There is a habit in the UK of making people with suspected coeliac disease eat wheat for an amount of time so an antibody test can be done.
Many, many people refuse to go through that. After keeping a food diary for sufficient time, observing the effect, giving up wheat, then finding that they have vomiting/cramps/flatulence/diarrhoea for a good 2 days whenever they eat a small amount of wheat (it's always worse when you're gluten-free), it becomes clear that there is at least something wrong for them with eating wheat.
It's like the way I noticed there was something wrong when I ate very fatty foods and certain odd other things like ginger - and that something gave me agony and vomiting for up to 12 hours - long before I was diagnosed with gallstones+cholecystitis, had a lap chol, and suddenly I could eat lovely things again.
So there are likely to be many undiagnosed coelics or people with other wheat intolerance in the UK.
(Then there are people who simply don't enjoy eating wheat - maybe the taste is boring or they prefer something with easier digestion or whatever.)
Putting it in quote marks is a way of teasing the Slashdotters' love for pervasive science.
Like sometimes my partner asks me to close my eyes and guess-which-one-this-is, whether one from among the various home grown or from the supermarket. But we don't actually document our tasting, publish and seek peer review, so who can say whether our methodology was perfect?
I'm merely talking about food in the grocery store with the label organic on it.
Where are you at? The well-known organic providers around here clearly select cultivars for taste and pick at the right time. IOW they, uh, *business-speak mode* leverage the organic brand with value-added tastiness.
Sort of. Unfortunately seeing organic on a label doesn't mean nearly as much as people think it does. It's a pretty narrowly defined term with loopholes you can drive a tanker truck through.
True enough. Like I said, I think it depends where you are: where I have stayed in the US, supermarket "organic" labels seems to mean fuck all but "costs slightly more".
If I had my cynical hat on, I'd say that it's hard to discourage people from eating organic "because it's better for you" or "because it's better for the environment".
So instead you think up random ways that it's not better for you. For example, contrary to popular opinion, eating organic bananas does not make your wang grow larger.
We grow lots of our own food. We do "blind taste tests" from time the time and it is fucking easy to work out which is the home-grown stuff. If you operate on a small enough scale to watch your plants individually grow, pick at the right time and select the best fruits for next year's seeds, you are going to get the best food. Could we still operate non-organically? Well, we could use pesticides, slug-killers, etc., but I absolutely do not want to discourage cooperative insects or kill garden wildlife/cats.
So, supermarket organic stuff which is "organic" in the sense of merely sticking to some list of requirements (e.g. "no pesticide") may not be tastier. You are buying for the farming method.
But "organic" in the practical sense - at least in the UK (supermarket veggies when I was in northern VA were, without exception, ghastly) - tends to mean more than simply following that list. If nothing else, the produce is picked at the right time and arrives at the supermarket quicker and fresher.
Given that the whining is only about the status of US corporations, it's pretty obvious that we're only speaking of US corporations.
That's stupid. The US did not develop in a vacuum.
So wave that magic education wand so that investors are no longer ignorant. Capital rarely starts in the hands of the people who best understand the business.
It's the responsibility of the investors to educate themselves.
That is the point. Investors don't want to be at that level of responsibility. Corporations provide a way to give capital to a business without assuming a high level of responsibility.
I don't want shitty corporations getting investment because investors don't "want" responsibility for what they own. It helps no-one. Stop socialising your debt, moochers!
This is why I love competing governments. If one government gets a bad idea (say like supporting your "thought" above), then we can always move ourselves and our assets to other countries which haven't gone so insane.
I'm sure you'll be sorely missed. The West is doing just so well since bigger businessmen began to almost entirely rely on the fact that they would not be ruined by the destruction of their companies. And China is doing just awfully for regulating larger businesses against that sort of behaviour.
"See, I told you organic food wasn't always more nutritious!"
1) Organic food has a bit of a wishy-washy definition;
2) Where the definitions exist, they are re farming methods;
3) Some people prefer to support those particular farming methods;
4) And those methods often produce tastier food.
The most "organic" thing you can do is not have children. Because we have reached the population point where it is very hard to use non-intensive farming methods.
Surely, you read up on the history of corporate personhood.
In which country? Or are we about to argue that America invented the corporation ("public company")?
Basically, it came about due to abuses of government power. Without such protection, governments from local on up to federal level could seize or tax corporation property in a way that they couldn't do for personally owned property.
Sigh. Everything in America is about abuse from the gubmint, isn't it? Can you think of less severe responses to the concern that corporations were being disadvantaged?
In other words, it came about as a legitimate reaction to existing threats. I think that makes it a proportionate response.
I know Anglo-Saxon law hasn't historically had much of a notion of proportionate, but it is a well developed notion in EU (i.e. Roman) law. A proportionate response is one which goes no further than necessary to achieve the aims - whether something is proportionate is independent from whether the aim is legitimate.
It's worth noting here that shareholders in such situations typically lose their entire investment. That's not even remotely "socializing the losses".
If you own something, you should be responsible for its debts. Otherwise it's a loan, not a share.
And the whole point behind limited liability is that shareholders are typically neither experts in the corporations' interests nor deeply involved.
And the whole problem with modern shareholding is that the shareholders are typically neither experts in the corporations' interests nor deeply involved.
So it doesn't make sense to put such an investor on the hook when they typically don't supervise it closely enough to justify that level of responsibility.
"So it doesn't make sense to put such an investor on the hook when they typically don't want to be responsible enough to justify that level of responsibility."
This is just a way to starve the businesses of your country out of capital. All the foreign competitors will appreciate your efforts.
Yes, yes, this argument's been used to justify everything from censorship to slavery. "If you make the capitalists fully responsible for their losses then... uh... think about your jobs!" OK, I've thought about them, and I've decided that there would be greater employment if people couldn't hoard wealth with the protection of the law.
I have created whole e-commerce systems for free, and that was ~9 years ago. Really, the market is so competitive right now that the only way you're going to get paid with your knowledge is thanks to everyone's favourite abuse of capitalism: information asymmetry. Find small organisations who have so little clue about IT that they think that abilities like yours aren't dime-a-dozen.
Alternatively, accept that your abilities are tools to enhance a career rather than career-worthy in themselves. Either learn to become a software engineer in the full sense, worrying more about learning than earning at this stage, or find something else that you like, safe in the knowledge that your IT skills will make you a more valuable member of any team.
I don't often come across someone on Slashdot who I think is mad, but I think you are.
Incidentally, assume I am very rich. The first thing I would do when private defence forces come in is take all your land and make you work as a slave on my plantation, because you annoy me and are - as you admit yourself - sufficiently unpopular that few will come to your defence. Go go free market definition of personhood!
is a legal interface with traditional government-run courts that is too technical for most people to understand.
Fairly simple when I took law. What difficulty were you having?
A contractual agreement can exist in perpetuity as original founders sell out, die, etc
This is useful, but legal personhood is a disproportionate response to the need.
but ultimately a corporation exists based on the Rights of the contemporary shareholders / parties to contract.
No. A corporation exists based on the "rights" (lol@religious capitalisation) of contemporary shareholders not to be fully responsible for what they do. They get full enjoyment of profits but can, when shit and fan are in alignment, socialise their losses.
The root of the "corporations are not people" hysteria is socialists trying to deny Rights (speech, liberty, property, etc) to individuals they don't like or want to rob.
On the contrary, a capitalist would want to return rights to debtors, responsibility to tortfeasors, &c.
Because the people own the street so choose how their property is used, i.e. property rights. If the people want to restrict taxis on the street so not any rapist or conman can respond to a hail, that's up to them.
It takes a particularly stupid sort of libertarian (but I repeat myself) to go around blaming The Government for absolutely everything wrong in the world. So, for your sake, imagine that The Government is actually a private business - let's call it The Corporation. Imagine that The Corporation owns everything "public" and has an contractual interest in everything else in the country, allowing it to collect fees for certain operations.
There. That's the whole country, unchanged, but now libertarian.
We should start with those other professions and, if things work out as one would expect, move on to professions with better justifications for government regulation.
You talk like a missionary. "First we must soften them by finding those who genuinely would benefit from our message, then we move on to those who could well do without it..."
As to whether or not there would be a way to stop incompetent doctors from practicing if certification boards did not exist, most libertarians support the right of people to sue when someone else's negligence causes them harm.
I know libertarians don't live in the real world, but you only get one body.
However, as I said, medicine is not the place to start going to a more libertarian model of professional regulation.
Nowhere is. Libertarianism is like a religion, starting with dogma and then sugegsting solutions according to dogma. I don't want policies which suggest "what about imposing the belief of the followers of X...", whatever X is. I don't want any more religions. I don't want to see the whole world turning in the direction of a particular religion. I want systems which are shown to work in a given scenario, whether that is regulated state operation for healthcare or mostly unregulated capitalism for various non-critical Internet services.
They are arguing for moderate regulation rather than regulation that attempts to determine what course of action practitioners will take in every eventuality that might come up..
This is a strawman. Doctors often have differences of opinion. I assume that US healthcare services, like UK, give you a right to a second opinion.
You're saying that the brain can organise people by colour. You're then saying that colour is a component of "what continent they were from" or something. You're then saying that all this has something to do with race. You haven't provided any sort of clear defnition of race. Is it just "something about someone's appearance which allows us to make a good guess about where at least some ancestors came from"?
For example, a black friend recently got asked, in one of the weakest chat-up attempts I've heard for quite a while, "So, where are you from?" "London." "Yeah, but where are your parents from?" "London." "What about your grandparents?" "Well, what you're asking is... why am I black... my [sufficient ancestors] came from Jamaica..." Except that, if you go not too far further back, the ancestors of the Jamaican family would in turn have come from Africa. Is she "Afro-Londonian", "Afro-Caribbean", "[specific part of] African", "African", or none of the above? What phrenological measures or other facial features do we measure, and when do they become sufficiently distinct as to create a new race?
You're then saying that it's possible to compare the albedo of the different Olympic participants to see if some sports have different average albedo to others. I don't see where you're going with this. Are you assuming that the Olympics is an entirely meritocratic event, selecting the best of the best from across the world?
So is semantic nonsense better or worse than syntactic error?
And if you give me some argument about how "It's putting forward the idea that you think about the concept of differentness", I'll strike you across the face with a PowerMac 8600 and garrot (garrot is being used as a verb, not a noun) you with an ADB mouse.
OTOH, if the exhortation is "when you think Apple, don't think 'better' - just think 'different'", I'll only drop a Mac Plus on your foot.
"Israel/Palestine has a right to exist" is absolutely flamebait. It's not useful at all, but is guaranteed to produce a lot of silly fighting. It's just repeating something which has been said ten thousand times. You can discuss the history of Israel or Palestine, or explain the positions of each side, or explain what will come of maintaining Israel's sovereignty or giving Palestine sovereignty - this might be interesting, or even insightful if you're trying really hard. But trite, unsound conclusions like "right to exist" have no merit.
You're right that intent may be considered, but re taking part vs just wanting to make trouble, you're standing in the minority in your interpretation of the moderation options. This is quite clear from the last ~15 years of Slashdot.
It is not sufficient to want to take part in the discussion. You have to want to play a reasonable and rational part in the discussion.
There may be a small minority of posters so dull that they intend to play a reasonable and rational part but display behaviour as if they intend only to play the fool. But, in the majority of cases, posts like the OP's show an intentional lack of willingness to make a sound contribution. They are flamebait at best.
There's not much choice in England. The 12 are usually selected from ~15 at random and that's that. A *huge* academic research effort recently completed by Cheryl Thomas (search and read!) has confirmed that jurors tend to be much less biased / against people's personal hobby-horses than both the tabloid and leftie media suggest - IOW English juries actually do pretty fucking well.
America has managed to take one of the best developments in justice that the world has ever created and fuck even that up. It is so sad.
Also ignore the post above me: jury nullification isn't very interesting, and tends to be cited as an excuse to limit the power of juries. Anyway, you go in all guns blazing and a fellow juror will just call you out; you lie to your fellow jurors by falsely stating your determination of the facts and you're throwing the jury system into disrepute. Like all powerful weapons, you apply nullification only where necessary. Again, though, we don't have the problem of insane sentences being handed out for minor crimes (e.g. marijuana possession) - it's harder to think myself in the position of such an ostensibly just but procedurally corrupt system as America's.
A contentious comment which lacks rational thought has no purpose but to insult.
It insults the reader; it insults logic; it insults intelligence; it insults humanity.
It is possible to find a subtle but remarkable fault in established reasoning, but you had better be damn good at showing it. It is possible write something logical which is based on uncommon premises, but those premises must be made clear.
For example, to dismiss global warming is anti-science in the sense that the scientific consensus disagrees with you - so you have to either (i) carefully provide an original explanation for results or (ii) explain why we shouldn't care that global warming is happening. If you're doing (ii), you better have some mighty interesting premises - anything which comes down to "cuz I will be dead by then" or "cuz the free market solves all 4 every1" IS so childish as to come under the "flamebait" category.
Other examples of flamebait: - Communism works; - Capitalism works; - Israel has a right to exist; - Palestine has a right to exist; - Just war is good; - All wars are wrong; - There is a heaven; - There is no heaven; - I deserve what I have; - You don't deserve what you have; etc.
All these statements are flamebait. Even if they had some element of correctness in them, they are so boring that they insult the reader. Be nuanced. Be sophisticated. Be insightful. Tackle an argument from all sides. Hell, on a good day, be original.
You're saying stuff like "some people have darker skin than others" or "some guys with slitty eyes have the slits a little different to some other guys so I can probably say vaguely which part of that area over there they come from". And then you're guessing that you can tell whether someone "has Asian ancestors" which as-is is bullshit - I can tell you that/everyone/ has African ancestors, for example, so I guess we're all black as black can be.
So, are you saying that "racial characteristics" form "a list of ways that people can look the same"? Where are you going with that? Do you want to see if there are correlations between whiteness of skin / slittiness of eyes and *something*? Are you aiming to find some sort of causation? What kind of objective tests do you propose? (hint: "lots of Olympic runners are kinda brown" and "all the guys who were excellent at math in my school had narrower eyelids than me" aren't the results of fair tests.) The last 150 years have been full of stuff like this, so come up with something good:-).
Slashdot Mirror
To understand where you went wrong, start by asking, "Why isn't organic food bruised?"
There is a habit in the UK of making people with suspected coeliac disease eat wheat for an amount of time so an antibody test can be done.
Many, many people refuse to go through that. After keeping a food diary for sufficient time, observing the effect, giving up wheat, then finding that they have vomiting/cramps/flatulence/diarrhoea for a good 2 days whenever they eat a small amount of wheat (it's always worse when you're gluten-free), it becomes clear that there is at least something wrong for them with eating wheat.
It's like the way I noticed there was something wrong when I ate very fatty foods and certain odd other things like ginger - and that something gave me agony and vomiting for up to 12 hours - long before I was diagnosed with gallstones+cholecystitis, had a lap chol, and suddenly I could eat lovely things again.
So there are likely to be many undiagnosed coelics or people with other wheat intolerance in the UK.
(Then there are people who simply don't enjoy eating wheat - maybe the taste is boring or they prefer something with easier digestion or whatever.)
Putting it in quote marks is a way of teasing the Slashdotters' love for pervasive science.
Like sometimes my partner asks me to close my eyes and guess-which-one-this-is, whether one from among the various home grown or from the supermarket. But we don't actually document our tasting, publish and seek peer review, so who can say whether our methodology was perfect?
I'm merely talking about food in the grocery store with the label organic on it.
Where are you at? The well-known organic providers around here clearly select cultivars for taste and pick at the right time. IOW they, uh, *business-speak mode* leverage the organic brand with value-added tastiness.
Sort of. Unfortunately seeing organic on a label doesn't mean nearly as much as people think it does. It's a pretty narrowly defined term with loopholes you can drive a tanker truck through.
True enough. Like I said, I think it depends where you are: where I have stayed in the US, supermarket "organic" labels seems to mean fuck all but "costs slightly more".
If I had my cynical hat on, I'd say that it's hard to discourage people from eating organic "because it's better for you" or "because it's better for the environment".
So instead you think up random ways that it's not better for you. For example, contrary to popular opinion, eating organic bananas does not make your wang grow larger.
We grow lots of our own food. We do "blind taste tests" from time the time and it is fucking easy to work out which is the home-grown stuff. If you operate on a small enough scale to watch your plants individually grow, pick at the right time and select the best fruits for next year's seeds, you are going to get the best food. Could we still operate non-organically? Well, we could use pesticides, slug-killers, etc., but I absolutely do not want to discourage cooperative insects or kill garden wildlife/cats.
So, supermarket organic stuff which is "organic" in the sense of merely sticking to some list of requirements (e.g. "no pesticide") may not be tastier. You are buying for the farming method.
But "organic" in the practical sense - at least in the UK (supermarket veggies when I was in northern VA were, without exception, ghastly) - tends to mean more than simply following that list. If nothing else, the produce is picked at the right time and arrives at the supermarket quicker and fresher.
Given that the whining is only about the status of US corporations, it's pretty obvious that we're only speaking of US corporations.
That's stupid. The US did not develop in a vacuum.
So wave that magic education wand so that investors are no longer ignorant. Capital rarely starts in the hands of the people who best understand the business.
It's the responsibility of the investors to educate themselves.
That is the point. Investors don't want to be at that level of responsibility. Corporations provide a way to give capital to a business without assuming a high level of responsibility.
I don't want shitty corporations getting investment because investors don't "want" responsibility for what they own. It helps no-one. Stop socialising your debt, moochers!
This is why I love competing governments. If one government gets a bad idea (say like supporting your "thought" above), then we can always move ourselves and our assets to other countries which haven't gone so insane.
I'm sure you'll be sorely missed. The West is doing just so well since bigger businessmen began to almost entirely rely on the fact that they would not be ruined by the destruction of their companies. And China is doing just awfully for regulating larger businesses against that sort of behaviour.
No. It's what's known as a "straw man".
"See, I told you organic food wasn't always more nutritious!"
1) Organic food has a bit of a wishy-washy definition;
2) Where the definitions exist, they are re farming methods;
3) Some people prefer to support those particular farming methods;
4) And those methods often produce tastier food.
The most "organic" thing you can do is not have children. Because we have reached the population point where it is very hard to use non-intensive farming methods.
Surely, you read up on the history of corporate personhood.
In which country? Or are we about to argue that America invented the corporation ("public company")?
Basically, it came about due to abuses of government power. Without such protection, governments from local on up to federal level could seize or tax corporation property in a way that they couldn't do for personally owned property.
Sigh. Everything in America is about abuse from the gubmint, isn't it? Can you think of less severe responses to the concern that corporations were being disadvantaged?
In other words, it came about as a legitimate reaction to existing threats. I think that makes it a proportionate response.
I know Anglo-Saxon law hasn't historically had much of a notion of proportionate, but it is a well developed notion in EU (i.e. Roman) law. A proportionate response is one which goes no further than necessary to achieve the aims - whether something is proportionate is independent from whether the aim is legitimate.
It's worth noting here that shareholders in such situations typically lose their entire investment. That's not even remotely "socializing the losses".
If you own something, you should be responsible for its debts. Otherwise it's a loan, not a share.
And the whole point behind limited liability is that shareholders are typically neither experts in the corporations' interests nor deeply involved.
And the whole problem with modern shareholding is that the shareholders are typically neither experts in the corporations' interests nor deeply involved.
So it doesn't make sense to put such an investor on the hook when they typically don't supervise it closely enough to justify that level of responsibility.
"So it doesn't make sense to put such an investor on the hook when they typically don't want to be responsible enough to justify that level of responsibility."
This is just a way to starve the businesses of your country out of capital. All the foreign competitors will appreciate your efforts.
Yes, yes, this argument's been used to justify everything from censorship to slavery. "If you make the capitalists fully responsible for their losses then... uh... think about your jobs!" OK, I've thought about them, and I've decided that there would be greater employment if people couldn't hoard wealth with the protection of the law.
I have created whole e-commerce systems for free, and that was ~9 years ago. Really, the market is so competitive right now that the only way you're going to get paid with your knowledge is thanks to everyone's favourite abuse of capitalism: information asymmetry. Find small organisations who have so little clue about IT that they think that abilities like yours aren't dime-a-dozen.
Alternatively, accept that your abilities are tools to enhance a career rather than career-worthy in themselves. Either learn to become a software engineer in the full sense, worrying more about learning than earning at this stage, or find something else that you like, safe in the knowledge that your IT skills will make you a more valuable member of any team.
I don't often come across someone on Slashdot who I think is mad, but I think you are.
Incidentally, assume I am very rich. The first thing I would do when private defence forces come in is take all your land and make you work as a slave on my plantation, because you annoy me and are - as you admit yourself - sufficiently unpopular that few will come to your defence. Go go free market definition of personhood!
is a legal interface with traditional government-run courts that is too technical for most people to understand.
Fairly simple when I took law. What difficulty were you having?
A contractual agreement can exist in perpetuity as original founders sell out, die, etc
This is useful, but legal personhood is a disproportionate response to the need.
but ultimately a corporation exists based on the Rights of the contemporary shareholders / parties to contract.
No. A corporation exists based on the "rights" (lol@religious capitalisation) of contemporary shareholders not to be fully responsible for what they do. They get full enjoyment of profits but can, when shit and fan are in alignment, socialise their losses.
The root of the "corporations are not people" hysteria is socialists trying to deny Rights (speech, liberty, property, etc) to individuals they don't like or want to rob.
On the contrary, a capitalist would want to return rights to debtors, responsibility to tortfeasors, &c.
Waa waa waa they aren't voting for what I want. The roads are mine I built them and should be able to drive what I want on them.
Because the people own the street so choose how their property is used, i.e. property rights. If the people want to restrict taxis on the street so not any rapist or conman can respond to a hail, that's up to them.
It takes a particularly stupid sort of libertarian (but I repeat myself) to go around blaming The Government for absolutely everything wrong in the world. So, for your sake, imagine that The Government is actually a private business - let's call it The Corporation. Imagine that The Corporation owns everything "public" and has an contractual interest in everything else in the country, allowing it to collect fees for certain operations.
There. That's the whole country, unchanged, but now libertarian.
Happy?
We should start with those other professions and, if things work out as one would expect, move on to professions with better justifications for government regulation.
You talk like a missionary. "First we must soften them by finding those who genuinely would benefit from our message, then we move on to those who could well do without it..."
As to whether or not there would be a way to stop incompetent doctors from practicing if certification boards did not exist, most libertarians support the right of people to sue when someone else's negligence causes them harm.
I know libertarians don't live in the real world, but you only get one body.
However, as I said, medicine is not the place to start going to a more libertarian model of professional regulation.
Nowhere is. Libertarianism is like a religion, starting with dogma and then sugegsting solutions according to dogma. I don't want policies which suggest "what about imposing the belief of the followers of X...", whatever X is. I don't want any more religions. I don't want to see the whole world turning in the direction of a particular religion. I want systems which are shown to work in a given scenario, whether that is regulated state operation for healthcare or mostly unregulated capitalism for various non-critical Internet services.
They are arguing for moderate regulation rather than regulation that attempts to determine what course of action practitioners will take in every eventuality that might come up..
This is a strawman. Doctors often have differences of opinion. I assume that US healthcare services, like UK, give you a right to a second opinion.
You're saying that the brain can organise people by colour. You're then saying that colour is a component of "what continent they were from" or something. You're then saying that all this has something to do with race. You haven't provided any sort of clear defnition of race. Is it just "something about someone's appearance which allows us to make a good guess about where at least some ancestors came from"?
For example, a black friend recently got asked, in one of the weakest chat-up attempts I've heard for quite a while, "So, where are you from?" "London." "Yeah, but where are your parents from?" "London." "What about your grandparents?" "Well, what you're asking is... why am I black... my [sufficient ancestors] came from Jamaica..." Except that, if you go not too far further back, the ancestors of the Jamaican family would in turn have come from Africa. Is she "Afro-Londonian", "Afro-Caribbean", "[specific part of] African", "African", or none of the above? What phrenological measures or other facial features do we measure, and when do they become sufficiently distinct as to create a new race?
You're then saying that it's possible to compare the albedo of the different Olympic participants to see if some sports have different average albedo to others. I don't see where you're going with this. Are you assuming that the Olympics is an entirely meritocratic event, selecting the best of the best from across the world?
So is semantic nonsense better or worse than syntactic error?
And if you give me some argument about how "It's putting forward the idea that you think about the concept of differentness", I'll strike you across the face with a PowerMac 8600 and garrot (garrot is being used as a verb, not a noun) you with an ADB mouse.
OTOH, if the exhortation is "when you think Apple, don't think 'better' - just think 'different'", I'll only drop a Mac Plus on your foot.
"Israel/Palestine has a right to exist" is absolutely flamebait. It's not useful at all, but is guaranteed to produce a lot of silly fighting. It's just repeating something which has been said ten thousand times. You can discuss the history of Israel or Palestine, or explain the positions of each side, or explain what will come of maintaining Israel's sovereignty or giving Palestine sovereignty - this might be interesting, or even insightful if you're trying really hard. But trite, unsound conclusions like "right to exist" have no merit.
You're right that intent may be considered, but re taking part vs just wanting to make trouble, you're standing in the minority in your interpretation of the moderation options. This is quite clear from the last ~15 years of Slashdot.
It is not sufficient to want to take part in the discussion. You have to want to play a reasonable and rational part in the discussion.
There may be a small minority of posters so dull that they intend to play a reasonable and rational part but display behaviour as if they intend only to play the fool. But, in the majority of cases, posts like the OP's show an intentional lack of willingness to make a sound contribution. They are flamebait at best.
There's not much choice in England. The 12 are usually selected from ~15 at random and that's that. A *huge* academic research effort recently completed by Cheryl Thomas (search and read!) has confirmed that jurors tend to be much less biased / against people's personal hobby-horses than both the tabloid and leftie media suggest - IOW English juries actually do pretty fucking well.
America has managed to take one of the best developments in justice that the world has ever created and fuck even that up. It is so sad.
Also ignore the post above me: jury nullification isn't very interesting, and tends to be cited as an excuse to limit the power of juries. Anyway, you go in all guns blazing and a fellow juror will just call you out; you lie to your fellow jurors by falsely stating your determination of the facts and you're throwing the jury system into disrepute. Like all powerful weapons, you apply nullification only where necessary. Again, though, we don't have the problem of insane sentences being handed out for minor crimes (e.g. marijuana possession) - it's harder to think myself in the position of such an ostensibly just but procedurally corrupt system as America's.
You forgot lolology.
You get an ology, you're a scientist!
A contentious comment which lacks rational thought has no purpose but to insult.
It insults the reader; it insults logic; it insults intelligence; it insults humanity.
It is possible to find a subtle but remarkable fault in established reasoning, but you had better be damn good at showing it. It is possible write something logical which is based on uncommon premises, but those premises must be made clear.
For example, to dismiss global warming is anti-science in the sense that the scientific consensus disagrees with you - so you have to either (i) carefully provide an original explanation for results or (ii) explain why we shouldn't care that global warming is happening. If you're doing (ii), you better have some mighty interesting premises - anything which comes down to "cuz I will be dead by then" or "cuz the free market solves all 4 every1" IS so childish as to come under the "flamebait" category.
Other examples of flamebait:
- Communism works;
- Capitalism works;
- Israel has a right to exist;
- Palestine has a right to exist;
- Just war is good;
- All wars are wrong;
- There is a heaven;
- There is no heaven;
- I deserve what I have;
- You don't deserve what you have;
etc.
All these statements are flamebait. Even if they had some element of correctness in them, they are so boring that they insult the reader. Be nuanced. Be sophisticated. Be insightful. Tackle an argument from all sides. Hell, on a good day, be original.
5 more languages I can do it in.
Proceed.
Capitalism?
You're saying stuff like "some people have darker skin than others" or "some guys with slitty eyes have the slits a little different to some other guys so I can probably say vaguely which part of that area over there they come from". And then you're guessing that you can tell whether someone "has Asian ancestors" which as-is is bullshit - I can tell you that /everyone/ has African ancestors, for example, so I guess we're all black as black can be.
So, are you saying that "racial characteristics" form "a list of ways that people can look the same"? Where are you going with that? Do you want to see if there are correlations between whiteness of skin / slittiness of eyes and *something*? Are you aiming to find some sort of causation? What kind of objective tests do you propose? (hint: "lots of Olympic runners are kinda brown" and "all the guys who were excellent at math in my school had narrower eyelids than me" aren't the results of fair tests.) The last 150 years have been full of stuff like this, so come up with something good :-).