> You can excercise your free speech rights by showing porn on public TV or > smoking pot or rallying folks to kill the President of the US.
None of these things are currently free speech. One is contrary to "decency" law. One is illegal substance use. The last is conspiracy.
But, despite the poor examples I think I get your point. There is a fine line between incitement and free speech. The acquitted man in the article, if we are to believe the assessment of the jury, was not inciting violence, but merely referencing inciteful materials.
Even if he were suspected of incitement, he deserved a trial, not a beat-down.
> Just like it won't prevent you from getting beaten up in Harlem after calling > people names.
Just because mob violence happens doesn't make it right. By the way, have you been to Harlem recently? I'm guessing your view of the area is a bit anachronistic.
What about the nuances of context, scientific exploration, arguments by counter example? How can one judge if a statement is incitement or not? Simple - you don't discriminate, because then you get into the murky waters of using your judgement of the merits of a statement to decide whether or not it's allowed to be stated. If this becomes common practice, we're all screwed, you and I, and it should be obvious as to why.
Let's assume you're right... it's a red herring anyway.
If, in reality, a soldier kills a person because he says something in support of suicide bombing, then the soldier is undoing his own work. Whether or not the soldier understands or even cares doesn't change the fact that such an act would be ultimately self-defeating.
> Don't give soldiers a hard time about this. It's that mentality that makes > them good at what they do.
You can be an effective killer and still have a moral compass and the faculties of independent thought. Most of the fighting men I know believe in the causes bandied about nowadays for the current wars. I may disagree, but I would much prefer, for the sake of everyone on the planet, that they think or at least adopt an opinion, rather than act as a soulless, programmable fighting apparatus of the politicians, as you describe. And really, I think this is the case for most soldiers - at least the handful I know.
If some reactionary soldier kicks the shit out of some guy for saying something even as repugnant as advocating suicide bombing, he is stomping on the freedoms he's fighting for. That's like building a house and then razing it because you don't like who moved in. There is no freedom of speech if there is still the implied threat of physical retaliation.
Besides, it's pretty obvious the guy isn't going to evangelize at Ft. Bragg. What's the point... it would be like trying to sell Pax Americana to a mullah and his followers, right?
Yeah, it would suck to run out of 5-minute epoxy in the heat of battle and have only that ghastly 90-minute crap. And what if your chief engineer is dead and you only have the chef left to repair the ship? Yoeman Beaker would end up with his head as a load-bearing member.
> Nice try, but (and I suspect many others) libertarians are definately on the > right end of that spectrum you try to wash yourself of
This is just false by any but the most abused (and ultimately meaningless) definitions of the terms. The right and left wings are used, at most, to define two basic axes:
1) authoritarian (anarchismtotalitarianism) 2) moral (progressivetraditionalist)
One can still be a progressively-minded libertarian or an anarcho-libertarian - neither breed is conservative or right-wing.
> most of the American public doesn't mind public decency standards, and > in fact, encourages them. They're not offended by the lack of pornography
Well, maybe not offended, but - I'd like to see what would happen if the restrictions on the broadcast depiction of sex acts were eased; the hypothesis being that if the taboo surrounding sex were lifted, then two things would happen:
- our appetite for violence would diminish - our appetite for gratuitous and fetishistic porn would diminish... the idea being that aggression and abberant and gratuitous pornography are, at worst, caused by sexual repression, because the difficulty in accepting even "normal" sexuality induces a strong desire to break stuff and obsessively watch hardcore. Hell, "porn" is nearly synonymous with "object of obsessive fixation." (food porn, war porn, etc).
Granted, you'll never completely kill the allure of sex, but I'm guessing it could be hidden in plain sight, like absurdly ideal close-up pictures of beer bottles or quarter-pounders. If you want it, you fixate on it while salivating - if it's not relevant to you, you don't notice it after a couple of viewings.
> The only nit I have is to wonder why it's ok to use simplified models in > engineering but not economics.
I understand your original objection... I should restate that I don't think sciences should be out of the picture when creating laws, but that the emphasis should be primarily on applying ethics to scientific conclusions, rather than ignoring an established ethical structure in favor of scientific models. Advances in science need time to be disseminated and adjust morals, and subsequently the prevailing ethical framework. This is only an opinion, but when I think of past examples (eugenics, holocaust-denial, the historical subjugation of women, etc) I think I'll stick with it for now, or until power classes are eliminated...
> Although the punishments dreampt up for the Buffalo spammer make capital > punishment look pretty attractive in the criminal's perspective.
Agreed... I think some of the people on/. are reading too much De Sade.
> His point is that the reason we assign rights to the government is to transact > for all of us in places such as this where it is ineffective to conduct > transactions ourselves.
His point is that it's acceptable to incorporate economic consequentialism into the process of forming public policy.
> His measure of worth isn't based on contribution to society, it's based on what > value you place on things that reduce your risk of dying.
I agree that's what he's saying, I just think that it serves (deliberately or not) to distract the reader from the main thesis, which is that some finite measure of individual worth should be used when forming laws, even if it contradicts the prevailing moral sensibilities.
My problem with this is two-fold. 1) There are, presumably, more economic models for determining individual worth that the one he cites. Indeed, if you're right, the one he's using is ultimately based on a moral (not economic) truism anyway:
> The value you place on your life (in actions not just words) is what it is > worth both to you and society regardless of how much money you have made or > what you have contributed to society.
There could be other models, based on less anarchistic principles, which could also win favor... such as the pro-corporate, anti-individual one I described in gp post.
Secondly, human beings are more intuitive than any economic model when it comes to complex things like ethics. If the results of an economic model don't match conventional moral wisdom, then either the morals are misguided or the model is wrong. The author's modest proposal fails because most people are sane enough to see that mortal condemnation of a minority of pranksters based on statistical valuation of individual life is tenuous at best, and a slippery moral slope at worst - because all types of scientific models, good and bad, could be maliciously misapplied for political purposes. This attempt to apply Occam's razor to issues that are truly moral dilemmas is like a neon sign for wackjobs who won't hesitate to misuse a theory to promote their own agenda.
> Flat the hell out, if the virus hadn't been written and released in the first > place, user incompetence wouldn't come into play. I don't REALLY advocate the > death penalty for virus writers, but I think a few folks getting thirty years > without parole in the big house would send a message to the l33t community.
Burn me once, shame on thee but burn me again - shame on me. If you read my post, I'm not talking about individuals... home users are in a different category, and deserve a bit more slack,. Corporations almost always have money and resources and there is no excuse for them to lose money to a virus attack when best preventive practices are cheap, obvious, and well-established. If I were an insurance company, I wouldn't pay out to a company that had inadequate security, and there's no way I'd pay them for loss of production due to a virus attack.
> Most of these scrawny/fatass individuals would indeed be somebody's bitch on the > inside. Maybe have some candid interviews with them about their experiences > after two years in the joint and then make them available on the net.
Male on male prison rape isn't any more just than male on female rape... just in case you were being serious.
> If you had read the article you would have noticed that blue collar women place > the highest value on their lives (followed by blue collar men). White collar > employees place a lower average value on their lives.
I obviously read the article, and I think you may have missed my point, which was that he argues as a utilitarian about what's better for society, but then talks about individual worth in terms of self-esteem, which doesn't have anything to do with it what you're worth to society. Based on your post, I'd say it's a pretty effective red herring.
> this article is comparing a person's life to a dollar figure
The guy's basically arguing a utilitarian position, but he doesn't take the argument to its logical, and even more controversial, conclusion.
Here's what he glosses over with his $10 million figure: In the U.S., violent crime mostly targets low-income victims. Corporate crime mostly targets the bottom line of high-income victims. In terms of dollars and cents, those low-income lives we are supposed to be saving as a result of deterrence are almost certainly worth less than the high-income folks, who can do more with their accumulated wealth.
This is in the style of _A Modest Proposal_, except that this guy doesn't seem comfortable with his own conclusions. Otherwise, he would have just come out and said oh by the way, the people who are typically murdered are not worth as much to the economy as the guys who are not getting shot, but simply losing wealth, so let's forget about deterring the murders of poor people, since it doesn't hurt the economy, and let's focus on the things that do.
Never mind that virus damage figures are almost always over-estimated anyway, and are increasingly due to incompetence of the victims rather than the innovation of virus writers.
I had that game, and the map wasn't nearly as complete as this one. I haven't played hit & run, but hey - they had to at least start from some canonical source, right?
Or my dubs, or my ice? And what about the bottle of '93 Cris? Probably because I spent too much money on the unicycle to afford the finer things in life. Now I'm just a geek with a unicycle I can't ride, one CD of Yanni mp3s, and no booty.
I think many municipalities (including my own) already have a freely available, online database of home and landowners, complete with curbside photos. Other information is available in hard form, you need only to go to the town records repository and ask. This isn't really new.
In my experience, thieves are generally pretty poor at what they do, though I'm sure there are a few adept ones. They do their "site surveys" on foot and take the most useless and worthless stuff. E.g. burglars stole my shitty stereo (w/o the faceplate), my cds and $20 binoculars, but they left a (very portable) $400 unicycle in the back seat. The parts could easily have been stripped and sold to BMXers for way more than the other stuff.
I think it's fascinating that the policy is even that complicated. I would have thought that it would be easier to take an us vs. them approach, and treat anyone firing at you with the same level of prejudice.
> Suffice it to say that I didn't just make it up.
Despite that I disagree with most of your opining in this thread, I wasn't trying to question your credibility. I really just wanted to confirm you were actually talking about what I guess is real-life US military practice, and not, say the UK or the Aussies.
1. If you're in uniform and you're fighting, you're an enemy soldier, and you're protected by the Geneva Conventions.
2. If you're not in uniform and you're not fighting, you're a civilian and you're not to be touched.
3. If you're not in uniform but you're fighting, you're a fucking spy and may be hanged or shot on the spot. Of course, in the interest of being extra-super-duper civilized, we call them "unlawful combatants" now.
It sounds like you have experience as a soldier. What branch? Is the above really SOP for the US military?
Slashdot Mirror
Well maybe the spirit of man can transcend statism. Ha.
Wait, are you inciting income tax evasion by quoting HDT?
> You can excercise your free speech rights by showing porn on public TV or
> smoking pot or rallying folks to kill the President of the US.
None of these things are currently free speech. One is contrary to "decency" law. One is illegal substance use. The last is conspiracy.
But, despite the poor examples I think I get your point. There is a fine line between incitement and free speech. The acquitted man in the article, if we are to believe the assessment of the jury, was not inciting violence, but merely referencing inciteful materials.
Even if he were suspected of incitement, he deserved a trial, not a beat-down.
> Just like it won't prevent you from getting beaten up in Harlem after calling
> people names.
Just because mob violence happens doesn't make it right. By the way, have you been to Harlem recently? I'm guessing your view of the area is a bit anachronistic.
What about the nuances of context, scientific exploration, arguments by counter example? How can one judge if a statement is incitement or not? Simple - you don't discriminate, because then you get into the murky waters of using your judgement of the merits of a statement to decide whether or not it's allowed to be stated. If this becomes common practice, we're all screwed, you and I, and it should be obvious as to why.
Sorry, your follow up post about FL re: the hard punch to the face made me think you were implying violence.
Let's assume you're right... it's a red herring anyway.
If, in reality, a soldier kills a person because he says something in support of suicide bombing, then the soldier is undoing his own work. Whether or not the soldier understands or even cares doesn't change the fact that such an act would be ultimately self-defeating.
> Don't give soldiers a hard time about this. It's that mentality that makes
> them good at what they do.
You can be an effective killer and still have a moral compass and the faculties of independent thought. Most of the fighting men I know believe in the causes bandied about nowadays for the current wars. I may disagree, but I would much prefer, for the sake of everyone on the planet, that they think or at least adopt an opinion, rather than act as a soulless, programmable fighting apparatus of the politicians, as you describe. And really, I think this is the case for most soldiers - at least the handful I know.
If some reactionary soldier kicks the shit out of some guy for saying something even as repugnant as advocating suicide bombing, he is stomping on the freedoms he's fighting for. That's like building a house and then razing it because you don't like who moved in. There is no freedom of speech if there is still the implied threat of physical retaliation.
Besides, it's pretty obvious the guy isn't going to evangelize at Ft. Bragg. What's the point... it would be like trying to sell Pax Americana to a mullah and his followers, right?
Yeah, we have no disaster recovery plan. It's abysmal planning to be tinkering on a system that doesn't have a full backup. ;)
Yeah, it would suck to run out of 5-minute epoxy in the heat of battle and have only that ghastly 90-minute crap. And what if your chief engineer is dead and you only have the chef left to repair the ship? Yoeman Beaker would end up with his head as a load-bearing member.
Pretty sure, though admittedly I have an older build - equally likely that it is a bug in the browser.
"It's more than just a cute way of seeing what's happening on a site,"
Dare I say that it is not any more than this? It's very cool, but wouldn't it be more intuitive in the form of a bunch of bar graphs or pie charts?
> there are still websites that only render correctly within Internet Explorer
also, support.microsoft.com KB search doesn't work from firefox.
> Nice try, but (and I suspect many others) libertarians are definately on the
> right end of that spectrum you try to wash yourself of
This is just false by any but the most abused (and ultimately meaningless) definitions of the terms. The right and left wings are used, at most, to define two basic axes:
1) authoritarian (anarchismtotalitarianism)
2) moral (progressivetraditionalist)
One can still be a progressively-minded libertarian or an anarcho-libertarian - neither breed is conservative or right-wing.
Hey, for some of us, the laptop and the genitals are in symbiosis - neither would get much use without the other.
The delicate balance of this relationship is mediated by DSL, screen cleaner and paper towels.
> most of the American public doesn't mind public decency standards, and
... the idea being that aggression and abberant and gratuitous pornography are, at worst, caused by sexual repression, because the difficulty in accepting even "normal" sexuality induces a strong desire to break stuff and obsessively watch hardcore. Hell, "porn" is nearly synonymous with "object of obsessive fixation." (food porn, war porn, etc).
> in fact, encourages them. They're not offended by the lack of pornography
Well, maybe not offended, but - I'd like to see what would happen if the restrictions on the broadcast depiction of sex acts were eased; the hypothesis being that if the taboo surrounding sex were lifted, then two things would happen:
- our appetite for violence would diminish
- our appetite for gratuitous and fetishistic porn would diminish
Granted, you'll never completely kill the allure of sex, but I'm guessing it could be hidden in plain sight, like absurdly ideal close-up pictures of beer bottles or quarter-pounders. If you want it, you fixate on it while salivating - if it's not relevant to you, you don't notice it after a couple of viewings.
> The only nit I have is to wonder why it's ok to use simplified models in
/. are reading too much De Sade.
> engineering but not economics.
I understand your original objection... I should restate that I don't think sciences should be out of the picture when creating laws, but that the emphasis should be primarily on applying ethics to scientific conclusions, rather than ignoring an established ethical structure in favor of scientific models. Advances in science need time to be disseminated and adjust morals, and subsequently the prevailing ethical framework. This is only an opinion, but when I think of past examples (eugenics, holocaust-denial, the historical subjugation of women, etc) I think I'll stick with it for now, or until power classes are eliminated...
> Although the punishments dreampt up for the Buffalo spammer make capital
> punishment look pretty attractive in the criminal's perspective.
Agreed... I think some of the people on
> His point is that the reason we assign rights to the government is to transact
> for all of us in places such as this where it is ineffective to conduct
> transactions ourselves.
His point is that it's acceptable to incorporate economic consequentialism into the process of forming public policy.
> His measure of worth isn't based on contribution to society, it's based on what
> value you place on things that reduce your risk of dying.
I agree that's what he's saying, I just think that it serves (deliberately or not) to distract the reader from the main thesis, which is that some finite measure of individual worth should be used when forming laws, even if it contradicts the prevailing moral sensibilities.
My problem with this is two-fold. 1) There are, presumably, more economic models for determining individual worth that the one he cites. Indeed, if you're right, the one he's using is ultimately based on a moral (not economic) truism anyway:
> The value you place on your life (in actions not just words) is what it is
> worth both to you and society regardless of how much money you have made or
> what you have contributed to society.
There could be other models, based on less anarchistic principles, which could also win favor... such as the pro-corporate, anti-individual one I described in gp post.
Secondly, human beings are more intuitive than any economic model when it comes to complex things like ethics. If the results of an economic model don't match conventional moral wisdom, then either the morals are misguided or the model is wrong. The author's modest proposal fails because most people are sane enough to see that mortal condemnation of a minority of pranksters based on statistical valuation of individual life is tenuous at best, and a slippery moral slope at worst - because all types of scientific models, good and bad, could be maliciously misapplied for political purposes. This attempt to apply Occam's razor to issues that are truly moral dilemmas is like a neon sign for wackjobs who won't hesitate to misuse a theory to promote their own agenda.
> Flat the hell out, if the virus hadn't been written and released in the first
> place, user incompetence wouldn't come into play. I don't REALLY advocate the
> death penalty for virus writers, but I think a few folks getting thirty years
> without parole in the big house would send a message to the l33t community.
Burn me once, shame on thee but burn me again - shame on me. If you read my post, I'm not talking about individuals... home users are in a different category, and deserve a bit more slack,. Corporations almost always have money and resources and there is no excuse for them to lose money to a virus attack when best preventive practices are cheap, obvious, and well-established. If I were an insurance company, I wouldn't pay out to a company that had inadequate security, and there's no way I'd pay them for loss of production due to a virus attack.
> Most of these scrawny/fatass individuals would indeed be somebody's bitch on the
> inside. Maybe have some candid interviews with them about their experiences
> after two years in the joint and then make them available on the net.
Male on male prison rape isn't any more just than male on female rape... just in case you were being serious.
> If you had read the article you would have noticed that blue collar women place
> the highest value on their lives (followed by blue collar men). White collar
> employees place a lower average value on their lives.
I obviously read the article, and I think you may have missed my point, which was that he argues as a utilitarian about what's better for society, but then talks about individual worth in terms of self-esteem, which doesn't have anything to do with it what you're worth to society. Based on your post, I'd say it's a pretty effective red herring.
> this article is comparing a person's life to a dollar figure
The guy's basically arguing a utilitarian position, but he doesn't take the argument to its logical, and even more controversial, conclusion.
Here's what he glosses over with his $10 million figure: In the U.S., violent crime mostly targets low-income victims. Corporate crime mostly targets the bottom line of high-income victims. In terms of dollars and cents, those low-income lives we are supposed to be saving as a result of deterrence are almost certainly worth less than the high-income folks, who can do more with their accumulated wealth.
This is in the style of _A Modest Proposal_, except that this guy doesn't seem comfortable with his own conclusions. Otherwise, he would have just come out and said oh by the way, the people who are typically murdered are not worth as much to the economy as the guys who are not getting shot, but simply losing wealth, so let's forget about deterring the murders of poor people, since it doesn't hurt the economy, and let's focus on the things that do.
Never mind that virus damage figures are almost always over-estimated anyway, and are increasingly due to incompetence of the victims rather than the innovation of virus writers.
Mmmm... seedy ROM.
I had that game, and the map wasn't nearly as complete as this one. I haven't played hit & run, but hey - they had to at least start from some canonical source, right?
Or my dubs, or my ice? And what about the bottle of '93 Cris? Probably because I spent too much money on the unicycle to afford the finer things in life. Now I'm just a geek with a unicycle I can't ride, one CD of Yanni mp3s, and no booty.
Yeah, you're probably right. I wish he had taken the damn uni, though - it would have put me over the deductible, and I could have gotten my CDs back.
I think many municipalities (including my own) already have a freely available, online database of home and landowners, complete with curbside photos. Other information is available in hard form, you need only to go to the town records repository and ask. This isn't really new.
In my experience, thieves are generally pretty poor at what they do, though I'm sure there are a few adept ones. They do their "site surveys" on foot and take the most useless and worthless stuff. E.g. burglars stole my shitty stereo (w/o the faceplate), my cds and $20 binoculars, but they left a (very portable) $400 unicycle in the back seat. The parts could easily have been stripped and sold to BMXers for way more than the other stuff.
> Yes, in essence.
I think it's fascinating that the policy is even that complicated. I would have thought that it would be easier to take an us vs. them approach, and treat anyone firing at you with the same level of prejudice.
> Suffice it to say that I didn't just make it up.
Despite that I disagree with most of your opining in this thread, I wasn't trying to question your credibility. I really just wanted to confirm you were actually talking about what I guess is real-life US military practice, and not, say the UK or the Aussies.
this civilian thing gets confusing.
Not at all. It's simple.
1. If you're in uniform and you're fighting, you're an enemy soldier, and you're protected by the Geneva Conventions.
2. If you're not in uniform and you're not fighting, you're a civilian and you're not to be touched.
3. If you're not in uniform but you're fighting, you're a fucking spy and may be hanged or shot on the spot. Of course, in the interest of being extra-super-duper civilized, we call them "unlawful combatants" now.
It sounds like you have experience as a soldier. What branch? Is the above really SOP for the US military?