speaking about honor killings. Unless moral cowardice counts as 'forbidding' now.
But I'm not an expert on violence against women. So I found one, and asked "what are the things we could be doing to reduce domestic murders of women in immigrant communities?" Guess what? "Ban turreted buildings" and "scream about the evils of Islam" weren't on the list.
Still arguably better than the tyranny of the lobbyist we have in the UK. (And much more so in the US.)
A morally ambiguous version: if it was clear in advance that neither Alistair nor Loghain has the leadership skills to stop the darkspawn, so the easiest way to save life was to seize power for yourself.
An even better morally ambiguous version: if Loghain did have the skill and sense to rally the army and stop the blight, and was the only one who did. Then the player would have to consider betraying their allies and letting the Redcliff forces be executed as traitors, in order to have a unified kingdom to resist the darkspawn. (The least coherent part of the game plot is Loghain's claim that there's no blight. This is done in order to give the player motive and means to stop him, of course, but it's blatantly ridiculous. Newly crowned usurpers or dictators love having a clear threat that demands the kingdom rally under their military leadership immediately, and here he's got a real one to work with!)
Dragon Age's story isn't great; if they were going to ditch the whole AD&D/Forgotten Realms setting that was at the heart of the Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights games, then I would have hoped that they would actually do something a bit more... well... different with it. Compared to... say... Mass Effect, it felt very much like they were playing it safe and sticking to a well-trodden path with Dragon Age. If that's what they're doing, then a part of me would actually have preferred to have a more familiar Forgotten Realms setting (not least because of the potential for Miniature Giant Space Hamsters). If, on the other hand, they were trying to produce a genuinely different "dark" fantasy story, then I'm sorry, but The Witcher got there first and did it better.
Everything parent said. Mass Effect does the style of star wars, but uses every bit of the freedom they gained from leaving KotOR behind, both in mechanics and in the universe, to do bigger and cooler stuff that Lucas would never touch.
With DA Bioware put a lot of effort into getting away from D&D, in order to produce... a stat/skill/feat based fantasy RPG system. I love DA, but there's nothing in it that wouldn't have worked fine in D&D rules. And DA has some genuinely interesting good/evil/nice/harsh character choices, but there's none of the Witcher's moral ambiguity. (The closest approach I can think of is Jowan in the Mage intro... a genuine moral choice there, but it doesn't actually change the outcome.) DA may be dark, but it always know who its good guys are.
Force wins. Then it is transferred. Then the transferred force wins. So, force is still winning, isn't it? Only the person wielding it has changed. This is consistent with the idea that force wins. Not just in the short term, but always.
That's what I get for over-simplifying to forum-comment length; impossible not to introduce obvious weak spots in any argument. Short form: Sorry, not so - mutual losses by multiple different parties do not constitute a win, for anyone. But you're right that the argument I presented is flawed; that's because I oversimplified it. A not-ridiculously-oversimplified version of the argument requires some actual facts, several pages of reasoning, and some sources. I didn't feel like doing that much typing.
In the movie too, force won. The human army was routed by force. This may be unexpected, but that does not mean force does not win.
True, but irrelevant, as Cameron-land != life. Pity, as it would only have taken a couple of easy additions to give the movie actual plot, moral dilemmas and hence convincing characters, as well as pretty beasties and elves. Fun movie though. Look, pretty beasties! With elves!
(Would be nice to live in movie-land, as might really would make right; by movie-rules it actually is so. Also, cars would explode when shot, torture would actually produce intel because torturers would have magic lie-detection powers (as long as they were white), I'd be guaranteed to resolve all of my issues with dying relatives before they went, and it would only rain when I was already miserable anyway. But women would be incapable of having conversations that weren't entirely about men, so on the whole I think I prefer living in this universe. Hmmm... must run an RPG set in movie-land sometime.)
If you do not obey the laws, what will happen to you?
Usually nothing. Most citizens of most modern societies break some laws routinely, frequently through ignorance. Ask any cop; if he follows you around for a couple of hours, he can find something to arrest you for. Lawmaking being pretty inefficient, much law is badly written and widely ignored in both directions.
But you could rightly call that evasive nitpicking on my part; you meant "government power over individual citizens is backed by overwhelming force." This is completely true... and does not refute my point. A government possesses stability and security precisely to the extent that they do not use this power. Laws are either made with the consent of the governed... or they demand increasing escalation of enforcement. This only works until you've escalated so far that the force undermines the structures that you're using to deliver force with... at which point the country usually collapses. (Zimbabwe's a pretty good near-worst-possible-case example.)
Short form: The government does not have the power to escalate indefinitely... because indefinite escalation tends towards destroying the society that the government is part of. Governments that survive do so in part because they know this, and limit their use of force to well below this point.
This is a statistical process, not an absolute one. Large and important results can be achieved by force, and injustice based on massive use of force can and does exist. But the trend is away: the more a law depends on force to execute it, the less popular it is, the greater the pressure away.
(My government has the ability to escalate any dispute with me until I am in prison or dead. But it doesn't have the ability to escalate a dispute with the population as a whole until the entire population is in prison or dead.)
Authoritarian states, backed entirely by use of force, are less stable and, ultimately, less successful. Force is the short-termm solution; long term it loses out.
Which does not, of course, differentiate it from most movies.
Consider this: Every significant war of the twentieth century - I'm reserving judgement on the twenty-first, too soon to tell - was started by the side that then lost. Peaceful revolutions had a poor but decidedly non-zero success rate. (Yes, this is a gross oversimplification, I know. But it's not a meritless point.)
Consider this also: The gross long-term trend in human-on-human violence is down, and has been so for centuries, at the least. Yes, that's an extreme macro trend, and local exceptions are abundant. But it is a trend.
I'm having trouble with my opinion on this. On the one hand, it does kinda devalue the prize. On the other hand, the Peace prize has frequently been used to make political statements; this isn't new. And I can sort of see the committee's point. Not-being-Bush is pretty praiseworthy in itself, in the cesspit of current US politics.
True, but social behaviour can - and does - change over time. It is, demonstrably, useful to fight for less-unjust patterns of behaviour - if you've identified one. Is life fair? Obviously not. Can it be made less-unfair, with effort? Yes.
Yes, but Acadia's an IMF. Full crew complement's about 1600 - big enough to be a flexible community in her own right. Relevant, but hardly a comparable problem.
Why can't you just use exclamation points? All-caps may be yelling... for idiots. English already has a convention for that. Besides, it would be more effective if you expressed it more artfully through your writing, rather than resorting the the cheapest possible method.
And there's the point. Nobody on /. is on Allen's side, syousef; you're preaching to the converted. Loudly, and badly. If we want to win, at some point we need to convince people who don't already agree with us.
Why is copyright law so bad? Because 99% of people don't know anything about it, and don't give a fuck. These are the people we need to win over, and it can't be done by yelling. I don't need to mud-wrestle Allen to beat her... and the more people do, the more it hurts our case. This is a media war, and the bad guys own the media... so why give them free boxes of ammo?
When we speak like this, people caring caring how right...
That's 'people stop caring', of course.
Which has been completely wasted in favour of people helling cheap insults on her blog.
yelling. Although, now I'd like this to be a verb. "To send [person] to hell, by the magical application of the proper insults on their blog, and invocation of the rituals of the BoingBoing criticism."
When we speak like this, people caring caring how right our argument is. You are yelling disgusting abuse at a woman you've never even met and about whom you know nothing. (Celebrity headlines do not constitute knowledge.) If we want sane copyright law, if we want to win this, then step one is making the case.
Allen's hypocritical rant was an opportunity to air our arguments. Which has been completely wasted in favour of people helling cheap insults on her blog. Let's make this clear: I don't care how stupid Allen is being. I care about winning the argument, getting better copyright laws, and fighting this 3-strikes bullshit. (She's ignorant of the issues. So educate her.)
So: big media gets a major, free win, which for once they deserve - we handed it to them on a silver platter. Right now, in media perception, 'opponents of Lily Allen's idiotic opinion' == 'bunch of rude screaming foul-mouthed teenagers yelling insults'.
Getting better copyright law in future will need the support of musicians. Many are already onside; you won't convince the others by calling them stupid or greedy, much less calling them 'human trash'. Insulting the enemy is inflating our egos... at the expense of actually accomplishing anything. - Modding up to promote yelling at people you don't like doesn't make it wise, but does make you look foolish.
The US hasn't ratified the extradition treaty because, apparently, even Congress isn't that dumb.
It's certainly not what he intended to claim!
In Science we try to communicate in the most precise and least ambiguous manner possible. Journalists don't have a reputation for that.
Journalists certainly don't, but to be fair, Singh does.
Most science journalism is bad because it is disastrously sensationalist (MMR vaccine), or far too gullible (most articles on alternative medicine), or both. Libel law cannot prevent either of these, as gullibly accepting claims that something is effective does not lead to libel suits. The journalism debunking nonsense, however, is easily threatened.
"The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments."
It doesn't seem like that big a leap to go from "[BCA] happily promotes bogus treatments" to "chiropractors as a group are intentionally deceitful"
It seems to me to be a huge leap. It is precisely the leap from 'Tynam is blatantly completely wrong about this' to 'Tynam is deliberately lying about this'. Nowhere in the article does Singh claim that the BCA knows the treatments are bogus; indeed, his objection is precisely that they don't know, and ought to.
What if he wrote what I substitute here in bold?
"The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, but they have not provided verifiable proof for any of these claims. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes scientifically unfounded treatments."
Then in all probability it would have made no difference. The judgement made against Singh doesn't have much to do with the dictionary definition of 'bogus', and he pretty my ignored all text submissions made by either party on the subject; it seems unlikely that paraphrasing in a more clinical way would have avoided the judgement. Indeed, it ignores the following paragraph in Singh's article, it which it is made clear that by 'bogus' he means exactly what you (correctly) assume he meant above.
Paraphrasing certainly wouldn't have avoided the lawsuit itself.
My point is that the cost of defending the suit is ruinous even if Singh wins. Critical science journalism is silenced by fear-of-lawsuit; the merits and flaws of this specific case are almost irrelevant. To be blunt: people like Singh and Goldacre are only able to perform journalism on medical issues at all because they have financial resources available, and have acted fearlessly in the face of large, unearned risks.
The current state of British libel law is such that only a rich person, or one with a large organisation's resources backing him, dare even try to write an article critical of poor (but profitable) pseudoscience.
...the law hasn't been described well enough.
That may well be. I don't see a link to the law, so I don't know how to verify this directly. Bad laws are written all the time, and this is probably one of them. But the complaints I've seen so far don't really sound hostile to scientific journalism.
British libel law is hostile to pretty much everybody; the damage it does to science journalism is simply an egregrious example.
Sadly I haven't found a good summary of our libel law online anwhere; just fluffy newspaper summaries of little evidential value. However, Google Books lets you preview the International Libel and Privacy Handbook; the Engl
The law as described here sounds very much on the side of good science.
Unfortunately, that just means the law hasn't been described well enough.
British libel law is abominably poor, and entirely on the side of the plaintiff. For a start, it's easy and cheap to bring a case, but ridiculously expensive - cost often two full orders of magnitude greater than the European average - to defend it. And the judge can easily hammer you with ridiculous interpretations of the original statement, which you're then required to accept. (For example, Singh has been required to prove a claim obviously incapable of proof - that chiropractors as a group are intentionally deceitful, not just wrong. It's certainly not what he intended to claim!)
This is disastrous for science journalism - because any attempt to debunk the pseudoscientific nonsense of fools, homeopaths, scientologists, scam artists or outright crooks is subject to immediate censorship-by-libel-law. (Even if it occurs elsewhere - London courts are notoriously willing to accept jurisdiction over libel cases that have no connection to the UK whatsoever.)
So... intercourse is not required for european sex?! Ridiculous.
Possibly ridiculous, but definitely true. I offer an easy proof-by-experiment: go down on, say, a French girl, then ask her whether you've had sex.
There is foreplay, and there is sex. These acts may happen within proximity to each other, but a person having an orgasm in a room by themselves is not having sex, that much is clear.
Yep, clearly. But that's not the discussion. A person having an orgasm in a room with somebody else, in one of their orifices, is clearly having sex regardless of which hole they use.
On the other hand, this european standard may explain why american girls have had this reputation for being easy... they thought they were merely being friendly when all the while, unbeknownst to them, they were being euro-raped.
Hmmm... this almost makes a bizarre sense. An American girl can, apparently, have anal sex while blowing another man, and then tell herself there wasn't any sex. Anal is the new heavy petting.
Huh.
This entire discussion is getting silly, even by my generous standards, so I'll finish on that thought.
For those who missed it: Europeans don't think you have to have babies to be having sex. We find these two situations easy to distinguish. Hint: It's also still sex if you're using a condom.
The more ebay becomes a store front, the more the network size no longer provides it with a lock-in.