Fortunately, our system is set up such that it can always self correct, even if it takes a while. That's what they keep telling us.
Slavery is a perfect example of that (it took two different Supreme Courts before it was set right). You think it's been set right? What percentage of the people are dependent on major corporation? Now I'll grant that "wage slavery" is preferable to the earlier kind, but it's not exactly "set right". People still aren't equal before the law. The wealthy and powerful have a different set of laws that apply to them than does everyone else. If you don't understand the truth of this, then you're not very observant. And there's no longer a large class of free people. I.e., people who aren't dependent on a master. That was basically wiped out by a combination of income tax and property tax. You CAN'T accept poverty as the price of independence, because you've got to pay money to keep your land save from governmental expropriation. I understand why this happened, but the effects happened, also. I don't think this was an intentional plan. But it was the result of governmental policy changes.
Instance: When the Hoover Dam was built the law said that nobody with a large farm (forget the precise acerage) was entitled to free water from it. This was ignored. The water was reserved for the large land owners in preference to the small land owners, at least in the Imperial Valley. Partially because the small land owners couldn't afford to bring suit in court, but that's only why the decision couldn't be stopped, not why it was made (which I don't know).
This has not "self-corrected", and it won't, because the small landowners have now been driven away from their land.
The "self-correction" of the system is based on the presumption that NOW is the state towards which it was tending. It's a myth. Over the entire time span of the existence of the US the power of centralized control has increased almost monotonically. Sometimes older modes of control have been abandoned, but only when newer ones have proven more desirable.
(There have been occasional short periods when the control has temporarily loosened slightly, generally when there has been a bulge in the population in the age bracket of 18-28, or when there has been a sudden acquisition of access to new territory, but this has been temporary.)
I don't know anyone in favor of this. I know many that will be against it as soon as they hear of it. Of course, by then it will be law...
With that lopsided vote, somebody powerful has put the fix in. And they're slipping it through in a relatively low profile way, so it's not something they want credit for.
I'd say corruption, but this looks more like a hidden layer of government. You don't get that lopsided a vote with ordinary corruption.
It's too late, but have you written your congressman to let them know how disappointed you are in them?
The problem is worse there, because ALL the figures that the government uses to measure the economy have been systematically tinkered with to make the current economy look better for at least decades. Which means that time series is impossible. (They keep changing the definitions of what any particular thing measures.)
Try to find out what the current money supply is, e.g. Which measure do you use, and what does it actually measure?
The current administration is always under pressure to make the economy look better. ALWAYS. And the easiest way to do so is to tinker with what's being measured without admitting that they've changed the measure.
I came up with the "Cosmic Garbageman" theory of the creation of life on Earth when I was in high school... but I never believed it seriously.
Still, here it goes:
There's this alien spaceship passing by, and they think that Sol III would be a good place to hold a picnic, so they do. And they're careless about how they dispose of their garbage.
Not exactly "Intelligent Design", but definitely not "life evolved naturally in the seas of earth" either.
There are lots of reasonable possibilities. There aren't many that it's reasonable to assign a high probability. One that *WOULD* qualify as "intelligent design" and has a reasonable possibility is directed panspermia: Long ago and far away an intelligent life form desired to spread it's descendents throughout the galaxy, but they couldn't figure out an FTL drive. So the whipped up a mix of primitive life forms that would have at least one survive in a mix of environments, wrapped them in a bunch of preservative capsules (designed to protect the contents from cosmic rays, etc., and to give the mass driver something to hold onto, and shot them out at every reasonable target they could find. LOTS of them.
OK. That's "Intelligent Design". I can't prove it was wrong. It actually seems to have a reasonable probability. We might have come from something like that. But do note that that's intelligent design of life, not of humans. I can't think of anything plausible that yields "intelligent design of humans" except the "The Universe is a Simulation" hypotheses. (No way to disprove that one, or estimate it's probability, either. Some variants say "Historical Simulation", others say "Video Game". They're all unfalsifiable.)
I don't think you're an artist, a writer, or a programmer. If you are, you need to turn around an look at yourself.
This is a first step into the grey area. Creation isn't an area of sharp divisions. Almost everything worthwhile is based on extensive predecessors. This is taking one kind of cell, and converting it into another (closely related) kind. This *IS* creation. It's not creating all that much, but it's creating a new species. (Whatever that means at the level of yeasts.) The new species has the DNA of one old species, and the support system (prions, etc.) of the other one. We know a lot more about the DNA level than we do about the prion level, but prions are in charge of ensuring that proteins fold properly. Change the folding properties, and the proteins act differently. Which means the cell acts differently.
Another step is the insertion of newly designed genes into an existing system. Another step is trying to build a minimal system from scratch. (These are all being worked on simultaneously.)
So this is another step into the area between selective breeding and creating life de novo. (Although even there I'm not implying that the atoms were synthesized. But one could require that step, too. It's just that I don't see any reason anyone would ever bother.)
The categories we think in don't have sharp edges, though we usually pretend they do. This is the creation of life, but it's just barely into the fuzzy area. Even so, it's ended up with a new species, and that wasn't the goal.
(OTOH, I'm not a biologist. It's possible that yeasts don't have prions acting as chaperones for protein folding. In which case I may be wrong about it being a new species, unless they made an error in their DNA synthesis.)
What would count as creating life? How much does one need to synthesize? How much needs to be totally original?
You can get to the point where I would think that even if we can do it, we shouldn't. Because it would be impossible to predict with surety how dangerous it would be.
(OTOH, if you're really a young Earth creationist... Sorry. I can't believe that. You can write a coherent paragraph.
But postulating that you were, would anything count as creating life where the atoms weren't synthetic as well as the molecules?)
I don't think a kill switch is the right answer, I'm more in favor of creating a dependence. Design the things to require an amino acid not to be found in the wild, and don't design any of them to make it. I believe that there are only around 20 amino acids that exist in the natural world, but it would be easy enough to synthesize an additional one through normal chemical processes. (Use one of the 20 as a starter, and add a new side chain, e.g. Possibly one incorporating iron or cobalt. Things that are common enough to be cheap to create, yet not a part of the normal requirements. [Yeah, blood uses iron and B-12 uses cobalt. That's how I can be certain that the compounds could be bio-compatible. But those are rare occurrences.])
With this kind of requirement, even if they did get loose, it would be possible to wipe them out of an area without damaging unmodified life.
Not all libertarians believe as you have outlined, but I'll agree that most do. I think of myself as a libertarian rather than an anarchist because I consider anarchy to be an unstable state, and anarchists believe, by definition, in no ruler. I consider myself a libertarian because I consider that the government is too intrusive. I consider myself conservative because I believe that one of the major jobs of the government is to conserve resources...including human resources. (Which means that I support inexpensive schooling, though I'm not real certain about free schooling. People don't seem to value it...)
There are difficult problems to which I have no solution. What does one do about uneducated people when they become adults? Is it reasonable to require that, as a condition for social support they be required to relocate and work in the fields? But that would be a lot of effort, would require training, and anyway those jobs are probably going away. Something like the Civilian Conservation Corps would be quite reasonable, but why was the original one disbanded? Wouldn't it undercut the wages of workers *not* on social support? And lots of jobs that are done seem to be done primarily to create jobs for people already. When the government requires a new variety of paperwork, isn't part of the reason that its acceptable that it decreases unemployment in a way that spreads the cost?
Unfortunately, computers have changed the ability of paperwork to create new jobs, and the near future arrival of robots will make it difficult for ANY low level job to be justified. And progressively eliminate more jobs until the only ones left are the ones that decide what the robots are to do.
So, I don't have an answer. If I were the kind of person that you believe a libertarian to be I'd have an unkind answer, but that's not who I am, even though I think of myself as a libertarian. (And that's one reason I refuse to think of myself as a Libertarian. I'd as soon be National Socialist.)
Sorry, but the people who tend to think for themselves are either libertarians (small "l") or anarchists...and even then it's not guaranteed. Most beliefs have as a part of their dogma that one needs to buy into a particular set of beliefs. (Different groups have belief sets that differ in how encompassing they are.)
Actually, even libertarians and anarchists have a minimal set of required beliefs. If you don't share, e.g., the belief that people should be free to live their lives with a minimal set of restrictions, then the label libertarian hardly applies to you, even if you claim it.
FWIW, I tend to think of myself as a libertarian conservative, but most of my friends, when they think of a label, probably think of me as a liberal. This should give a small illustration with one of the problems with such labels.
P.S.: I'm not acquainted with how John Milton distinguished freedom and license, but given "Paradise Lost", I don't think I'd agree with his distinction.
The problem is that every monopoly tends to evolve into a tyranny. And duopolies and oligarchies tend to evolve in to a class of masters and a class of servants. And as time passes the masters agree to increase the extortion of value from the servile.
So we don't just have one set of overlords, we've got several. Do you have a choice of many independent ISPs? If not, you have a partial mastery by the ISP. Do you have many reasonable opportunities? If not, you have a partial mastery by the employer. Et multitudinous cetera.
How much any particular master can demand depends on how difficult it is to escape from his control. If you can escape from a particular master just by, say, refusing to be interested in movies, then the degree of mastery that that oligarchy can demand is limited. If, however, they can demand that you pay them a toll whenever you purchase an item that's capable of storing bits, then they have a much greater degree of mastery. If they can control what you can learn as history, that, again, increases their control.
Now during the 1990's and 2000's small chains of newspapers, which had already become dependent upon the wire services, were bought up by larger corporations, which were, in turn, either bought up by, or already owned by, larger corporations. Similar changes happened in the book publishing businesses. So the historical record and news became controlled by a small number of larger corporations (which often didn't even have much interest in their acquisitions). But policy is set at corporate headquarters. If you want more details, check the blog of Charles Stross. He's authoritative WRT, at least, the book business.
Similar chains of acquisitions and centralizations of power were also happening in various other areas. The result is that many features of our lives are controlled by a small number of interlocking oligarchies.
OTOH, government *is* special. Government is that entity which reserves to itself and it's agents the use of force.
Note, however, that calling ANY of these oligarchs a King is a misuse of the term. Their power is not inherited, and none of them claim dominion over all aspects of our lives. This doesn't, however, make their actions either malign or not malign. But it does mean that we have precious little leverage to apply if we disagree with them. And it means that if two independent oligarchies are competing for our resources, they tend to avoid direct conflict, and instead separately attempt to extract more resources from their subservient population (which overlaps with the subservient population of the other oligarchy).
Only the government has the possibility of restraining the actions of these oligarchies, so one of their policies has long been to corrupt the government into not defending the citizenry of the country against them. In this they have been largely, but not totally, successful.
If there is a reasoned argument as to why this analysis is incorrect, I would be VERY pleased to hear it, as I find it quite depressing.
There's a way...but it involves cross-compilation. If you're really paranoid, cross-compilation and an intermediate language designed de novo. Then you write interpreter for the new language, and in that new language you write the compiler for a subset of the target language to emit assember code for a different platform . Taking this emitted code, you assemble it. (Static assembly, no system libraries. If you're really paranoid, design it to run on bare metal with no OS or memory management.) Now you've got a secure compiler, but it's probably not very efficient, so you compile a more complete version of the language, with more features. Continue.
I don't think this was what Wirth was aiming for, but Oberon would be a good candidate target language, because you'd NEVER need to trust system libraries or memory management. You could always run from bare metal.
Notice that a part of the process was designing a custom language? That was so no prediction of what code would represent the language could be made ahead of time. Similarly the cross-compilation was so the hardware couldn't predict what bit patterns meant what.
Of course, this is only ALMOST safe. Real safety requires that you also build the CPU. (I once made a really simple one, so it's not totally impossible. just expensive and inefficient and limited and time-consuming.)
Sort of depends on the definitions used. I'm against cruelty, unless the target is a masochist, but...
Child porn has been used to imprison a 15 year old who sent pictures of self to their 16 year old partner. (I'm vague, because of uncertainty, but I think the 15 year old was a boy. And it's possible that he was arrested for possessing nude pictures of his 16 year old girl-friend [that she sent from her cellphone].)
Since then I've been a bit skeptical of child-porn stories.
Also, a man having sex with a small dog is clearly wrong. But with a horse...if it objected, the man would never walk again. And women appear to have been "making it" with animals since the stone ages without anyone suffering. (Well, bar a few who didn't choose to do so, but there the wrong is in the coercion.)
And incest? Do you *believe* everything you read? How do you know whether they are related or not?
P.S.: Child porn has been stretched to cover cartoons. Explain to me why I should disapprove of those cartoons? I remember seeing similar comic books when I was in high school around 1960, so I'm certain it's nothing new.
Umnh. The problem is that Christian today doesn't have a reasonable definition, outside of the historical. (About which you appear to know more than I do, even if I still disagree with the interpretations of what the things that happened meant.)
When a Southern Baptist of the "If English was good enough for Jesus..." school uses the term "Christian Nation" what he means isn't that closely related to what a "Liberal Unitarian from a West Coast metropolis" would mean. And there are lots of dimensions of divergence between them. In point of fact, however, only the more conservative group would be likely to use the term, so that's the direction the meaning of the term has drifted. So if you want Christian to mean "bigoted, ignorant, and determinedly short-sighted", then we can adopt the meaning used in "a Christian Nation". Otherwise, we'd better look for some other definition.
Not quite. Donner was, specifically, the god of thunder, while Thor was both thunder and lightning...and more generally or stormy weather. (Actually, Thor had a big temple in central Sweden which was given over to his agricultural connections. Not sure why it was Thor rather than Freyr, but it was.)
What we know about Norse gods tends to be highly filtered, generally coming down through christian priests telling folk tales...which they filtered through their own religion. (A good old Roman custom. The Roman's identified Tyr, god of the formalities of battle and truces, with Mars, e.g. This is the natural result of believing that gods are externalities and exist when no one's around.)
Ok. I'll accept without bothering to check that the Nicene creed was the same as Constantine, so that means I'm just talking about one incident rather than two. That was the conversion of Christianity into a worship of authoritarianism, and established that the Bishop of Rome was the head of the church. (Which cut off Christians off to the East or South. There weren't a significant number to the North or West, so that wasn't a problem.)
Well, this is necessary if you want a centralized church to reinforce the state. They cut out of the official line lots and lots of "miracle stories" and stories of the youth of Jesus. These were too similar to various stories about various other gods that the people would already be familiar with.
It's hard to be too specific about what they cut out, since they afterwards attempted to destroy all records that it had ever been a part of the faith. They weren't totally successful, but they did a pretty good job. Often when I ran across something that appeared to be part of what got cut out I couldn't determine just how old it really was, so lots of times it could have been an independent creation...or even re-creation. Some have survived, and they ones I'm familiar with are basically stories of Jesus working magic to aid people. (The kind of thing that later got wrapped around saints.)
N.B.: I'm not counting here things like the Gospel of Thomas. I don't think those were ever articles of popular faith in or around Rome. Others either were clearly written later, or look likely to have been written later. (Which, if any, Gospel of Judas are you going to accept?)
Yeah, I've got my own understanding. I went looking through Christianity for a few years...now I can't understand why I bothered. There's nothing there to find. Alchemy and Astrology had less dross per pound of text. (Which isn't praise of those two.)
Strangely enough theurgy, understood in a neo-pagan context and mixed liberally with C.G.Jung and Empiricism, was a reasonable answer to what *I* was searching for, though I didn't realize this until a decade or so later. The most useful part of Christianity turned out to be Mary Baker Eddy. (Just don't believe her. Take what she says as experimental findings [with lots of noise] and arrive at your own theory.)
The Nicean (Nicene?) creed? You mean when the Bishops got together and threw out over half of what the people believed in? That was the establishment of religious orthodoxy, all right. The most complete since Constantine. And he had already thoroughly trashed the ideals of the original religion.
I'm not going to argue in defense of "original Christianity" because nobody has any defensible argument for what it was. I would note, however, that long before Constantine the arguments had gotten so vicious that one faction took a Roman army (lead by a Christian general of their faction) and literally killed all adherents of another faction. (This happened in northern Judea.) It's not important or I'd look up the details, but factional fighting between Christians over doctrinal purity has been going on for as long as we have reliable records. (Has anyone found the court proceedings of the trial and execution of Joshua of Nazareth yet? They hadn't when I last checked.)
It's also true that many of those may be "official simulations". When the government is the source of news about what the government's doing, it's quite reasonable to be skeptical. When they don't let anyone else check it just increases the grounds for doubting their honesty.
I do understand why we have IP laws...it's just that the trail I followed didn't parallel yours, which to me looks more like a chain of justifications.
Consider, e.g., the Sony-Bono Copyright legislation. That was specifically passed for the benefit of Hollywood. They didn't even disguise it much. (Consider the name of the bill.) It should really have been called the WaltDisney Copyright bill, since he was one of the major lobbyists in favor, but Sony Bono had turned from actor (singer?) to politician and then died, so it was more politic to name it after him.
By the time the DMCA was on the floor, I was paying more attention. That was written and pushed by the RIAA and the MPAA. (The RIAA was more active, as movies were too large to be threatened by downloads.)
Software patents was an interesting trick. The original US software patents were by Intel, and it was actually patenting a piece of hardware, but in doing so it patented the hardware implementation of a piece of code. This was a valid interpretation of existing law, but was interpreted as justifying software patents. It didn't really, but that's the way it's been interpreted ever since. (Rather like the way Corporations became legal persons...which never even had a court decision to back it up, but merely a legal secretaries transcription of court records what became accepted through usage. No law or court decision ever decided that it was so, they just accepted "existing usage".)
So when I trace it I see chains of lobbyists, backroom deals, improper procedures, etc. I don't see any high principles, much as they might be trotted out when publicists want to defend the current laws. Things just didn't happen that way.
Now what you might claim is that the decisions lead to an environment where opportunistic entities taking advantage of the legal environment were able to achieve worthy goals. That might well be justifiable (though I can also see counter arguments). This, however, is quite different from saying that these reasons are why the laws developed as they did.
Legal and moral are independent traits. They ought to have a strong positive correlation, but it's beginning to appear that presuming they are orthogonal is being an optimist.
Of course, the fact that he worked closely with Alexander Hamilton means that I'm not very willing to trust either his ideals or his honesty on anything, without independent grounds for belief.
Remember, Hamilton is the guy who founded the national debt by writing the government a check he didn't have funds to cover (money didn't yet exist), and then having the govt. pay him back for his loan with interest. (Anyone who's followed the banks over the last couple of years should have an idea of how this can make one lots of money.) And if I'm not wrong, he was secretary of the treasury at the time (or the equivalent).
Got a problem with that. Thor was Norse, Donner was native to Britain. But Donnerstag is German, and Thursday is English.
Now it you'd said Thor's Day, then I might be willing to consider that you might be an (English speaking) Norse neo-pagan. But Thursday is a bit too corrupt to make a judgment call on. (Which, I guess, was your point.)
To me that suggests that he was a politician taking actions to shore up public relations in an area where he perceived himself both weak and under attack.
It doesn't say anything about what he believed. Beliefs should be judged by actions more than by words.
I think the correct term for most of them is "Free Thinker". E.g, Jefferson was very interested in religion and philosophy. He was a Deist AND a Mason AND a Christian (and probably other things as well)...and above all, a politician. But a politician with philosophical ideals.
Calling Jefferson a Christian is like calling a liberal Unitarian a Christian. He'll accept the label, but it's not really very descriptive.
FWIW, I doubt that MOST Christian faiths deserve to be called Christian, even though that's the traditional term. They've got precious little to do with J.C., even though they worship his words (usually in some particular translation). Worship doesn't imply any degree of understanding. It just implies that you can find some phrase that can be used out of context to justify what you have decided to do for other reasons. The more someone claims to be a Christian, the more I think of "Honest John's Used Cars".
It's a bit worse than that, though not substantially worse. (Depending, of course, on just how much oil is released.) This may be enough additional stress to convert the entire gulf into a dead zone, rather than the partial dead zone that we've dealt with previously.
If enough oil is released it could also spread a dead zone up the Gulf Stream, though I feel this is doubtful. OTOH, the ocean off-shore the coast is already home to many dead zones, so it might not require that much additional stress.
This could be a disaster to the fishing industries, which are already nearing collapse due to over-fishing and improper fishing. (Again, just adding a bit more stress to something that's already overstressed.) This, of course, will cause other food prices to rise, which they were already doing due to the increases in the price of oil.
Nothing here looks like a disaster to the Earth, but it's a pretty big disaster to the humans that happen to live near the area...and to some that don't live that near, but were already under near limiting stress. Also to some species. Some have probably already been wiped out. More probably will be. These were generally species that had already been pushed near extinction, and this will have been just the final blow. Others only live/d in a restricted area, and when that area is rendered uninhabitable, they die.
Just to put things in perspective, a nuclear war that killed off all humans and most other mammals wouldn't be a disaster to the Earth. Only to the people. But as a person, I would find it a major disaster. (Presuming that I lived long enough. Quite unlikely as I live in a major metropolitan area.) Saying that something isn't a major disaster just because it isn't a disaster to the Earth is stupidly unreasonable. Only the collision that split off the moon has counted as a major disaster to the Earth. Even the incident that killed off 90% of all species (genera?) wasn't a major disaster to the Earth.
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Fortunately, our system is set up such that it can always self correct, even if it takes a while.
That's what they keep telling us.
Slavery is a perfect example of that (it took two different Supreme Courts before it was set right).
You think it's been set right? What percentage of the people are dependent on major corporation?
Now I'll grant that "wage slavery" is preferable to the earlier kind, but it's not exactly "set right". People still aren't equal before the law. The wealthy and powerful have a different set of laws that apply to them than does everyone else. If you don't understand the truth of this, then you're not very observant. And there's no longer a large class of free people. I.e., people who aren't dependent on a master. That was basically wiped out by a combination of income tax and property tax. You CAN'T accept poverty as the price of independence, because you've got to pay money to keep your land save from governmental expropriation. I understand why this happened, but the effects happened, also. I don't think this was an intentional plan. But it was the result of governmental policy changes.
Instance: When the Hoover Dam was built the law said that nobody with a large farm (forget the precise acerage) was entitled to free water from it. This was ignored. The water was reserved for the large land owners in preference to the small land owners, at least in the Imperial Valley. Partially because the small land owners couldn't afford to bring suit in court, but that's only why the decision couldn't be stopped, not why it was made (which I don't know).
This has not "self-corrected", and it won't, because the small landowners have now been driven away from their land.
The "self-correction" of the system is based on the presumption that NOW is the state towards which it was tending. It's a myth. Over the entire time span of the existence of the US the power of centralized control has increased almost monotonically. Sometimes older modes of control have been abandoned, but only when newer ones have proven more desirable.
(There have been occasional short periods when the control has temporarily loosened slightly, generally when there has been a bulge in the population in the age bracket of 18-28, or when there has been a sudden acquisition of access to new territory, but this has been temporary.)
I don't know anyone in favor of this. I know many that will be against it as soon as they hear of it. Of course, by then it will be law...
With that lopsided vote, somebody powerful has put the fix in. And they're slipping it through in a relatively low profile way, so it's not something they want credit for.
I'd say corruption, but this looks more like a hidden layer of government. You don't get that lopsided a vote with ordinary corruption.
It's too late, but have you written your congressman to let them know how disappointed you are in them?
The problem is worse there, because ALL the figures that the government uses to measure the economy have been systematically tinkered with to make the current economy look better for at least decades. Which means that time series is impossible. (They keep changing the definitions of what any particular thing measures.)
Try to find out what the current money supply is, e.g. Which measure do you use, and what does it actually measure?
The current administration is always under pressure to make the economy look better. ALWAYS. And the easiest way to do so is to tinker with what's being measured without admitting that they've changed the measure.
I came up with the "Cosmic Garbageman" theory of the creation of life on Earth when I was in high school ... but I never believed it seriously.
Still, here it goes:
There's this alien spaceship passing by, and they think that Sol III would be a good place to hold a picnic, so they do. And they're careless about how they dispose of their garbage.
Not exactly "Intelligent Design", but definitely not "life evolved naturally in the seas of earth" either.
There are lots of reasonable possibilities. There aren't many that it's reasonable to assign a high probability. One that *WOULD* qualify as "intelligent design" and has a reasonable possibility is directed panspermia:
Long ago and far away an intelligent life form desired to spread it's descendents throughout the galaxy, but they couldn't figure out an FTL drive. So the whipped up a mix of primitive life forms that would have at least one survive in a mix of environments, wrapped them in a bunch of preservative capsules (designed to protect the contents from cosmic rays, etc., and to give the mass driver something to hold onto, and shot them out at every reasonable target they could find. LOTS of them.
OK. That's "Intelligent Design". I can't prove it was wrong. It actually seems to have a reasonable probability. We might have come from something like that. But do note that that's intelligent design of life, not of humans. I can't think of anything plausible that yields "intelligent design of humans" except the "The Universe is a Simulation" hypotheses. (No way to disprove that one, or estimate it's probability, either. Some variants say "Historical Simulation", others say "Video Game". They're all unfalsifiable.)
I don't think you're an artist, a writer, or a programmer. If you are, you need to turn around an look at yourself.
This is a first step into the grey area. Creation isn't an area of sharp divisions. Almost everything worthwhile is based on extensive predecessors. This is taking one kind of cell, and converting it into another (closely related) kind. This *IS* creation. It's not creating all that much, but it's creating a new species. (Whatever that means at the level of yeasts.) The new species has the DNA of one old species, and the support system (prions, etc.) of the other one. We know a lot more about the DNA level than we do about the prion level, but prions are in charge of ensuring that proteins fold properly. Change the folding properties, and the proteins act differently. Which means the cell acts differently.
Another step is the insertion of newly designed genes into an existing system. Another step is trying to build a minimal system from scratch. (These are all being worked on simultaneously.)
So this is another step into the area between selective breeding and creating life de novo. (Although even there I'm not implying that the atoms were synthesized. But one could require that step, too. It's just that I don't see any reason anyone would ever bother.)
The categories we think in don't have sharp edges, though we usually pretend they do. This is the creation of life, but it's just barely into the fuzzy area. Even so, it's ended up with a new species, and that wasn't the goal.
(OTOH, I'm not a biologist. It's possible that yeasts don't have prions acting as chaperones for protein folding. In which case I may be wrong about it being a new species, unless they made an error in their DNA synthesis.)
What would count as creating life?
How much does one need to synthesize?
How much needs to be totally original?
You can get to the point where I would think that even if we can do it, we shouldn't. Because it would be impossible to predict with surety how dangerous it would be.
(OTOH, if you're really a young Earth creationist... Sorry. I can't believe that. You can write a coherent paragraph.
But postulating that you were, would anything count as creating life where the atoms weren't synthetic as well as the molecules?)
I don't think a kill switch is the right answer, I'm more in favor of creating a dependence. Design the things to require an amino acid not to be found in the wild, and don't design any of them to make it. I believe that there are only around 20 amino acids that exist in the natural world, but it would be easy enough to synthesize an additional one through normal chemical processes. (Use one of the 20 as a starter, and add a new side chain, e.g. Possibly one incorporating iron or cobalt. Things that are common enough to be cheap to create, yet not a part of the normal requirements. [Yeah, blood uses iron and B-12 uses cobalt. That's how I can be certain that the compounds could be bio-compatible. But those are rare occurrences.])
With this kind of requirement, even if they did get loose, it would be possible to wipe them out of an area without damaging unmodified life.
Not all libertarians believe as you have outlined, but I'll agree that most do. I think of myself as a libertarian rather than an anarchist because I consider anarchy to be an unstable state, and anarchists believe, by definition, in no ruler. I consider myself a libertarian because I consider that the government is too intrusive. I consider myself conservative because I believe that one of the major jobs of the government is to conserve resources...including human resources. (Which means that I support inexpensive schooling, though I'm not real certain about free schooling. People don't seem to value it...)
There are difficult problems to which I have no solution. What does one do about uneducated people when they become adults? Is it reasonable to require that, as a condition for social support they be required to relocate and work in the fields? But that would be a lot of effort, would require training, and anyway those jobs are probably going away. Something like the Civilian Conservation Corps would be quite reasonable, but why was the original one disbanded? Wouldn't it undercut the wages of workers *not* on social support? And lots of jobs that are done seem to be done primarily to create jobs for people already. When the government requires a new variety of paperwork, isn't part of the reason that its acceptable that it decreases unemployment in a way that spreads the cost?
Unfortunately, computers have changed the ability of paperwork to create new jobs, and the near future arrival of robots will make it difficult for ANY low level job to be justified. And progressively eliminate more jobs until the only ones left are the ones that decide what the robots are to do.
So, I don't have an answer. If I were the kind of person that you believe a libertarian to be I'd have an unkind answer, but that's not who I am, even though I think of myself as a libertarian. (And that's one reason I refuse to think of myself as a Libertarian. I'd as soon be National Socialist.)
Sorry, but the people who tend to think for themselves are either libertarians (small "l") or anarchists...and even then it's not guaranteed. Most beliefs have as a part of their dogma that one needs to buy into a particular set of beliefs. (Different groups have belief sets that differ in how encompassing they are.)
Actually, even libertarians and anarchists have a minimal set of required beliefs. If you don't share, e.g., the belief that people should be free to live their lives with a minimal set of restrictions, then the label libertarian hardly applies to you, even if you claim it.
FWIW, I tend to think of myself as a libertarian conservative, but most of my friends, when they think of a label, probably think of me as a liberal. This should give a small illustration with one of the problems with such labels.
P.S.: I'm not acquainted with how John Milton distinguished freedom and license, but given "Paradise Lost", I don't think I'd agree with his distinction.
The problem is that every monopoly tends to evolve into a tyranny. And duopolies and oligarchies tend to evolve in to a class of masters and a class of servants. And as time passes the masters agree to increase the extortion of value from the servile.
So we don't just have one set of overlords, we've got several. Do you have a choice of many independent ISPs? If not, you have a partial mastery by the ISP. Do you have many reasonable opportunities? If not, you have a partial mastery by the employer. Et multitudinous cetera.
How much any particular master can demand depends on how difficult it is to escape from his control. If you can escape from a particular master just by, say, refusing to be interested in movies, then the degree of mastery that that oligarchy can demand is limited. If, however, they can demand that you pay them a toll whenever you purchase an item that's capable of storing bits, then they have a much greater degree of mastery. If they can control what you can learn as history, that, again, increases their control.
Now during the 1990's and 2000's small chains of newspapers, which had already become dependent upon the wire services, were bought up by larger corporations, which were, in turn, either bought up by, or already owned by, larger corporations. Similar changes happened in the book publishing businesses. So the historical record and news became controlled by a small number of larger corporations (which often didn't even have much interest in their acquisitions). But policy is set at corporate headquarters. If you want more details, check the blog of Charles Stross. He's authoritative WRT, at least, the book business.
Similar chains of acquisitions and centralizations of power were also happening in various other areas. The result is that many features of our lives are controlled by a small number of interlocking oligarchies.
OTOH, government *is* special. Government is that entity which reserves to itself and it's agents the use of force.
Note, however, that calling ANY of these oligarchs a King is a misuse of the term. Their power is not inherited, and none of them claim dominion over all aspects of our lives. This doesn't, however, make their actions either malign or not malign. But it does mean that we have precious little leverage to apply if we disagree with them. And it means that if two independent oligarchies are competing for our resources, they tend to avoid direct conflict, and instead separately attempt to extract more resources from their subservient population (which overlaps with the subservient population of the other oligarchy).
Only the government has the possibility of restraining the actions of these oligarchies, so one of their policies has long been to corrupt the government into not defending the citizenry of the country against them. In this they have been largely, but not totally, successful.
If there is a reasoned argument as to why this analysis is incorrect, I would be VERY pleased to hear it, as I find it quite depressing.
There's a way...but it involves cross-compilation. If you're really paranoid, cross-compilation and an intermediate language designed de novo. Then you write interpreter for the new language, and in that new language you write the compiler for a subset of the target language to emit assember code for a different platform . Taking this emitted code, you assemble it. (Static assembly, no system libraries. If you're really paranoid, design it to run on bare metal with no OS or memory management.) Now you've got a secure compiler, but it's probably not very efficient, so you compile a more complete version of the language, with more features. Continue.
I don't think this was what Wirth was aiming for, but Oberon would be a good candidate target language, because you'd NEVER need to trust system libraries or memory management. You could always run from bare metal.
Notice that a part of the process was designing a custom language? That was so no prediction of what code would represent the language could be made ahead of time. Similarly the cross-compilation was so the hardware couldn't predict what bit patterns meant what.
Of course, this is only ALMOST safe. Real safety requires that you also build the CPU. (I once made a really simple one, so it's not totally impossible. just expensive and inefficient and limited and time-consuming.)
Sort of depends on the definitions used. I'm against cruelty, unless the target is a masochist, but...
Child porn has been used to imprison a 15 year old who sent pictures of self to their 16 year old partner. (I'm vague, because of uncertainty, but I think the 15 year old was a boy. And it's possible that he was arrested for possessing nude pictures of his 16 year old girl-friend [that she sent from her cellphone].)
Since then I've been a bit skeptical of child-porn stories.
Also, a man having sex with a small dog is clearly wrong. But with a horse...if it objected, the man would never walk again. And women appear to have been "making it" with animals since the stone ages without anyone suffering. (Well, bar a few who didn't choose to do so, but there the wrong is in the coercion.)
And incest? Do you *believe* everything you read? How do you know whether they are related or not?
P.S.: Child porn has been stretched to cover cartoons. Explain to me why I should disapprove of those cartoons? I remember seeing similar comic books when I was in high school around 1960, so I'm certain it's nothing new.
Umnh. The problem is that Christian today doesn't have a reasonable definition, outside of the historical. (About which you appear to know more than I do, even if I still disagree with the interpretations of what the things that happened meant.)
When a Southern Baptist of the "If English was good enough for Jesus..." school uses the term "Christian Nation" what he means isn't that closely related to what a "Liberal Unitarian from a West Coast metropolis" would mean. And there are lots of dimensions of divergence between them. In point of fact, however, only the more conservative group would be likely to use the term, so that's the direction the meaning of the term has drifted. So if you want Christian to mean "bigoted, ignorant, and determinedly short-sighted", then we can adopt the meaning used in "a Christian Nation". Otherwise, we'd better look for some other definition.
Not quite. Donner was, specifically, the god of thunder, while Thor was both thunder and lightning...and more generally or stormy weather.
(Actually, Thor had a big temple in central Sweden which was given over to his agricultural connections. Not sure why it was Thor rather than Freyr, but it was.)
What we know about Norse gods tends to be highly filtered, generally coming down through christian priests telling folk tales...which they filtered through their own religion. (A good old Roman custom. The Roman's identified Tyr, god of the formalities of battle and truces, with Mars, e.g. This is the natural result of believing that gods are externalities and exist when no one's around.)
Ok. I'll accept without bothering to check that the Nicene creed was the same as Constantine, so that means I'm just talking about one incident rather than two. That was the conversion of Christianity into a worship of authoritarianism, and established that the Bishop of Rome was the head of the church. (Which cut off Christians off to the East or South. There weren't a significant number to the North or West, so that wasn't a problem.)
Well, this is necessary if you want a centralized church to reinforce the state. They cut out of the official line lots and lots of "miracle stories" and stories of the youth of Jesus. These were too similar to various stories about various other gods that the people would already be familiar with.
It's hard to be too specific about what they cut out, since they afterwards attempted to destroy all records that it had ever been a part of the faith. They weren't totally successful, but they did a pretty good job. Often when I ran across something that appeared to be part of what got cut out I couldn't determine just how old it really was, so lots of times it could have been an independent creation...or even re-creation. Some have survived, and they ones I'm familiar with are basically stories of Jesus working magic to aid people. (The kind of thing that later got wrapped around saints.)
N.B.: I'm not counting here things like the Gospel of Thomas. I don't think those were ever articles of popular faith in or around Rome. Others either were clearly written later, or look likely to have been written later. (Which, if any, Gospel of Judas are you going to accept?)
Yeah, I've got my own understanding. I went looking through Christianity for a few years...now I can't understand why I bothered. There's nothing there to find. Alchemy and Astrology had less dross per pound of text. (Which isn't praise of those two.)
Strangely enough theurgy, understood in a neo-pagan context and mixed liberally with C.G.Jung and Empiricism, was a reasonable answer to what *I* was searching for, though I didn't realize this until a decade or so later. The most useful part of Christianity turned out to be Mary Baker Eddy. (Just don't believe her. Take what she says as experimental findings [with lots of noise] and arrive at your own theory.)
The Nicean (Nicene?) creed? You mean when the Bishops got together and threw out over half of what the people believed in? That was the establishment of religious orthodoxy, all right. The most complete since Constantine. And he had already thoroughly trashed the ideals of the original religion.
I'm not going to argue in defense of "original Christianity" because nobody has any defensible argument for what it was. I would note, however, that long before Constantine the arguments had gotten so vicious that one faction took a Roman army (lead by a Christian general of their faction) and literally killed all adherents of another faction. (This happened in northern Judea.) It's not important or I'd look up the details, but factional fighting between Christians over doctrinal purity has been going on for as long as we have reliable records. (Has anyone found the court proceedings of the trial and execution of Joshua of Nazareth yet? They hadn't when I last checked.)
It's also true that many of those may be "official simulations". When the government is the source of news about what the government's doing, it's quite reasonable to be skeptical. When they don't let anyone else check it just increases the grounds for doubting their honesty.
I do understand why we have IP laws...it's just that the trail I followed didn't parallel yours, which to me looks more like a chain of justifications.
Consider, e.g., the Sony-Bono Copyright legislation. That was specifically passed for the benefit of Hollywood. They didn't even disguise it much. (Consider the name of the bill.) It should really have been called the WaltDisney Copyright bill, since he was one of the major lobbyists in favor, but Sony Bono had turned from actor (singer?) to politician and then died, so it was more politic to name it after him.
By the time the DMCA was on the floor, I was paying more attention. That was written and pushed by the RIAA and the MPAA. (The RIAA was more active, as movies were too large to be threatened by downloads.)
Software patents was an interesting trick. The original US software patents were by Intel, and it was actually patenting a piece of hardware, but in doing so it patented the hardware implementation of a piece of code. This was a valid interpretation of existing law, but was interpreted as justifying software patents. It didn't really, but that's the way it's been interpreted ever since. (Rather like the way Corporations became legal persons...which never even had a court decision to back it up, but merely a legal secretaries transcription of court records what became accepted through usage. No law or court decision ever decided that it was so, they just accepted "existing usage".)
So when I trace it I see chains of lobbyists, backroom deals, improper procedures, etc. I don't see any high principles, much as they might be trotted out when publicists want to defend the current laws. Things just didn't happen that way.
Now what you might claim is that the decisions lead to an environment where opportunistic entities taking advantage of the legal environment were able to achieve worthy goals. That might well be justifiable (though I can also see counter arguments). This, however, is quite different from saying that these reasons are why the laws developed as they did.
Legal and moral are independent traits. They ought to have a strong positive correlation, but it's beginning to appear that presuming they are orthogonal is being an optimist.
Of course, the fact that he worked closely with Alexander Hamilton means that I'm not very willing to trust either his ideals or his honesty on anything, without independent grounds for belief.
Remember, Hamilton is the guy who founded the national debt by writing the government a check he didn't have funds to cover (money didn't yet exist), and then having the govt. pay him back for his loan with interest. (Anyone who's followed the banks over the last couple of years should have an idea of how this can make one lots of money.) And if I'm not wrong, he was secretary of the treasury at the time (or the equivalent).
Got a problem with that. Thor was Norse, Donner was native to Britain. But Donnerstag is German, and Thursday is English.
Now it you'd said Thor's Day, then I might be willing to consider that you might be an (English speaking) Norse neo-pagan. But Thursday is a bit too corrupt to make a judgment call on.
(Which, I guess, was your point.)
To me that suggests that he was a politician taking actions to shore up public relations in an area where he perceived himself both weak and under attack.
It doesn't say anything about what he believed. Beliefs should be judged by actions more than by words.
I think the correct term for most of them is "Free Thinker". E.g, Jefferson was very interested in religion and philosophy. He was a Deist AND a Mason AND a Christian (and probably other things as well)...and above all, a politician. But a politician with philosophical ideals.
Calling Jefferson a Christian is like calling a liberal Unitarian a Christian. He'll accept the label, but it's not really very descriptive.
FWIW, I doubt that MOST Christian faiths deserve to be called Christian, even though that's the traditional term. They've got precious little to do with J.C., even though they worship his words (usually in some particular translation). Worship doesn't imply any degree of understanding. It just implies that you can find some phrase that can be used out of context to justify what you have decided to do for other reasons. The more someone claims to be a Christian, the more I think of "Honest John's Used Cars".
It's a bit worse than that, though not substantially worse. (Depending, of course, on just how much oil is released.) This may be enough additional stress to convert the entire gulf into a dead zone, rather than the partial dead zone that we've dealt with previously.
If enough oil is released it could also spread a dead zone up the Gulf Stream, though I feel this is doubtful. OTOH, the ocean off-shore the coast is already home to many dead zones, so it might not require that much additional stress.
This could be a disaster to the fishing industries, which are already nearing collapse due to over-fishing and improper fishing. (Again, just adding a bit more stress to something that's already overstressed.) This, of course, will cause other food prices to rise, which they were already doing due to the increases in the price of oil.
Nothing here looks like a disaster to the Earth, but it's a pretty big disaster to the humans that happen to live near the area...and to some that don't live that near, but were already under near limiting stress. Also to some species. Some have probably already been wiped out. More probably will be. These were generally species that had already been pushed near extinction, and this will have been just the final blow. Others only live/d in a restricted area, and when that area is rendered uninhabitable, they die.
Just to put things in perspective, a nuclear war that killed off all humans and most other mammals wouldn't be a disaster to the Earth. Only to the people. But as a person, I would find it a major disaster. (Presuming that I lived long enough. Quite unlikely as I live in a major metropolitan area.) Saying that something isn't a major disaster just because it isn't a disaster to the Earth is stupidly unreasonable. Only the collision that split off the moon has counted as a major disaster to the Earth. Even the incident that killed off 90% of all species (genera?) wasn't a major disaster to the Earth.