Are you satisfied with a system that allows each of Ted Cruz's donors to have literally 100,000 times as much "speech" as each of Lessig's donors?
I don't really give a fuck as I am not USA-ian.
Also, what the flying fuck does it matter what am * I * satisfied with or not? Unless at least half of those ~130 million who turn up to vote in USA is interested in that same thing, I might as well start shitting in my other hand - at least it'll be warm and it will feel kinda substantial.
And if those people are (dis)satisfied - they should contact their congress-critters. Not try to reenact Brewster's Millions. There's no chance they'll outdo Richard Pryor AND a million dollars was a losers choices even back then.
What's your point? There's no connection between donors and voters. Only 90,000 voters make sizable ($2600) contributions to any campaign
The point is that those numbers you're showing actually make his numbers even worse.
First of all, his donations are pitiful. Nowhere near "sizable" at an average of $120. In the game of "pay for election" he already lost. Those Ted Cruz and Rand Paul numbers you mention. He will NEVER get those numbers. NEVER!
Then, there's the fact that since he "announced" his candidacy and got his name out there, number of his donors "skyrocketed" to 8794. All that publicity boost got 466 people to reach for their wallets, and donate less than the previously established average. 466 out of 130 million. Not out of 90000 cause these donations too were not "sizable". Taking donations as a measure of faith, his "supporters" show a complete lack of faith in him.
Which is not surprising, cause you don't have to be a genius to realize that his plan is not a paradox - but a delusion.
1 - He wants to fight the influence of big money on elections. 2 - Ergo, he supposedly understands that money wins elections. Or at least it influences elections by a huge enough amount that he wants to run for president (and then resign) in order to stop that. 3 - BUT - in order to achieve that, he plans to go against people who both have the money AND who like the fact that money influences elections. 4 - So, he must understand that he won't get any money, thus he will not win elections. GOTO 1.
Only way that kind of plan can make sense is if the planner is delusional. He wants to challenge people with guns to a gunfight, where they will use real, loaded, guns and he will use a warm fart.
And BESIDES THAT... His big plan is to threaten politicians with an excuse to just sit on their asses and do nothing while giving daily interviews about how it is all president's fault?
And that's why we can't have any more of this giving birth to grown college professors thing. People should be born as babies and they should be allowed to grow up slowly, so they can read books for small children. Maybe then they'll remember that you can't punish Br'er Rabbit by throwing him in the Briar Patch.
He'll run out of money long before campaigns really begin. He'll be invited to exactly 0 debates. He won't even get a chance to be laughed out of the room. Rand Paul has better chances than him. WAY better chances.
Rand Paul won his seat in 2010 with 755216 votes. Lessig reached his "MILLION DOLLARS!!!" with donations from 8328 donors. So, to reach Rand Paul numbers he would have to have over 90 supporters not willing to donate a dime, for every supporter that DID donate money for his "campaign". Which would be its own special version of depressing if it were true. And that's just to reach Rand "Snowballs In Hell" Paul numbers.
What he probably WILL accomplish is to tie the ideas he is trying to push with attributes and phrases such as "fringe", "kook", "silly", "crazy", "nonsensical", "ridiculous", "armchair politician", "ivory tower academic", "incompetent", "egghead", "nutty", "loser" and "please stop helping".
but note the badges and other indications of rank aboard the Enterprise. People may be equal, but some are obviously more equal.
Badges and ranks are a mark of higher RESPONSIBILITY and of required levels of ABILITY. You seem to be confusing them with medals and jewelry used to signal ones STATUS - i.e. being "more equal than others".
The post-scarcity you imagine creates Borg - not human societies. Humans have needs that don't comply to laws of economy and which can't be scaled up as they are not things to be accumulated. Needs like emotional, family or social ties, needs for personal achievement and betterment - needs to BE more instead of to have more.
Borg eliminate the need to feel and be (rejecting/imposing rejection of uniqueness in exchange for attempted uniform "perfection") - and thus they can have " a fleet of starships so vast that they block out the stars". Or trans-warp conduits that allow them to jump across the galaxy at will, or go time-traveling, or to invade other universes...
Q could also snap fingers and block out stars (no ships needed - omnipotence will do) - but at a cost of personal achievement and permanent boredom to the point that suicide starts looking good. Better than trolling vastly inferior species at least.
Federation is a post-scarcity society in a sense that humanity has ENOUGH RESOURCES FOR EVERYONE'S BASIC BIOLOGICAL NEEDS, so everyone can just bugger off and go climb mountains, fuck around on holodeck if that is their fancy - or they can join Starfleet and explore the universe, or go out and colonize some planet, or run a restaurant like Sisko's dad, or make wine like Picard's brother, or...
Except that is not the case of "disagree" but of "let me hate and harass in peace" and "my imaginary friend gave me right to hatemonger".
And when one invokes "imaginary friend" rules... well, one sets oneself up for a LOT more than just bankruptcy. Like being offered as a human sacrifice to someone else's imaginary friend. And then we call that person who kidnaps people and cuts their hearts out as a sacrifice to the their imaginary friend not a premeditating murderer - but a MENTALLY INSANE person. Adults with "imaginary friends" are mentally insane. Children too, probably. So, that "people who disagree" is closer to "mentally insane people who just want to spread hatred and harassment towards people for whom their psychosis tells them that they are 'fair game'"
As for "harassing them into bankruptcy"... Besides the fact that Melissa and Aaron's imaginary friend would dictate exactly that had they been running a bank and not a bakery - they were breaking a law. Deliberately and purposefully. On account of "imaginary friend is our get out of jail free ticket". Which if it were true would make 9/11 a perfectly fine way of expressing one's beliefs in imaginary creatures and rules.
But besides THAT... You are full of shit. http://www.politico.com/story/... They made out like gangbusters (more like just regular gangsters) from donations from people who apparently think that they, the people, should pay for products of other people's insane decisions. From each according to their ability to give, for Melissa and Aaron according to their need to pay for their hate-license. Because they, too share the same ideology of who to hate.
And they weren't nothing "into bankruptcy" - they chose to lock up their shop, rather than comply to "cakes - not hate" order. http://aclu-co.org/court-cases...
The Commission's order affirmed previous determinations that Masterpieceâ(TM)s refusal to sell Mullins and Craig a wedding cake constituted discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in violation of Colorado law. The Commission also ordered Masterpiece Cakeshop to change its company policies, provide "comprehensive staff training" regarding public accommodations discrimination, and provide quarterly reports for the next two years regarding steps it has taken to come into compliance and whether it has turned away any prospective customers.
Better donations than rejecting discrimination, no cake for those we hate!
Instead of A coin flipped for 20000 days, they take data on... say... 100 coins. VARIOUS data. Weight, color, date on coin, number of scratches, source of coin, air temperature, does flipper of coins like dogs or cats... Then they flip those coins for some number of times and write all that data down too. Including the sequence of results - heads, heads, heads, tails, tails, heads... They get a BIG pile of data to mine.
Then, and this is a clincher, they "Distinguish between causal effects and attributes". In other words - they come up with a theory of "what" influences the results and "how". They don't go into why just yet - they only look for nice regressions between their independent variables and their dependent ones.
Anyway, now they have all that data and outcomes based on various attributes. They can cherry pick those results they like and build their coin-flipping models based on attributes which fit to desired results. Post hoc ergo propter hoc + confirmation bias? Nah man... Regression analysis. Then, based on that, they build a model and plug into it new data from a new sample of coins. Then they dump all that into regression trees and go looking for "predictions" of results they would like to see - thus providing the "why". http://www.nasonline.org/progr...
I.e. Make a lot of guesses "based on" previous "maybes" - then pick ones you like. Now... someone get me a 20-something blonde female, dog lover with a degree in flower arrangement and a 1956 Australian penny with a bluish-greenish tint. My model predicts a 50% chance of getting either head or tail under those conditions.
You can make fun of everything. You can jam in jokes anywhere. Hell... just put a laugh track on it and some people will laugh at anything. Just like with that show where people tune in to laugh at how awkward nerds are. You can also parody SciFi up the kazoo. Most of it has already been done by Red Dwarf though.
The fact that there is room for jokes can't change the fact that Galaxy Quest was not about joking about SciFi tropes or making fun of such shows or its audiences. That's what The Big Bang Theory is about.
Galaxy Quest is your classic "the dream is real and I am secretly a hero king" story. And THAT story can't be stretched out for too long before it becomes a genuine story of heroics and NOT a parody. Galaxy Quest ends by becoming Galaxy Quest the Journey Continues. It stops treating the show or the work of those actors on the show as a joke - but as a real and highly important MISSION.
They are no longer actors. They are an ACTUAL HEROIC CREW of NSEA Protector which was a real starship. They are no longer acting. They are on a diplomatic mission, sending messages into outer space. They have a real living alien with them on the set. They KNOW things and they did things that have changed them and the entire universe they live in. The ending changes the GENRE for the audience. It becomes obvious that it is not a SciFi parody but genuine SciFi. Because it is a love letter - not a parody. Goofy characters become heroes. Seen Guardians of the Galaxy? Seen Antman?
MASH never stopped being a comedy, turning around and making every joke actually just a bizarre scene in a gritty war drama. If it did, it would be Kafkian. Neither did Hogan's Heroes. Nor did Lost in Space or Star Trek get a laugh track and started being about crazy hijinks of a wacky crew.
They can try doing that, sure, but all they'll end up with is just another lame "reference is a joke" show, like that crap Seth MacFarlane keeps churning out.
This was my thought, especially it they made it as much a parody of Star Trek as the movie was of the cast and culture.
The same actions, characters and tropes that movie is poking fun of, turn out first heroic then triumphant by the end. They really become heroes they were playing on a show, they save the world, help out friendly aliens, redeem their fans AND they get a revival of their show.
I doubt that the same effect can be achieved with a lesser (cheaper) cast and as a running gag over a season or more. Sam Rockwell alone already used up most of those jokes. While being awesome and ultimately - heroic.
Trying to copy Rickman on the other hand... simply won't work.
...but tear GAS is addressed "To Whom It May Concern".
As for those other "less lethal" weapons... aiming skills are not the issue. Fact that they are LEGAL means that should they want they can employ any kind of technique to achieve that hit with a drone. Be it "painting" the target with a laser by a human or any and all AI or assisting technology available EVER in the future... Doesn't matter.
The fact that this legalizes drones equipped for "less than lethal" drone strikes against civilian population is what matters. Drone strikes against civilians. It has a certain ring to it, does it not?
Clearly, AK he had was already illegal. And clearly, everyone knows where to get illegal guns. And clearly, everyone knows that there are A LOT of illegal guns. And clearly, Belgium has gun permits and other regulation.
The issue is that Belgian cops are not doing anything about it. I.e. There is NO ENFORCEMENT OF REGULATION of clearly and obviously illegal guns.
Making guns illegal is a thing that exists in your head. The article and my point are about easy access to guns (through lack of enforcement of regulation) making everyone LESS safe.
I never claimed there was a conspiracy, I claimed that people commonly call things "science" in order to manipulate the public and provided examples which are easy to find and validate.
That "people" lying i.e. "call things science" in order to manipulate - that's a description of a conspiracy by definition. ANY definition. If it walks like duck... Meeh... you know the rest.
As for examples "easy to find"... Go find me a James Bond movie I'm thinking off right now. Here's a hint: he kills a guy in it. You provided vague anecdotes you only half remember as "examples" of your conspiracy theories about manipulators of the public calling non-science science - and you expect everyone else to know your thoughts. Onus probandi much? No?
You do realize that the examples I gave (without handwaving "it's out there... find the truth yourself") ARE science? Nothing unscientific about them.
It's just that their methodology and conclusions are (probably) tainted by biases. BUT! Because it is science, the proofs and examples where they went wrong are RIGHT THERE, in the studies. Built in. No one had to manipulate, lie, hide, conspire... They wrote down exactly where they fucked up. That's a feature of the scientific method. What you are describing sounds like tabloid "science" and conspiracy theories.
Manipulation does not require one form, it takes many forms. Similarly dishonesty is not simply a lie, but can also be withholding information or re-ordering information to present a false reality.
You don't seem to understand the difference between a scientific study and a tabloid article.
Main feature of science is that it can be taken apart because - it is science. And it MUST be taken apart during scientific work because - it is science. You can't "re-order" or "withhold" gravity or any other established law of nature or a finding proven previously. It is not some secret art. It is all out in the open already. You WILL be called out as a bad scientist and a kook if you try to do that. Richard Feynman called out Linus Pauling as a "vitamin C cures cancer" kook in a damn song.
All you can do is fiddle with numbers and hope no one tries to replicate your results while you live. P-hacking is obvious, mislabeling too, using vague survey questions, badly set up controls... It is all obvious and it will be right there in the paper. Or it will not be - WHICH WILL MAKE IT EVEN MORE OBVIOUS.
You are basically tossing ad hominems (though maybe unintentionally... you seem to have a misunderstanding of topics you are arguing), strawmen (again... maybe you don't understand the scientific process) and demanding of people to prove that you are right. Which is ironic... cause my original post was supporting yours, though through a more moderate explanation.
But you seem to be too enamored in your "EVERYONE LIES!!! ALL THE TIME!!!" theory to realize that. Then again... you find it "amazing" that 1 in 5 Americans comes out to "about 63 million people" in my guesstimate and in the "BS study you referred to". As if dividing about 318 million with about 5 should change significantly depending on who does such basic math.
I have a feeling that when you say "science" you do not think it means what it actually means.
And I'm not talking about that executed police officer. Or the executed Protection Service officer (French version of Secret Service), assigned as a bodyguard to Stephane Charbonnier.
I'm talking about this guy reportedly getting his guns and ammo at the same place where terrorists in France have been getting it "traditionally" - Belgium. From TFA:
Matthew Holehouse writes from Brussels:
The attack on the Thalys train brings fresh scrutiny on the ease of purchasing weapons in Belgium. The gunman is believed to have entered the train at Brussels Gare du Midi, Belgium's busiest station and the terminus of the Eurostar rail link to Britain.
He was carrying a short-stocked Kalashnikov assault rifle, at least five magazines of ammunition, a handgun and knives, according to witnesses. It comes eight months after the terrorist attacks in Paris in January. The weapons used in those attacks were bought from criminal gangs and arms dealers in Belgium.
Amedy Couliby, whose attack on a Kosher supermarket killed four Jewish Parisiens, bought his Scorpion machine gun and Tokarev handgun in Brussels and Charleroi. The Kuoachi brothers, who slaughtered 12 people at Charlie Hebdo magazine, received their weapons from Coulibaly, who bought them near Gare du Midi for around £3,800.
The scruffy backstreets around the station host a large market and the area is well known as a marketplace for illegal arms. Many weapons are thought to be left over from the wars in the former Yugoslavia. Typically, a Kalashnikov automatic rifle, could be bought for several hundred euros in Bosnia, and then sold on in Belgium or the Netherlands for use in organised crime for ten times that sum. Earlier this month police in Charleroi broke up a suspected international arms smuggling ring, alleged to be using crude forged paperwork to import Glock and Sauer handguns fitted with silencers, Browning rifles, and shotguns.
Gun ownership is permitted under licence in Belgium, although automatic and military-grade weapons are illegal. There are around 900,000 firearms circulating in the country of 11 million, of which around 300,000 are thought to be unregistered, according to official estimates.
Easy access to guns is what has made this attack in France and those before possible. What prevented it from becoming a tragedy were people willing, ready and able to rush and tackle the gunman.
Modern diets are only about 10,000 years old, and the calorie rich eating of today is less than 100 years old.
That's a bit of a fallacy there.
Corn, potato, beans, tomato, turkey, cocoa, peanuts, sunflowers (8-11% of vegetable oil comes from its seeds)... and many more. All those didn't exist as far as the world is concerned until the discovery of America. And so many more would only become common and thus cheap after being transplanted to Americas and farmed there on all that empty and rich land, with free slave labor, then traded with the rest of the world. Sugar was known for thousands of years, but it didn't "take off" until 18th century.
And that's all just before we changed those foods to be better. Wind the clock back mere decades and look up Norman Borlaug. The bread we eat today could not exist mere 50 years ago.
So, from one side, 10000 years as a limit to the "change in our diet" due to agriculture is nonsense. From another, we didn't go out there into the wild, experimenting willy-nilly what to grow agriculturally. We just picked the BEST food for US and planted and cultivated MORE of it.
We have an enzyme which takes a rather rare (in nature) sugar called sucrose and splits it into fructose and glucose so we could both get energy and save energy (eat our cake and have it too) from a single molecule. We EVOLVED to be able to do that - so we planted crops that make more of that molecule. Some of us have an enzyme which allows us to digest lactose and get energy from that too - after we wean off from our mom's milk. So we bred cattle that produce THAT molecule (and fat, and meat, and hides...). Some Japanese can digest cellulose cause they have special gut bacteria with enzymes which allow them to get energy from algae.
Why all those various ways to harvest energy from all those plants and animals? Because there never was enough of it. We went hungry. Again - India mere decades ago. Parts of Africa today. Europe and Americas before that, mere decades not centuries ago. Heck... centuries ago we had nearly no way to preserve food. Canning is an early 19th century invention. Refrigeration took decades more. Modern refrigeration took even longer. Before that we ate when we could, what we could, stored some dried foods and prayed for short winters. And we went hungry.
We did not "change our diet" 10000 years ago by content, nor did we do it by quantity until recently. The fact that we ARE getting fat off of modern food PROVES that we have evolved to eat that kind of food.
We did not evolve to not spend those calories by sitting the whole day working, sitting while going from place to place, spending winters in comfortably warm rooms with all that cheap food we don't have to hunt, or plant, or harvest or even steal... right there at our arms reach.
There's no "modern" diet, in a biological sense. Same food, just more of it, more easily. There IS a modern lifestyle and modern technology. Like cars, electricity, penicillin... That's the bit we haven't yet figured out how to adapt to ourselves in a way that we get more benefits. Just like we fixed plants to be more nutritious. Or edible.
There's a technology we figured out long ago that allows us to digest otherwise indigestible or poorly digestible food. I.e. To get more benefits out of food by adapting it to ourselves. It's called cooking.
There is a science that's equivalent of cooking for modern life, but it is in its infancy. It's called ergonomics. But it is where cooking used to be back when we would scour the ground after a forest fire, looking for animals that got cooked alive.
See, most of their customers, including their largest customers, are very likely to be unaffected by the change as they're not buying off-brand or foreign toner cartridges.
This is not about off-brand or foreign cartridges. Those things are bulky. Any profit made on the favorable exchange rate gets eaten in transport.
This is about "developing markets" in "emerging economies" being forced to buy local models of Xerox machines - instead of far cheaper refurbished ones which got replaced by new models in the "first world". At the same time, this would force local cottage industries that provide refills in those countries to start importing "first world" used Xerox cartridges. And since those things are bulky, it would eat at their profits and many if not all would have to shutter their stores.
It's a win-win-win. It forces sales of "third world" models in the "third world", it forces sales of original cartridges AND it takes a swing at the refill cottage industries all over the world, at least for some time. In theory.
Only issue is that the entire idea revolves around the notion of people respecting their rules of regional encoding. Instead of finding a way to get around them.
The issue is that people are inherently manipulative, so they don't want better numbers. Studies use intentionally incorrect information, like you point out with male rape not being counted as rape.
Had they been manipulative they'd change the data and simply report inflated numbers - not use vague, badly worded definitions, prone to misinterpretation, or protocols and methodology prone to bias from both surveyors and surveyed.
You are describing a conspiracy where "studies use intentionally incorrect information". I am describing a situation where confirmation biases of people designing and running the study, forces them to set goalposts so wide in order to get the results they are expecting - that the results they get are so high it is obviously ridiculous.
Your theory proposes existence of scientifically sound studies which produce correct conclusions based on falsified data (scientists lied), which could not be proven wrong without repeating the study. My theory suggests a reason for faulty interpretation of correct data (both scientists and subjects told the truth) - which can be proven by just looking at the data and methodology of the study.
Two other manipulations heavily used are studies that count bisexuals as gay and as bisexual to double the wanted demographics numbers. Murders not being counted as murders to make it appear like crime is being reduced. Deaths being linked to a specific cause to manipulate society even when the cause was only a minor factor.
Now that sounds even more conspiratorial. Fake gays, hidden murders and lying about causes of death. Oh my!
My point was not intended to say that science is not possible
Neither was mine.
It was to suggest that people coming up with those specific studies have their minds set about what those studies MUST show - so they unintentionally or through the lack of scientific rigor (they are often psychologists) produce badly designed studies. No one is lying, faking or hiding anything. They are just incompetent.
Today I heard yet another bonehead talking about the alleged "Rape Culture" at college which uses a 40 year old bullshit study for it's statistics. Not because we can't do better studies, but because the numbers in that particular study favor the bullshit they want you to believe.
There is a possibility that people who want to do those studies actually CAN'T do better studies.
CDC did a phone survey study on rape. Spent tens of thousands of work hours and several million dollars on it. http://www.cdc.gov/violencepre... And got "rates of sexual violence in the United States...comparable to those in the war-stricken Congo". Their methodology was tainted at several steps, from framing the questions, through all survey takers being female (which totally can't alter their approach to asking questions after first couple of cases of women reporting rape), to paying for answers (paying more for taking part in the rape-related part of the "health" survey).
So, they did another one. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/pdf/ss... This one not only had numbers once again shooting through the roof, this time you didn't even have to look up methodology to see glaring errors.
Results: In the United States, an estimated 19.3% of women and 1.7% of men have been raped during their lifetimes; an estimated 1.6% of women reported that they were raped in the 12 months preceding the survey. The case count for men reporting rape in the preceding 12 months was too small to produce a statistically reliable prevalence estimate. An estimated 43.9% of women and 23.4% of men experienced other forms of sexual violence during their lifetimes, including being made to penetrate, sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact, and noncontact unwanted sexual experiences.
If dad forces mom to have sex - that's rape. If dad forces dad to have sex - that's also rape. If mom forces dad to have sex... that's not rape. That's "other forms of sexual violence".
It's the old "It's only the guy who's GIVING the blowjob that's gay" logic. Along with the "men can only be raped by other men" logic - i.e. "women can't rape". I.e. All rapists are men.
Could it be that people doing these studies simply can't give up their confirmation biases, and that they are taking existence of "rape culture" as a foregone conclusion?
When about 1 in 5 (or more) of population reports being raped... which is about 63 million people in USA... That either means that there are tens of millions of rapists out there, working overtime to meet their rape quotas while everyone, INCLUDING VICTIMS, is just going with it and shrugging their shoulders without a care for themselves or others - or that the people doing the studies have serious issues with the methodology of their studies.
People with mental issues should be unemployable as police or security officers. Timothy Loehmann, who shot Tamir Rice, simply joined police force in a different city after he resigned facing termination for "emotional instability".
The other thing that should not be allowed to happen is the militarization of police force. Neither through pumping surplus military weapons and equipment through billion dollar "reutilization programs", nor through military tactics and training.
It's Special Weapons and Tactics, not POLICE weapons and tactics. If all your cops act or look like SWAT teams do... That's not policing crime. That's a country/state/county/city trying to control its citizens through "superior force".
And police will get BOTH military tactics and training AND mentally unstable police officers when it starts dipping into the pool of military veterans, coming home from a decade or so of war.
British anti-bully researchers Andrea Adams and Tim Field have used the expression "workplace bullying" instead of what Leymann called "mobbing" in a workplace context. They identify mobbing as a particular type of bullying that is not as apparent as most, defining it as "an emotional assault. It begins when an individual becomes the target of disrespectful and harmful behavior. Through innuendo, rumors, and public discrediting, a hostile environment is created in which one individual gathers others to willingly, or unwillingly, participate in continuous malevolent actions to force a person out of the workplace."[3]
Adams and Field believe that mobbing is typically found in work environments that have poorly organised production or working methods and incapable or inattentive management and that mobbing victims are usually "exceptional individuals who demonstrated intelligence, competence, creativity, integrity, accomplishment and dedication".[3]
Shallcross, Ramsay and Barker consider workplace "mobbing" to be a generally unfamiliar term in some English speaking countries. Some researchers claim that mobbing is simply another name for bullying. Workplace mobbing can be considered as a "virus" or a "cancer" that spreads throughout the workplace via gossip, rumour and unfounded accusations. It is a deliberate attempt to force a person out of their workplace by humiliation, general harassment, emotional abuse and/or terror. Mobbing can be described as being "ganged up on." Mobbing is executed by a leader (who can be a manager, a co-worker, or a subordinate). The leader then rallies others into a systematic and frequent "mob-like" behaviour toward the victim.[4]
Psychological and health effects
Victims of workplace mobbing frequently suffer from: adjustment disorders, somatic symptoms (e.g., headaches or irritable bowel syndrome), psychological trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder and major depression.[5]
In mobbing targets with PTSD, Leymann notes that the "mental effects were fully comparable with PTSD from war or prison camp experiences. Some patients may develop alcoholism or other substance abuse disorders. Family relationships routinely suffer. Some targets may even develop brief psychotic episodes, generally with paranoid symptoms. Leymann estimated that 15% of suicides in Sweden could be directly attributed to workplace mobbing.[5]
1) The Power of Culture: "At Facebook, culture is everything and it's an incredible timesaver," Campos said. Culture allows Facebook to cut through bureaucracy, he said. Among the ways Facebook emphasizes its culture is through its now well-known posters that say things like: "Fail harder;" "Move fast and break things;" and, "What would you do if you weren't afraid?"
Facebook also reinforces its culture through storytelling, like the "will you resign" email example he shared with the audience. "It was an incredibly powerful message," Campos explained. "Everybody at the company read this email and had the exact same takeaway and perspective that I did, they all thought it was immediately addressed to them. And it was striking as a result of that. And they never forgot it. And we keep talking about it - we talk about how do we handle confidential information in the company. The 'will you resign' email is quite famous." There are a ton of stories like this that Facebook uses to reinforce key culture points that prevent the creation of unnecessary steering committees and advisory boards, Campos said.
Posters he's describing are pure propaganda, all basically shouting "WORK HARDER AND MORE!", while those mass "Your job is insecure" emails are nothing but mobbing.
If that's culture, it's nothing but culture of fear. Ah well... someone has to keep getting stress-related heart attacks, strokes and cancers I guess.
Basically the culinary equivalent of body integrity identity disorder. Why should I cook and eat tasty food when I can just slurp a shake and be done with the whole eating thing?
You are setting up a one dimensional scale from zero to totalitarian. It is actually a multi-dimensional graph.
You are basically looking at a scaleless shadow of a 3D object and calling it a line.
THEN, you set an arbitrarily determined (i.e. made up, guessed, fake, wrong) middle of your scaleless shadow, and jam a shadow of a completely different 3D system inside. I.e. An ECONOMIC one. You know... like bartering. Or communism.
It is akin to setting up a scale to describe movement, putting lying down on one end and flying through space at the speed of light on the other, and then deciding that the middle between those two options is a carrot. Why a carrot? Well, because orange.
Your parents weren't forced to trade in their genes and their kids for food and basic comforts. You just got more comforts available. That's all those 4 continents boil down to.
You think you made a choice. Instead you got pushed to invest into worthless toys (some of which you don't even "own") which will all be raked up and dumped into a landfill once you die. Cause you bought the lie. Congratulations.
Might wanna plant a tree. It's not your genes but at least it feels like doing something.
BTW, are you living in a war-torn country with a history of genocide? Cause I do. And what you are describing looks a LOT like the lives of much of my generation. Only with less travel. We're poor. Luxuries and comforts reflect that.
Do we recognize the rights of others as a kind of tribal convention?
Yes.
Or are we compelled to do so because of something in human nature?
Yes.
There is no OR. That's a false dichotomy. We ARE forced to be tribal and social by our biology, we don't get to choose or juxtapose one to the other. Our biology requires both living in packs and care for infants - those who don't want that get written out of the DNA-pool hundreds of millions of years ago, long before the whole bipedal thing, let alone ethics. And when such an individual appears through chance or mutation - we don't like those animals. We call them psychos. Parasites. Evil. Werewolves.
Cooperation forced by biological need for familial, romantic and other relationships is what puts just another set of run of the mill primates on top of the food chain. Plus a lucky roll of the dice or two. Tit-for-tat is what makes single cell organisms join up in cell colonies. Other algorithms may seem profitable in short term, but in the long run... it's always cooperation. We are social beings cause cooperation is a great strategy for survival of both the individual and its genes.
It's an important philosophical question because it potentially colors a lot of mundane ethical questions
No it is not. A question.
Legal personhood can not be based on ethics. If it were, a society could "legally" give kids and comatose people all the rights that a sane adult has. There would be no age of consent, drinking age, or any such thing as a state of diminished capacity of the mind. Got a heartbeat? Full person. With all rights and oblig... oh... wait... Rights come with obligations.
For a society (and we build those cause we need them) to work all sides in any relationship must agree to and obey both rights and the obligations they entail. Enough relationships don't work (cause there are way too many for all to work at the same time, plus there is the element of chance, plus there are outside factors, plus there are werewolves...) - society breaks up. So, we build RULES into societies to hold them together, and we call those rules laws, customs, morals... in order to codify rights and obligations (that we think are) needed for a society to exist. Enough rules don't work or keep getting broken in order for the society to work - society breaks up.
Ethics is merely a description of our understanding of the underlying rules on which we choose to base our society. That's why slavery can and was once perfectly ethical. Or racism. Or fascism. It's a thing we invent to make society work the way we imagine that it should be. NOT the way it is best for either a person, persons, the society or the humanity as a whole.
And when we base "personhood" on ethics we get societies where people are not persons based on wealth, sex, race, imaginary ethnic and cultural properties, age... Until that society breaks cause eventually inter-personal relationships in it can't work with such rules.
Personhood AND a society which doesn't get broken up by the rules needed to run that society and which also describe what a person is - must be based on reality. I.e. Rights that any single person must/might have and the obligations that those rights entail. Tit-for-tat. Can't agree and obey both - sorry, can't have that right. Here's a nice cage. In a zoo or in a dungeon... No biggie for the society. Society don't care. Persons care.
Should enough persons care enough to give rights to those who can't also obey obligations, such as chimps because... ethics... Well...
Slashdot Mirror
Are you satisfied with a system that allows each of Ted Cruz's donors to have literally 100,000 times as much "speech" as each of Lessig's donors?
I don't really give a fuck as I am not USA-ian.
Also, what the flying fuck does it matter what am * I * satisfied with or not?
Unless at least half of those ~130 million who turn up to vote in USA is interested in that same thing, I might as well start shitting in my other hand - at least it'll be warm and it will feel kinda substantial.
And if those people are (dis)satisfied - they should contact their congress-critters.
Not try to reenact Brewster's Millions.
There's no chance they'll outdo Richard Pryor AND a million dollars was a losers choices even back then.
What's your point? There's no connection between donors and voters. Only 90,000 voters make sizable ($2600) contributions to any campaign
The point is that those numbers you're showing actually make his numbers even worse.
First of all, his donations are pitiful.
Nowhere near "sizable" at an average of $120. In the game of "pay for election" he already lost.
Those Ted Cruz and Rand Paul numbers you mention. He will NEVER get those numbers. NEVER!
Then, there's the fact that since he "announced" his candidacy and got his name out there, number of his donors "skyrocketed" to 8794.
All that publicity boost got 466 people to reach for their wallets, and donate less than the previously established average.
466 out of 130 million. Not out of 90000 cause these donations too were not "sizable".
Taking donations as a measure of faith, his "supporters" show a complete lack of faith in him.
Which is not surprising, cause you don't have to be a genius to realize that his plan is not a paradox - but a delusion.
1 - He wants to fight the influence of big money on elections.
2 - Ergo, he supposedly understands that money wins elections. Or at least it influences elections by a huge enough amount that he wants to run for president (and then resign) in order to stop that.
3 - BUT - in order to achieve that, he plans to go against people who both have the money AND who like the fact that money influences elections.
4 - So, he must understand that he won't get any money, thus he will not win elections. GOTO 1.
Only way that kind of plan can make sense is if the planner is delusional.
He wants to challenge people with guns to a gunfight, where they will use real, loaded, guns and he will use a warm fart.
And BESIDES THAT...
His big plan is to threaten politicians with an excuse to just sit on their asses and do nothing while giving daily interviews about how it is all president's fault?
And that's why we can't have any more of this giving birth to grown college professors thing.
People should be born as babies and they should be allowed to grow up slowly, so they can read books for small children.
Maybe then they'll remember that you can't punish Br'er Rabbit by throwing him in the Briar Patch.
He'll run out of money long before campaigns really begin.
He'll be invited to exactly 0 debates.
He won't even get a chance to be laughed out of the room.
Rand Paul has better chances than him. WAY better chances.
Rand Paul won his seat in 2010 with 755216 votes.
Lessig reached his "MILLION DOLLARS!!!" with donations from 8328 donors.
So, to reach Rand Paul numbers he would have to have over 90 supporters not willing to donate a dime, for every supporter that DID donate money for his "campaign".
Which would be its own special version of depressing if it were true.
And that's just to reach Rand "Snowballs In Hell" Paul numbers.
What he probably WILL accomplish is to tie the ideas he is trying to push with attributes and phrases such as "fringe", "kook", "silly", "crazy", "nonsensical", "ridiculous", "armchair politician", "ivory tower academic", "incompetent", "egghead", "nutty", "loser" and "please stop helping".
but note the badges and other indications of rank aboard the Enterprise. People may be equal, but some are obviously more equal.
Badges and ranks are a mark of higher RESPONSIBILITY and of required levels of ABILITY.
You seem to be confusing them with medals and jewelry used to signal ones STATUS - i.e. being "more equal than others".
And Scotty is not even a real Scotsman.
The post-scarcity you imagine creates Borg - not human societies.
Humans have needs that don't comply to laws of economy and which can't be scaled up as they are not things to be accumulated.
Needs like emotional, family or social ties, needs for personal achievement and betterment - needs to BE more instead of to have more.
Borg eliminate the need to feel and be (rejecting/imposing rejection of uniqueness in exchange for attempted uniform "perfection") - and thus they can have " a fleet of starships so vast that they block out the stars".
Or trans-warp conduits that allow them to jump across the galaxy at will, or go time-traveling, or to invade other universes...
Q could also snap fingers and block out stars (no ships needed - omnipotence will do) - but at a cost of personal achievement and permanent boredom to the point that suicide starts looking good.
Better than trolling vastly inferior species at least.
Federation is a post-scarcity society in a sense that humanity has ENOUGH RESOURCES FOR EVERYONE'S BASIC BIOLOGICAL NEEDS, so everyone can just bugger off and go climb mountains, fuck around on holodeck if that is their fancy - or they can join Starfleet and explore the universe, or go out and colonize some planet, or run a restaurant like Sisko's dad, or make wine like Picard's brother, or...
people up who disagree
Except that is not the case of "disagree" but of "let me hate and harass in peace" and "my imaginary friend gave me right to hatemonger".
And when one invokes "imaginary friend" rules... well, one sets oneself up for a LOT more than just bankruptcy.
Like being offered as a human sacrifice to someone else's imaginary friend.
And then we call that person who kidnaps people and cuts their hearts out as a sacrifice to the their imaginary friend not a premeditating murderer - but a MENTALLY INSANE person.
Adults with "imaginary friends" are mentally insane. Children too, probably.
So, that "people who disagree" is closer to "mentally insane people who just want to spread hatred and harassment towards people for whom their psychosis tells them that they are 'fair game'"
As for "harassing them into bankruptcy"...
Besides the fact that Melissa and Aaron's imaginary friend would dictate exactly that had they been running a bank and not a bakery - they were breaking a law. Deliberately and purposefully.
On account of "imaginary friend is our get out of jail free ticket".
Which if it were true would make 9/11 a perfectly fine way of expressing one's beliefs in imaginary creatures and rules.
But besides THAT... You are full of shit.
http://www.politico.com/story/...
They made out like gangbusters (more like just regular gangsters) from donations from people who apparently think that they, the people, should pay for products of other people's insane decisions.
From each according to their ability to give, for Melissa and Aaron according to their need to pay for their hate-license.
Because they, too share the same ideology of who to hate.
And they weren't nothing "into bankruptcy" - they chose to lock up their shop, rather than comply to "cakes - not hate" order.
http://aclu-co.org/court-cases...
The Commission's order affirmed previous determinations that Masterpieceâ(TM)s refusal to sell Mullins and Craig a wedding cake constituted discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in violation of Colorado law. The Commission also ordered Masterpiece Cakeshop to change its company policies, provide "comprehensive staff training" regarding public accommodations discrimination, and provide quarterly reports for the next two years regarding steps it has taken to come into compliance and whether it has turned away any prospective customers.
Better donations than rejecting discrimination, no cake for those we hate!
Instead of A coin flipped for 20000 days, they take data on... say... 100 coins.
VARIOUS data. Weight, color, date on coin, number of scratches, source of coin, air temperature, does flipper of coins like dogs or cats...
Then they flip those coins for some number of times and write all that data down too.
Including the sequence of results - heads, heads, heads, tails, tails, heads...
They get a BIG pile of data to mine.
Then, and this is a clincher, they "Distinguish between causal effects and attributes".
In other words - they come up with a theory of "what" influences the results and "how".
They don't go into why just yet - they only look for nice regressions between their independent variables and their dependent ones.
Anyway, now they have all that data and outcomes based on various attributes.
They can cherry pick those results they like and build their coin-flipping models based on attributes which fit to desired results.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc + confirmation bias? Nah man... Regression analysis.
Then, based on that, they build a model and plug into it new data from a new sample of coins.
Then they dump all that into regression trees and go looking for "predictions" of results they would like to see - thus providing the "why".
http://www.nasonline.org/progr...
I.e. Make a lot of guesses "based on" previous "maybes" - then pick ones you like.
Now... someone get me a 20-something blonde female, dog lover with a degree in flower arrangement and a 1956 Australian penny with a bluish-greenish tint.
My model predicts a 50% chance of getting either head or tail under those conditions.
You are missing the point.
You can make fun of everything. You can jam in jokes anywhere.
Hell... just put a laugh track on it and some people will laugh at anything.
Just like with that show where people tune in to laugh at how awkward nerds are.
You can also parody SciFi up the kazoo. Most of it has already been done by Red Dwarf though.
The fact that there is room for jokes can't change the fact that Galaxy Quest was not about joking about SciFi tropes or making fun of such shows or its audiences.
That's what The Big Bang Theory is about.
Galaxy Quest is your classic "the dream is real and I am secretly a hero king" story.
And THAT story can't be stretched out for too long before it becomes a genuine story of heroics and NOT a parody.
Galaxy Quest ends by becoming Galaxy Quest the Journey Continues.
It stops treating the show or the work of those actors on the show as a joke - but as a real and highly important MISSION.
They are no longer actors. They are an ACTUAL HEROIC CREW of NSEA Protector which was a real starship.
They are no longer acting. They are on a diplomatic mission, sending messages into outer space.
They have a real living alien with them on the set. They KNOW things and they did things that have changed them and the entire universe they live in.
The ending changes the GENRE for the audience. It becomes obvious that it is not a SciFi parody but genuine SciFi.
Because it is a love letter - not a parody. Goofy characters become heroes.
Seen Guardians of the Galaxy?
Seen Antman?
MASH never stopped being a comedy, turning around and making every joke actually just a bizarre scene in a gritty war drama. If it did, it would be Kafkian.
Neither did Hogan's Heroes.
Nor did Lost in Space or Star Trek get a laugh track and started being about crazy hijinks of a wacky crew.
They can try doing that, sure, but all they'll end up with is just another lame "reference is a joke" show, like that crap Seth MacFarlane keeps churning out.
This was my thought, especially it they made it as much a parody of Star Trek as the movie was of the cast and culture.
The same actions, characters and tropes that movie is poking fun of, turn out first heroic then triumphant by the end.
They really become heroes they were playing on a show, they save the world, help out friendly aliens, redeem their fans AND they get a revival of their show.
I doubt that the same effect can be achieved with a lesser (cheaper) cast and as a running gag over a season or more.
Sam Rockwell alone already used up most of those jokes.
While being awesome and ultimately - heroic.
Trying to copy Rickman on the other hand... simply won't work.
...but tear GAS is addressed "To Whom It May Concern".
As for those other "less lethal" weapons... aiming skills are not the issue.
Fact that they are LEGAL means that should they want they can employ any kind of technique to achieve that hit with a drone.
Be it "painting" the target with a laser by a human or any and all AI or assisting technology available EVER in the future... Doesn't matter.
The fact that this legalizes drones equipped for "less than lethal" drone strikes against civilian population is what matters.
Drone strikes against civilians. It has a certain ring to it, does it not?
Clearly, AK he had was already illegal.
And clearly, everyone knows where to get illegal guns.
And clearly, everyone knows that there are A LOT of illegal guns.
And clearly, Belgium has gun permits and other regulation.
The issue is that Belgian cops are not doing anything about it.
I.e. There is NO ENFORCEMENT OF REGULATION of clearly and obviously illegal guns.
Making guns illegal is a thing that exists in your head.
The article and my point are about easy access to guns (through lack of enforcement of regulation) making everyone LESS safe.
I never claimed there was a conspiracy, I claimed that people commonly call things "science" in order to manipulate the public and provided examples which are easy to find and validate.
That "people" lying i.e. "call things science" in order to manipulate - that's a description of a conspiracy by definition. ANY definition.
If it walks like duck... Meeh... you know the rest.
As for examples "easy to find"... Go find me a James Bond movie I'm thinking off right now. Here's a hint: he kills a guy in it.
You provided vague anecdotes you only half remember as "examples" of your conspiracy theories about manipulators of the public calling non-science science - and you expect everyone else to know your thoughts.
Onus probandi much? No?
You do realize that the examples I gave (without handwaving "it's out there... find the truth yourself") ARE science?
Nothing unscientific about them.
It's just that their methodology and conclusions are (probably) tainted by biases.
BUT! Because it is science, the proofs and examples where they went wrong are RIGHT THERE, in the studies. Built in.
No one had to manipulate, lie, hide, conspire...
They wrote down exactly where they fucked up. That's a feature of the scientific method.
What you are describing sounds like tabloid "science" and conspiracy theories.
Manipulation does not require one form, it takes many forms. Similarly dishonesty is not simply a lie, but can also be withholding information or re-ordering information to present a false reality.
You don't seem to understand the difference between a scientific study and a tabloid article.
Main feature of science is that it can be taken apart because - it is science.
And it MUST be taken apart during scientific work because - it is science.
You can't "re-order" or "withhold" gravity or any other established law of nature or a finding proven previously.
It is not some secret art. It is all out in the open already. You WILL be called out as a bad scientist and a kook if you try to do that.
Richard Feynman called out Linus Pauling as a "vitamin C cures cancer" kook in a damn song.
All you can do is fiddle with numbers and hope no one tries to replicate your results while you live.
P-hacking is obvious, mislabeling too, using vague survey questions, badly set up controls...
It is all obvious and it will be right there in the paper. Or it will not be - WHICH WILL MAKE IT EVEN MORE OBVIOUS.
You are basically tossing ad hominems (though maybe unintentionally... you seem to have a misunderstanding of topics you are arguing), strawmen (again... maybe you don't understand the scientific process) and demanding of people to prove that you are right.
Which is ironic... cause my original post was supporting yours, though through a more moderate explanation.
But you seem to be too enamored in your "EVERYONE LIES!!! ALL THE TIME!!!" theory to realize that.
Then again... you find it "amazing" that 1 in 5 Americans comes out to "about 63 million people" in my guesstimate and in the "BS study you referred to".
As if dividing about 318 million with about 5 should change significantly depending on who does such basic math.
I have a feeling that when you say "science" you do not think it means what it actually means.
which would have made everything a lot easier.
And I'm not talking about that executed police officer.
Or the executed Protection Service officer (French version of Secret Service), assigned as a bodyguard to Stephane Charbonnier.
I'm talking about this guy reportedly getting his guns and ammo at the same place where terrorists in France have been getting it "traditionally" - Belgium.
From TFA:
Matthew Holehouse writes from Brussels:
The attack on the Thalys train brings fresh scrutiny on the ease of purchasing weapons in Belgium.
The gunman is believed to have entered the train at Brussels Gare du Midi, Belgium's busiest station and the terminus of the Eurostar rail link to Britain.
He was carrying a short-stocked Kalashnikov assault rifle, at least five magazines of ammunition, a handgun and knives, according to witnesses.
It comes eight months after the terrorist attacks in Paris in January. The weapons used in those attacks were bought from criminal gangs and arms dealers in Belgium.
Amedy Couliby, whose attack on a Kosher supermarket killed four Jewish Parisiens, bought his Scorpion machine gun and Tokarev handgun in Brussels and Charleroi.
The Kuoachi brothers, who slaughtered 12 people at Charlie Hebdo magazine, received their weapons from Coulibaly, who bought them near Gare du Midi for around £3,800.
The scruffy backstreets around the station host a large market and the area is well known as a marketplace for illegal arms.
Many weapons are thought to be left over from the wars in the former Yugoslavia. Typically, a Kalashnikov automatic rifle, could be bought for several hundred euros in Bosnia, and then sold on in Belgium or the Netherlands for use in organised crime for ten times that sum.
Earlier this month police in Charleroi broke up a suspected international arms smuggling ring, alleged to be using crude forged paperwork to import Glock and Sauer handguns fitted with silencers, Browning rifles, and shotguns.
Gun ownership is permitted under licence in Belgium, although automatic and military-grade weapons are illegal.
There are around 900,000 firearms circulating in the country of 11 million, of which around 300,000 are thought to be unregistered, according to official estimates.
Easy access to guns is what has made this attack in France and those before possible.
What prevented it from becoming a tragedy were people willing, ready and able to rush and tackle the gunman.
Modern diets are only about 10,000 years old, and the calorie rich eating of today is less than 100 years old.
That's a bit of a fallacy there.
Corn, potato, beans, tomato, turkey, cocoa, peanuts, sunflowers (8-11% of vegetable oil comes from its seeds)... and many more.
All those didn't exist as far as the world is concerned until the discovery of America.
And so many more would only become common and thus cheap after being transplanted to Americas and farmed there on all that empty and rich land, with free slave labor, then traded with the rest of the world.
Sugar was known for thousands of years, but it didn't "take off" until 18th century.
And that's all just before we changed those foods to be better. Wind the clock back mere decades and look up Norman Borlaug.
The bread we eat today could not exist mere 50 years ago.
So, from one side, 10000 years as a limit to the "change in our diet" due to agriculture is nonsense.
From another, we didn't go out there into the wild, experimenting willy-nilly what to grow agriculturally.
We just picked the BEST food for US and planted and cultivated MORE of it.
We have an enzyme which takes a rather rare (in nature) sugar called sucrose and splits it into fructose and glucose so we could both get energy and save energy (eat our cake and have it too) from a single molecule.
We EVOLVED to be able to do that - so we planted crops that make more of that molecule.
Some of us have an enzyme which allows us to digest lactose and get energy from that too - after we wean off from our mom's milk.
So we bred cattle that produce THAT molecule (and fat, and meat, and hides...).
Some Japanese can digest cellulose cause they have special gut bacteria with enzymes which allow them to get energy from algae.
Why all those various ways to harvest energy from all those plants and animals?
Because there never was enough of it. We went hungry.
Again - India mere decades ago. Parts of Africa today. Europe and Americas before that, mere decades not centuries ago.
Heck... centuries ago we had nearly no way to preserve food.
Canning is an early 19th century invention. Refrigeration took decades more. Modern refrigeration took even longer.
Before that we ate when we could, what we could, stored some dried foods and prayed for short winters.
And we went hungry.
We did not "change our diet" 10000 years ago by content, nor did we do it by quantity until recently.
The fact that we ARE getting fat off of modern food PROVES that we have evolved to eat that kind of food.
We did not evolve to not spend those calories by sitting the whole day working, sitting while going from place to place, spending winters in comfortably warm rooms with all that cheap food we don't have to hunt, or plant, or harvest or even steal... right there at our arms reach.
There's no "modern" diet, in a biological sense. Same food, just more of it, more easily.
There IS a modern lifestyle and modern technology. Like cars, electricity, penicillin...
That's the bit we haven't yet figured out how to adapt to ourselves in a way that we get more benefits.
Just like we fixed plants to be more nutritious. Or edible.
There's a technology we figured out long ago that allows us to digest otherwise indigestible or poorly digestible food.
I.e. To get more benefits out of food by adapting it to ourselves.
It's called cooking.
There is a science that's equivalent of cooking for modern life, but it is in its infancy.
It's called ergonomics.
But it is where cooking used to be back when we would scour the ground after a forest fire, looking for animals that got cooked alive.
See, most of their customers, including their largest customers, are very likely to be unaffected by the change as they're not buying off-brand or foreign toner cartridges.
This is not about off-brand or foreign cartridges.
Those things are bulky. Any profit made on the favorable exchange rate gets eaten in transport.
This is about "developing markets" in "emerging economies" being forced to buy local models of Xerox machines - instead of far cheaper refurbished ones which got replaced by new models in the "first world".
At the same time, this would force local cottage industries that provide refills in those countries to start importing "first world" used Xerox cartridges.
And since those things are bulky, it would eat at their profits and many if not all would have to shutter their stores.
It's a win-win-win.
It forces sales of "third world" models in the "third world", it forces sales of original cartridges AND it takes a swing at the refill cottage industries all over the world, at least for some time.
In theory.
Only issue is that the entire idea revolves around the notion of people respecting their rules of regional encoding.
Instead of finding a way to get around them.
The issue is that people are inherently manipulative, so they don't want better numbers. Studies use intentionally incorrect information, like you point out with male rape not being counted as rape.
Had they been manipulative they'd change the data and simply report inflated numbers - not use vague, badly worded definitions, prone to misinterpretation, or protocols and methodology prone to bias from both surveyors and surveyed.
You are describing a conspiracy where "studies use intentionally incorrect information".
I am describing a situation where confirmation biases of people designing and running the study, forces them to set goalposts so wide in order to get the results they are expecting - that the results they get are so high it is obviously ridiculous.
Your theory proposes existence of scientifically sound studies which produce correct conclusions based on falsified data (scientists lied), which could not be proven wrong without repeating the study.
My theory suggests a reason for faulty interpretation of correct data (both scientists and subjects told the truth) - which can be proven by just looking at the data and methodology of the study.
Two other manipulations heavily used are studies that count bisexuals as gay and as bisexual to double the wanted demographics numbers. Murders not being counted as murders to make it appear like crime is being reduced. Deaths being linked to a specific cause to manipulate society even when the cause was only a minor factor.
Now that sounds even more conspiratorial.
Fake gays, hidden murders and lying about causes of death. Oh my!
My point was not intended to say that science is not possible
Neither was mine.
It was to suggest that people coming up with those specific studies have their minds set about what those studies MUST show - so they unintentionally or through the lack of scientific rigor (they are often psychologists) produce badly designed studies.
No one is lying, faking or hiding anything. They are just incompetent.
Today I heard yet another bonehead talking about the alleged "Rape Culture" at college which uses a 40 year old bullshit study for it's statistics. Not because we can't do better studies, but because the numbers in that particular study favor the bullshit they want you to believe.
There is a possibility that people who want to do those studies actually CAN'T do better studies.
CDC did a phone survey study on rape. Spent tens of thousands of work hours and several million dollars on it.
http://www.cdc.gov/violencepre...
And got "rates of sexual violence in the United States...comparable to those in the war-stricken Congo".
Their methodology was tainted at several steps, from framing the questions, through all survey takers being female (which totally can't alter their approach to asking questions after first couple of cases of women reporting rape), to paying for answers (paying more for taking part in the rape-related part of the "health" survey).
So, they did another one.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/pdf/ss...
This one not only had numbers once again shooting through the roof, this time you didn't even have to look up methodology to see glaring errors.
Results: In the United States, an estimated 19.3% of women and 1.7% of men have been raped during their lifetimes; an estimated 1.6% of women reported that they were raped in the 12 months preceding the survey.
The case count for men reporting rape in the preceding 12 months was too small to produce a statistically reliable prevalence estimate.
An estimated 43.9% of women and 23.4% of men experienced other forms of sexual violence during their lifetimes, including being made to penetrate, sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact, and noncontact unwanted sexual experiences.
If dad forces mom to have sex - that's rape.
If dad forces dad to have sex - that's also rape.
If mom forces dad to have sex... that's not rape. That's "other forms of sexual violence".
It's the old "It's only the guy who's GIVING the blowjob that's gay" logic.
Along with the "men can only be raped by other men" logic - i.e. "women can't rape".
I.e. All rapists are men.
Could it be that people doing these studies simply can't give up their confirmation biases, and that they are taking existence of "rape culture" as a foregone conclusion?
When about 1 in 5 (or more) of population reports being raped... which is about 63 million people in USA...
That either means that there are tens of millions of rapists out there, working overtime to meet their rape quotas while everyone, INCLUDING VICTIMS, is just going with it and shrugging their shoulders without a care for themselves or others - or that the people doing the studies have serious issues with the methodology of their studies.
People with mental issues should be unemployable as police or security officers.
Timothy Loehmann, who shot Tamir Rice, simply joined police force in a different city after he resigned facing termination for "emotional instability".
The other thing that should not be allowed to happen is the militarization of police force.
Neither through pumping surplus military weapons and equipment through billion dollar "reutilization programs", nor through military tactics and training.
It's Special Weapons and Tactics, not POLICE weapons and tactics.
If all your cops act or look like SWAT teams do... That's not policing crime.
That's a country/state/county/city trying to control its citizens through "superior force".
And police will get BOTH military tactics and training AND mentally unstable police officers when it starts dipping into the pool of military veterans, coming home from a decade or so of war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In the workplace
Main article: Workplace bullying
British anti-bully researchers Andrea Adams and Tim Field have used the expression "workplace bullying" instead of what Leymann called "mobbing" in a workplace context. They identify mobbing as a particular type of bullying that is not as apparent as most, defining it as "an emotional assault. It begins when an individual becomes the target of disrespectful and harmful behavior. Through innuendo, rumors, and public discrediting, a hostile environment is created in which one individual gathers others to willingly, or unwillingly, participate in continuous malevolent actions to force a person out of the workplace."[3]
Adams and Field believe that mobbing is typically found in work environments that have poorly organised production or working methods and incapable or inattentive management and that mobbing victims are usually "exceptional individuals who demonstrated intelligence, competence, creativity, integrity, accomplishment and dedication".[3]
Shallcross, Ramsay and Barker consider workplace "mobbing" to be a generally unfamiliar term in some English speaking countries. Some researchers claim that mobbing is simply another name for bullying. Workplace mobbing can be considered as a "virus" or a "cancer" that spreads throughout the workplace via gossip, rumour and unfounded accusations. It is a deliberate attempt to force a person out of their workplace by humiliation, general harassment, emotional abuse and/or terror. Mobbing can be described as being "ganged up on." Mobbing is executed by a leader (who can be a manager, a co-worker, or a subordinate). The leader then rallies others into a systematic and frequent "mob-like" behaviour toward the victim.[4]
Psychological and health effects
Victims of workplace mobbing frequently suffer from: adjustment disorders, somatic symptoms (e.g., headaches or irritable bowel syndrome), psychological trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder and major depression.[5]
In mobbing targets with PTSD, Leymann notes that the "mental effects were fully comparable with PTSD from war or prison camp experiences. Some patients may develop alcoholism or other substance abuse disorders. Family relationships routinely suffer. Some targets may even develop brief psychotic episodes, generally with paranoid symptoms. Leymann estimated that 15% of suicides in Sweden could be directly attributed to workplace mobbing.[5]
1) The Power of Culture: "At Facebook, culture is everything and it's an incredible timesaver," Campos said. Culture allows Facebook to cut through bureaucracy, he said. Among the ways Facebook emphasizes its culture is through its now well-known posters that say things like: "Fail harder;" "Move fast and break things;" and, "What would you do if you weren't afraid?"
Facebook also reinforces its culture through storytelling, like the "will you resign" email example he shared with the audience. "It was an incredibly powerful message," Campos explained. "Everybody at the company read this email and had the exact same takeaway and perspective that I did, they all thought it was immediately addressed to them. And it was striking as a result of that. And they never forgot it. And we keep talking about it - we talk about how do we handle confidential information in the company. The 'will you resign' email is quite famous." There are a ton of stories like this that Facebook uses to reinforce key culture points that prevent the creation of unnecessary steering committees and advisory boards, Campos said.
Posters he's describing are pure propaganda, all basically shouting "WORK HARDER AND MORE!", while those mass "Your job is insecure" emails are nothing but mobbing.
If that's culture, it's nothing but culture of fear.
Ah well... someone has to keep getting stress-related heart attacks, strokes and cancers I guess.
Basically the culinary equivalent of body integrity identity disorder.
Why should I cook and eat tasty food when I can just slurp a shake and be done with the whole eating thing?
I would not be surprised if Rob Rhinehart is actually just a guy with an extreme case of a restrictive food intake disorder.
You are setting up a one dimensional scale from zero to totalitarian.
It is actually a multi-dimensional graph.
You are basically looking at a scaleless shadow of a 3D object and calling it a line.
THEN, you set an arbitrarily determined (i.e. made up, guessed, fake, wrong) middle of your scaleless shadow, and jam a shadow of a completely different 3D system inside.
I.e. An ECONOMIC one. You know... like bartering. Or communism.
It is akin to setting up a scale to describe movement, putting lying down on one end and flying through space at the speed of light on the other, and then deciding that the middle between those two options is a carrot.
Why a carrot? Well, because orange.
Your parents weren't forced to trade in their genes and their kids for food and basic comforts.
You just got more comforts available. That's all those 4 continents boil down to.
You think you made a choice.
Instead you got pushed to invest into worthless toys (some of which you don't even "own") which will all be raked up and dumped into a landfill once you die.
Cause you bought the lie. Congratulations.
Might wanna plant a tree. It's not your genes but at least it feels like doing something.
BTW, are you living in a war-torn country with a history of genocide?
Cause I do. And what you are describing looks a LOT like the lives of much of my generation.
Only with less travel. We're poor. Luxuries and comforts reflect that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Do we recognize the rights of others as a kind of tribal convention?
Yes.
Or are we compelled to do so because of something in human nature?
Yes.
There is no OR. That's a false dichotomy.
We ARE forced to be tribal and social by our biology, we don't get to choose or juxtapose one to the other.
Our biology requires both living in packs and care for infants - those who don't want that get written out of the DNA-pool hundreds of millions of years ago, long before the whole bipedal thing, let alone ethics.
And when such an individual appears through chance or mutation - we don't like those animals.
We call them psychos. Parasites. Evil. Werewolves.
Cooperation forced by biological need for familial, romantic and other relationships is what puts just another set of run of the mill primates on top of the food chain. Plus a lucky roll of the dice or two.
Tit-for-tat is what makes single cell organisms join up in cell colonies.
Other algorithms may seem profitable in short term, but in the long run... it's always cooperation.
We are social beings cause cooperation is a great strategy for survival of both the individual and its genes.
It's an important philosophical question because it potentially colors a lot of mundane ethical questions
No it is not. A question.
Legal personhood can not be based on ethics.
If it were, a society could "legally" give kids and comatose people all the rights that a sane adult has.
There would be no age of consent, drinking age, or any such thing as a state of diminished capacity of the mind.
Got a heartbeat? Full person.
With all rights and oblig... oh... wait... Rights come with obligations.
Be it claims and liberties or positive vs. negative rights - one person's rights include either/or/and their and other persons' obligations.
For a society (and we build those cause we need them) to work all sides in any relationship must agree to and obey both rights and the obligations they entail.
Enough relationships don't work (cause there are way too many for all to work at the same time, plus there is the element of chance, plus there are outside factors, plus there are werewolves...) - society breaks up.
So, we build RULES into societies to hold them together, and we call those rules laws, customs, morals... in order to codify rights and obligations (that we think are) needed for a society to exist.
Enough rules don't work or keep getting broken in order for the society to work - society breaks up.
Ethics is merely a description of our understanding of the underlying rules on which we choose to base our society.
That's why slavery can and was once perfectly ethical. Or racism. Or fascism.
It's a thing we invent to make society work the way we imagine that it should be.
NOT the way it is best for either a person, persons, the society or the humanity as a whole.
And when we base "personhood" on ethics we get societies where people are not persons based on wealth, sex, race, imaginary ethnic and cultural properties, age...
Until that society breaks cause eventually inter-personal relationships in it can't work with such rules.
Personhood AND a society which doesn't get broken up by the rules needed to run that society and which also describe what a person is - must be based on reality.
I.e. Rights that any single person must/might have and the obligations that those rights entail. Tit-for-tat.
Can't agree and obey both - sorry, can't have that right. Here's a nice cage. In a zoo or in a dungeon...
No biggie for the society. Society don't care. Persons care.
Should enough persons care enough to give rights to those who can't also obey obligations, such as chimps because... ethics...
Well...
Society breaks.
See subject.