I believe in fairness, egalitarianism, and reciprocity. I believe in limiting the attainment of unfair levels of wealth. Most wealthy are wealthy due more to luck, connections, and lack of morals than due to anything that is of tangible benefit to the rest of society. Why should society then reward the rich?
To paraphrase my earlier quote, "the law in it's majestic equality protects the property of the rish man and the hobo equally." How much benefit does each get from the "equal" protection afforded their property under the law? It would be hard to argue that the vagrant gets anywhere near the benefit that the rich man does, yet he pays the same sales tax when he buys something.
I am not saying that we all do not benefit from a stable society, I'm just saying the rich benefit more.
Oh Lord, won't you code me a kernel driver, My friends all have frame rates that are so much higher Write code all my lifetime, still no firewire, So oh Lord, won't you code me a kernel driver!
What is law really for, who does it really protect, and who pays the cost? I'm sure you know the quote, "The law, in it's majestic fairness, forbids the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under a bridge." The law exists to serve the rich. A stable society serves the status quo. Property laws do not help those who own no property.
I'm not blaming law enforcement. It's the wealthy that are implementing these policies, law enforcement are only trying to do their job, just as you say. Their job is to protect the rights of the rich, and incidentally (and only so long as it also serves the interests of the rich), the rest of us.
Modern research says you are wrong. Economic games played in India for months worth of salary have shown some interesting findings. Less than 5% of people are naturally selfish. About 15% of people are naturally selfless and always more concerned with fairness and reciprocity than anything else. The rest will do what society tells them. In most cases, society tells them to be selfish. So in fact, society does rather the opposite of what you say.
Look at Jean Liedloff's book The Continuum Concept, in which she studies rain forest tribes unimpacted by western culture. Despite having no taboos against incest, adultery, and homosexuality, these happened less than in cultures that had those taboos. All of societies efforts to repress and change human nature tend to backfire.
It's true that most people are plain and simple, but all that means is that they would rather do what they are told than think for themselves. There is nothing wrong with this. The fact that they just do what has worked in the past gives us innovators the slack to innovate. If everyone were trying new things all the time, we'd all starve. But it means we have a responsibility to each other, to create the kind of society we want. Most people will act fairly in a fair society, just as most people will cheat in a society of cheaters.
The myth of the necessity of control is foisted off on the masses by people who want to control others. Only control freaks who want authority to tell you what to do will tell you that human nature is basically bad and needs the threat of punishment in order to be perfected. Do not listen to those people, they are sick in the head.
I mean really, does anyone think that making people safer is the actual purpose of these programs? I know, I know, never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity, but millions of cameras, everyone photographed hundreds of times a day... Come on, who can believe that is about anything but control of society.
1.) You obviously missed the part where I mentioned the trumped up charges, meaning, he lied, people believed him, and voted to go to war based on the lied. Where were the WMDs?
2.) The old, "Yeah, well, other people did it too!" argument, a staple of any six-year-old's argumentation, and on par for most right wing "debaters."
3.) Remember when the top tax bracket was 90% and the economy was booming? You know, greatest generation and all that? Thought not. The rich unjustly reap the lion's share of the country's wealth, they should pay the majority of taxes.
4.) WTF? Taliban? Where did I mention them? If I recall, it was Al Qaeda that attacked us. What happened to them, where's Osama, why don't you address the real issue rather than a straw man?
5.) Fuck you. That is all the response that that statement warrants.
6.) Washington was a Deist, look it up. The left is not Godless, we just don't believe in your fire-and-brimstone, psychopathic God.
7.) Got any numbers on that, some comparisons maybe? Thought not.
It must suck being stuck worshiping a failed ideology and making excuses for a pack of con artists and incompetent charlatans because you are too proud to admit you were conned.
I think the point of the study wasn't that modern medicine could have saved him, it's how it could have. Anyone could come along and say, "oh yeah, modern medicine would have saved him." It takes someone with more experience than the peanut gallery here on Slashdot to explain how.
Bullshit. Look at the Tibetan Buddhist monks who starved themselves to death in times of famine to prove to their people that being hungry does not mean you have to become an animal. The threat of violence has been proven ineffective, and unnecessary. People tend to play by the rules if the majority of other people do likewise, if there is a way that they personally can help ensure that others play by the rules, the rules are clear, and the consequences for failure to comply are clear, fair, consistent, and carried out by the people themselves. This has been upheld by modern socioeconomic research.
Read Saharasia by James DeMeo if you want a cohesive explanation for the existence of pathological levels of violence in human society. Basically, when we were hunter gatherers, human on human violence was limited to fits of passion and the occasional bought with overpopulation or local resource scarcity. If young men in a tribe felt they had no assured place, they would engage in low level warfare against neighboring tribes, such as "counting coupe" that would result in a very few deaths, just enough to even things out.
After we developed agriculture and animal husbandry, gathered a surplus, and began to organize and specialize, we could no longer rely on natural corrective measures. We could no longer move on when the rains stopped and the herds moved on. And that was what happened, due to natural causes, over vast regions of northern Africa and central Asia. For the first time ever, we had both famine on a mssive scale, and the organizational level to do something about it. What that created was a whole generation of children both brain damaged by famine and raised by severely post traumatic stressed parents. This locked in the natural human famine based mind set of seeing scarcity in the world and responding with violence. What should have been a natural emergency response system became the norm.
Huh, what? That's a flawed analogy. Keeping them in prison keeps them from committing crimes, it's letting them out without properly rehabilitating them that creates repeat offenders. If people have no legitimate means of ensuring their survival by contributing to society, they will resort to crime. Ex cons often have few legitimate means of survival, society needs to address that point if it wishes to cut down on recidivism.
We don't blame Bush for the things that have gone wrong with our lives. We blame him for invading a sovereign nation on trumped up charges, dismantling constitutional protections of our most basic and precious rights, providing welfare in the form of tax relief to the wealthiest individuals and corporations, usurping power for the executive branch, presiding over the most secretive administration in US history, botching the job in Afghanistan, letting Osama escape, botching the job in Iraq, fucking up the economy, raising the deficit to undreamed of heights, fucking over the environment, billions of dollars of cash missing in Iraq, no WMDs, increased threat of domestic terrorism, fucking up on port security, firing republican DAs midterm for investigating republican wrongdoing and/or not investigating democratic wrongdoing, squandering international good-will and alienating our allies, setting back the progress of science in America, pandering to the religious right, imposing un-republican ideals of Federal power over States rights, borrowing against future generations of citizens to fund his fiscally irresponsible policies, and being a smarmy, self congratulatory, ignorant frat-boy with a track record of business failures and DWI convictions.
So it's okay if we only cut off a little? It's still without consent. I know, female "circumcision" is really a clitorectomy, and there are a few (dubious) medical reasons for performing male circumcision. But one thing you will find if you study world cultures, ALL cultures that practice ANY form of genital mutilation or that glorify ANY form of child abuse are violent and abusive cultures in other areas as well.
Yeah, that line of reasoning works well in theory, but in practice you have only the rights you are capable of upholding. To uphold your rights against a more powerful individual or group, you also need a group. So as I said, you can prattle on all you like about your rights, when the men with weapons come, if you are without a society to uphold those rights, you are fucked.
The other problem with the concept of innate rights is that anyone is free to interpret rights however they wish. There is no external, universally verifiable, authoritative source to tell you what your so-called "natural rights" are or even from which set of fundamental principles they spring. Enlightened self interest is a far more pragmatic rock on which to build a moral foundation.
I won't insult you by going into all the anti-death penalty arguments here. They are out there, and if you are interested you can find them. I assume you already have, and have rejected them for whatever reason. Fine. But plenty of smart people do feel that there is no moral justification for the death penalty. As I said, immediate self defense is one thing. The death penalty is just state sanctioned revenge killing, which is both morally unjustifiable and ineffective from a pragmatic standpoint.
You don't know my type. Violence is appropriate for immediate defense. Not for modifying behavior. If there is a whole body of evidence that violence dissuades crime or modifies behavior, perhaps you could provide a reference. Ghandi encouraged his society to eschew violence, and things turned out pretty well for India.
You are making the "is-aught" logical error, by saying that the way things are is the way they should be. You are making the more fundamental error of assuming your premises are true, that violence is a major natural component of human behavior, rather than a product of society and upbringing. Human beings are almost all born with the capacity for violence, true, but it is only brought out by societies that specifically set out to destroy the natural counterbalance to violence, which is empathy. The true way to decrease violence is to raise empathy.
Of course, this only works for the 95+ percent of humanity born with a working sense of empathy. As for the rest, kill them if they step too far out of line, sure. There's no other way with some sociopaths and psychopaths. But it is possible to teach some sociopaths and psychopaths why they should behave within normal bounds, as it is in their own self interest.
I think there is a certain class of people who are perhaps borderline sociopathic that glorify violence, seeing themselves as the sheepdogs of the world, and the rest of us as either sheep or wolves. We don't need people like that, they aren't sheepdogs. They too are wolves, just more clever at fitting in.
Make a juried legal system part of the game. Let people press charges and sue people, in game. Conviction could mean anything from confiscation of in game resources through "imprisonment" of your avatar, all the way to the "death penalty" of losing your account. Heck, make people pay a month's deposit which is forfeit if you are convicted. Sure, people would try to game the system, but people have been trying to game legal systems since they were invented, I think we know ways to protect against that by now.
It is counter productive to make your argument in terms of natural laws or natural rights. People will debate your definition of natural. Rather, put it in terms of self interest. These things are only "natural" because they have evolved to work. If they really are natural, these so-called laws or rights will be in an individuals enlightened self interest.
I'm also tired of the individualist vs. collectivist argument. There is a complex feedback system tying individuals and societies together in an interdependent web. It's not one or the other. As the African proverb says, only free people can make a strong tribe, and only a strong tribe can make people free. You can go on and on about how people are already free, and don't need anyone to make them so. Which is all well and good until the bad men with weapons come and you are all alone, prattling on about your rights. Rights only exist outside of theory when put into practice by communities willing to defend them.
And your ideas about punishment and motivation are also outdated and ineffective. Those kind of violent actions merely justify others acting violently for their beliefs as well. They perpetuate violence, not reduce it. "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind," remember? You may be justified in acting violently in your own head and heart, but so are they.
Your "solutions" appeal to the primitive, emotional side of humanity. They feel good, but they create the very thing they purport to work against.
Uh, wow. Just... wow. Feeling a bit defensive, are we? Nobody said anything about the US, Bush, Republicans, or the military. This is just an interesting story about the perils of redacting electronic documents.
I mean, I understand why you'd be feeling so defensive. It must suck, feeling like you have to defend the indefensible just so you don't have to admit that you were taken in by a pack of incompetent con artists.
I can't be the only one who finds it funny that the first page of a document on redacting documents claims, "This page intentionally left blank," can I?
Yes, exactly, they will think our outmoded techniques were so quaint. Their Reality Rights Management chips installed in every human at birth will simply prevent you from experiencing anything without paying someone for the privilege.
Okay, perhaps you are right. But you didn't address default formats in your original post. And let's be clear: you are talking about home users' individual choices, not corporate or government policy.
Come on, if.rtf and.txt could store the files that Word could create, people would never have used.doc. What a poorly thought out response, equating.rtf and.txt with formats that can actually, you know, store all the formatting you applied to your documents.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe in fairness, egalitarianism, and reciprocity. I believe in limiting the attainment of unfair levels of wealth. Most wealthy are wealthy due more to luck, connections, and lack of morals than due to anything that is of tangible benefit to the rest of society. Why should society then reward the rich?
To paraphrase my earlier quote, "the law in it's majestic equality protects the property of the rish man and the hobo equally." How much benefit does each get from the "equal" protection afforded their property under the law? It would be hard to argue that the vagrant gets anywhere near the benefit that the rich man does, yet he pays the same sales tax when he buys something.
I am not saying that we all do not benefit from a stable society, I'm just saying the rich benefit more.
Oh Lord, won't you code me a kernel driver,
My friends all have frame rates that are so much higher
Write code all my lifetime, still no firewire,
So oh Lord, won't you code me a kernel driver!
What is law really for, who does it really protect, and who pays the cost? I'm sure you know the quote, "The law, in it's majestic fairness, forbids the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under a bridge." The law exists to serve the rich. A stable society serves the status quo. Property laws do not help those who own no property.
I'm not blaming law enforcement. It's the wealthy that are implementing these policies, law enforcement are only trying to do their job, just as you say. Their job is to protect the rights of the rich, and incidentally (and only so long as it also serves the interests of the rich), the rest of us.
Modern research says you are wrong. Economic games played in India for months worth of salary have shown some interesting findings. Less than 5% of people are naturally selfish. About 15% of people are naturally selfless and always more concerned with fairness and reciprocity than anything else. The rest will do what society tells them. In most cases, society tells them to be selfish. So in fact, society does rather the opposite of what you say.
Look at Jean Liedloff's book The Continuum Concept, in which she studies rain forest tribes unimpacted by western culture. Despite having no taboos against incest, adultery, and homosexuality, these happened less than in cultures that had those taboos. All of societies efforts to repress and change human nature tend to backfire.
It's true that most people are plain and simple, but all that means is that they would rather do what they are told than think for themselves. There is nothing wrong with this. The fact that they just do what has worked in the past gives us innovators the slack to innovate. If everyone were trying new things all the time, we'd all starve. But it means we have a responsibility to each other, to create the kind of society we want. Most people will act fairly in a fair society, just as most people will cheat in a society of cheaters.
The myth of the necessity of control is foisted off on the masses by people who want to control others. Only control freaks who want authority to tell you what to do will tell you that human nature is basically bad and needs the threat of punishment in order to be perfected. Do not listen to those people, they are sick in the head.
I mean really, does anyone think that making people safer is the actual purpose of these programs? I know, I know, never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity, but millions of cameras, everyone photographed hundreds of times a day... Come on, who can believe that is about anything but control of society.
1.) You obviously missed the part where I mentioned the trumped up charges, meaning, he lied, people believed him, and voted to go to war based on the lied. Where were the WMDs?
2.) The old, "Yeah, well, other people did it too!" argument, a staple of any six-year-old's argumentation, and on par for most right wing "debaters."
3.) Remember when the top tax bracket was 90% and the economy was booming? You know, greatest generation and all that? Thought not. The rich unjustly reap the lion's share of the country's wealth, they should pay the majority of taxes.
4.) WTF? Taliban? Where did I mention them? If I recall, it was Al Qaeda that attacked us. What happened to them, where's Osama, why don't you address the real issue rather than a straw man?
5.) Fuck you. That is all the response that that statement warrants.
6.) Washington was a Deist, look it up. The left is not Godless, we just don't believe in your fire-and-brimstone, psychopathic God.
7.) Got any numbers on that, some comparisons maybe? Thought not.
It must suck being stuck worshiping a failed ideology and making excuses for a pack of con artists and incompetent charlatans because you are too proud to admit you were conned.
I think the point of the study wasn't that modern medicine could have saved him, it's how it could have. Anyone could come along and say, "oh yeah, modern medicine would have saved him." It takes someone with more experience than the peanut gallery here on Slashdot to explain how.
Cry me a river, coward. Better a Slashbot than a Bushbot.
A lot of us don't think the supposedly democratic congress is doing enough, so those numbers don't mean what you imply they mean.
Bullshit. Look at the Tibetan Buddhist monks who starved themselves to death in times of famine to prove to their people that being hungry does not mean you have to become an animal. The threat of violence has been proven ineffective, and unnecessary. People tend to play by the rules if the majority of other people do likewise, if there is a way that they personally can help ensure that others play by the rules, the rules are clear, and the consequences for failure to comply are clear, fair, consistent, and carried out by the people themselves. This has been upheld by modern socioeconomic research.
Read Saharasia by James DeMeo if you want a cohesive explanation for the existence of pathological levels of violence in human society. Basically, when we were hunter gatherers, human on human violence was limited to fits of passion and the occasional bought with overpopulation or local resource scarcity. If young men in a tribe felt they had no assured place, they would engage in low level warfare against neighboring tribes, such as "counting coupe" that would result in a very few deaths, just enough to even things out.
After we developed agriculture and animal husbandry, gathered a surplus, and began to organize and specialize, we could no longer rely on natural corrective measures. We could no longer move on when the rains stopped and the herds moved on. And that was what happened, due to natural causes, over vast regions of northern Africa and central Asia. For the first time ever, we had both famine on a mssive scale, and the organizational level to do something about it. What that created was a whole generation of children both brain damaged by famine and raised by severely post traumatic stressed parents. This locked in the natural human famine based mind set of seeing scarcity in the world and responding with violence. What should have been a natural emergency response system became the norm.
Huh, what? That's a flawed analogy. Keeping them in prison keeps them from committing crimes, it's letting them out without properly rehabilitating them that creates repeat offenders. If people have no legitimate means of ensuring their survival by contributing to society, they will resort to crime. Ex cons often have few legitimate means of survival, society needs to address that point if it wishes to cut down on recidivism.
We don't blame Bush for the things that have gone wrong with our lives. We blame him for invading a sovereign nation on trumped up charges, dismantling constitutional protections of our most basic and precious rights, providing welfare in the form of tax relief to the wealthiest individuals and corporations, usurping power for the executive branch, presiding over the most secretive administration in US history, botching the job in Afghanistan, letting Osama escape, botching the job in Iraq, fucking up the economy, raising the deficit to undreamed of heights, fucking over the environment, billions of dollars of cash missing in Iraq, no WMDs, increased threat of domestic terrorism, fucking up on port security, firing republican DAs midterm for investigating republican wrongdoing and/or not investigating democratic wrongdoing, squandering international good-will and alienating our allies, setting back the progress of science in America, pandering to the religious right, imposing un-republican ideals of Federal power over States rights, borrowing against future generations of citizens to fund his fiscally irresponsible policies, and being a smarmy, self congratulatory, ignorant frat-boy with a track record of business failures and DWI convictions.
So it's okay if we only cut off a little? It's still without consent. I know, female "circumcision" is really a clitorectomy, and there are a few (dubious) medical reasons for performing male circumcision. But one thing you will find if you study world cultures, ALL cultures that practice ANY form of genital mutilation or that glorify ANY form of child abuse are violent and abusive cultures in other areas as well.
Yeah, that line of reasoning works well in theory, but in practice you have only the rights you are capable of upholding. To uphold your rights against a more powerful individual or group, you also need a group. So as I said, you can prattle on all you like about your rights, when the men with weapons come, if you are without a society to uphold those rights, you are fucked.
The other problem with the concept of innate rights is that anyone is free to interpret rights however they wish. There is no external, universally verifiable, authoritative source to tell you what your so-called "natural rights" are or even from which set of fundamental principles they spring. Enlightened self interest is a far more pragmatic rock on which to build a moral foundation.
I won't insult you by going into all the anti-death penalty arguments here. They are out there, and if you are interested you can find them. I assume you already have, and have rejected them for whatever reason. Fine. But plenty of smart people do feel that there is no moral justification for the death penalty. As I said, immediate self defense is one thing. The death penalty is just state sanctioned revenge killing, which is both morally unjustifiable and ineffective from a pragmatic standpoint.
You don't know my type. Violence is appropriate for immediate defense. Not for modifying behavior. If there is a whole body of evidence that violence dissuades crime or modifies behavior, perhaps you could provide a reference. Ghandi encouraged his society to eschew violence, and things turned out pretty well for India.
You are making the "is-aught" logical error, by saying that the way things are is the way they should be. You are making the more fundamental error of assuming your premises are true, that violence is a major natural component of human behavior, rather than a product of society and upbringing. Human beings are almost all born with the capacity for violence, true, but it is only brought out by societies that specifically set out to destroy the natural counterbalance to violence, which is empathy. The true way to decrease violence is to raise empathy.
Of course, this only works for the 95+ percent of humanity born with a working sense of empathy. As for the rest, kill them if they step too far out of line, sure. There's no other way with some sociopaths and psychopaths. But it is possible to teach some sociopaths and psychopaths why they should behave within normal bounds, as it is in their own self interest.
I think there is a certain class of people who are perhaps borderline sociopathic that glorify violence, seeing themselves as the sheepdogs of the world, and the rest of us as either sheep or wolves. We don't need people like that, they aren't sheepdogs. They too are wolves, just more clever at fitting in.
Make a juried legal system part of the game. Let people press charges and sue people, in game. Conviction could mean anything from confiscation of in game resources through "imprisonment" of your avatar, all the way to the "death penalty" of losing your account. Heck, make people pay a month's deposit which is forfeit if you are convicted. Sure, people would try to game the system, but people have been trying to game legal systems since they were invented, I think we know ways to protect against that by now.
It is counter productive to make your argument in terms of natural laws or natural rights. People will debate your definition of natural. Rather, put it in terms of self interest. These things are only "natural" because they have evolved to work. If they really are natural, these so-called laws or rights will be in an individuals enlightened self interest.
I'm also tired of the individualist vs. collectivist argument. There is a complex feedback system tying individuals and societies together in an interdependent web. It's not one or the other. As the African proverb says, only free people can make a strong tribe, and only a strong tribe can make people free. You can go on and on about how people are already free, and don't need anyone to make them so. Which is all well and good until the bad men with weapons come and you are all alone, prattling on about your rights. Rights only exist outside of theory when put into practice by communities willing to defend them.
And your ideas about punishment and motivation are also outdated and ineffective. Those kind of violent actions merely justify others acting violently for their beliefs as well. They perpetuate violence, not reduce it. "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind," remember? You may be justified in acting violently in your own head and heart, but so are they.
Your "solutions" appeal to the primitive, emotional side of humanity. They feel good, but they create the very thing they purport to work against.
Uh, wow. Just... wow. Feeling a bit defensive, are we? Nobody said anything about the US, Bush, Republicans, or the military. This is just an interesting story about the perils of redacting electronic documents.
I mean, I understand why you'd be feeling so defensive. It must suck, feeling like you have to defend the indefensible just so you don't have to admit that you were taken in by a pack of incompetent con artists.
Worse, it could be both.
"Reality, brought to you by Brawndo! It's got the electrolytes plants crave!"
You either pay your fees, or you see the commercials. ALL. THE. TIME.
I can't be the only one who finds it funny that the first page of a document on redacting documents claims, "This page intentionally left blank," can I?
Yes, exactly, they will think our outmoded techniques were so quaint. Their Reality Rights Management chips installed in every human at birth will simply prevent you from experiencing anything without paying someone for the privilege.
Okay, perhaps you are right. But you didn't address default formats in your original post. And let's be clear: you are talking about home users' individual choices, not corporate or government policy.
Come on, if .rtf and .txt could store the files that Word could create, people would never have used .doc. What a poorly thought out response, equating .rtf and .txt with formats that can actually, you know, store all the formatting you applied to your documents.
Or is it merely a rhetorical question designed to encourage flaming and thus more page hits?
Wait, this is Slashdot.
Do I even need to ask this question, or do I just like to watch myself type?