Thanks for that clarification, I agree with you completely. I'd like things to be different to, and I regard any number of laws as unfair and unjust. I just don't make any claims that I have some moral right to have things my way:)
Try to put things in terms of "This is why this course of action would benefit you, personally," rather than "I have a moral right to so and so," and you will get a lot more people agreeing with you.
There is no land in the US that does not come with the stipulation, "All stipulations still adhere to the land even if you sell it." So no one has the moral right to sell you land without the stipulations on it, because they agreed to those stipulations when they bought the land, obviously, or they wouldn't have bought it.
So someone can want to sell you land with no strings attached, but they bought the land with strings attached, and one of those strings is that the strings stay on when the land is sold.
The government is responsible for upholding contracts. Everyone entered into a contract when they bought land. If they wish to sell it, they must abide by the contract. No one's moral right to transact business trumps their responsiblity to uphold contracts freely entered into.
Not only that, but consider that you do employ the government to protect your land. That is a contract. Part of the contract is, there are strings on the land the government protects.
Sorry, but there is no one legally able to sell you land with no strings attached without breaking a freely agreed to contract.
Your first choice has a one in three chance of being wrong. Your second choice has a 50/50 chance of being wrong. Your first choice has a greater chance of being wrong, therefore, you should change it.
It has nothing to do with cognitive dissonance. The cognitive dissonance experiment has been show to contain a similar type of error, that is all. I don't think you really read the article.
No, they can't. If you try to drop out of scociety then you are branded as "Antisocial" and "Extremist." Opting out of scociety is an option that has far more setbacks than attempting to reform it. This is so indicative of libertarian thinking. You want to be able to act without consequences. You want to be able to 'drop out' without anyone thinking less of you. You want the benefits without the setbacks.
Say someone offers to sell you land. But the land comes with stipulations. Say you have to feed their cats, and anyone you sell the land to also has to feed their cats.
You might not want to buy land with strings like that attached, but I'm sure you'd agree that it would be morally within that land owner's rights to attempt to sell such land. You wouldn't go around claiming he had no right to put such stipulations on, if you didn't like it, you wouldn't buy it. And you wouldn't go buying it and ignoring the stipulations, would you?
The thing is, everyone who has bought land in the US has bought land with such stipulations on it. They freely chose to do so. You could buy the land from them, but not without the stipulations.
The government is not an unrelated third party. They uphold your claims to the land, and defend you from those who would take it away. They are also in charge of enforcing the stipulations.
If you don't like that, you are free to shop around for a better deal. But you have no right to get the deal you'd like. You seem to think you have a moral right to buy land in an area you like with no strings attached. You don't. You get to choose from among the alternatives offered. So sorry if the alternative you'd like is not available, but that is equally an issue under any sort of lassez faire free market system, as well.
You know what destroys infection? FIRE! Good old cleansing fire. Simply stuff your computer full of old newspapers, douse it with gasoline, and light it on fire, and I guarantee that it will be free from infection.
If this either seems to drastic or fails to do the trick, just squirt a syringe full of penicillin directly into the power supply while the computer is running, that should help.
It's not a new definition or a redefinition. You just aren't familiar with the standard terminology used by physicists. That's okay, no one mistook you for a physicist in the first place. There are far more phase transitions than the ones you are likely to be familiar with.
I gave you a link that shows experimental data. And there is no such thing as empty space, it's a froth of virtual particles. That's why the Casimir effect exists. But look, I don't want to go explaining all of modern physics to you. There are plenty of books you can read, and I'm no expert, just an interested amateur.
You may be a smart person, and well educated in your field. But you aren't well educated about physics. Your intuitions are wrong and your ideas are simplistic. Attempting to refute modern physics does not make you look smart. On the contrary, it makes you look like a crackpot.
There is tons of empirical evidence of the phase change between the combined Electroweak force and the forces of Electromagnetism and weak interaction.
First, unless you are producing your own illegal drugs, you have no right to them. If you can't find them for sale, tough. If you are producing your own illegal drugs, there are very many places you could go in this country where you could drop out and do nothing but produce and consume said drugs without being harassed.
You seem to think you have a right to find the deal you want at the price you want. You can't find any place where there is land for sale that is not already bound into contracts with a government? Well I can't find a place that will sell me a platypus that shits diamonds. My rights to own a platypus that shits diamonds are being infringed!
You're right, its more accurate to say it's up to each person whether they want to help another. But there is no moral obligation to do so.
You feel a responsiblity to your loved ones because that's what you choose. If you chose not to, in libertarian philosophy, that would be okay too.
So you are saying that you acknowledge that society provides things for you, and you therefore have a responsibility to society?
You don't get to go just anywhere and do what you want. This country is occupied already, and every square mile of land in this country has had thousands of man-hours of labor mixed in, through surveying if nothing else. You think you should be able to just take other people's land to do your own thing on? All land in the US comes with conditions, limitations, and responsibilities. If you don't like it, shop somewhere else.
Now, you could go live in a cave somewhere in the US and do whatever drugs or whatever else you want without being bothered. I know people who've done just that. Alaska's a big place. But what you seem to want is the benefit of living in society without having to play by society's rules.
I know what a libertarian is. You've demonstrated the inherent hypocrisy of the philosophy admirably right here. You think you should get to do whatever you like, including taking other people's land and changing the rules unilaterally.
You are free to shop around for a deal you like. There is no guarantee the deal you want will be available, either in your libertarian system or the one we have now. You libertarians seem to think that you have an innate right to find the deal you like at the price you want, and we are all obliged to make sure you get it.
Your argument amounts to, "I should be able to buy unicorns for a dollar. If you won't sell me unicorns for a dollar, you are taking away my rights." Really, that is the same as, "I should be able to buy land in this country where the rules don't apply to me. If no such land is available, you are taking away my rights."
Oh ShieldW0lf, what a great post ruined by a bigoted, elitist attitude. If you'd phrased it just a little differently, people might actually have listened and learned something. As it is, you've let your emotions stand in the way of effective communication. It's almost as if insulting your opponent was more important to you than getting your message across.
Or maybe it was more important for you to make sure we understand what a wicked hard pragmatist you are, and we're all immature moon-calves who can only look at the world through rose colored glasses. Is that kind of what you were going for there?
I hope you understand, I'm on the same page as you regarding right and wrong. "It means that right and wrong varies depending on the environment and situation. Where the environment and situation are the same, right and wrong are the same." This is a clear and succinct way of putting this idea. Too bad very few people are going to take it in because of your hostile attitude.
Ah well, hopefully you at least made yourself feel good.
Libertarians generally reject the idea that there is a moral responsibility to help those in need. They aren't 'more or less' saying that people should be left to die on their own: they are flat out stating that barring any contract to the contrary, you are on your own.
The problem with communicating with libertarians is that they tend to think any attempt at discussion of these issues is an attempt to force them into helping others. They think their only moral responsibility is to themselves.
Libertarians find the idea of being 'forced' into helping others as repugnant as most people find the idea of refusing to help others. But they are curiously blind to the ways we all help them everyday, and even when this is pointed out, they claim they never asked for it, so they feel no reciprocal responsibility.
The thing is, they aren't being forced. They could drop out of society. But they want the benefits of living in a society with none of the responsibilities.
There is lots of potential but not with most of the mainstream games available today. Now whether mainstream games could be designed to be really educational and simultaneously fun is another issue. This is exactly how I feel. Most strategy games teach some sort of critical thinking. Or rather, one must learn it to play well. I'd say the SimCity, Tycoon, and Civilization games all do a good job. As for math, eh, addition and subtraction pretty much covers it in today's games. And as for bias, well, history books and lessons have it too.
First, you are being completely disingenuous and backtracking by claiming you never said these costs were made up. Let me quote the post I was responding too:
"The problem is - there is no 'real' cost to be levied. The 'real' costs so beloved of the greens isn't determined by accounting - they are instead a collection of wishful thinking, assumptions, biases, and a general desire to punish anyone who uses fossil fuels."
Now let me quote the above post, so everyone can clearly see what you are attempting to do:
"I never claimed they were made up. I merely point out that there isn't a rational and equitable way of accounting for them, and that the belief that such a method exists is wishful thinking. There is a difference."
Please by all means, reconcile those two statements in a logical and coherent fashion.
Now, you also claim there is no rational and equitable way to account for negative externalities and resource depletion. This is patently absurd. Of course we can, some people just don't want to. They want us to pay for these things.
How about we keep a balance sheet of natural resources and those extracting the resources in a non sustainable way must pay for the privilege? We can easily measure pollution and habitat destruction and assign a cost to that, then impose that costs on the ones creating it.
You insult and slander those of us concerned by the fact that we are paying costs incurred by other people as "wishful thinking, assumptions, biases, and a general desire to punish anyone who uses fossil fuels." You are siding with the powerful against those who would seek redress for wrongs committed against us, and belittling our rightful complaints. When called on your behavior, you attempt to backtrack and rewrite your own statements so they seem less supercilious. The honorable thing to do would be to admit you were wrong and apologize, but I hold little hope of that ever happening.
Suffice it to say, I see you for what you really are. You haven't fooled anyone.
Then you admit that your earlier statement, "I would also note that the sock puppet regimes only exist in an oppressive state because of the repressive nature of the regimes they replaced," was completely WRONG?
You have gone from claiming that we only replaced dictatorships with dictatorships to admitting that we primarily replaced freely elected governments with dictatorships. Your cat-like ability to pivot 180 degrees in almost no time is simply astounding.
Are you trying to be funny or are you just unimaginative? There are more types of games than just FPS. Many strategy games can teach economic concepts, math, and critical thinking. RPGs could be used to teach history; I'm sure many people remember more about pioneer life from playing Oregon Trail than they do from history lessons. Games can very easily teach physics, math, logic, chemistry, biology, and much more.
Eh, where do you get the idea that we have only replaced dictatorships with dictatorships? Look up the history of Chile under Allende for one counter example. From what I've read, we have more commonly replaced democratically elected socialist governments with dictatorships.
If your mailbox is randomly losing mail, your IMAP server has problems and perhaps you should consider trying a better one. However, if you think MAPI/Exchange "actually works" in any meaningful sense, then perhaps your ides of 'better' is significantly different from the average person's.
Just because economics makes certain absurd assumptions about real costs does not make these real costs any less real. Natural resources are assumed to be unlimited, and their loss, use, or destruction is not counted as a cost in accounting. Negative externalities are similarly never recorded in corporate books.
Pollution is an example of a negative externality. Someone has to pay for it. Environmental destruction, loss of habitat and extinction are also negative externalities. They are a real cost not accounted for in our bookkeeping.
Claiming these are all just made up, wishful thinking by 'greens' is itself wishful thinking.
Sock puppet regimes exist because the US would rather deal with free market friendly dictators than popularly elected socialist governments. We have a long history of deposing democracies and installing dictatorships.
How does eating food from cans produced by big corporations make you less dependent on big corporations? Canned foods are no longer a necessity or even a good idea in first world nations, they are a waste of resources.
There are also major new discoveries of oil in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. So why am I paying $3.40 for gas????
And why don't these new discoveries make to the news networks, radio or newpapers???
Because these aren't new discoveries. They are old, know deposits that were, for one reason or another, not economical to tap when the price of oil was low. Now that it is high, it makes economic sense to tap these reserves. If the price went down again, the reserves would no longer make enough profit to justify using them.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for that clarification, I agree with you completely. I'd like things to be different to, and I regard any number of laws as unfair and unjust. I just don't make any claims that I have some moral right to have things my way :)
Try to put things in terms of "This is why this course of action would benefit you, personally," rather than "I have a moral right to so and so," and you will get a lot more people agreeing with you.
There is no land in the US that does not come with the stipulation, "All stipulations still adhere to the land even if you sell it." So no one has the moral right to sell you land without the stipulations on it, because they agreed to those stipulations when they bought the land, obviously, or they wouldn't have bought it.
So someone can want to sell you land with no strings attached, but they bought the land with strings attached, and one of those strings is that the strings stay on when the land is sold.
The government is responsible for upholding contracts. Everyone entered into a contract when they bought land. If they wish to sell it, they must abide by the contract. No one's moral right to transact business trumps their responsiblity to uphold contracts freely entered into.
Not only that, but consider that you do employ the government to protect your land. That is a contract. Part of the contract is, there are strings on the land the government protects.
Sorry, but there is no one legally able to sell you land with no strings attached without breaking a freely agreed to contract.
Your first choice has a one in three chance of being wrong. Your second choice has a 50/50 chance of being wrong. Your first choice has a greater chance of being wrong, therefore, you should change it.
It has nothing to do with cognitive dissonance. The cognitive dissonance experiment has been show to contain a similar type of error, that is all. I don't think you really read the article.
Say someone offers to sell you land. But the land comes with stipulations. Say you have to feed their cats, and anyone you sell the land to also has to feed their cats.
You might not want to buy land with strings like that attached, but I'm sure you'd agree that it would be morally within that land owner's rights to attempt to sell such land. You wouldn't go around claiming he had no right to put such stipulations on, if you didn't like it, you wouldn't buy it. And you wouldn't go buying it and ignoring the stipulations, would you?
The thing is, everyone who has bought land in the US has bought land with such stipulations on it. They freely chose to do so. You could buy the land from them, but not without the stipulations.
The government is not an unrelated third party. They uphold your claims to the land, and defend you from those who would take it away. They are also in charge of enforcing the stipulations.
If you don't like that, you are free to shop around for a better deal. But you have no right to get the deal you'd like. You seem to think you have a moral right to buy land in an area you like with no strings attached. You don't. You get to choose from among the alternatives offered. So sorry if the alternative you'd like is not available, but that is equally an issue under any sort of lassez faire free market system, as well.
You know what destroys infection? FIRE! Good old cleansing fire. Simply stuff your computer full of old newspapers, douse it with gasoline, and light it on fire, and I guarantee that it will be free from infection.
If this either seems to drastic or fails to do the trick, just squirt a syringe full of penicillin directly into the power supply while the computer is running, that should help.
It's not a new definition or a redefinition. You just aren't familiar with the standard terminology used by physicists. That's okay, no one mistook you for a physicist in the first place. There are far more phase transitions than the ones you are likely to be familiar with.
I gave you a link that shows experimental data. And there is no such thing as empty space, it's a froth of virtual particles. That's why the Casimir effect exists. But look, I don't want to go explaining all of modern physics to you. There are plenty of books you can read, and I'm no expert, just an interested amateur.
You may be a smart person, and well educated in your field. But you aren't well educated about physics. Your intuitions are wrong and your ideas are simplistic. Attempting to refute modern physics does not make you look smart. On the contrary, it makes you look like a crackpot.
Just because you don't understand the evidence doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_force
There is tons of empirical evidence of the phase change between the combined Electroweak force and the forces of Electromagnetism and weak interaction.
First, unless you are producing your own illegal drugs, you have no right to them. If you can't find them for sale, tough. If you are producing your own illegal drugs, there are very many places you could go in this country where you could drop out and do nothing but produce and consume said drugs without being harassed.
You seem to think you have a right to find the deal you want at the price you want. You can't find any place where there is land for sale that is not already bound into contracts with a government? Well I can't find a place that will sell me a platypus that shits diamonds. My rights to own a platypus that shits diamonds are being infringed!
You're right, its more accurate to say it's up to each person whether they want to help another. But there is no moral obligation to do so.
You feel a responsiblity to your loved ones because that's what you choose. If you chose not to, in libertarian philosophy, that would be okay too.
So you are saying that you acknowledge that society provides things for you, and you therefore have a responsibility to society?
You don't get to go just anywhere and do what you want. This country is occupied already, and every square mile of land in this country has had thousands of man-hours of labor mixed in, through surveying if nothing else. You think you should be able to just take other people's land to do your own thing on? All land in the US comes with conditions, limitations, and responsibilities. If you don't like it, shop somewhere else.
Now, you could go live in a cave somewhere in the US and do whatever drugs or whatever else you want without being bothered. I know people who've done just that. Alaska's a big place. But what you seem to want is the benefit of living in society without having to play by society's rules.
I know what a libertarian is. You've demonstrated the inherent hypocrisy of the philosophy admirably right here. You think you should get to do whatever you like, including taking other people's land and changing the rules unilaterally.
You are free to shop around for a deal you like. There is no guarantee the deal you want will be available, either in your libertarian system or the one we have now. You libertarians seem to think that you have an innate right to find the deal you like at the price you want, and we are all obliged to make sure you get it.
Your argument amounts to, "I should be able to buy unicorns for a dollar. If you won't sell me unicorns for a dollar, you are taking away my rights." Really, that is the same as, "I should be able to buy land in this country where the rules don't apply to me. If no such land is available, you are taking away my rights."
Oh ShieldW0lf, what a great post ruined by a bigoted, elitist attitude. If you'd phrased it just a little differently, people might actually have listened and learned something. As it is, you've let your emotions stand in the way of effective communication. It's almost as if insulting your opponent was more important to you than getting your message across.
Or maybe it was more important for you to make sure we understand what a wicked hard pragmatist you are, and we're all immature moon-calves who can only look at the world through rose colored glasses. Is that kind of what you were going for there?
I hope you understand, I'm on the same page as you regarding right and wrong. "It means that right and wrong varies depending on the environment and situation. Where the environment and situation are the same, right and wrong are the same." This is a clear and succinct way of putting this idea. Too bad very few people are going to take it in because of your hostile attitude.
Ah well, hopefully you at least made yourself feel good.
Short answer: people are trying to change it. Long answer: the AC is a prick who uses his cynical beliefs to excuse his lack of involvement.
Libertarians generally reject the idea that there is a moral responsibility to help those in need. They aren't 'more or less' saying that people should be left to die on their own: they are flat out stating that barring any contract to the contrary, you are on your own.
The problem with communicating with libertarians is that they tend to think any attempt at discussion of these issues is an attempt to force them into helping others. They think their only moral responsibility is to themselves.
Libertarians find the idea of being 'forced' into helping others as repugnant as most people find the idea of refusing to help others. But they are curiously blind to the ways we all help them everyday, and even when this is pointed out, they claim they never asked for it, so they feel no reciprocal responsibility.
The thing is, they aren't being forced. They could drop out of society. But they want the benefits of living in a society with none of the responsibilities.
Most games don't come with VoIP built in. That's what Ventrillo and Teamspeak are for.
Actually, in many theories spacetime itself can undergo phase transitions.
After you shoot Jesus in the head, you need to teabag him. I hear that keeps him from respawning. Damn stupid level boss if you ask me.
First, you are being completely disingenuous and backtracking by claiming you never said these costs were made up. Let me quote the post I was responding too:
"The problem is - there is no 'real' cost to be levied. The 'real' costs so beloved of the greens isn't determined by accounting - they are instead a collection of wishful thinking, assumptions, biases, and a general desire to punish anyone who uses fossil fuels."
Now let me quote the above post, so everyone can clearly see what you are attempting to do:
"I never claimed they were made up. I merely point out that there isn't a rational and equitable way of accounting for them, and that the belief that such a method exists is wishful thinking. There is a difference."
Please by all means, reconcile those two statements in a logical and coherent fashion.
Now, you also claim there is no rational and equitable way to account for negative externalities and resource depletion. This is patently absurd. Of course we can, some people just don't want to. They want us to pay for these things.
How about we keep a balance sheet of natural resources and those extracting the resources in a non sustainable way must pay for the privilege? We can easily measure pollution and habitat destruction and assign a cost to that, then impose that costs on the ones creating it.
You insult and slander those of us concerned by the fact that we are paying costs incurred by other people as "wishful thinking, assumptions, biases, and a general desire to punish anyone who uses fossil fuels." You are siding with the powerful against those who would seek redress for wrongs committed against us, and belittling our rightful complaints. When called on your behavior, you attempt to backtrack and rewrite your own statements so they seem less supercilious. The honorable thing to do would be to admit you were wrong and apologize, but I hold little hope of that ever happening.
Suffice it to say, I see you for what you really are. You haven't fooled anyone.
Then you admit that your earlier statement, "I would also note that the sock puppet regimes only exist in an oppressive state because of the repressive nature of the regimes they replaced," was completely WRONG?
You have gone from claiming that we only replaced dictatorships with dictatorships to admitting that we primarily replaced freely elected governments with dictatorships. Your cat-like ability to pivot 180 degrees in almost no time is simply astounding.
Are you trying to be funny or are you just unimaginative? There are more types of games than just FPS. Many strategy games can teach economic concepts, math, and critical thinking. RPGs could be used to teach history; I'm sure many people remember more about pioneer life from playing Oregon Trail than they do from history lessons. Games can very easily teach physics, math, logic, chemistry, biology, and much more.
Eh, where do you get the idea that we have only replaced dictatorships with dictatorships? Look up the history of Chile under Allende for one counter example. From what I've read, we have more commonly replaced democratically elected socialist governments with dictatorships.
Do you have any examples to prove your point?
If your mailbox is randomly losing mail, your IMAP server has problems and perhaps you should consider trying a better one. However, if you think MAPI/Exchange "actually works" in any meaningful sense, then perhaps your ides of 'better' is significantly different from the average person's.
Just because economics makes certain absurd assumptions about real costs does not make these real costs any less real. Natural resources are assumed to be unlimited, and their loss, use, or destruction is not counted as a cost in accounting. Negative externalities are similarly never recorded in corporate books.
Pollution is an example of a negative externality. Someone has to pay for it. Environmental destruction, loss of habitat and extinction are also negative externalities. They are a real cost not accounted for in our bookkeeping.
Claiming these are all just made up, wishful thinking by 'greens' is itself wishful thinking.
Sock puppet regimes exist because the US would rather deal with free market friendly dictators than popularly elected socialist governments. We have a long history of deposing democracies and installing dictatorships.
How does eating food from cans produced by big corporations make you less dependent on big corporations? Canned foods are no longer a necessity or even a good idea in first world nations, they are a waste of resources.
There are also major new discoveries of oil in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. So why am I paying $3.40 for gas????
And why don't these new discoveries make to the news networks, radio or newpapers???
Because these aren't new discoveries. They are old, know deposits that were, for one reason or another, not economical to tap when the price of oil was low. Now that it is high, it makes economic sense to tap these reserves. If the price went down again, the reserves would no longer make enough profit to justify using them.