"Star Trek: 25th Anniversary", the precursor to Judgement Rites. It was very nice as well, except for the quite difficult and unavoidable battle against 3 Bird of Prays near the end.
That sentence cannot extend anything, because it's not part of the claims. However, the claims themselves do not refer to a web browser, so it already covers any and all applications that work with "hypertext documents".
Re:I'm going to write to my congressman
on
More Microsoft Patents
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· Score: 2, Informative
If you want an overview of studies on software patents, have a look here. Clickable links to the referenced studies are provided in the bibliography at the end.
Said "wiser" slashdotter will have a hard time doing that in this case. What is covered by a patent, is what's in the claims. This is claim 1 of the patent:
1. In a computer system having a video display, a keyboard device for providing a key input, a method of discovering each of a plurality of hyperlinks in a hypertext document, said input device having keys, comprising:
(a) displaying the hypertext document on the video display;
(b) organizing the plurality of the hyperlinks in the document into a sequence in an element list, wherein the sequence of the hyperlinks is based on the disposition of each hyperlink in the document, and wherein the element list comprises information describing a location of a next hyperlink and a type of the next hyperlink; and
(c) when a predefined key on the keyboard device is actuated, giving focus to the next hyperlink of the plurality of hyperlinks in the sequence.
So as long as you have
a computing device, a display, some key-input device, an algorithm to discover all hyperlinks in an html document;
a) a way to display to the html document on the display;
b) a way to organise the links into a sequence in a list based on their disposition in the document (e.g. add them to a linked list as you encounter them), with the location of the next hyperlink (pointers!) and the description of the type of the next hyper link (typ: hyperlink_type_t);
c) when a predefined key is pressed, shift focus to the next hyperlink.
Apart from that you have to keep track in your url list of the types of the links (regardless of the classification you use), all it does cover is indeed plain and pure going from one link to the next by pressing a key.
At least the titles from PomPom Games use it. Of course, I can only judge by the Mac OS X versions, but at least those work fine. Since most of the work is done by the OS and hardware, I'm not sure how SDL could really slow down things a lot (they just offer a uniform interface afaik).
The OS controls the hardware, and the OS is the optional part and thus why it's okay for buisnesses to not go to standards.
The reason his comparison does hold to a certain extent, is the so-called "networking effects" in the information world. Even though in theory everyone could use his own proprietary formats, in practice that doesn't work. People communicate, download files from the web, put different computers on the same network and want them to be able to talk to each other etc. A file is almost never used on only one computer or by one person.
If one company gets the upper hand in a particular field, your product has to be able to communicate with them or you stand no chance at all in the market. That's why there is a natural tendency towards monopoly positions in the software world. You don't want to further that tendency as much as possible.
Because everyone offering the same options (electricity) is going to kill a buisness model.
Protecting a particular business model does not make sense (from a policy maker's point of view) if it inhibits other business models which are more beneficial to the economy (and thus society).
he real question that nobody seems to ask is : HOW THE FUCK DOES THE USPTO EVEN CONSIDER SUCH APPLICATIONS?
Because the US abandoned all limits as far as patentable subject matter are concerned. Everything useful "made by man under the Sun" is considered to be fair game.
This patent perfectly shows why just increasing non-obviousness standards will not stop the influx of idiotic patents.
As true as that is, you don't see the patent offices of other countries passing out patents to everybody and his dog for things that anybody with five minutes of experience in the field knows are an old hat.
That's not true. Many US software patents have European equivalents. It really isn't just a problem of the patent offices themselves, it's largely inherent to the nature of software itself and the patent system's inability to deal with it (because it was never designed for that kind of stuff).
You're completely right. And the patent system was never even designed with the idea that it would be possible to assess all possible prior art. The non-obviousness and usefulness requirements are merely filters to take out a number of a priori "known" bad patents. They know they can't get all bad patents out, but the idea is that in the end, the positive effects of the granted "good patents" outweigh the negative effects of the granted "bad patents".
This is however merely a hypothesis and most certainly not true per definition or because of some economic law. As Fritz Machlup said in the fifties, when he studied the patent system for Congress:
if we didn't have a patent
system, it would be irresponsible to create one; but since we do, it would be irresponsible to get rid of it.
So what clearly is irresponsible, keeping extending the patent system into fields it was never intended to cover without any economic rationale to back it up, such as mathematics and business methods. The non-obviousness becomes even harder to check (who's going to e.g. data mine all open source software out there to check whether a particular algorithm hasn't been published before), innovation happened just as well before there were software patents etc. And now we even have tons of studies to back up our gut feeling that software patents to more harm than good.
Therefore, just solving the non-obviousness problem and making patents easier to appeal, or going after some annoying patents like EFF is doing are not real solutions. The problem is the subject matter itself. The actions of the EFF are merely detracting from the real problem, and I would contend it may even do more harm than good. After all, they legitimise the system by saying that only annoying software patents with prior art are bad, while every software patent can be used "to steal IP" from all software authors, by forbidding him to rightfully profit from his copyright (to use a catch phrase of the other camp).
Someone who publishes something, should never have to worry about patents. The act of publishing should never constitute a patent infringement.
I plan on placing some stuff there relating to software patents too; a subject we both take an interest in, if I'm not mistaken.
I guess I should be happy that you don't reply to each of my posts on that subject that all studies on it are merely opinions and that in an alternate universe those studies could perfectly say the reverse etc:)
This is false. Congress held hearings in several locations on the topic of software patents.
They did so after the fact. Have a look at this chapter from the NRC book "The Digital Dilemma" (search for legislative branch).
I read the 600K+ of transcripts from hearings they held in California (talk about dull reading). Almost to a person, there was a stark division between two camps: the developers opposed software patents, largely arguing that "copyright and speed of innovation is sufficient"; the lawyers argued that patents were absolutely required.
Yes, that's generally the case. Although in some cases the lawyers themselves also oppose them, see e.g. the testimony of Robert Barr (head IP at Cisco) before the FTC in 2002.
The time is fast approaching when the developers should form a single voice (hello ACM, IEEE, are you there?) and say "we told you so, change it." This is and always will be an inherently political process.
In the end it's indeed politics that has to create the guidelines. But the situation you (in the US) and we (in Europe) are now in is not the direct consequence of political games, but of juridical games.
The board of directors of Microsoft are not blindly allowing their 'I.P.' department carte blanche to damage their strategic interests though. Theirs is a deliberate policy but it is amoral not immoral - they genuinely believe it's in the best interests of their shareholders
... until they find themselves at the wrong end of the stick. I contend that management has been mislead by their IP department, and that this has happened in many large companies. It's not just bad for society as a whole, in the long run it's just as bad for large companies and their shareholders imho.
The real enemies are the corrupt, incompetent or short-sighted politicians and legislators who make and administrate the laws that enable such companies to behave immorally and unethically, yet perfectly legally.
In case of software patents, it has nothing to do with corrupt politicians and legislators. Software patents were introduced in the US (and Europe for now) without any political interventions whatsoever. It's the Patent Offices that grant such patents, and the courts that consider them valid. Why? Because the corporations are asking, arguing and suing for it.
In this case the corporations (or better: the "intellectual property departments" of corporations) are directly responsible. And then they start complaining about the consequences of their own actions...
No, I don't and didn't. What I have been saying is, that, if you accept that a majority justifies laws against hate-speech, it justifies laws against anti-hate speech too.
My only problem is that I wonder why you keep repeating that, because I never claimed it's justified because of a majority ruling. It's simply as if you want to make me say that.
It does not mean that it is so by law of nature or so, it means that those rights apply in all situations/universally
Indeed, and that's my point exactly: they do not show that. Slavery, for instance, was a very common accepted practise, at one time. Yet, in the current timeframe, it would be considered fundamental against human basic rights.
You are still misunderstanding it. It's a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, not a Declaration of Universal Human Rights. I.e., the Declaration was adopted with the intent of it being Universally applicable regarding the Human Rights defined in it. It nowhere claims that the human rights it defines are universal by their very nature.
I.o.w., the goal was to have some declaration which would be universally applicable (otherwise, you could just as well have no declaration at all) regarding defining a number of human rights which would be guaranteed and which cannot be taken away. So it was not just called "a declaration" but the Universal Declaration.
And as I said before, it was originally indeed simply the product of its time. Nobody contests that, you'll find that back in every discussion on the origins of the UDHR. I even mentioned that literally, and extrapolated on that later on.
If you are of the opinion that something is a tragedy. I doubt the nazi's would have found it a tragedy if all jews were killed in concentrationcamps.
That's why I previously asked you whether you accepted things like the right to life as a fundamental right. If you don't, then there is no point in having any rights at all, since you can't make use of any right when you're dead.
It all boils down to whether you recognise that an individual has a right to any rights or not. Or maybe even stronger, whether whether you accept the concept of the existence of individuals, or whether there's only a hive or so.
Thus, consistency DOES make an argument stronger, though it doesn't give us 'good' (in the sense of ethical) reasonings. But what, then, can one use for ethical guidelines?
Someone who has no sense of morality or conscience fulfills the textbook definition of "psychopath". I'm not sure whether it would be a good idea to have society ruled by psychopaths. In fact, psychopaths often follow extremely logical and consistent rules (because they don't have any other rules). But because they completely disregard the consequences of their actions, they are extremely dangerous to society (to any society, including fascist ones).
A basic principle of Kants' philosophy, was that you shouldn't do to others what you wouldn't want them to do to you.
That's really not just Kant. In fact, when I replied to an earlier message of yours, I suddenly had to think of the saying "Do not judge lest you be judged". So I googled for it and found this page. Since I was not raised in a Catholic way, I even didn't know it came from the Bible. Anyway, it's almost exactly the same thing, plus of course the obligatory "when in doubt, judge by God's word".
I suppose humanists replace God's word by conscience. You (and possibly Kant, I never read his works) simply rip it out. It can be nice as a mental exercise or to have long discussions on slashdot about, but as I said before you're bli
Then, in essence, you say that in social issues, an opinion of one group inherently can go above the opinions of another, even when there is no logic or rationality behind it.
I said "opinions based on facts", as in historical evidence. There is logic and rationality behind it (disrespect for the human rights they mention has resulted in great tragedies, while respect for them hasn't -> it seems logical to demand some basic respect for those rights etc), but a conclusion always contains some form of opinion, unless you are working with maths.
Saying that is not necessary, also means another group with oposing ideas do not have to show any logic, that their opinion is, in principle, enough, whether they can argument it in a correct way or not.
I never claimed you don't have to show any logic, I simply said you can't use only logic. And at some level it even is logical that we in Europe banned hate speech, given that we saw what it indirectly led to (regardless of what courts have said, speech is a very powerful weapon if used properly). It may not be impartial or without moral prejudice, but that's something else.
Given the choice between demonstrating they are wrong, and muffling them up (with obvious little results, seen the progress of ultra-right in Europe), it is more democratic to chose for the first. And a democracy should always strive to be more democratic, not less.
Have you seen the progress of extreme right in the US? They've been governing the whole thing for the last 4 years! I do not think banning of hate speech as such has a large impact on the progress or deterring of extreme right. I do think it can have a profound influence on the living quality of some minorities. Most importantly however, I'm convinced that in the case of Europe, it's an extremely strong symbolical thing, which makes it no longer "a ban on hate speech as such" but "a ban on hate speech with a further symbolic effect". See below for more on this.
You're axis does not make it that any better, it merely shows it's a step in wrong direction.
It moves us slightly more to the center (slightly, because as I said it's a trade-off of one basic human right for another). I thought you were the one that was against extremes? Keep in mind that the bottom is total anarchy.
While you seem to accept that step for a perceived benifit of peace, I don't.
I never said that. Really. What I said is that it is a symbolic action of society, to show that (at that period in time) people were willing to sacrifice part of their freedom (of speech) in order to try to do something to help preventing such atrocities from happening again. It's a symbol, plain and simple.
I also said that tearing down that symbol in the name of logic and consistency would have effects going much farther that what logic would dictate. It would not be the same as never having had a ban on hate speech.
It's like the patriot act in the USA: meant for protecting the US against those evil muslims that want to create a fundamentalistic muslimstate all over the world. Well, a few more of those terror attacks, and a few more of these laws later, and what ARE you protecting, at the end? Not the free and democratic country, that's for sure. What use is it, in an efort to protect oneself, to become a policestate of your own?
That's the stepping stone theory, which has proven to be false as far as the banning of hate speech in Europe is concerned. In the US, the terrorist attacks are merely used as an excuse by those in power to to get more and more power. I don't think you can say that of the banning of hate speech in Europe after WWII.
Well...ermm..I didn't see no evidence, just opinions. Social evidence of what, exactly?
Name one large conflict/war in histo
Re:Blizzard does Linux?
on
XCode Roundup
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· Score: 1
Probably, just like 10.1 and 10.2 folks can't upgrade to XCode 1 without upgrading to Panther. That doesn't mean you can't compile and install gcc 3.5 of course.
Hmm...do you mean to indicate that you *would* accept it, then? Because that was the conculsion I made (that you wouldn't accept the same reasoning, but reversed on yourself).
I simply meant that if the UDHR were drawn up by fascists in your hypothetical world and they put in that anti-racism were forbidden because it was supposedly against a fundamental right, that I would not accept it (and you found that that hypocrite, because I do accept forbidding hate speech), and that I do not think that this is hypocrite at all for the reasons explained in my previous post (and partly repeated below).
In short: fascists are against the principle of individual rights, as the state goes above everything. So any "rights" they give, are per definition never universal (since the state can change those at will for anyone and at any time). So they simply cannot draw up a UDHR, except one that states "you have no inherent individual rights". Therefore, your hypothesis is false, and my non-acceptance is not even very relevant. A better answer would have been "mu" I guess.
Well, I hope you are not going to get on your high horse again, because I'm not saying you are hypocrite, but, really... there are many hypocrites who don't feel they are hypocrite. Thus, whether a person feels or not that he himself is hypocrite is by no means the proof that he isn't.
Duh. That's why I tried to explain why I did not feel hypocrite, so you could see why I feel that way and could argue against it (or, who knows, agree I'm not hypocrite).
Following the actual meaning of the word, if one does not act the way one preaches (or does not accept a reasoning for himself that he himself uses on others), this constitute hypocrisy. The question whether a person himself believes or feels he is (or not), does not enter the picture.
My belief/preaching is that there are fundamental human rights such as e.g. human dignity and personal freedom, and that any rules made that claim to protect human rights cannot be squarely aimed at the destruction of such rights.
That's why I accept banning of hate speech (it aims at protecting dignity, at a trade off with freedom and possibly other things) and not banning any speech at all (aims at protecting personal freedom, at a potential trade-off with dignity and possibly other things). It's also why I do not accept forbidding anti-racism speech (reducing personal freedom in exchange for what?) or explicitly allowing discriminatory talk (reducing dignity in exchange for what? It does not provide for extra freedom, since it was already allowed).
My argumentation and conclusion holds, in any case better then yours, because mine is not based on opinions, while yours boil down to just that.
I think you are misguided if you think that abstract logic (based on hypothetical situations or not) always goes above opinions based on facts in case of social issues.
You may counterargument that that is against a basic right, but, so what? They don't have to be rational, so whether they feel it is a basic right, why should they care? In a way, you are proving my point, that, if, like you claim societies have a right to choose for theirselves, even if they are irrational, then societies have the right to chose to be racist or fundamentalist too.
You missed my point. Maybe I didn't stress it enough in my last post, but I was almost all the time talking about the goals of the UDHR (protecting human dignity, the right not to have to live in constant fear,... the stuff that's mentioned in the preamble). The rules of the UDHR are just general guidelines to achieve those things and sometimes trade-offs have to be made (as illustrated in the free speech debate). Which trade-off you make depends on your background and I think a society has the right to choose which trade-off they make. You
On the other hand, it is rather clear what the inevitable conclusion would be, indeed, and I suspect that's why you are so reluctant to answer it.
Just a small nit: what your conclusion would be. I do not feel the least bit hypocrite about it. In fact, I think the other choice of simply blindly defending whatever the rules are and switching with them like a leave in the wind is actually hypocrite. I've simply been looking for arguments that can show you why I feel that way and why your conclusion does not hold.
Now, remember, the main argument you gave, was that it was against a basic human right. It is fairly trivial to demonstarte that that can't be the main reason at all, because speech that goes against other 'basic rights' is not being forbidden.
And this is where the societies come into play. As I've said many times now already: you cannot construct social theories purely on rules of logic. If you would argue against education, people would probably think you're a looney and ignore you. If you managed to get a powerful movement, managed to grasp power for a while and forbid eduction to a lot of people that way, I'm quite sure that afterwards draconian measures would be taken to prevent that basic right (as pretty much the entire world, from authoritarian to libertarian, has agreed) from being taken away again.
And apart from that, basic human rights are, as we now can agree on, I hope (?), not universal, but rather based on opinions.
Not just mere opinions like yours or mine, but opinions of a society that encompasses pretty much the entire world. The UDHR committee originally consisted of someone from the US, someone from France, someone from Lebanon and someone from China (you may call them all "left", but as I said in my previous post, left and right is meaningless in this context; it's libertarian/anarchist vs authoritarian/fascist in this debate).
It was later included and referred to in a lot of other conventions, treaties and covenants and many of its elements can be found back in religions, pre-existing laws/rules (such as the US Constitution), works from philosophers,... This is not just some majority opinion, it is something that has grown out of human society as a whole (left, right, authoritarian, libertarian,...), trying to define what makes us human, which rights must be guaranteed in order for people "to be able to be humans", all with the goal of encouraging dignity, peace, cooperation and respect for all.
The Preamble nicely explains where those rules come from and why they chose those particular rights:
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,
Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,
Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in cooperation with the United Nations, the promotion of u
In theory you can do whatever you want with it since it's all public, but I'd prefer if you simply link to it and not just copy/paste parts.
And despite my earlier comment of that being my last post, I've been doing research on what really constitutes left and right (left and right nowadays have little to do with human rights or racism, those are more properties of the axis of authoritarian/fascist and libertarian/anarchist), on how the universal declaration of human rights actually came to be (it was not just a bunch of libertarian or anarchist people) and the history of the concept of human rights (you'll be happy to hear that the concept of human rights is indeed quite recent, that the UDHR originally a product of early 20th century European thinking and thus was not universal at all, but things evolved, as also the previous link notes). Of course they're not universal because they're called universal, it's more like the other way round (I'll reply to the argument "but what if the world was mainly ruled by Hitlers and Stalins" later).
I may reply later in detail to your last post, but I'm still convinced that your "hypocrisy test" poses a false dilemma (or at least presents a false conclusion) and that it is not possible to make good social rules by only looking at rational arguments, because the human nature and thus also society simply are not rational. There is this thing called a conscience that most people have, and simply factoring that out of rule making altogether because it's not exactly the same for everyone does not automatically give you good rules for well functioning society.
You may become the ultimate "impartialist" who can set aside all his own moral values and rules, but that does not mean the rules you end up with that way are rules that result in a well functioning society. Society grows, evolves and is per definition deeply affected what happened before. You call those ghosts from the parts and chains that prevent following the path to ultimate rational enlightenment, but others see it as learning from your mistakes and *attempting* (which obviously does not automatically mean succeeding) to prevent them from happening again. Therefore just discarding that
For example, the banning of hate speech in Europe and the inalienable right to have arms in the US are indeed examples of mainly symbolic rules as opposed to purely rational rules. But exactly this symbolism is very strong, and you cannot discard that as being irrelevant or "overrulable" purely in the name of impartial logic and consistency.
Just abolishing them (even in the name of rationality or enlightenment), would always be interpreted as a signal that the government doesn't want you to have weapons so they can better oppress you, or that the holocaust wasn't that bad after (or maybe even didn't happen). You may know that is not the case, but society just doesn't work that way. You can't manage it like it's a bunch of drones who simply follow the rules and do nothing more or nothing less, nor think outside the box. That's why I stand by my point that each society has the right to make its own rules based on its experiences, and why I think the absolute free speech in the US is exactly as justifiable (even though I don't agree with it) as the banning of hate speech in Europe.
Slashdot Mirror
DV is also lossy. But maybe it doesn't get worse as fast on successive saves?
"Star Trek: 25th Anniversary", the precursor to Judgement Rites. It was very nice as well, except for the quite difficult and unavoidable battle against 3 Bird of Prays near the end.
That sentence cannot extend anything, because it's not part of the claims. However, the claims themselves do not refer to a web browser, so it already covers any and all applications that work with "hypertext documents".
If you want an overview of studies on software patents, have a look here. Clickable links to the referenced studies are provided in the bibliography at the end.
- a computing device, a display, some key-input device, an algorithm to discover all hyperlinks in an html document;
- a) a way to display to the html document on the display;
- b) a way to organise the links into a sequence in a list based on their disposition in the document (e.g. add them to a linked list as you encounter them), with the location of the next hyperlink (pointers!) and the description of the type of the next hyper link (typ: hyperlink_type_t);
- c) when a predefined key is pressed, shift focus to the next hyperlink.
Apart from that you have to keep track in your url list of the types of the links (regardless of the classification you use), all it does cover is indeed plain and pure going from one link to the next by pressing a key.At least the titles from PomPom Games use it. Of course, I can only judge by the Mac OS X versions, but at least those work fine. Since most of the work is done by the OS and hardware, I'm not sure how SDL could really slow down things a lot (they just offer a uniform interface afaik).
If one company gets the upper hand in a particular field, your product has to be able to communicate with them or you stand no chance at all in the market. That's why there is a natural tendency towards monopoly positions in the software world. You don't want to further that tendency as much as possible.
Protecting a particular business model does not make sense (from a policy maker's point of view) if it inhibits other business models which are more beneficial to the economy (and thus society).The changes are usually merely a matter of wording, to show that there is "a technical solution to a technical problem".
With "equivalents" I did mean "granted equivalents", not just applications.
This patent perfectly shows why just increasing non-obviousness standards will not stop the influx of idiotic patents.
This is however merely a hypothesis and most certainly not true per definition or because of some economic law. As Fritz Machlup said in the fifties, when he studied the patent system for Congress:
So what clearly is irresponsible, keeping extending the patent system into fields it was never intended to cover without any economic rationale to back it up, such as mathematics and business methods. The non-obviousness becomes even harder to check (who's going to e.g. data mine all open source software out there to check whether a particular algorithm hasn't been published before), innovation happened just as well before there were software patents etc. And now we even have tons of studies to back up our gut feeling that software patents to more harm than good.Therefore, just solving the non-obviousness problem and making patents easier to appeal, or going after some annoying patents like EFF is doing are not real solutions. The problem is the subject matter itself. The actions of the EFF are merely detracting from the real problem, and I would contend it may even do more harm than good. After all, they legitimise the system by saying that only annoying software patents with prior art are bad, while every software patent can be used "to steal IP" from all software authors, by forbidding him to rightfully profit from his copyright (to use a catch phrase of the other camp).
Someone who publishes something, should never have to worry about patents. The act of publishing should never constitute a patent infringement.
I'm under the impression both of us think the other one doesn't get the points he's trying to get across, so I'll leave it at this.
Good luck with your blog.
In this case the corporations (or better: the "intellectual property departments" of corporations) are directly responsible. And then they start complaining about the consequences of their own actions...
My only problem is that I wonder why you keep repeating that, because I never claimed it's justified because of a majority ruling. It's simply as if you want to make me say that.
You are still misunderstanding it. It's a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, not a Declaration of Universal Human Rights. I.e., the Declaration was adopted with the intent of it being Universally applicable regarding the Human Rights defined in it. It nowhere claims that the human rights it defines are universal by their very nature.
I.o.w., the goal was to have some declaration which would be universally applicable (otherwise, you could just as well have no declaration at all) regarding defining a number of human rights which would be guaranteed and which cannot be taken away. So it was not just called "a declaration" but the Universal Declaration.
And as I said before, it was originally indeed simply the product of its time. Nobody contests that, you'll find that back in every discussion on the origins of the UDHR. I even mentioned that literally, and extrapolated on that later on.
That's why I previously asked you whether you accepted things like the right to life as a fundamental right. If you don't, then there is no point in having any rights at all, since you can't make use of any right when you're dead.
It all boils down to whether you recognise that an individual has a right to any rights or not. Or maybe even stronger, whether whether you accept the concept of the existence of individuals, or whether there's only a hive or so.
Someone who has no sense of morality or conscience fulfills the textbook definition of "psychopath". I'm not sure whether it would be a good idea to have society ruled by psychopaths. In fact, psychopaths often follow extremely logical and consistent rules (because they don't have any other rules). But because they completely disregard the consequences of their actions, they are extremely dangerous to society (to any society, including fascist ones).
That's really not just Kant. In fact, when I replied to an earlier message of yours, I suddenly had to think of the saying "Do not judge lest you be judged". So I googled for it and found this page. Since I was not raised in a Catholic way, I even didn't know it came from the Bible. Anyway, it's almost exactly the same thing, plus of course the obligatory "when in doubt, judge by God's word".
I suppose humanists replace God's word by conscience. You (and possibly Kant, I never read his works) simply rip it out. It can be nice as a mental exercise or to have long discussions on slashdot about, but as I said before you're bli
I said "opinions based on facts", as in historical evidence. There is logic and rationality behind it (disrespect for the human rights they mention has resulted in great tragedies, while respect for them hasn't -> it seems logical to demand some basic respect for those rights etc), but a conclusion always contains some form of opinion, unless you are working with maths.
I never claimed you don't have to show any logic, I simply said you can't use only logic. And at some level it even is logical that we in Europe banned hate speech, given that we saw what it indirectly led to (regardless of what courts have said, speech is a very powerful weapon if used properly). It may not be impartial or without moral prejudice, but that's something else.
Have you seen the progress of extreme right in the US? They've been governing the whole thing for the last 4 years! I do not think banning of hate speech as such has a large impact on the progress or deterring of extreme right. I do think it can have a profound influence on the living quality of some minorities. Most importantly however, I'm convinced that in the case of Europe, it's an extremely strong symbolical thing, which makes it no longer "a ban on hate speech as such" but "a ban on hate speech with a further symbolic effect". See below for more on this.
It moves us slightly more to the center (slightly, because as I said it's a trade-off of one basic human right for another). I thought you were the one that was against extremes? Keep in mind that the bottom is total anarchy.
I never said that. Really. What I said is that it is a symbolic action of society, to show that (at that period in time) people were willing to sacrifice part of their freedom (of speech) in order to try to do something to help preventing such atrocities from happening again. It's a symbol, plain and simple.
I also said that tearing down that symbol in the name of logic and consistency would have effects going much farther that what logic would dictate. It would not be the same as never having had a ban on hate speech.
That's the stepping stone theory, which has proven to be false as far as the banning of hate speech in Europe is concerned. In the US, the terrorist attacks are merely used as an excuse by those in power to to get more and more power. I don't think you can say that of the banning of hate speech in Europe after WWII.
Name one large conflict/war in histo
Probably, just like 10.1 and 10.2 folks can't upgrade to XCode 1 without upgrading to Panther. That doesn't mean you can't compile and install gcc 3.5 of course.
I simply meant that if the UDHR were drawn up by fascists in your hypothetical world and they put in that anti-racism were forbidden because it was supposedly against a fundamental right, that I would not accept it (and you found that that hypocrite, because I do accept forbidding hate speech), and that I do not think that this is hypocrite at all for the reasons explained in my previous post (and partly repeated below).
In short: fascists are against the principle of individual rights, as the state goes above everything. So any "rights" they give, are per definition never universal (since the state can change those at will for anyone and at any time). So they simply cannot draw up a UDHR, except one that states "you have no inherent individual rights". Therefore, your hypothesis is false, and my non-acceptance is not even very relevant. A better answer would have been "mu" I guess.
Duh. That's why I tried to explain why I did not feel hypocrite, so you could see why I feel that way and could argue against it (or, who knows, agree I'm not hypocrite).
My belief/preaching is that there are fundamental human rights such as e.g. human dignity and personal freedom, and that any rules made that claim to protect human rights cannot be squarely aimed at the destruction of such rights.
That's why I accept banning of hate speech (it aims at protecting dignity, at a trade off with freedom and possibly other things) and not banning any speech at all (aims at protecting personal freedom, at a potential trade-off with dignity and possibly other things). It's also why I do not accept forbidding anti-racism speech (reducing personal freedom in exchange for what?) or explicitly allowing discriminatory talk (reducing dignity in exchange for what? It does not provide for extra freedom, since it was already allowed).
I think you are misguided if you think that abstract logic (based on hypothetical situations or not) always goes above opinions based on facts in case of social issues.
You missed my point. Maybe I didn't stress it enough in my last post, but I was almost all the time talking about the goals of the UDHR (protecting human dignity, the right not to have to live in constant fear, ... the stuff that's mentioned in the preamble). The rules of the UDHR are just general guidelines to achieve those things and sometimes trade-offs have to be made (as illustrated in the free speech debate). Which trade-off you make depends on your background and I think a society has the right to choose which trade-off they make. You
Just a small nit: what your conclusion would be. I do not feel the least bit hypocrite about it. In fact, I think the other choice of simply blindly defending whatever the rules are and switching with them like a leave in the wind is actually hypocrite. I've simply been looking for arguments that can show you why I feel that way and why your conclusion does not hold.
And this is where the societies come into play. As I've said many times now already: you cannot construct social theories purely on rules of logic. If you would argue against education, people would probably think you're a looney and ignore you. If you managed to get a powerful movement, managed to grasp power for a while and forbid eduction to a lot of people that way, I'm quite sure that afterwards draconian measures would be taken to prevent that basic right (as pretty much the entire world, from authoritarian to libertarian, has agreed) from being taken away again.
Not just mere opinions like yours or mine, but opinions of a society that encompasses pretty much the entire world. The UDHR committee originally consisted of someone from the US, someone from France, someone from Lebanon and someone from China (you may call them all "left", but as I said in my previous post, left and right is meaningless in this context; it's libertarian/anarchist vs authoritarian/fascist in this debate).
It was later included and referred to in a lot of other conventions, treaties and covenants and many of its elements can be found back in religions, pre-existing laws/rules (such as the US Constitution), works from philosophers, ... This is not just some majority opinion, it is something that has grown out of human society as a whole (left, right, authoritarian, libertarian, ...), trying to define what makes us human, which rights must be guaranteed in order for people "to be able to be humans", all with the goal of encouraging dignity, peace, cooperation and respect for all.
The Preamble nicely explains where those rules come from and why they chose those particular rights:
And despite my earlier comment of that being my last post, I've been doing research on what really constitutes left and right (left and right nowadays have little to do with human rights or racism, those are more properties of the axis of authoritarian/fascist and libertarian/anarchist), on how the universal declaration of human rights actually came to be (it was not just a bunch of libertarian or anarchist people) and the history of the concept of human rights (you'll be happy to hear that the concept of human rights is indeed quite recent, that the UDHR originally a product of early 20th century European thinking and thus was not universal at all, but things evolved, as also the previous link notes). Of course they're not universal because they're called universal, it's more like the other way round (I'll reply to the argument "but what if the world was mainly ruled by Hitlers and Stalins" later).
I may reply later in detail to your last post, but I'm still convinced that your "hypocrisy test" poses a false dilemma (or at least presents a false conclusion) and that it is not possible to make good social rules by only looking at rational arguments, because the human nature and thus also society simply are not rational. There is this thing called a conscience that most people have, and simply factoring that out of rule making altogether because it's not exactly the same for everyone does not automatically give you good rules for well functioning society.
You may become the ultimate "impartialist" who can set aside all his own moral values and rules, but that does not mean the rules you end up with that way are rules that result in a well functioning society. Society grows, evolves and is per definition deeply affected what happened before. You call those ghosts from the parts and chains that prevent following the path to ultimate rational enlightenment, but others see it as learning from your mistakes and *attempting* (which obviously does not automatically mean succeeding) to prevent them from happening again. Therefore just discarding that
For example, the banning of hate speech in Europe and the inalienable right to have arms in the US are indeed examples of mainly symbolic rules as opposed to purely rational rules. But exactly this symbolism is very strong, and you cannot discard that as being irrelevant or "overrulable" purely in the name of impartial logic and consistency.
Just abolishing them (even in the name of rationality or enlightenment), would always be interpreted as a signal that the government doesn't want you to have weapons so they can better oppress you, or that the holocaust wasn't that bad after (or maybe even didn't happen). You may know that is not the case, but society just doesn't work that way. You can't manage it like it's a bunch of drones who simply follow the rules and do nothing more or nothing less, nor think outside the box. That's why I stand by my point that each society has the right to make its own rules based on its experiences, and why I think the absolute free speech in the US is exactly as justifiable (even though I don't agree with it) as the banning of hate speech in Europe.