I'll give that guy his due - he did some digging and came up with some more meaningful answers than I have read. But - burglary and auto theft are "violent" offenses? I'm afraid that he missed the point. Violence is often dished out for little or no reason, other than the desire to hurt someone. Unless the domicile is actually occupied during a burglary, then burglary isn't a violent crime. Likewise with an auto theft - it would only count as a violent crime if the car were taken at gunpoint - or knifepoint, or at least while in possession of a dangerous blunt instrument.
On this, however, he and I agree: "In sum, it becomes clear that an objective comparison between any two countries types of offenses is a difficult and time consuming endeavour. In order for it to be done properly, matching definitions need to be found, and umbrella terms that group large numbers of what one country may class as offenses and the other not, must be avoided. Statistics must be broken down to their bare bones and compared accurately and objectively if any meaningful parallels are to be found. I hope that above,"
So - my own summary would have to be something like this: Seems like a lot of people who are full of feces have been spreading half-truths, and I believed some of them. I'm not real sure what to think about our comparative crime rates. But, I am real sure of the contents of this PDF, if you care to read it:
I offer half an apology. This IS an international forum, so I should probably have gone to the effort to define my terms. I used those terms as they apply to US politics today. Democrats have more or less taken ownership of the terms liberal and progressive, and republicans apply the term socialist to the democrats.
I do realize that the political spectrum is much, MUCH larger and diverse than US politics, but my comments are directed at Americans more than toward the world.
Your failure is that you are not recognizing that the people who collect statistics manipulate the definitions of the numbers they collect. Not every nation includes suicide with their murder rates. And, we are back to my original post - YOU MUST PAY CAREFUL ATTENTION TO THE SOURCE OF THOSE NUMBERS AS WELL AS THE METHODS BEING USED TO MANIPULATE THOSE NUMBERS.
Naturally, you probably didn't notice AC's response. Remember the Bundy ranch? A relatively small number of people did make the government back down.
The other AC's response paints Bundy as a "welfare mooch" - but if you dig deeper into the issue, you may very well conclude that the real welfare mooches were trying to shut Bundy down for their own profit.
You are somewhat correct. Swiss laws are rather complex, but when you get down to the bottom line - Switzerland has near universal conscription, and all conscripts are required to maintain their weapons, in their own homes. Much like Israel. So, the fact is, the Swiss are armed.
Misplace a box of ammo, and you're in deep doo-doo there, but you DO HAVE THE WEAPON! In a dire emergency, you can defend yourself, or the old lady next door, or the church congregation down the street.
When you start comparing crime rates, violent crime rates, gun deaths, or any other socially important data, you really need to pay careful attention to terminology. It matters little that the UK may experience only 1% of our gun deaths, if they also experience 800% of our violent crime rate. After you are mutilated or dead, is it really going to matter to you that you were killed with a gun, or a knife, or a stone, or you were choked to death? Violent crime is violent crime.
Given the choice, I think I'd rather be shot to death, than bludgeoned to death. The suffering is likely to end much, much sooner.
BOTTOM LINE: liberals, progressives, and socialists always want to disarm the public. But, disarming the public never makes the public any safer. It only makes it safer for GOVERNMENT TO OPPRESS THE PEOPLE!!
Ask any number of infamous people, starting with Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Mao tse Tung.
I like how you're thinking. I'm trying to remember a story - I've read so damned many - there was a planet, could have even been Mars, where they kept the public away because they found God's thumbprint on it. Kinda crazy that I can't even remember the title or author, but the idea has come back to me from time to time. Anyway, yeah, in theory God is experimenting with a zillion other life forms on a whole bunch of other planets, and it would be presumptuous of us to go out and meddle with his other stuff. Or - - - maybe it wouldn't be presumptuous, either. Maybe THAT IS the experiment, to see which one of the experiments gets off whichever stupid rock it was first developed on!
Actually - religion seems to me to be more of an anchor to earth, than a reason to go off planet. Your religious nuts are more likely to argue, "If God wanted us in space, he would have PUT US IN SPACE!"
As for getting out act together - I'm sure that will impress the next big rock scheduled to strike the earth. "Hey, those humans have gotten their act together! Maybe I'll just nudge myself into a near miss orbit, instead of obliterating life on earth!"
So, tell us, which religion do you subscribe to? Sounds a bit like humanism. Basically, you believe that if we can all just get along, then everything will work out for the best, right?
Screw that, Pal. Bad things happen to good people. Most religions admit that much - yours seems to be pretty screwed up.
" I know the story in the Lord of the Rings pretty well, but I doubt you'd find many people to claim it was a real history."
Apostasy. Unfortunately, you find it everywhere, these days. Fortunately for the unbelievers, we believers don't demand that they lose their heads for their unbelief. We just let the wizards deal with them!
"successful theories give useful and correct predictions. Religion does not."
Actually, you should study some metaphysics. A number of religions have made some pretty amazing predictions, that eventually came about. What's the term here - uhhhh - "self fulfilling prediction"?
Question: Is there, or is there not, a nation of Israel today?: Is Zionism a real thing, or not?
Unless you are a church member, you probably have little idea of the impact of one of those self fulfilling prophecies when they DO finally come true.
If the theory of evolution is accurate at all, then yes, there HAVE been transitions from one kind of animal to another. Monkeys, apes, and humans, are supposed to have a "common ancestor" after all. That ancestor was almost certainly "ape-like", but he wasn't an ape, or a monkey, or a human. Yes, of course he's in the same family as all of us, but he was something else, or rather, WE are all something else. Reach back far enough, and someone has to explain where the hell the first mammal came from, after all. Was he hatched from an egg? What KIND of egg?
Mmmm. Gotta argue with that. I mean, it almost sounds reasonable, but I'm not sure that you are saying exactly what you meant to say.
"The" explanation, would actually be "proven beyond any possible doubt". Such proof, of course, would require a time machine, and a LOT of observation and recordings from eons past.
The fact that some "consensus" has been reached, or that no one has a reasonable argument against an explanation doesn't make it "the" explanation.
And, wouldn't it be funny as hell, if we DID send a time machine back, and as it drifted further and further back, we gathered shitloads of evidence that evolution really is real - BUT, there was also an entity at the beginning that started it all off? Then, EVERYONE would all be embarrassed! Yep, evolution is real, alright, but I've not given up on intelligent design, either.
"No matter how far we travel, I expect a lot of cultural baggage will come with us, and a lot of our irrational behavior is hard-wired into our brains."
Futuristic combat story tellers would agree with you. You might try David Drake. His own story is interesting, and his Hammer's Slammers stories were written as a sort of rehabilitation. There are a lot of Slammer's stories - you might like to start with Redliners.
In the history of mankind, I've only heard stories of a couple of people who didn't die. In fact, most people die horrible deaths. That fact won't change, no matter how far mankind travels - or doesn't travel. If we manage to cure cancer, and all mankind's other ills, that will be great. But, I don't believe that we ever will. Even if we cured the five most lethal diseases that we know of today, there will be something new to worry about tomorrow. We have been waging biological warfare against nature since the earliest ancestor crawled out of that primordial soup, and nature will continue that war until the last man and woman have died.
There is no utopian solution to poverty, hunger, and disease. I simply don't believe in such a solution. The past hundred years or so have been remarkable victories for mankind, but there is simply no reason to suspect that we will see no setbacks. Polio has been defeated, mumps, measles, and others have been set back seriously, but we are breeding new superkiller bugs in our hospitals and medical centers right now. Oh - the flu. It mutates and changes rapidly - we could experience another 1918 at any time. What was the number? 21 million dead, around the world, I believe? With our population levels today, the next time around could see those numbers increased by a couple orders of magnitude.
Life is precarious. If you are a Russian, I would suspect that you are more aware of that fact than I should be.
Your view, and mine, are diametrically opposed. To me, there can be nothing more important than getting mankind established in places off the face of the earth. We have plenty of evidence of big rocks striking the earth in the past, and we have plenty of evidence of major extinction events. Throughout all of our history, we have kept all of our eggs in one basket. We need to distribute our eggs into as many baskets as we possibly can.
There are reasons to dislike Russia's government - but this is one great reason to salute and respect Russia's government. I support any and every effort that can possibly result in distributing those eggs.
First we had an omnipotent Bush who took blame for things that happened long before he became president. Now, we have a super-omnipotent Obama.
Obama was a young punk, still wet behind the ears, when the United States decided to scrap all it's moon and deeper space capabilities in favor of a dumb ass space plane concept. A shuttle was a pretty cool idea - as a means to an end. The shuttles should have been there to service the REAL exploration efforts. But, instead, the shuttle program became an end, in and of itself, and the larger programs were simply ignored, and filed in the circular file.
If Russians have the will to go to the moon, then they are miles ahead of us. The American people, and especially the American politicians, lack the will.
Perhaps you would like to debate the ultimate weapon now?
Okay - you think Google is evil. I'm less happy with Google than I was in years past, but I'm still willing to argue that assessment.
Which entity would you choose to replace Google today? You may choose any government, corporate, or nonprofit entity you wish. Look around, and choose carefully. You may pick that entity, you may strip Google of all it's resources, and hand those resources over to that entity. Which one is going to do better than Google? If you should bother to post back with a reply, PLEASE offer some rationale for your decision. And - be prepared to have your decision torn apart.
At this point in time, I honestly believe that Google is still pretty damned good, and that they have a ways to go before you can call them "evil". I am also pretty damned sure that I don't want the federal government or any of it's agencies running Google's assets. I can't think of any company that could do a better job, and certainly none that would. Nonprofits? Maybe if the EFF were interested . . . Let's not EVEN consider any religious organizations, whether it be my favorite, or yours.
"I don't want to "weaken government", I want to weaken the federal government."
In theory, I agree with you. The feds have gotten far to fat and powerful, in all aspects. Transportation, communication, education, commerce, intelligence, first amendment and second amendment rights, every thing.
Got any ideas, though? Let's set aside any utopian views. Let's pretty much ignore how things "should have been". Right now, today, in the real world, how do we go about limiting any aspect of government control in our lives? Can it be done? What will it take to effect any change, how can governmental control be weakened?
A lot of people are beginning to believe that it will take a revolution of some sort. Witness events near Las Vegas in recent weeks. https://www.google.com/search?...
Now, please, pass that word on to the rest of Silly Con Valley. You might nudge Google when you pass that word on. Few of us give a small goddamn about some coder's preferred perversions - just shut up and code!
First, we heard that Ubuntu was going to push a Metro-like desktop. Then, almost immediately afterward, we heard that Gnome was going to push a Metro-like desktop. All across the *nix world, there were protests that rapidly grew into revolutions against the concept, but neither Ubuntu nor Gnome could be dissuaded.
I feel a bit bad that Gnome is in financial straits today. But, there is no real depth to my sympathy. I'm managing quite well on this Mate desktop. Had Mate not come along, I would probably be bouncing back and forth between XFCE and E17. Or, more likely, I would have finally settled on an E17 configuration that I liked. There are SO MANY variables and decisions to make when configuring E, whereas Mate and most other desktops just offer a well rounded "default" when they are installed.
Oh - you were talking about respect. Gnome should be an object lesson for other projects. Don't just abandon or try to bully your dedicated fan base. Don't insult their intelligence. Respect your users, or your users will abandon you in turn.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll give that guy his due - he did some digging and came up with some more meaningful answers than I have read. But - burglary and auto theft are "violent" offenses? I'm afraid that he missed the point. Violence is often dished out for little or no reason, other than the desire to hurt someone. Unless the domicile is actually occupied during a burglary, then burglary isn't a violent crime. Likewise with an auto theft - it would only count as a violent crime if the car were taken at gunpoint - or knifepoint, or at least while in possession of a dangerous blunt instrument.
On this, however, he and I agree:
"In sum, it becomes clear that an objective comparison between any two countries types of offenses is a difficult and time consuming endeavour. In order for it to be done properly, matching definitions need to be found, and umbrella terms that group large numbers of what one country may class as offenses and the other not, must be avoided. Statistics must be broken down to their bare bones and compared accurately and objectively if any meaningful parallels are to be found. I hope that above,"
So - my own summary would have to be something like this: Seems like a lot of people who are full of feces have been spreading half-truths, and I believed some of them. I'm not real sure what to think about our comparative crime rates. But, I am real sure of the contents of this PDF, if you care to read it:
http://www.law.harvard.edu/stu...
I offer half an apology. This IS an international forum, so I should probably have gone to the effort to define my terms. I used those terms as they apply to US politics today. Democrats have more or less taken ownership of the terms liberal and progressive, and republicans apply the term socialist to the democrats.
I do realize that the political spectrum is much, MUCH larger and diverse than US politics, but my comments are directed at Americans more than toward the world.
Your failure is that you are not recognizing that the people who collect statistics manipulate the definitions of the numbers they collect. Not every nation includes suicide with their murder rates. And, we are back to my original post - YOU MUST PAY CAREFUL ATTENTION TO THE SOURCE OF THOSE NUMBERS AS WELL AS THE METHODS BEING USED TO MANIPULATE THOSE NUMBERS.
www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf
Naturally, you probably didn't notice AC's response. Remember the Bundy ranch? A relatively small number of people did make the government back down.
The other AC's response paints Bundy as a "welfare mooch" - but if you dig deeper into the issue, you may very well conclude that the real welfare mooches were trying to shut Bundy down for their own profit.
You are somewhat correct. Swiss laws are rather complex, but when you get down to the bottom line - Switzerland has near universal conscription, and all conscripts are required to maintain their weapons, in their own homes. Much like Israel. So, the fact is, the Swiss are armed.
Misplace a box of ammo, and you're in deep doo-doo there, but you DO HAVE THE WEAPON! In a dire emergency, you can defend yourself, or the old lady next door, or the church congregation down the street.
www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf
http://www.politifact.com/trut...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
When you start comparing crime rates, violent crime rates, gun deaths, or any other socially important data, you really need to pay careful attention to terminology. It matters little that the UK may experience only 1% of our gun deaths, if they also experience 800% of our violent crime rate. After you are mutilated or dead, is it really going to matter to you that you were killed with a gun, or a knife, or a stone, or you were choked to death? Violent crime is violent crime.
Given the choice, I think I'd rather be shot to death, than bludgeoned to death. The suffering is likely to end much, much sooner.
BOTTOM LINE: liberals, progressives, and socialists always want to disarm the public. But, disarming the public never makes the public any safer. It only makes it safer for GOVERNMENT TO OPPRESS THE PEOPLE!!
Ask any number of infamous people, starting with Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Mao tse Tung.
I like how you're thinking. I'm trying to remember a story - I've read so damned many - there was a planet, could have even been Mars, where they kept the public away because they found God's thumbprint on it. Kinda crazy that I can't even remember the title or author, but the idea has come back to me from time to time. Anyway, yeah, in theory God is experimenting with a zillion other life forms on a whole bunch of other planets, and it would be presumptuous of us to go out and meddle with his other stuff. Or - - - maybe it wouldn't be presumptuous, either. Maybe THAT IS the experiment, to see which one of the experiments gets off whichever stupid rock it was first developed on!
Actually - religion seems to me to be more of an anchor to earth, than a reason to go off planet. Your religious nuts are more likely to argue, "If God wanted us in space, he would have PUT US IN SPACE!"
As for getting out act together - I'm sure that will impress the next big rock scheduled to strike the earth. "Hey, those humans have gotten their act together! Maybe I'll just nudge myself into a near miss orbit, instead of obliterating life on earth!"
So, tell us, which religion do you subscribe to? Sounds a bit like humanism. Basically, you believe that if we can all just get along, then everything will work out for the best, right?
Screw that, Pal. Bad things happen to good people. Most religions admit that much - yours seems to be pretty screwed up.
" I know the story in the Lord of the Rings pretty well, but I doubt you'd find many people to claim it was a real history."
Apostasy. Unfortunately, you find it everywhere, these days. Fortunately for the unbelievers, we believers don't demand that they lose their heads for their unbelief. We just let the wizards deal with them!
"successful theories give useful and correct predictions. Religion does not."
Actually, you should study some metaphysics. A number of religions have made some pretty amazing predictions, that eventually came about. What's the term here - uhhhh - "self fulfilling prediction"?
Question: Is there, or is there not, a nation of Israel today?: Is Zionism a real thing, or not?
Unless you are a church member, you probably have little idea of the impact of one of those self fulfilling prophecies when they DO finally come true.
If the theory of evolution is accurate at all, then yes, there HAVE been transitions from one kind of animal to another. Monkeys, apes, and humans, are supposed to have a "common ancestor" after all. That ancestor was almost certainly "ape-like", but he wasn't an ape, or a monkey, or a human. Yes, of course he's in the same family as all of us, but he was something else, or rather, WE are all something else. Reach back far enough, and someone has to explain where the hell the first mammal came from, after all. Was he hatched from an egg? What KIND of egg?
Mmmm. Gotta argue with that. I mean, it almost sounds reasonable, but I'm not sure that you are saying exactly what you meant to say.
"The" explanation, would actually be "proven beyond any possible doubt". Such proof, of course, would require a time machine, and a LOT of observation and recordings from eons past.
The fact that some "consensus" has been reached, or that no one has a reasonable argument against an explanation doesn't make it "the" explanation.
And, wouldn't it be funny as hell, if we DID send a time machine back, and as it drifted further and further back, we gathered shitloads of evidence that evolution really is real - BUT, there was also an entity at the beginning that started it all off? Then, EVERYONE would all be embarrassed! Yep, evolution is real, alright, but I've not given up on intelligent design, either.
"No matter how far we travel, I expect a lot of cultural baggage will come with us, and a lot of our irrational behavior is hard-wired into our brains."
Futuristic combat story tellers would agree with you. You might try David Drake. His own story is interesting, and his Hammer's Slammers stories were written as a sort of rehabilitation. There are a lot of Slammer's stories - you might like to start with Redliners.
http://david-drake.com/tag/red...
Agreed.
In the history of mankind, I've only heard stories of a couple of people who didn't die. In fact, most people die horrible deaths. That fact won't change, no matter how far mankind travels - or doesn't travel. If we manage to cure cancer, and all mankind's other ills, that will be great. But, I don't believe that we ever will. Even if we cured the five most lethal diseases that we know of today, there will be something new to worry about tomorrow. We have been waging biological warfare against nature since the earliest ancestor crawled out of that primordial soup, and nature will continue that war until the last man and woman have died.
There is no utopian solution to poverty, hunger, and disease. I simply don't believe in such a solution. The past hundred years or so have been remarkable victories for mankind, but there is simply no reason to suspect that we will see no setbacks. Polio has been defeated, mumps, measles, and others have been set back seriously, but we are breeding new superkiller bugs in our hospitals and medical centers right now. Oh - the flu. It mutates and changes rapidly - we could experience another 1918 at any time. What was the number? 21 million dead, around the world, I believe? With our population levels today, the next time around could see those numbers increased by a couple orders of magnitude.
Life is precarious. If you are a Russian, I would suspect that you are more aware of that fact than I should be.
Your view, and mine, are diametrically opposed. To me, there can be nothing more important than getting mankind established in places off the face of the earth. We have plenty of evidence of big rocks striking the earth in the past, and we have plenty of evidence of major extinction events. Throughout all of our history, we have kept all of our eggs in one basket. We need to distribute our eggs into as many baskets as we possibly can.
There are reasons to dislike Russia's government - but this is one great reason to salute and respect Russia's government. I support any and every effort that can possibly result in distributing those eggs.
First we had an omnipotent Bush who took blame for things that happened long before he became president. Now, we have a super-omnipotent Obama.
Obama was a young punk, still wet behind the ears, when the United States decided to scrap all it's moon and deeper space capabilities in favor of a dumb ass space plane concept. A shuttle was a pretty cool idea - as a means to an end. The shuttles should have been there to service the REAL exploration efforts. But, instead, the shuttle program became an end, in and of itself, and the larger programs were simply ignored, and filed in the circular file.
If Russians have the will to go to the moon, then they are miles ahead of us. The American people, and especially the American politicians, lack the will.
Perhaps you would like to debate the ultimate weapon now?
"Bribery and deceit are fairly ineffective at effecting long-term policies."
Do the railroads in the United States still possess the land that they stole for pennies on the hundreds of dollars when the iron horse was proposed?
Okay - you think Google is evil. I'm less happy with Google than I was in years past, but I'm still willing to argue that assessment.
Which entity would you choose to replace Google today? You may choose any government, corporate, or nonprofit entity you wish. Look around, and choose carefully. You may pick that entity, you may strip Google of all it's resources, and hand those resources over to that entity. Which one is going to do better than Google? If you should bother to post back with a reply, PLEASE offer some rationale for your decision. And - be prepared to have your decision torn apart.
At this point in time, I honestly believe that Google is still pretty damned good, and that they have a ways to go before you can call them "evil". I am also pretty damned sure that I don't want the federal government or any of it's agencies running Google's assets. I can't think of any company that could do a better job, and certainly none that would. Nonprofits? Maybe if the EFF were interested . . . Let's not EVEN consider any religious organizations, whether it be my favorite, or yours.
"I don't want to "weaken government", I want to weaken the federal government."
In theory, I agree with you. The feds have gotten far to fat and powerful, in all aspects. Transportation, communication, education, commerce, intelligence, first amendment and second amendment rights, every thing.
Got any ideas, though? Let's set aside any utopian views. Let's pretty much ignore how things "should have been". Right now, today, in the real world, how do we go about limiting any aspect of government control in our lives? Can it be done? What will it take to effect any change, how can governmental control be weakened?
A lot of people are beginning to believe that it will take a revolution of some sort. Witness events near Las Vegas in recent weeks. https://www.google.com/search?...
Now, please, pass that word on to the rest of Silly Con Valley. You might nudge Google when you pass that word on. Few of us give a small goddamn about some coder's preferred perversions - just shut up and code!
You're new here, aren't you?
No, Slashcode isn't going to boot Anonymous Coward out of these discussions.
Respect is, after all, a two-way street.
First, we heard that Ubuntu was going to push a Metro-like desktop. Then, almost immediately afterward, we heard that Gnome was going to push a Metro-like desktop. All across the *nix world, there were protests that rapidly grew into revolutions against the concept, but neither Ubuntu nor Gnome could be dissuaded.
I feel a bit bad that Gnome is in financial straits today. But, there is no real depth to my sympathy. I'm managing quite well on this Mate desktop. Had Mate not come along, I would probably be bouncing back and forth between XFCE and E17. Or, more likely, I would have finally settled on an E17 configuration that I liked. There are SO MANY variables and decisions to make when configuring E, whereas Mate and most other desktops just offer a well rounded "default" when they are installed.
Oh - you were talking about respect. Gnome should be an object lesson for other projects. Don't just abandon or try to bully your dedicated fan base. Don't insult their intelligence. Respect your users, or your users will abandon you in turn.