MMORPGs especially, and video games in general are an embryonic art form. Look at movies. Look how much more popular the independent films have become in the last decade. Films like Sideways, Lost in Translation, Adaptation, Being John Malcovich, these weren't that expensive to produce and they made good money for their investors. But audiences had to become more educated, they had to learn to appreciate more subtlety and nuance, and that is one of the things that art is for. Good art teaches and instructs as it lifts us up or lets us look into dark places we'd rather not. Video games and MMORPGs can be good art.
So sure, the larger market, and in some ways the most predictable market will be in providing the equivalent of the Hollywood blockbuster, pandering to the lowest common denominator. But that market, as new as it is, is nearing saturation and there is an untapped market for content with more nuance, subtlety, and complexity. That market has until now been served primarily by the hobbyist/DIY set. That will never go away, but it will be nice to have a developed market for talented hobbyists to graduate into and actually make some money doing what they love.
Games need to reach out to the larger market anyway. Do bored housewives go see blockbusters? Well, sometimes, but they really like romances, don't they? Ever wonder why there aren't more women involved in gaming? Not that I mean to stereotype, of course any particular person may like any damn thing they please, but I do think I'm on to something here. Can it be that hard to make an MMORPG with romantic type quests for the ladies? Safer than role playing it with another human if you're married, if you know what I mean.
In short, no, I don't think WOW style content is the end-all, be-all of MMORPG market penetration in America, by any means.
Cool, that actually makes me want to buy NWN2, just to check out your server. I only played NWN when it hit the $10 bin, so I was too late for the heyday of individual servers. I read about it after I had played the game. The thing is, I played D&D first of all RPGs I've played. And I mean D&D, original blue box set. Not AD&D, not D&D basic, or edition this or that, D&D. I played a bunch of others, then found GURPS, and level based games seemed trite and constricting after that. But I actually liked NWN even in single player. Still, skill based systems such as say, The Elder Scrolls series, have always appealed to me more than class based systems.
The ultimate for me would be a persistent online RPG married to a complex sim. That way, skills other than combat could be modeled in game with real effects, and the emergent properties of such a system would make game play unique to each server. Social and political skills would suddenly have real meaning if you could use them to sway mobs or rule kingdoms. Crafting skills would become far more powerful if you could train NPCs and purchase shops to run. And actual social connections to established groups of players would become most important of all, as in a real society.
I would also like to see a virtual world server governed, paid for and run through a collective government. That would be OOC, but in character, in the game world, I would like to see governance and law modeled with systematized effects. Characters could become a part of the systems, or fight against them. Having a fair and democratic OOC governance would be especially important when you were modeling in game oppressive and unfair systems. These of course are entertaining to play in, acting out rebel and fascist fantasies, but people who have been gaming for a while know players can get... confused. Thus the fair OOC governance.
Anyway, these all seem like pipe dreams now, but someday, I think all us geeks know something like that is bound to happen.
On one level, everything you say is true. On another, it is a complete cop out. You have the true knowledge, but that by itself is useless. A psychopath with the true knowledge is still a psychopath, he just knows that there is no arbitrary external reason why he shouldn't mass murder.
It is false to say that life is fair. Life is both fair and not fair. It is also, and at the same time, neither fair nor not fair. Fair is a human concept, and the universe does not play by human rules except where we make it.
There is no individual eternal soul to accumulate Karma. Everything is a part of the unbroken chain of cause and effect. Everything comes into being when the conditions around it support that arising, and everything ends when the conditions to not support its continued existence. Real Karma is merely the sum of the value judgments you have placed on the individual moments of your life. The similarity of a past moment to a present moment determines the value judgment you place on it now. That is the truth of past lives. Your past lives are the past judgments you have made, and they determine your present life, the judgments you place on the present moment.
Saying someone 'deserves' what they get is an nuclear way of putting it. It's not a moral issue, there is no arbitrary, external value scale of right and wrong. This is not some vast teaching machine, with everyone's special fuzzy life lesson all planned out. There is no plan, no entity can sit outside the infinite and look in.
Nice debate. I make assumptions some times when I hear the concept of "natural rights" bandied about, and it appears I shouldn't have, at least in this case. You are not your typical strong property rights libertarian, and actually appear to have a brain in your head. The fact that I still keep happening into conversations like this shows exactly why I still keep coming back to Slashdot after, whoa, has it been ten years? Damn.
Saying that you don't think property rights are a natural right took a lot of the wind out of the sails of my argument. But I can turn it around, because the fact is that it's pretty easy to agree that "natural rights" are a valid concept when you agree on the what all the natural rights should be. The hard part is that many people don't agree, and though there are a set of rights that I'm sure the majority of people in the world could agree on, there is no universal set of rights, and there is no external scope or measure by which to make an ultimate judgment about what rights are to be considered 'natural.' And the "desert isle" argument (whatever I could do, alone on a desert isle, are my natural rights) is a weak one. I could do anything alone on a desert isle, but so what?
Firstly, if no one else is there, then all the rights that apply to group situations simply aren't valid. Free speech, for instance. I'm sorry, but free speech is not just talking to yourself. It's having someone listen, or at least having the potential for someone to listen. Why do you think protesters were up in arms over the 'free speech zones?' Property rights are another case because there is no one there to infringe on your property, but you've already agreed that property rights are a useful legal concept, not a natural right.
Violence, well, I can do violence to anything on the island, but there are no people on the island, and here we get into a gray area, don't we? And even without people, violence can be done to me. I could be eaten by wild animals, does this mean I have no right not to be eaten? Many rights relate to personal interactions, and without other people on the island we can't express those rights. Free speech is the right to communicate, which requires another person. The right to assembly, also rather moot. Privacy? How would you even define that without the concept of society? Is it a natural right not to be viewed? What about my right to view anything, I can certainly look at anything I want on a desert isle, right?
Certainly 'do what you want, so long as you don't harm others' is a good rule of thumb, but it isn't the great guiding light some make it out to be, precisely because it is so vague. What is harm? If someone tells me a secret, and I pass it along, have I harmed them? But, but, free speech! If someone hurts my feelings by telling me the truth about myself, have I been harmed? Do I have a right not to hear the truth? But on a desert island I wouldn't have to!
Do you see, what I am trying to show here is that 'natural rights' are not so useful a concept as you make out. Many rights are hard to classify as natural or not, even though we know they are important. And there are a million and one trivial things I could do on a desert island that simply don't rise to the level of rights at all. "I'm going to fight for my right to poop in a bush," isn't much of a battle cry, now is it?
But in the final analysis, it is the fact that the list of natural rights must be created a priori that kills the concept. There is no external list to go to, no ultimate authority to tell you what they are, only flawed human beings. There is no final arbiter, no system of protecting and upholding rights except that which we make. And any right that is not actively protected and upheld is meaningless. You can claim you still have that right, but that is a silly semantic game. Tell your executioner that you have the right to life, see what good it will do. None.
That is why I base my concept of rights on contract. If people can not agree to the rights, and agree to
Are you sure you're replying to my post? I was advocating a voice altering electronic filter that could make your voice sound like anything from a robot to an alien to a biker dude. That kind of negates everything you've just said, so I have to assume that maybe you replied to the wrong post?
You don't have to go into the reasons why you play as a guy. I think everyone over the age of twelve who plays games online knows why.
But that ultimate set of rights is derived from contract between humans, not some platonic ideal. That's all I'm saying. I think we should uphold a much broader set of rights than we do now, including the right to clean air and water, medicine, shelter, clothing and food.
And the power of free speech and expression exists until someone takes it away, because all people have the ability to express themselves, inherently. If you were trapped alone, on a desert island, with no society whatsoever, you would be able to freely express yourself. Talking to yourself isn't expressing yourself, it's just nuts. Free speech without an audience isn't free speech. Don't believe me? Go protest in this free speech zone where no one can hear you.
I will be more clear about the problem I have with the concept of natural rights. They exist to cut off debate. For instance, I think that fencing off land violates my natural right to walk around wherever I choose. In your trite little desert isle scenario, I can go wherever I want without hindrance. What gives you the right to keep me off your land? Ah, I see, natural right.
Property rights exist to serve property owners, not the landless. That is one area where I, and a lot of other people disagree about natural rights. In my concept of rights based on contract, only land owners are a party to the private property contract because only they derive benefit from it. Non land owners, who are not a party to the contract, have no reason to uphold it unless they get some benefit.
Now, our society finds private property a useful concept. So what do the non-owners get from it? Well, property owners have to pay taxes and they will get some of the benefit of those taxes. In my world view, this situation is justified. Most advocates of the concept of natural rights would disagree. They would say that because property rights are natural, land owners owe nothing to the landless.
People want to initiate debate about rights because they want to find some convoluted reasoning for taking away the basic freedoms and abilities that people have by their very nature. Exactly. You want to take away everyone's right to use your private property (not personal property, like a house or clothes, or anything made by human labor: private property. Land.) And you have some convoluted reasoning involving some supposed arbitrary "nature," and the concept of "retaliatory force."
Do you understand the issue I have with the concept of natural rights now? I'm not asking you to agree, I just want to know if I've explained myself well enough.
People do not have free will, that is an illusion. I want you to look carefully at the chain of causation as a thought or choice arises. Where did that choice come from? Did you choose to bring that choice into your consciousness? How? There is no individual self, there is only the system, infinite and eternal. Mental formations are no different from any sense formations such as sight or sound. Thoughts and feelings are fundamentally the same, even the feeling of, "Who is it that is sensing this?" That too is a mental formation.
The thing is, you are still caught in subject/object duality. You think "you" are an entity separate from the universe, observing it. You are not. There is no little homunculus or spirit inside your head looking out through your eyes and hearing through your ears. The sense of self is no different than any other sense, and there is no one having those sense experiences. They just are. What creates the sense of self is the correlation between the sense impressions.
The problem with your point of view is the same problem I have with books like the secret. They aren't FOR people who are behind to use to get ahead, they are for people who are AHEAD who want an excuse about how they made it. I mean, "I got where I am through hard work and determination, and so can you!" is a whole hell of a lot easier to accept than, "I worked hard but I also got lucky because the system was unfair in my favor."
People are not separate from their environment and their society. Would you be willing to accept that in the ultimate case, where someone is completely isolated from all social contact from birth, they will have absolutely nothing to contribute? Sadly, those experiments were done you know. Some nutty German thought isolated babies would naturally speak German. Then where do you draw the line of personal responsibility? If society can impact an individual to the point where that individual is no longer even truly human, is it that much of a stretch to say that some people are impacted by circumstance to the point that their possible choices become very limited?
The ability to rise above circumstance is in a large part genetic. Most people do not need that skill. In fact, if everyone were rising above their society, there wouldn't be any society. From the standpoint of the species, it is advantageous to have the majority be followers and a few be managers or leaders. Unfortunately, we do not get to choose what genes we are born with.
This is also not to say that this situation is ideal or immutable. People could be taught to rise above society and think for themselves. Then they would be doing what society tells them by thinking for themselves.
Your advice is good, but I have worked as an organizer in poor communities, and I can tell you, if you went into any poor ghetto in the world with that attitude, you would be scoffed at as a privileged individual who tells self-serving stories for their own benefit. I've seen too many organizers ruin a drive with attitudes like that.
Those kind of people do not want to empathize with others, or they don't have the ability. They don't want to look at the fact that other people's lives and experiences are very, very different from theirs. They just want to feel special, as if the choices they were presented with by random chance some how entitle them to look down on the rest of us from a pedestal. You do not know what it is like in anyone else's shoes, and with that attitude, it is obvious you don't want to know. You just want to go through life with the fundamental assumption that everyone is, or could be, like you if not for some inner failing. With an attitude like that, you will never be truly close to another human being.
I hope you aren't the type who uses the mantra of personal responsibility as a shield from having to take responsibility for your own actions. You know, the "Don't like it? That's your problem!" syndrome. Face it, you are a part of a system and what you do impacts others. Not everyone is at a pla
You know what matters less? Your opinion about this story. You know what matters even less than that? My opinion about your opinion. So there we are, then. Glad that's settled.
Personal responsibility is an important concept. However, it is a dangerous concept as well. People will use it as an excuse not to change a corrupt or unfair system. They will use it to explain why they succeeded while others around them failed, and to excuse any impact their actions have on others.
Sometimes, a person is where they are because of poor choices. Other times, the socio-economic system they are a part of is at fault. There is no level playing field in life, and life is the type of game where once you are ahead, it becomes easier and easier to get further ahead. Conversely, if you start off behind,it is easier and easier to slip further behind.
Society is created by individuals, but individuals are created by society. It is a dynamic system. You can not isolate the individual components of the system and blame the emergent properties of the system itself on the individuals.
Sadly, the majority of people are only capable of doing what society expects of them. If society says they will fail, that is what they will do. And that hurts all of us.
Hehe, I'm imagining a content filter, l33tsp34k to faux-olde-english. "n00b, I totally pwned joo!" becomes "Forsooth! Mighty foe, thou art vanquished!"
Seriously though, I've been thinking about a MMORPG collective for serious gamers. A few thousand true role players could easily afford to go in on an adequate server and you could give people memberships for content contribution. It could work, but it would be a lot of effort and there would be no profit in it, so I don't see it happening. I would join something like that. It's hard coming from a pencil and paper RPG world where everyone really gets into the role playing aspect, to an MMORPG world where paladins have names like hotchixxor69. Ugh.
We need something for gaming like those voice alteration devices for the phone. You know, the ones that frightened little old ladies use to sound like burly bikers? It could be done in software as a plug-in for voice chat. You could select your character's voice through a menu.
The thing is, that 11 year old is getting valuable leadership and teaching experience. If he is competent to lead the party, and a simple software tweak would let you suspend disbelief, it's a good thing.
No, people have no natural rights. The concept of rights wouldn't exist without society. There would only be power: do I have the power to do this or not? Every right involves giving up another right as part of a mutual trade with another human being. I don't want to be hit in the face, neither do you. We both give up the right to hit each other in the face in exchange for not getting hit in the face. And we agree that if anyone else tries to hit either one of us in the face, the other will try to stop it. All rights are derived from this principle of contract. I mean, if I say I have the right to free speech, but no one will uphold my right, do I have it or don't I? You have to walk pretty far out on a philosophical limb to say I do. Realistically and in any practical sense, I don't.
So, I would say, Governments do not give people rights, other people do through contract. Government merely expresses the collective will of the people as to what our collective rights should be.
The whole concept of natural rights is a kind of dodge or con. It is simply an appeal to authority designed to shut down debate around rights. "Oh, sorry. That's a natural right, end of discussion." The thing is, if there were such a thing as natural rights, they would be clear and self evident to all. Therefore the discussion of natural rights would never need to take place because we would all know them by instinct. Yet we do need to discuss them, and there is no clear consensus on what rights should be included in the hallowed list of 'natural' rights.
Oooh! Right on the money. Left wing fascist with right wing tendencies, it's true. That encapsulates exactly why I don't like her. She does keep getting worse, doesn't she? I thought she was so damn cool during Bill's first term, now she seems like a completely different person: one who will do or say anything to pander for votes.
You know, here is the thing: I think at one time she was liberal. Certainly in college, also while Bill was president. It feels to me like something happened to her. She changed. She's not the Hillary of universal health care from Bill's first term. I have nothing against the idea of a female president, or ambitious women in general. It just seems like she has sold out her values and now would do or say anything to get elected. Maybe I'm wrong, and I would certainly vote for her over any republican in a heartbeat, but she isn't my first choice. Now a Pelosi presidency, that I could get behind.
Really? What voting record do you base that on? If Hillary is a liberal, she's unlike any liberals I associate with. I think you are confused by the ongoing Republican push to redefine the political spectrum. I'd say Clinton was a right-winger with centrist tendencies, and Hillary is a centrist.
Corporations are "evil" because of their structure. No one person is accountable for the evils a corporation does. CEOs don't go to jail for poisoning millions, but they will get the boot if they don't protect the bottom line at all costs. Stockholders aren't fined if their company rapes the environment. That is the problem, that is why corporations behave in an anti-social fashion. There is nothing wrong with commerce, and the free market works wonders under many conditions, but corporatism is evil.
Unions are different because they are (theoretically!) accountable to their members through elections. Political organizations such as you mention have no where near the power of corporations. No one is calling for excluding anyone, I don't even know where you got that. Are you paying attention to the conversation, or the voices in your head? Read and attempt to understand what people here are really saying, not what that the little parody of a liberal that sits in your head is saying.
You are the kind of Republican this anarcho-syndicalist can actually stomach. If all you Republicans stuck to the party's original planks of fiscal responsibility, states' rights and a small federal government, I would have no problem with Republicanism in general. It's when you veer off into religious nuttery, neo-con insanity (neo-cons are liberals, by the original definition, btw), or corporate ass-kissery that I have a problem.
Actually, I have no problem with intelligent, rational folks of near any political persuasion. It's the teeming hordes of screeching, poo-flinging monkeys on all sides that I can't stand.
I'm an anarcho-syndicalist and I feel the same way about Clinton, and his wife. They aren't real democrats. They are both centrist populists. Dennis Kucinich is the only democrat worth his salt these days. You know how most intelligent republicans are jumping ship these days? That was me vis a vis the democrats years ago.
I admit, listening to most repubs talk about Clinton is exactly as you describe, but elemenope is not a republican, and he isn't just badmouthing Clinton (except for the sedimentary rock bit, which is actually funny and kinda true.) He's offering legitimate criticism of his presidency. If we can't respond to criticism with something more than grade school insults, we're no better than the republicans.
You know who I liked? Carter. Go ahead and laugh. I think he was a better president than Clinton.
Neil Gaiman is an immensely popular sci-fi/fantasy author. He also does some great graphic novels like The Sandman. I can't imagine being into sci-fi, fantasy, or comics and not having heard of him. He's not got quite the same level of publicity as, say, Heinlein or Tolkien, but he's got quite a lot of fans.
Reporters may be liberal, but owners and editors are all conservative, and the US media has a decidedly right wing bias. I have no idea how anyone could think the US media is liberal. It is lazy and hypocritical, but not liberal.
Seeing as how most countries have socialized medicine, and it works better than American free-market capitalist medicine, what's your problem?
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I had a feeling something like that must exist. Now, to force people to use it!
Your faux-olde-english to nerd translator has developed some kind of malfunction.
MMORPGs especially, and video games in general are an embryonic art form. Look at movies. Look how much more popular the independent films have become in the last decade. Films like Sideways, Lost in Translation, Adaptation, Being John Malcovich, these weren't that expensive to produce and they made good money for their investors. But audiences had to become more educated, they had to learn to appreciate more subtlety and nuance, and that is one of the things that art is for. Good art teaches and instructs as it lifts us up or lets us look into dark places we'd rather not. Video games and MMORPGs can be good art.
So sure, the larger market, and in some ways the most predictable market will be in providing the equivalent of the Hollywood blockbuster, pandering to the lowest common denominator. But that market, as new as it is, is nearing saturation and there is an untapped market for content with more nuance, subtlety, and complexity. That market has until now been served primarily by the hobbyist/DIY set. That will never go away, but it will be nice to have a developed market for talented hobbyists to graduate into and actually make some money doing what they love.
Games need to reach out to the larger market anyway. Do bored housewives go see blockbusters? Well, sometimes, but they really like romances, don't they? Ever wonder why there aren't more women involved in gaming? Not that I mean to stereotype, of course any particular person may like any damn thing they please, but I do think I'm on to something here. Can it be that hard to make an MMORPG with romantic type quests for the ladies? Safer than role playing it with another human if you're married, if you know what I mean.
In short, no, I don't think WOW style content is the end-all, be-all of MMORPG market penetration in America, by any means.
Cool, that actually makes me want to buy NWN2, just to check out your server. I only played NWN when it hit the $10 bin, so I was too late for the heyday of individual servers. I read about it after I had played the game. The thing is, I played D&D first of all RPGs I've played. And I mean D&D, original blue box set. Not AD&D, not D&D basic, or edition this or that, D&D. I played a bunch of others, then found GURPS, and level based games seemed trite and constricting after that. But I actually liked NWN even in single player. Still, skill based systems such as say, The Elder Scrolls series, have always appealed to me more than class based systems.
The ultimate for me would be a persistent online RPG married to a complex sim. That way, skills other than combat could be modeled in game with real effects, and the emergent properties of such a system would make game play unique to each server. Social and political skills would suddenly have real meaning if you could use them to sway mobs or rule kingdoms. Crafting skills would become far more powerful if you could train NPCs and purchase shops to run. And actual social connections to established groups of players would become most important of all, as in a real society.
I would also like to see a virtual world server governed, paid for and run through a collective government. That would be OOC, but in character, in the game world, I would like to see governance and law modeled with systematized effects. Characters could become a part of the systems, or fight against them. Having a fair and democratic OOC governance would be especially important when you were modeling in game oppressive and unfair systems. These of course are entertaining to play in, acting out rebel and fascist fantasies, but people who have been gaming for a while know players can get... confused. Thus the fair OOC governance.
Anyway, these all seem like pipe dreams now, but someday, I think all us geeks know something like that is bound to happen.
Oh, my dumb, sorry.
That was the weakest part of my argument, and unnecessary anyhow. See my reply to RexRhino next to this one for a more detailed analysis.
On one level, everything you say is true. On another, it is a complete cop out. You have the true knowledge, but that by itself is useless. A psychopath with the true knowledge is still a psychopath, he just knows that there is no arbitrary external reason why he shouldn't mass murder.
It is false to say that life is fair. Life is both fair and not fair. It is also, and at the same time, neither fair nor not fair. Fair is a human concept, and the universe does not play by human rules except where we make it.
There is no individual eternal soul to accumulate Karma. Everything is a part of the unbroken chain of cause and effect. Everything comes into being when the conditions around it support that arising, and everything ends when the conditions to not support its continued existence. Real Karma is merely the sum of the value judgments you have placed on the individual moments of your life. The similarity of a past moment to a present moment determines the value judgment you place on it now. That is the truth of past lives. Your past lives are the past judgments you have made, and they determine your present life, the judgments you place on the present moment.
Saying someone 'deserves' what they get is an nuclear way of putting it. It's not a moral issue, there is no arbitrary, external value scale of right and wrong. This is not some vast teaching machine, with everyone's special fuzzy life lesson all planned out. There is no plan, no entity can sit outside the infinite and look in.
Nice debate. I make assumptions some times when I hear the concept of "natural rights" bandied about, and it appears I shouldn't have, at least in this case. You are not your typical strong property rights libertarian, and actually appear to have a brain in your head. The fact that I still keep happening into conversations like this shows exactly why I still keep coming back to Slashdot after, whoa, has it been ten years? Damn.
Saying that you don't think property rights are a natural right took a lot of the wind out of the sails of my argument. But I can turn it around, because the fact is that it's pretty easy to agree that "natural rights" are a valid concept when you agree on the what all the natural rights should be. The hard part is that many people don't agree, and though there are a set of rights that I'm sure the majority of people in the world could agree on, there is no universal set of rights, and there is no external scope or measure by which to make an ultimate judgment about what rights are to be considered 'natural.' And the "desert isle" argument (whatever I could do, alone on a desert isle, are my natural rights) is a weak one. I could do anything alone on a desert isle, but so what?
Firstly, if no one else is there, then all the rights that apply to group situations simply aren't valid. Free speech, for instance. I'm sorry, but free speech is not just talking to yourself. It's having someone listen, or at least having the potential for someone to listen. Why do you think protesters were up in arms over the 'free speech zones?' Property rights are another case because there is no one there to infringe on your property, but you've already agreed that property rights are a useful legal concept, not a natural right.
Violence, well, I can do violence to anything on the island, but there are no people on the island, and here we get into a gray area, don't we? And even without people, violence can be done to me. I could be eaten by wild animals, does this mean I have no right not to be eaten? Many rights relate to personal interactions, and without other people on the island we can't express those rights. Free speech is the right to communicate, which requires another person. The right to assembly, also rather moot. Privacy? How would you even define that without the concept of society? Is it a natural right not to be viewed? What about my right to view anything, I can certainly look at anything I want on a desert isle, right?
Certainly 'do what you want, so long as you don't harm others' is a good rule of thumb, but it isn't the great guiding light some make it out to be, precisely because it is so vague. What is harm? If someone tells me a secret, and I pass it along, have I harmed them? But, but, free speech! If someone hurts my feelings by telling me the truth about myself, have I been harmed? Do I have a right not to hear the truth? But on a desert island I wouldn't have to!
Do you see, what I am trying to show here is that 'natural rights' are not so useful a concept as you make out. Many rights are hard to classify as natural or not, even though we know they are important. And there are a million and one trivial things I could do on a desert island that simply don't rise to the level of rights at all. "I'm going to fight for my right to poop in a bush," isn't much of a battle cry, now is it?
But in the final analysis, it is the fact that the list of natural rights must be created a priori that kills the concept. There is no external list to go to, no ultimate authority to tell you what they are, only flawed human beings. There is no final arbiter, no system of protecting and upholding rights except that which we make. And any right that is not actively protected and upheld is meaningless. You can claim you still have that right, but that is a silly semantic game. Tell your executioner that you have the right to life, see what good it will do. None.
That is why I base my concept of rights on contract. If people can not agree to the rights, and agree to
Are you sure you're replying to my post? I was advocating a voice altering electronic filter that could make your voice sound like anything from a robot to an alien to a biker dude. That kind of negates everything you've just said, so I have to assume that maybe you replied to the wrong post?
You don't have to go into the reasons why you play as a guy. I think everyone over the age of twelve who plays games online knows why.
But that ultimate set of rights is derived from contract between humans, not some platonic ideal. That's all I'm saying. I think we should uphold a much broader set of rights than we do now, including the right to clean air and water, medicine, shelter, clothing and food.
I will be more clear about the problem I have with the concept of natural rights. They exist to cut off debate. For instance, I think that fencing off land violates my natural right to walk around wherever I choose. In your trite little desert isle scenario, I can go wherever I want without hindrance. What gives you the right to keep me off your land? Ah, I see, natural right.
Property rights exist to serve property owners, not the landless. That is one area where I, and a lot of other people disagree about natural rights. In my concept of rights based on contract, only land owners are a party to the private property contract because only they derive benefit from it. Non land owners, who are not a party to the contract, have no reason to uphold it unless they get some benefit.
Now, our society finds private property a useful concept. So what do the non-owners get from it? Well, property owners have to pay taxes and they will get some of the benefit of those taxes. In my world view, this situation is justified. Most advocates of the concept of natural rights would disagree. They would say that because property rights are natural, land owners owe nothing to the landless. People want to initiate debate about rights because they want to find some convoluted reasoning for taking away the basic freedoms and abilities that people have by their very nature. Exactly. You want to take away everyone's right to use your private property (not personal property, like a house or clothes, or anything made by human labor: private property. Land.) And you have some convoluted reasoning involving some supposed arbitrary "nature," and the concept of "retaliatory force."
Do you understand the issue I have with the concept of natural rights now? I'm not asking you to agree, I just want to know if I've explained myself well enough.
People do not have free will, that is an illusion. I want you to look carefully at the chain of causation as a thought or choice arises. Where did that choice come from? Did you choose to bring that choice into your consciousness? How? There is no individual self, there is only the system, infinite and eternal. Mental formations are no different from any sense formations such as sight or sound. Thoughts and feelings are fundamentally the same, even the feeling of, "Who is it that is sensing this?" That too is a mental formation.
The thing is, you are still caught in subject/object duality. You think "you" are an entity separate from the universe, observing it. You are not. There is no little homunculus or spirit inside your head looking out through your eyes and hearing through your ears. The sense of self is no different than any other sense, and there is no one having those sense experiences. They just are. What creates the sense of self is the correlation between the sense impressions.
The problem with your point of view is the same problem I have with books like the secret. They aren't FOR people who are behind to use to get ahead, they are for people who are AHEAD who want an excuse about how they made it. I mean, "I got where I am through hard work and determination, and so can you!" is a whole hell of a lot easier to accept than, "I worked hard but I also got lucky because the system was unfair in my favor."
People are not separate from their environment and their society. Would you be willing to accept that in the ultimate case, where someone is completely isolated from all social contact from birth, they will have absolutely nothing to contribute? Sadly, those experiments were done you know. Some nutty German thought isolated babies would naturally speak German. Then where do you draw the line of personal responsibility? If society can impact an individual to the point where that individual is no longer even truly human, is it that much of a stretch to say that some people are impacted by circumstance to the point that their possible choices become very limited?
The ability to rise above circumstance is in a large part genetic. Most people do not need that skill. In fact, if everyone were rising above their society, there wouldn't be any society. From the standpoint of the species, it is advantageous to have the majority be followers and a few be managers or leaders. Unfortunately, we do not get to choose what genes we are born with.
This is also not to say that this situation is ideal or immutable. People could be taught to rise above society and think for themselves. Then they would be doing what society tells them by thinking for themselves.
Your advice is good, but I have worked as an organizer in poor communities, and I can tell you, if you went into any poor ghetto in the world with that attitude, you would be scoffed at as a privileged individual who tells self-serving stories for their own benefit. I've seen too many organizers ruin a drive with attitudes like that.
Those kind of people do not want to empathize with others, or they don't have the ability. They don't want to look at the fact that other people's lives and experiences are very, very different from theirs. They just want to feel special, as if the choices they were presented with by random chance some how entitle them to look down on the rest of us from a pedestal. You do not know what it is like in anyone else's shoes, and with that attitude, it is obvious you don't want to know. You just want to go through life with the fundamental assumption that everyone is, or could be, like you if not for some inner failing. With an attitude like that, you will never be truly close to another human being.
I hope you aren't the type who uses the mantra of personal responsibility as a shield from having to take responsibility for your own actions. You know, the "Don't like it? That's your problem!" syndrome. Face it, you are a part of a system and what you do impacts others. Not everyone is at a pla
You know what matters less? Your opinion about this story. You know what matters even less than that? My opinion about your opinion. So there we are, then. Glad that's settled.
Personal responsibility is an important concept. However, it is a dangerous concept as well. People will use it as an excuse not to change a corrupt or unfair system. They will use it to explain why they succeeded while others around them failed, and to excuse any impact their actions have on others.
Sometimes, a person is where they are because of poor choices. Other times, the socio-economic system they are a part of is at fault. There is no level playing field in life, and life is the type of game where once you are ahead, it becomes easier and easier to get further ahead. Conversely, if you start off behind,it is easier and easier to slip further behind.
Society is created by individuals, but individuals are created by society. It is a dynamic system. You can not isolate the individual components of the system and blame the emergent properties of the system itself on the individuals.
Sadly, the majority of people are only capable of doing what society expects of them. If society says they will fail, that is what they will do. And that hurts all of us.
Hehe, I'm imagining a content filter, l33tsp34k to faux-olde-english. "n00b, I totally pwned joo!" becomes "Forsooth! Mighty foe, thou art vanquished!"
Seriously though, I've been thinking about a MMORPG collective for serious gamers. A few thousand true role players could easily afford to go in on an adequate server and you could give people memberships for content contribution. It could work, but it would be a lot of effort and there would be no profit in it, so I don't see it happening. I would join something like that. It's hard coming from a pencil and paper RPG world where everyone really gets into the role playing aspect, to an MMORPG world where paladins have names like hotchixxor69. Ugh.
We need something for gaming like those voice alteration devices for the phone. You know, the ones that frightened little old ladies use to sound like burly bikers? It could be done in software as a plug-in for voice chat. You could select your character's voice through a menu.
The thing is, that 11 year old is getting valuable leadership and teaching experience. If he is competent to lead the party, and a simple software tweak would let you suspend disbelief, it's a good thing.
No, people have no natural rights. The concept of rights wouldn't exist without society. There would only be power: do I have the power to do this or not? Every right involves giving up another right as part of a mutual trade with another human being. I don't want to be hit in the face, neither do you. We both give up the right to hit each other in the face in exchange for not getting hit in the face. And we agree that if anyone else tries to hit either one of us in the face, the other will try to stop it. All rights are derived from this principle of contract. I mean, if I say I have the right to free speech, but no one will uphold my right, do I have it or don't I? You have to walk pretty far out on a philosophical limb to say I do. Realistically and in any practical sense, I don't.
So, I would say, Governments do not give people rights, other people do through contract. Government merely expresses the collective will of the people as to what our collective rights should be.
The whole concept of natural rights is a kind of dodge or con. It is simply an appeal to authority designed to shut down debate around rights. "Oh, sorry. That's a natural right, end of discussion." The thing is, if there were such a thing as natural rights, they would be clear and self evident to all. Therefore the discussion of natural rights would never need to take place because we would all know them by instinct. Yet we do need to discuss them, and there is no clear consensus on what rights should be included in the hallowed list of 'natural' rights.
Oooh! Right on the money. Left wing fascist with right wing tendencies, it's true. That encapsulates exactly why I don't like her. She does keep getting worse, doesn't she? I thought she was so damn cool during Bill's first term, now she seems like a completely different person: one who will do or say anything to pander for votes.
You know, here is the thing: I think at one time she was liberal. Certainly in college, also while Bill was president. It feels to me like something happened to her. She changed. She's not the Hillary of universal health care from Bill's first term. I have nothing against the idea of a female president, or ambitious women in general. It just seems like she has sold out her values and now would do or say anything to get elected. Maybe I'm wrong, and I would certainly vote for her over any republican in a heartbeat, but she isn't my first choice. Now a Pelosi presidency, that I could get behind.
Really? What voting record do you base that on? If Hillary is a liberal, she's unlike any liberals I associate with. I think you are confused by the ongoing Republican push to redefine the political spectrum. I'd say Clinton was a right-winger with centrist tendencies, and Hillary is a centrist.
Corporations are "evil" because of their structure. No one person is accountable for the evils a corporation does. CEOs don't go to jail for poisoning millions, but they will get the boot if they don't protect the bottom line at all costs. Stockholders aren't fined if their company rapes the environment. That is the problem, that is why corporations behave in an anti-social fashion. There is nothing wrong with commerce, and the free market works wonders under many conditions, but corporatism is evil.
Unions are different because they are (theoretically!) accountable to their members through elections. Political organizations such as you mention have no where near the power of corporations. No one is calling for excluding anyone, I don't even know where you got that. Are you paying attention to the conversation, or the voices in your head? Read and attempt to understand what people here are really saying, not what that the little parody of a liberal that sits in your head is saying.
You are the kind of Republican this anarcho-syndicalist can actually stomach. If all you Republicans stuck to the party's original planks of fiscal responsibility, states' rights and a small federal government, I would have no problem with Republicanism in general. It's when you veer off into religious nuttery, neo-con insanity (neo-cons are liberals, by the original definition, btw), or corporate ass-kissery that I have a problem.
Actually, I have no problem with intelligent, rational folks of near any political persuasion. It's the teeming hordes of screeching, poo-flinging monkeys on all sides that I can't stand.
I'm an anarcho-syndicalist and I feel the same way about Clinton, and his wife. They aren't real democrats. They are both centrist populists. Dennis Kucinich is the only democrat worth his salt these days. You know how most intelligent republicans are jumping ship these days? That was me vis a vis the democrats years ago.
I admit, listening to most repubs talk about Clinton is exactly as you describe, but elemenope is not a republican, and he isn't just badmouthing Clinton (except for the sedimentary rock bit, which is actually funny and kinda true.) He's offering legitimate criticism of his presidency. If we can't respond to criticism with something more than grade school insults, we're no better than the republicans.
You know who I liked? Carter. Go ahead and laugh. I think he was a better president than Clinton.
Neil Gaiman is an immensely popular sci-fi/fantasy author. He also does some great graphic novels like The Sandman. I can't imagine being into sci-fi, fantasy, or comics and not having heard of him. He's not got quite the same level of publicity as, say, Heinlein or Tolkien, but he's got quite a lot of fans.
Reporters may be liberal, but owners and editors are all conservative, and the US media has a decidedly right wing bias. I have no idea how anyone could think the US media is liberal. It is lazy and hypocritical, but not liberal.
Seeing as how most countries have socialized medicine, and it works better than American free-market capitalist medicine, what's your problem?