The sole purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the innocent.
Through out the ages methods have ranged from an eye for an eye, to hanging thieves, to cutting off thieves' hands, to penitentiaries, to attempts at psychological reform.
However, while punishment is a METHOD of protecting the innocent from criminals, I believe that once it becomes the PURPOSE if the system that we have lost perspective. As much as anger and disgust makes me think that certain criminals DESERVE certain punishments, our rationale minds must always ask, and answer honestly "Will this prevent the further criminalization of innocent people?" If the answer is "no", then I believe that satisfying our revenge instinct and blood lust to no purpose starts to edge into the realm of criminal itself.
Likewise, "reform" shouldn't be a goal in and of itself. I think that WITHOUT reform, any system that includes the release of prisoners does NOT achieve the goal of protecting the innocent. At least, not longer then the prison sentence is for. But I also don't think that many criminals "deserve" any type of forgiveness. For more primitive societies that could not afford to feed and house themselves, much less criminals, harsh physical punishments and executions were what criminals got, and given the position of the society at the time, the society would not be in the wrong to administer their most effective punishments available. Of course mercy is desirable, so as we prosper we are able to treat even our criminals better. This is good, but I do not believe it is a matter of a criminals "right" to be treated "humanly" by a society that he or she did not treat humanly. Rights are something that ALL societies, rich or poor, are obliged to respect.
Because you have to wonder: how do the machines know what Tasty Wheat feels like? Maybe they got it wrong. Maybe what I think Tasty Wheat feels like actually feels like oatmeal, or tuna fish. That makes you wonder about a lot of things. You take chicken, for example: maybe they couldn't figure out what to make chicken feel like, which is why chicken feels like everything.
wouldn't you be playing tag with, you know, William McKinley or something? if 1970 +2^31 is 2038, 1970 -2^31 is 1901 sometime. Then you invest in any stock you can find!
And when you come back to today, you'll find all your stocks got bankrupted in the great depression. damn!
You say the Earth is "becoming less habitable every day". But the ability of the Earth to support us, or rather, our ability to utilize the Earth efficiently, is increasing.
Back in the 70s there was a guy who calling for mandatory sterilization to keep world population down. He said we would be starving by the 90s.
30 years and 2 billion more people later we are still paying farmers not to grow crops.
The theories about the world's imminent destruction make the front page, but the REAL ways we are improving our ability to utilize the earth are completely ignored.
The Earth, today, is more hospitable to humans than it has ever been before.
So is the toxic radioactive mold in my air conditioning ducts going to combine with our towns arsenic laced water supply and come down and kill my family while our babies choke on small toys and our children dodge bullets spray from mailmen's assault rifles in the playground as they eat their poisonous school lunches, or not?
ah, your cover is blown. you know what a hard drive is. Now if you had said it was in you "white box with the blinking lights" or in your "screen", i might have beleived you.
Re:Well, since I can't get to the article...
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Will Bush have the stamina and ethic to stay in Iraq,
well, like you said, he's thick. so suspect he will stay in. He obviously isn't concerned about it hurting him this election, and he's got nothing to loose in the next one.
And what happened to Afgahnistan?
elections this month.
actually, between Iraq and Afghanistan, I expect Afghanistan has a higher chance of failure. Tribal cultures aren't very compatible with democracies. Tribalism is why Somalia failed (well, lack of commitment was. Tribalism was just the force we weren't committed to taking care of. If it was even possible)
Re:Well, since I can't get to the article...
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You might be interested some other quotes by good ol' Thomas Jefferson: "Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom." "It is more honorable to repair a wrong than to persist in it" "All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to = remain silent."
Kerry's honest? he's a politician! Bush is no Honest Abe, but "honesty" isn't what I see in either of these two.
And didn't I just say that I thought Iraq was the right thing to do? Persisting in Iraq is not "persisting in a wrong".
Who's remaining silent about Tyranny now? Is PATRIOT tyranny? Kerry voted for it. IF he had real objections to it, he'd have voted against it. Like i said to point one, he's a politician. You believe Kerry but not Bush?
Fine. Be honest about it. Don't manufacture reasons.
I am honest about it. Not that you should believe me now, but I never supported Iraq as an essential part of the "war on Terror". WMDs is a side show. I'm an arrogant American bastard. I'm not afraid of Chemical weapons that Iraq (or anyone else) has. Its piddling small change next to the immediate ass whooping Saddam would get if he ever actually USED WMDs on us.
Like I said in my reply to the other dude, i Voted for Bush because of the RESULTS of his actions. a freer Iraq. I respect your complaints about bullheadedness about defanging Iraq. Iraq never really had fangs. not to us, anyway.
Re:Well, since I can't get to the article...
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gee, you make it sound like I support Bush. I just told you why I voted for him. That single point is really the only distinction I see between the two.
I don't care WHY you think we went into Iraq, or WHY Bush and these "neocons" went into Iraq. You can make all the "guesses" you like about the Jews or Big Oil or whatever shadowy power scheme you believe in. Saddam is gone, and we are replacing the Ba'athists with a representative democracy. The RESULT is a good one (so far), even if you believe the worst intentions were behind it.
Kerry doesn't promise this result AT ALL.
And yeah, lets try to affect a change towards human rights and liberal democracy in the list of other places too. Maybe not with bombs and tanks (at least not at this point), but ignoring those areas is bad too. I'd hope that other countries would step up to the task of stopping genocide in places like Sudan while we are busy. But if they don't, and we have a chance to make a difference, lets make it.
Because, frankly, we're a hegemony at this point. We have the OPPORTUNITY to make a difference now. We don't have a USSR injecting its influence to fuck with us. We don't have to support dictators because it is strategically expedient to do so. That might change soon.
Granted, the American people (and power brokers, if you choose to believe) will want to see some sort of "gain" for American interests whenever we go to war. We got scared out of the do-gooder role for the most part in 1993 when the bodies of American Servicemen we dragged thru the streets of Mogadishu. Its hard to justify 'charitable' wars to the American People.
Maybe its NOT our responsibility to be the "world police". But even if we ARE being "robber barons", we're making Iraq and Afghanistan a fuck load better then they were.
So yeah, I think that Bush made the world a better place, for whatever reason.
Re:Well, since I can't get to the article...
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· Score: 1
My vote for Bush can be summed up nicely by a quote from Jefferson: "Resistance to Tyrants is obedience to God"
As far as the "War on Terror" goes, I'm not REALLY concerned. I was close enough to NYC to see the dust cloud in the sky from when the WTC collapsed, but I'm not really worried about terrorists killing me. More Americans will kill Americans by the end of the year then Terrorists have managed to kill in the past decade. Bush had done well enough against the terrorists, and while I doubt Kerry will do "better"... It doesn't really matter.
They both are going to spend gads of money on pork barrel programs.
Both support PATRIOT. Or at least voted and signed it.
But Bush has the guts to take out tyrants. The Taliban and Saddam's Ba'athists have no right to rule as they did. As the Strong, I think the US has a certain amount of obligation to the Weak to help them out of oppression. Pick them up and stand them on their own two feet.
In the long run, will nation building succeed in Iraq and Afghanistan? Well, it didn't work in Somalia. It did work in Japan and Germany. It might be a fool's errand, but I think taking those two regimes out was to remain faithful to our founding principles of getting the boots of tyrants off the backs of men.
thats actually the point i was trying to make. most "Journalists" are just parrots. They don't actually go out and colelct data, they just repeat what other "journalists" are saying.
...do Journalists deserve respect? And since when do Journalists get tech subjects correct with out their hands being held?
"Journalism" these days (and perhaps always?) is a whole lot of sensationalism. Most news comes from a limited group of sources anyway, so its not like Journalists are doing all that much collecting of information. It's a phenomenon that's hard to see when you pick up your local paper (unless you pick up 10 papers a day, you don't realize that every paper has the same news articles from the AP or Knight Ridder), but the same principle is painfully obvious in the "blogosphere". Someone has a story, then the next day, everyone has the story (copied form the first blog).
thanks for posting that. I watched it tonight. the whole thing is very moving. Mostly the shots of SpaceShipOne on the runway, with the crowds lined up to watch.
it reminds me of something i read once:
"The ultimate responsibility of the pilot is to fulfill the dreams of the countless millions of earthbound ancestors who could only stare skyward and wish."
Thanks for your anti-west sentiment, but what about russia? japan? china? the Islamic empire? Shaka zulu? Genghis Khan? present day somalian warlords. present day egypt, iran, syria? 1951 North Korea?
I see you have chosen to put your inaccurate statements in boldface type. Does that make you a boldfaced liar?
We are talking about renal failure, not cancer.
Uranium dust inhalation is not deadly because uranium is radioactive, it is deadly because it is a heavy metal that's amusing, since YOU (js7a) put THIS in boldface:
the 800 tons of DU used in Afghanistan is the radioactive equivalent of 83,000 Nagasaki bombs. The amount of DU used in Iraq is equivalent to 250,000 Nagasaki bombs....
So you're saying that DU is dangerous because of radioactivity until someone calls "bullshit"?
Slashdot Mirror
Also, armed citizens.
haha. dude, you just made my day with that post. thanks :)
The sole purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the innocent.
Through out the ages methods have ranged from an eye for an eye, to hanging thieves, to cutting off thieves' hands, to penitentiaries, to attempts at psychological reform.
However, while punishment is a METHOD of protecting the innocent from criminals, I believe that once it becomes the PURPOSE if the system that we have lost perspective. As much as anger and disgust makes me think that certain criminals DESERVE certain punishments, our rationale minds must always ask, and answer honestly "Will this prevent the further criminalization of innocent people?" If the answer is "no", then I believe that satisfying our revenge instinct and blood lust to no purpose starts to edge into the realm of criminal itself.
Likewise, "reform" shouldn't be a goal in and of itself. I think that WITHOUT reform, any system that includes the release of prisoners does NOT achieve the goal of protecting the innocent. At least, not longer then the prison sentence is for. But I also don't think that many criminals "deserve" any type of forgiveness. For more primitive societies that could not afford to feed and house themselves, much less criminals, harsh physical punishments and executions were what criminals got, and given the position of the society at the time, the society would not be in the wrong to administer their most effective punishments available. Of course mercy is desirable, so as we prosper we are able to treat even our criminals better. This is good, but I do not believe it is a matter of a criminals "right" to be treated "humanly" by a society that he or she did not treat humanly. Rights are something that ALL societies, rich or poor, are obliged to respect.
Otherwise, you're right. This doesn't help.
Because you have to wonder: how do the machines know what Tasty Wheat feels like? Maybe they got it wrong. Maybe what I think Tasty Wheat feels like actually feels like oatmeal, or tuna fish. That makes you wonder about a lot of things. You take chicken, for example: maybe they couldn't figure out what to make chicken feel like, which is why chicken feels like everything.
wouldn't you be playing tag with, you know, William McKinley or something? if 1970 +2^31 is 2038, 1970 -2^31 is 1901 sometime. Then you invest in any stock you can find!
And when you come back to today, you'll find all your stocks got bankrupted in the great depression. damn!
Human's are a virus? then get some Antibiotics
You say the Earth is "becoming less habitable every day". But the ability of the Earth to support us, or rather, our ability to utilize the Earth efficiently, is increasing.
Back in the 70s there was a guy who calling for mandatory sterilization to keep world population down. He said we would be starving by the 90s.
30 years and 2 billion more people later we are still paying farmers not to grow crops.
The theories about the world's imminent destruction make the front page, but the REAL ways we are improving our ability to utilize the earth are completely ignored.
The Earth, today, is more hospitable to humans than it has ever been before.
seems like this planet is supporting more and more people every year...
Does this mean the galactic recession is over? Or are they just building Earth Mark II for the mice?
"Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer" - Adolf Hitler
"One World, One web, One program" - Microso...er.. Linux Guru?
PS: its a joke. laugh.
So is the toxic radioactive mold in my air conditioning ducts going to combine with our towns arsenic laced water supply and come down and kill my family while our babies choke on small toys and our children dodge bullets spray from mailmen's assault rifles in the playground as they eat their poisonous school lunches, or not?
ah, your cover is blown. you know what a hard drive is. Now if you had said it was in you "white box with the blinking lights" or in your "screen", i might have beleived you.
Will Bush have the stamina and ethic to stay in Iraq,
well, like you said, he's thick. so suspect he will stay in. He obviously isn't concerned about it hurting him this election, and he's got nothing to loose in the next one.
And what happened to Afgahnistan?
elections this month.
actually, between Iraq and Afghanistan, I expect Afghanistan has a higher chance of failure. Tribal cultures aren't very compatible with democracies. Tribalism is why Somalia failed (well, lack of commitment was. Tribalism was just the force we weren't committed to taking care of. If it was even possible)
You might be interested some other quotes by good ol' Thomas Jefferson: "Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom." "It is more honorable to repair a wrong than to persist in it" "All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to = remain silent."
Kerry's honest? he's a politician! Bush is no Honest Abe, but "honesty" isn't what I see in either of these two.
And didn't I just say that I thought Iraq was the right thing to do? Persisting in Iraq is not "persisting in a wrong".
Who's remaining silent about Tyranny now? Is PATRIOT tyranny? Kerry voted for it. IF he had real objections to it, he'd have voted against it. Like i said to point one, he's a politician. You believe Kerry but not Bush?
Fine. Be honest about it. Don't manufacture reasons.
I am honest about it. Not that you should believe me now, but I never supported Iraq as an essential part of the "war on Terror". WMDs is a side show. I'm an arrogant American bastard. I'm not afraid of Chemical weapons that Iraq (or anyone else) has. Its piddling small change next to the immediate ass whooping Saddam would get if he ever actually USED WMDs on us.
Like I said in my reply to the other dude, i Voted for Bush because of the RESULTS of his actions. a freer Iraq. I respect your complaints about bullheadedness about defanging Iraq. Iraq never really had fangs. not to us, anyway.
gee, you make it sound like I support Bush. I just told you why I voted for him. That single point is really the only distinction I see between the two.
I don't care WHY you think we went into Iraq, or WHY Bush and these "neocons" went into Iraq. You can make all the "guesses" you like about the Jews or Big Oil or whatever shadowy power scheme you believe in. Saddam is gone, and we are replacing the Ba'athists with a representative democracy. The RESULT is a good one (so far), even if you believe the worst intentions were behind it.
Kerry doesn't promise this result AT ALL.
And yeah, lets try to affect a change towards human rights and liberal democracy in the list of other places too. Maybe not with bombs and tanks (at least not at this point), but ignoring those areas is bad too. I'd hope that other countries would step up to the task of stopping genocide in places like Sudan while we are busy. But if they don't, and we have a chance to make a difference, lets make it.
Because, frankly, we're a hegemony at this point. We have the OPPORTUNITY to make a difference now. We don't have a USSR injecting its influence to fuck with us. We don't have to support dictators because it is strategically expedient to do so. That might change soon.
Granted, the American people (and power brokers, if you choose to believe) will want to see some sort of "gain" for American interests whenever we go to war. We got scared out of the do-gooder role for the most part in 1993 when the bodies of American Servicemen we dragged thru the streets of Mogadishu. Its hard to justify 'charitable' wars to the American People.
Maybe its NOT our responsibility to be the "world police". But even if we ARE being "robber barons", we're making Iraq and Afghanistan a fuck load better then they were.
So yeah, I think that Bush made the world a better place, for whatever reason.
My vote for Bush can be summed up nicely by a quote from Jefferson: "Resistance to Tyrants is obedience to God"
As far as the "War on Terror" goes, I'm not REALLY concerned. I was close enough to NYC to see the dust cloud in the sky from when the WTC collapsed, but I'm not really worried about terrorists killing me. More Americans will kill Americans by the end of the year then Terrorists have managed to kill in the past decade. Bush had done well enough against the terrorists, and while I doubt Kerry will do "better"... It doesn't really matter.
They both are going to spend gads of money on pork barrel programs.
Both support PATRIOT. Or at least voted and signed it.
But Bush has the guts to take out tyrants. The Taliban and Saddam's Ba'athists have no right to rule as they did. As the Strong, I think the US has a certain amount of obligation to the Weak to help them out of oppression. Pick them up and stand them on their own two feet.
In the long run, will nation building succeed in Iraq and Afghanistan? Well, it didn't work in Somalia. It did work in Japan and Germany. It might be a fool's errand, but I think taking those two regimes out was to remain faithful to our founding principles of getting the boots of tyrants off the backs of men.
thats actually the point i was trying to make. most "Journalists" are just parrots. They don't actually go out and colelct data, they just repeat what other "journalists" are saying.
...you're part of the precipitate.
there are people out there who can't figure out how to use condoms.
oh wait, many of them are here, aren't they?
...do Journalists deserve respect? And since when do Journalists get tech subjects correct with out their hands being held?
"Journalism" these days (and perhaps always?) is a whole lot of sensationalism. Most news comes from a limited group of sources anyway, so its not like Journalists are doing all that much collecting of information. It's a phenomenon that's hard to see when you pick up your local paper (unless you pick up 10 papers a day, you don't realize that every paper has the same news articles from the AP or Knight Ridder), but the same principle is painfully obvious in the "blogosphere". Someone has a story, then the next day, everyone has the story (copied form the first blog).
thanks for posting that. I watched it tonight. the whole thing is very moving. Mostly the shots of SpaceShipOne on the runway, with the crowds lined up to watch.
it reminds me of something i read once:
"The ultimate responsibility of the pilot is to fulfill the dreams of the countless millions of earthbound ancestors who could only stare skyward and wish."
and dreaming we are!
"If you build castles in the air," Thoreau said, "that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."
Before there IS anything, we first must imagine it.
Wernher von Braun said the most important ingredient to building a moon rocket is: "the will to do it!"
The space industry exists. Now we have to build it.
where did i respond to you? i replied to maxpublic.
Thanks for your anti-west sentiment, but what about russia? japan? china? the Islamic empire? Shaka zulu? Genghis Khan? present day somalian warlords. present day egypt, iran, syria? 1951 North Korea?
conquest is a Western invention? my ass it is.
I see you have chosen to put your inaccurate statements in boldface type. Does that make you a boldfaced liar?
We are talking about renal failure, not cancer.
Uranium dust inhalation is not deadly because uranium is radioactive, it is deadly because it is a heavy metal
that's amusing, since YOU (js7a) put THIS in boldface:
the 800 tons of DU used in Afghanistan is the radioactive equivalent of 83,000 Nagasaki bombs. The amount of DU used in Iraq is equivalent to 250,000 Nagasaki bombs....
So you're saying that DU is dangerous because of radioactivity until someone calls "bullshit"?