People, organisations, religions, philosophies, all of these should be used to the idea that they can be insulted by others without being able to stop them.
I have a Cintiq display, and use it to play flash games - the lack of mouseover support is no big deal. If your application *only* works with traditional mice, then it's simply limited on those platforms, regardless of language. Flash has nothing to do with it, it's just a pointer difference for some of your users.
The relevance is that you can't assume that blame falls on the parents or students for not reading the contract or that such a contract, if it mentions stuff like this, immunises the district from lawsuits.
I would hope whomever is responsible for the policy (and for supporting it) gets the brunt of the suit. Is the whole district responsible for an outrageous policy (that's presumably not very well known, or people would've been making a lot of noise about this before it reached this point)?
Still, it's an interesting issue - how *do* we handle things when the people we elect (or those they hire/appoint), on behalf of us, do something bloody stupid like this? Huge settlements/fines might be fine for businesses because they're external to society (in that if they fall over because of improprieties it's no big deal, usually), but we can't really fine ourselves, as that's just moving our money around.
It's not purely out of malice, it's because it's in the public interest. It's acceptable here.
Journalists are not magical pure sources of good; they never were. That doesn't meant that we're better off without them and all the prying they can do. To the contrary - I wish they did more prying.
The thing is, it'd take someone with both considerable energy and a good name to manage it - when a product is declared dead, pretenders might pop up like weeds but, just like the French/Iranian/Prussian/Russian/Persian royal family, nobody takes them seriously.
I don't think it's exactly backwards - it's not a perfect match of principles, but they oppose the intervention of the state (through democratic means) into the workings of business, preferring business generally be free. I wouldn't call neocons libertarian though - libertarians are principlists on the matter while neocons are reasonably pragmatic.
I acknowledge that the origins of neoconservativism involve many socialists who gave up on socialism itself. Calling it fundamentally marxist is a bit glib though, as they discarded marxist theory in its entirety and have nothing more than that element in common with some marxist thought (which is in fact in common with many political philosophies from all over the map). In other words, don't blame us (socialists) for the neocons:)
American political terminology has shifted over the years - in the early days of the US, the conservatives (Federalists) were capitalism-and-democracy-skeptic aristocrats aiming to preserve a traditional, well-ordered society given the opportunity of the revolution, and the european-term-liberals (Democratic Republicans) were relatively pro-market radical-democracy atraditionalists aiming to use the revolution to create an entirely new society free of european traditions. It was a very different political landscape, and there were many shifts between then and now - no political party today (from libertarians to socialists, democrats to republicans) can rightly claim any participants in the "first party system" (or the "second party system") as being theirs - positions have aligned very differently.
The neoconservatives have been fairly clear in their philosophical writings as to what they desire for America, and religion is not the centerpiece of any of it. A fair number of neocons are also openly atheist. They may be willing to entertain coalition with anyone who will help them meet their goals, but they're a distinct political tradition and such alliances will only be pragmatic, not principled.
I think it's ok not to like neocons (I don't like them), but we should try to have as clear a perspective as possible on who the players are and what they want. Demonising just leads to misunderstanding.
That sums it up nicely. It's possible to make a lot of very different-but-coherent political philosophies, these being quite numerous.
One point of disagreement - I don't think you characterise the neocons correctly. Neocons are not particularly committed to religion in government. They may have been in coalitions with theocratic wings of the republicans, but these have generally been uneasy ones. Neocons are better defined as what the europeans call liberal - strong markets, weak democracy, and the belief that the strong-markets/weak-democracy model broadly betters the world, is desired by the world, and should be aggressively brought to the world.
Postmodernists are only one strand of liberals, just as theocrats are only one strand of conservatives. You'd be mistaken to say that they're either leading the coalition or defining it, and you are mistaken in your later paragraphs when you suggest that they are "the liberals" or that all environmentalists are the "we should live naked in the woods" sort.
I'm not a democrat, but I'm a liberal (one committed to environmental causes), and I'd love to see more funds go to interesting NASA projects (and DARPA projects, for that matter). I don't actually care that the humans in space are American, but i do think we have the funds and infrastructure to contribute meaningfully towards the scientific and engineering challenges of the day.
If you'd be willing to demonise less, you might find it easier to help people (even people very different from you, presumably including me) cooperate with you on topics of mutual interest.
No, you can't act as you like. That's not what freedom of religion is about. It's "hands off my mind", not "don't tell me what to do".
You're simply wrong about Gore. The academic consensus is very strong. Popular media might not portray it very reliably or well, but it's there. Academia is the most reliable institution for determining truth that we have. What it says might not be aimed at countering a spirited opposition by industry, the faithful, or the politically inspired, but that does not change things. You might "make up your own mind", but if you don't study the field, you might as well be making stuff up - without relevant background, we can't understand the fields. I have limited expertese in a few fields, reasonable understanding of several more, and much more limited understanding of other fields. You'd be a fool to listen to me speculate on physics - no matter how much I tried to make sense (or how good I might sound if I worked on it), I simply lack the background to be authoritative. It's too easy for vested interests to hire talking heads to dispute the experts.
False. You have had plenty of opportunity to say what gives government this right, and you've failed to even try. (And simply saying "society gives them that right" is, of course, not a serious argument, because that would justify all manner of atrocities, including the Holocaust.)
Unfortunately, you've failed by Godwin's Law here, and you shamefully lose the discussion (with no demerit to your actual position). Pity. I was enjoying the back-and-forth, and now I don't even need to read the rest of your argument. Oh well. Be more careful next time.
No I don't - what freedom of religion meant, in the context of the settlers, was an escape from the old European idea that the faith of the people followed that of their ruler. In those times, particularly in the microstates of the Holy Roman Empire (proto-Germany), a new ruler meant everybody converted. Rival christian (and jewish, and muslim) faiths were actively squashed. Freedom of religion is an end to that. It's not a "I get to live as I please so long as I can religiously justify it", it's a "I can believe as I like".
And no, Gore's efforts are not "utterly flawed". They're popularisations of science, and as such have some distortions, some of them inherent to translating things so that everyone can understand them (I'm an academe, and I lack the background to understand, without spending a lot of time, most of the publications in the disciplines I see all the time - non-academes have an even tougher time), some of them because his scientific advice was presumably inaccurate. Still, Gore's warnings are about as good as we could hope for, and they're quite necessary to keep the biosphere alive. It's surprising that it's become such a political issue (I guess Libertarians and Industrialists would like to live in a world without consequences though, so..). Global warming is academically-noncontroversial fact, and we know that human activity contributed significantly to it. Active propoganda efforts in popular media may say otherwise, but the researchers have a very strong consensus otherwise. Betting between popular media with financial vested interests and researchers, one is generally a fool to go with the former.
And no, the state as a representation of society has the right and duty to promote the public good for all citizens in its borders. Mandatory universal public education is reasonable. I claim society and the child both have the right, and the parent does not have the right to deprive that. Parental rights are not absolute - the state and the child have rights as well. People live in society, they are not islands, and we all have various claims on each other. Law and society structure those claims, but they will never boil down to either parents or society in general having exclusive control over children.
Most parents are not capable of providing a good education for their child. They lack the expertise, and the failings of their education will be passed on to their kid. How many people do you know that know all of the following well enough to teach it: Calculus, Genetics, Biology, Statistics, Algebra, Trig, History, Art, Sociology, Sex Ed, Law, Physics, etc etc. I would expect any high school teacher (and ideally middle school and less) to do very well on their GREs if they took them at any point in their career. I learned all these topics and more in school from people who specialised in teaching them. My parents were very bright, but I doubt they could've done a passable job without it becoming a fulltime job. There's a reason even the fulltime teachers specialise.
Improving public education is important, but withdrawing from it should not be permitted. If you disagree, so what? You don't get to force your opinion on your kids or on society. (see? Those words are not really an argument, they're just a way to assert what you believe for people who already agree with you. I can do it too)
Governments are more general than the bits of propoganda that are part of the culture of each individual one. This being philosophy, most Americans don't particularly understand these distinction anyhow.
I don't deny freedom of religion. People can believe whatever weird shit they like, they just don't get to have society's institutions recognise or care about their beliefs.
Al Gore's message, while it does not mesh perfectly with the sciences, is about as on-target as one might hope for a politician trying to make a difference in the world. The broad terms of that debate are indeed over (the scientific community has had a strong consensus for a very long time, the data is overwhelming, and the areas of study have moved on to the specifics). The "evolution is a big hoax" folk, by contrast, are on the same ground as the flat earth folk. I realise you might know a few of them and want to spare their feelings, but we can still like them as people while understanding them to have a few beliefs that are ridiculous.
And no, the state, as a representative of society, has the right to decide what a good education is. A good education connects the solid conclusions from the societal institutions of science with the public, alongside teaching civics, the arts, maths, and various other topics. While in theory, a parent who really understands their basic topics could teach their child the early versions of these fields, thise parents are in fact rare, and instead it's often used by nutters who want to pass on some of their ignorance to their kids and bigots who don't want their kids mixing with those of different races.
The child's interests are more important - they should be exposed to the current state of the fields taught and get the broader set of ideas that teachers and other kids provide. Parents have plenty of time to inculturate their kids, and so if they're ignorant or racist as part of their faith/culture the kids will be exposed to both sets of ideas and rub shoulders with those of other races. Kids are broadly ill-served with homeschooling because they have a more narrow inculturation.
I recognise that my philosophy is not exactly the basis for our legal system or culture here, but neither is yours - there is naturally a lot more "should" than "is" in these discussions.
No, it's job is to protect society. Protect it, advance its interests, etc. Rights are only part of the picture, and they're the smaller part.
Denying medical treatment for religious reasons is no different than denying it because of whim. It's abuse, and it merits full sanction of the law.
There's no such thing as spiritual damage. I'm sure you're not one of the crazy sort we're talking about, prone to denying shoah or evolution, believing in a flat earth, or anything like that. While we might regret hurting the feelings of people like that, the state should not give them special privilege because of their beliefs - having a uniform legal code means relying on a secular notion of truth - any mystical additions that people might have must simply be ignored by the state when constructing either the justice system or advancing the public good, hence the reason we consider equivalent the parent who doesn't get medical treatment for their child because they don't feel like it and the parent who doesn't because they're crazy (not all religious folk are nutjobs, of course, just typically your "evolution is a big hoax" sorts).
Homeschooling is not intrinsically abuse, true. I brought up abuse to suggest that a parents rights approach cannot be absolute. It *can* amount to neglect though if the parent intentionally hampers their child's mental development (which some parents do, for religious reasons). It's not easy to draw the line in these cases (and I don't envy the job of social workers in needing to deal with these tricky situations), but I think a mandatory universal education is often best for the child if the parent is sufficiently nuts. If you like, you could think of that as my asserting that the rights of the child to a good education are more important than any rights claims the parents might lay to manage their child's life.
You are the parent, and the state is the state. Its job is to protect society. When parents abuse their kids, the kids are taken away, regardless of how much the parents think they have a right to do it. The rights of the kids have to be protected, and they're more important than the rights of the parent.
It is, of course, not quite analogous to say that things that are properly child abuse (e.g. when a Christian Scientist or Scientologist denies medical treatment to their kids because of their stupid beliefs) are analogous to this. However, parental rights are not absolute, the welfare of the child can override them in some circumstances, and this might be a case(less critical but still important) where we should say that it does.
Who the hell are YOU -- or any parents -- to deprive the children of their right to a standard education?
See, with that phrasing, it's easy to turn it around. The issue here is precisely whether the parental interest in making decisions for the family or the state interest in providing a standard education and inculturation for its people is more important.
We can do it on an individual level, but we can't do it on other levels - IP police might not manage to catch every individual, but if the Mozilla foundation were to itself violate patent/copyright protections, it would lose. I agree with you on what should happen in the long run, but we shouldn't expect Mozilla to die for our beliefs. They have to fight this on another level, by simply steering away frm proprietary codecs when possible.
Slashdot Mirror
People, organisations, religions, philosophies, all of these should be used to the idea that they can be insulted by others without being able to stop them.
I have a Cintiq display, and use it to play flash games - the lack of mouseover support is no big deal. If your application *only* works with traditional mice, then it's simply limited on those platforms, regardless of language. Flash has nothing to do with it, it's just a pointer difference for some of your users.
Ahh, I misread you. Oops.
The relevance is that you can't assume that blame falls on the parents or students for not reading the contract or that such a contract, if it mentions stuff like this, immunises the district from lawsuits.
There are many things that people cannot sign away by contract. This is a very important and good thing.
I would hope whomever is responsible for the policy (and for supporting it) gets the brunt of the suit. Is the whole district responsible for an outrageous policy (that's presumably not very well known, or people would've been making a lot of noise about this before it reached this point)?
Still, it's an interesting issue - how *do* we handle things when the people we elect (or those they hire/appoint), on behalf of us, do something bloody stupid like this? Huge settlements/fines might be fine for businesses because they're external to society (in that if they fall over because of improprieties it's no big deal, usually), but we can't really fine ourselves, as that's just moving our money around.
It's not purely out of malice, it's because it's in the public interest. It's acceptable here.
Journalists are not magical pure sources of good; they never were. That doesn't meant that we're better off without them and all the prying they can do. To the contrary - I wish they did more prying.
Slashdot is not your therapist. If it were, you'd probably have more problems after you left.
Their day job.
The thing is, it'd take someone with both considerable energy and a good name to manage it - when a product is declared dead, pretenders might pop up like weeds but, just like the French/Iranian/Prussian/Russian/Persian royal family, nobody takes them seriously.
I don't think it's exactly backwards - it's not a perfect match of principles, but they oppose the intervention of the state (through democratic means) into the workings of business, preferring business generally be free. I wouldn't call neocons libertarian though - libertarians are principlists on the matter while neocons are reasonably pragmatic.
I acknowledge that the origins of neoconservativism involve many socialists who gave up on socialism itself. Calling it fundamentally marxist is a bit glib though, as they discarded marxist theory in its entirety and have nothing more than that element in common with some marxist thought (which is in fact in common with many political philosophies from all over the map). In other words, don't blame us (socialists) for the neocons :)
American political terminology has shifted over the years - in the early days of the US, the conservatives (Federalists) were capitalism-and-democracy-skeptic aristocrats aiming to preserve a traditional, well-ordered society given the opportunity of the revolution, and the european-term-liberals (Democratic Republicans) were relatively pro-market radical-democracy atraditionalists aiming to use the revolution to create an entirely new society free of european traditions. It was a very different political landscape, and there were many shifts between then and now - no political party today (from libertarians to socialists, democrats to republicans) can rightly claim any participants in the "first party system" (or the "second party system") as being theirs - positions have aligned very differently.
The neoconservatives have been fairly clear in their philosophical writings as to what they desire for America, and religion is not the centerpiece of any of it. A fair number of neocons are also openly atheist. They may be willing to entertain coalition with anyone who will help them meet their goals, but they're a distinct political tradition and such alliances will only be pragmatic, not principled.
I think it's ok not to like neocons (I don't like them), but we should try to have as clear a perspective as possible on who the players are and what they want. Demonising just leads to misunderstanding.
That sums it up nicely. It's possible to make a lot of very different-but-coherent political philosophies, these being quite numerous.
One point of disagreement - I don't think you characterise the neocons correctly. Neocons are not particularly committed to religion in government. They may have been in coalitions with theocratic wings of the republicans, but these have generally been uneasy ones. Neocons are better defined as what the europeans call liberal - strong markets, weak democracy, and the belief that the strong-markets/weak-democracy model broadly betters the world, is desired by the world, and should be aggressively brought to the world.
Postmodernists are only one strand of liberals, just as theocrats are only one strand of conservatives. You'd be mistaken to say that they're either leading the coalition or defining it, and you are mistaken in your later paragraphs when you suggest that they are "the liberals" or that all environmentalists are the "we should live naked in the woods" sort.
I'm not a democrat, but I'm a liberal (one committed to environmental causes), and I'd love to see more funds go to interesting NASA projects (and DARPA projects, for that matter). I don't actually care that the humans in space are American, but i do think we have the funds and infrastructure to contribute meaningfully towards the scientific and engineering challenges of the day.
If you'd be willing to demonise less, you might find it easier to help people (even people very different from you, presumably including me) cooperate with you on topics of mutual interest.
No, you can't act as you like. That's not what freedom of religion is about. It's "hands off my mind", not "don't tell me what to do".
You're simply wrong about Gore. The academic consensus is very strong. Popular media might not portray it very reliably or well, but it's there. Academia is the most reliable institution for determining truth that we have. What it says might not be aimed at countering a spirited opposition by industry, the faithful, or the politically inspired, but that does not change things. You might "make up your own mind", but if you don't study the field, you might as well be making stuff up - without relevant background, we can't understand the fields. I have limited expertese in a few fields, reasonable understanding of several more, and much more limited understanding of other fields. You'd be a fool to listen to me speculate on physics - no matter how much I tried to make sense (or how good I might sound if I worked on it), I simply lack the background to be authoritative. It's too easy for vested interests to hire talking heads to dispute the experts.
False. You have had plenty of opportunity to say what gives government this right, and you've failed to even try. (And simply saying "society gives them that right" is, of course, not a serious argument, because that would justify all manner of atrocities, including the Holocaust.)
Unfortunately, you've failed by Godwin's Law here, and you shamefully lose the discussion (with no demerit to your actual position). Pity. I was enjoying the back-and-forth, and now I don't even need to read the rest of your argument. Oh well. Be more careful next time.
No I don't - what freedom of religion meant, in the context of the settlers, was an escape from the old European idea that the faith of the people followed that of their ruler. In those times, particularly in the microstates of the Holy Roman Empire (proto-Germany), a new ruler meant everybody converted. Rival christian (and jewish, and muslim) faiths were actively squashed. Freedom of religion is an end to that. It's not a "I get to live as I please so long as I can religiously justify it", it's a "I can believe as I like".
And no, Gore's efforts are not "utterly flawed". They're popularisations of science, and as such have some distortions, some of them inherent to translating things so that everyone can understand them (I'm an academe, and I lack the background to understand, without spending a lot of time, most of the publications in the disciplines I see all the time - non-academes have an even tougher time), some of them because his scientific advice was presumably inaccurate. Still, Gore's warnings are about as good as we could hope for, and they're quite necessary to keep the biosphere alive. It's surprising that it's become such a political issue (I guess Libertarians and Industrialists would like to live in a world without consequences though, so ..). Global warming is academically-noncontroversial fact, and we know that human activity contributed significantly to it. Active propoganda efforts in popular media may say otherwise, but the researchers have a very strong consensus otherwise. Betting between popular media with financial vested interests and researchers, one is generally a fool to go with the former.
And no, the state as a representation of society has the right and duty to promote the public good for all citizens in its borders. Mandatory universal public education is reasonable. I claim society and the child both have the right, and the parent does not have the right to deprive that. Parental rights are not absolute - the state and the child have rights as well. People live in society, they are not islands, and we all have various claims on each other. Law and society structure those claims, but they will never boil down to either parents or society in general having exclusive control over children.
Most parents are not capable of providing a good education for their child. They lack the expertise, and the failings of their education will be passed on to their kid. How many people do you know that know all of the following well enough to teach it: Calculus, Genetics, Biology, Statistics, Algebra, Trig, History, Art, Sociology, Sex Ed, Law, Physics, etc etc. I would expect any high school teacher (and ideally middle school and less) to do very well on their GREs if they took them at any point in their career. I learned all these topics and more in school from people who specialised in teaching them. My parents were very bright, but I doubt they could've done a passable job without it becoming a fulltime job. There's a reason even the fulltime teachers specialise.
Improving public education is important, but withdrawing from it should not be permitted. If you disagree, so what? You don't get to force your opinion on your kids or on society. (see? Those words are not really an argument, they're just a way to assert what you believe for people who already agree with you. I can do it too)
Governments are more general than the bits of propoganda that are part of the culture of each individual one. This being philosophy, most Americans don't particularly understand these distinction anyhow.
I don't deny freedom of religion. People can believe whatever weird shit they like, they just don't get to have society's institutions recognise or care about their beliefs.
Al Gore's message, while it does not mesh perfectly with the sciences, is about as on-target as one might hope for a politician trying to make a difference in the world. The broad terms of that debate are indeed over (the scientific community has had a strong consensus for a very long time, the data is overwhelming, and the areas of study have moved on to the specifics). The "evolution is a big hoax" folk, by contrast, are on the same ground as the flat earth folk. I realise you might know a few of them and want to spare their feelings, but we can still like them as people while understanding them to have a few beliefs that are ridiculous.
And no, the state, as a representative of society, has the right to decide what a good education is. A good education connects the solid conclusions from the societal institutions of science with the public, alongside teaching civics, the arts, maths, and various other topics. While in theory, a parent who really understands their basic topics could teach their child the early versions of these fields, thise parents are in fact rare, and instead it's often used by nutters who want to pass on some of their ignorance to their kids and bigots who don't want their kids mixing with those of different races.
The child's interests are more important - they should be exposed to the current state of the fields taught and get the broader set of ideas that teachers and other kids provide. Parents have plenty of time to inculturate their kids, and so if they're ignorant or racist as part of their faith/culture the kids will be exposed to both sets of ideas and rub shoulders with those of other races. Kids are broadly ill-served with homeschooling because they have a more narrow inculturation.
I recognise that my philosophy is not exactly the basis for our legal system or culture here, but neither is yours - there is naturally a lot more "should" than "is" in these discussions.
No, it's job is to protect society. Protect it, advance its interests, etc. Rights are only part of the picture, and they're the smaller part.
Denying medical treatment for religious reasons is no different than denying it because of whim. It's abuse, and it merits full sanction of the law.
There's no such thing as spiritual damage. I'm sure you're not one of the crazy sort we're talking about, prone to denying shoah or evolution, believing in a flat earth, or anything like that. While we might regret hurting the feelings of people like that, the state should not give them special privilege because of their beliefs - having a uniform legal code means relying on a secular notion of truth - any mystical additions that people might have must simply be ignored by the state when constructing either the justice system or advancing the public good, hence the reason we consider equivalent the parent who doesn't get medical treatment for their child because they don't feel like it and the parent who doesn't because they're crazy (not all religious folk are nutjobs, of course, just typically your "evolution is a big hoax" sorts).
Homeschooling is not intrinsically abuse, true. I brought up abuse to suggest that a parents rights approach cannot be absolute. It *can* amount to neglect though if the parent intentionally hampers their child's mental development (which some parents do, for religious reasons). It's not easy to draw the line in these cases (and I don't envy the job of social workers in needing to deal with these tricky situations), but I think a mandatory universal education is often best for the child if the parent is sufficiently nuts. If you like, you could think of that as my asserting that the rights of the child to a good education are more important than any rights claims the parents might lay to manage their child's life.
You are the parent, and the state is the state. Its job is to protect society. When parents abuse their kids, the kids are taken away, regardless of how much the parents think they have a right to do it. The rights of the kids have to be protected, and they're more important than the rights of the parent.
It is, of course, not quite analogous to say that things that are properly child abuse (e.g. when a Christian Scientist or Scientologist denies medical treatment to their kids because of their stupid beliefs) are analogous to this. However, parental rights are not absolute, the welfare of the child can override them in some circumstances, and this might be a case(less critical but still important) where we should say that it does.
Who the hell are YOU -- or any parents -- to deprive the children of their right to a standard education?
See, with that phrasing, it's easy to turn it around. The issue here is precisely whether the parental interest in making decisions for the family or the state interest in providing a standard education and inculturation for its people is more important.
We can do it on an individual level, but we can't do it on other levels - IP police might not manage to catch every individual, but if the Mozilla foundation were to itself violate patent/copyright protections, it would lose. I agree with you on what should happen in the long run, but we shouldn't expect Mozilla to die for our beliefs. They have to fight this on another level, by simply steering away frm proprietary codecs when possible.
It's not like the industry is going to suddenly shift formats in five minutes and Firefox can only make a new release every five years.
I don't think it's a good solution if it leaves Linux users out.
Pity patenting obvious things is their policy. Even I have prior art on this one.
Behold: economies of scale.