Hmm, didn't know that. Thanks for pointing that out. I keep my cache set at 0B all the time so I've never noticed the cache was still enabled when private browsing. (And I do encrypt swap.)
Since medical science was more primitive then, people probably didn't realize they had lung damage until they were experiencing noticeable symptoms like difficulty breathing, coughing, pneumonia, &c..
If multiple factories are polluting all in the same manner, and someone is suffering damage as a result of this pollution, they can sue all of the factories. The lawsuits were about injunctions, not collecting damages, so assigning specific, quantifiable, apportionable blame is less important than simply proving that any given factory is polluting, and therefore must be stopped.
Yes, and the fact that the government got away with outlawing child porn a few decades ago (1973 in the U.S., for example) has since been used as justification to outlaw photos and videos of animal cruelty ("crush videos"), photos of extreme violence and gore, and in some places like the U.K. now, things like consensual bondage/S&M pornography.
Any power we give to the government will ultimately be abused.
How about you tell me how possessing child pornography is a good thing that can be justified?
How about you tell me how this is justification for outlawing something?
How, exactly, does possessing child pornography not encourage child abuse? Why should it be legal to possess those images?
In other words, you are claiming that a piece of information is dangerous and thus should be outlawed: The excuse used by tyrants everywhere to justify attacks on freedom of expression.
The original intent of outlawing CP in 1973 was to go after the producers---the people who actually sexually assaulted children. It had nothing to do with legislating morality, criminalizing paraphilias, and so on. Over the next 20-30 years, though, the U.S. Government slowly expanded these laws to cover all manner of victimless crimes, like they do with everything else. And of course since so many people are so disgusted by CP and pedophilia that they either don't even notice this or don't care.
You cannot arrest someone for wanting to cause harm; everyone will want to harm another person at some point in their life.
Give it time. If you told someone fifty years ago that "possessing" an image or "intent to view" an image would ever be a crime, they would have laughed, too.
I cleared the browser cache and history and did everything I could to scrub every trace of those bytes from my machine.
Turn off your browser cache and history. Every browser nowadays has a "private" mode that temporarily disables these features, which you should always use when browsing any sort of sketchy sites. Tor is also useful to mask your IP.
Of the defendant in the case which sparked the ruling, though, reader concertina226 asks "Errr... just because he didn't download the pictures, how does this make it okay? He's still accessing child porn! "
Because "accessing" isn't the actual statutory offense, and "possessing" is? But never let facts get in the way of mindless moral panic, eh?
Did the government prosecute companies for putting pollutants into somebody's lungs, or did they prosecute for putting pollutants into the air? It's easier to show that a firm's pollutants left its own smokestacks than to show it entered someone's lungs.
The latter. Pollution was handled in civil court, as a "nuisance" claim. This would require that some individual claimed damages. It wouldn't have to be as direct as pollution going into someone's lungs---if there house was damaged by soot, their water polluted with chemicals, or whatever, that would be a sufficient tort. (Although I'm not sure why you think it's so difficult to show pollution entered someone's lungs---if they're breathing in the presence of the pollution, that the pollution entered their lungs is an obvious conclusion.)
I more concerned about the physics of pollution than noncoercion.
To the point where you support pointing guns at innocent people?
Back when the government allowed people to challenge polluters in court, how do you think they did it? I don't know the details myself, but there are obviously ways of doing this since this is how it used to be done.
Or are you just looking for ways of shooting down an alternative, noncoercive solution to the problem of pollution?
The Slashdot summary implies this is about interest rates on existing loans. It's not:
The Democratic bill would keep interest rates for subsidized Stafford loans at 3.4 percent for an additional year, rather than doubling automatically for new loans starting July 1. It would have no impact on current loans.
So the failure of this bill will cause interest rates on new loans to jump to 6.8%. Increased costs will decrease demand for these loans, and thus less people will get sucked into the indentured servitude that is the student loan system. This is a good thing.
Keep the state out of science? that makes no sense. Have you been paying attention?
Why? Because some people believe doom and damnation is coming if we don't do something? Devout religionists assert that belief in their religion is the difference between damnation and salvation, too. So the State should get back involved in making sure people's souls are saved?
Of course you make regulations to limit that. What the hell else do you do? AS has been proven, the market won't fix it.
Really. Read this article on free-market solutions to water and air pollution. Here's the pertinent section:
[T]he American courts, during the late -- and as far back as the early 19th century made the deliberate decision to allow property rights to be violated by industrial smoke. To do so, the courts had to -- and did -- systematically change and weaken the defenses of property right embedded in Anglo-Saxon common law. Before the mid and late 19th century, any injurious air pollution was considered a tort, a nuisance against which the victim could sue for damages and against which he could take out an injunction to cease and desist from any further invasion of his property rights. But during the 19th century, the courts systematically altered the law of negligence and the law of nuisance to permit any air pollution which was not unusually greater than any similar manufacturing firm, one that was not more extensive than the customary practice of fellow polluters.
The article goes on to provide a few examples of specific cases, including one that eliminated the ability of collective victims (e.g., residents of an entire city) to use the common-law class-action process to enjoin polluters.
Does that sound like market failure to you? Or does it sound like the government itself caused the problem we now face, by passing laws and judgments giving immunity to polluters decades ago, and now the government wants to solve this problem---of its own making---by doing the only thing it knows how, passing more laws and regulations?
When you argument is to make lies about the science You Are Wrong. its time to stop and change your position because You Are Wrong.
The "argument" here isn't on the science---it's what the government is trying to justify doing to people by using the science. When a person is trying to defend themselves against coercion, it's perfectly natural that they might resort to lying. If a victim of an inchoate robbery is able to ward off the thief by lying to him, don't you think that's a perfectly moral course of action?
If a comet was going to hit the earth in 10 years, would you lie about it because it will cost tax money to divert?
One, why are you so sure it would cost tax money to divert?
Two, this question isn't an analogy to climate change. A more accurate question would be along the lines of "If a comet had a one in three chance of hitting the Earth, and then those odds were reduced to one in 1,000 only after comet-impact advocates had spent decades hyping the threat..." Climate change may be true; I'm not disputing that. But its ultimate effects are far from certain, and even some of its own proponents are now admitting the certain disasters they were predicting are overblown.
Would I lie about it? No. I try to get people to concentrate on the crux of the issue: The immorality of thieving from people to support issues others feel are important. But if some people want to defend themselves against that theft using other tactics, such as lying, that's their business.
So long as the politicians keep trying to use climate change theory to shove new taxes, regulations, and laws down people's throats, people are going to defend themselves by whatever means they can, including trying to discredit the science in the first place.
Keep the state out of science, just like we learned to do with religion centuries ago, and people will stop trying to corrupt science.
Most American politics is about distraction. If the Republicans actually approached the issue by highlighting the ethical question here, some clever people might broaden that ethical question to other issues that would make the Republicans downright uncomfortable.
So either it's never correct to initiate violence, or it's always correct.
Okay, so when is it okay to initiate violence? And what's your justification for doing so?
Again, the fact that one can exercise some control over one's body does not mean that one has total control over it. Another false dichotomy.
You either control yourself or you don't. If you don't control yourself completely, then you don't at all---whatever "control" you think you have over yourself is merely at the whim of whoever else controls you. (In other words, any "rights" you have in a statist society is at the government's whim.)
Rothbard wrote about how to deal with pollution. The pertinent paragraph:
But in the case of air pollution we are dealing not so much with private property in the air as with protecting private property in one's lungs, fields, and orchards. The vital fact about air pollution is that the polluter sends unwanted and unbidden pollutants -- from smoke to nuclear radiation to sulfur oxides -- through the air and into the lungs of innocent victims, as well as onto their material property. All such emanations which injure person or property constitute aggression against the private property of the victims. Air pollution, after all, is just as much aggression as committing arson against another's property or injuring him physically. Air pollution that injures others is aggression pure and simple.
All irrelevant. None of that changes the fact that the U.S. Government's actions, not the actions of Syria, are the cause of the games industry collapse in Syria.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, didn't know that. Thanks for pointing that out. I keep my cache set at 0B all the time so I've never noticed the cache was still enabled when private browsing. (And I do encrypt swap.)
Since medical science was more primitive then, people probably didn't realize they had lung damage until they were experiencing noticeable symptoms like difficulty breathing, coughing, pneumonia, &c..
If multiple factories are polluting all in the same manner, and someone is suffering damage as a result of this pollution, they can sue all of the factories. The lawsuits were about injunctions, not collecting damages, so assigning specific, quantifiable, apportionable blame is less important than simply proving that any given factory is polluting, and therefore must be stopped.
Killing ...the person trying to kill you.
Yes, and the fact that the government got away with outlawing child porn a few decades ago (1973 in the U.S., for example) has since been used as justification to outlaw photos and videos of animal cruelty ("crush videos"), photos of extreme violence and gore, and in some places like the U.K. now, things like consensual bondage/S&M pornography.
Any power we give to the government will ultimately be abused.
How about you tell me how this is justification for outlawing something?
In other words, you are claiming that a piece of information is dangerous and thus should be outlawed: The excuse used by tyrants everywhere to justify attacks on freedom of expression.
Wrong. Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234 (2002).
The original intent of outlawing CP in 1973 was to go after the producers---the people who actually sexually assaulted children. It had nothing to do with legislating morality, criminalizing paraphilias, and so on. Over the next 20-30 years, though, the U.S. Government slowly expanded these laws to cover all manner of victimless crimes, like they do with everything else. And of course since so many people are so disgusted by CP and pedophilia that they either don't even notice this or don't care.
Nothing. What's your point? That we should keep punishing innocent people so guilty people can't claim to be innocent?
Give it time. If you told someone fifty years ago that "possessing" an image or "intent to view" an image would ever be a crime, they would have laughed, too.
Turn off your browser cache and history. Every browser nowadays has a "private" mode that temporarily disables these features, which you should always use when browsing any sort of sketchy sites. Tor is also useful to mask your IP.
So we're lobotomizing people again, eh? Just like they tried to "cure" homosexuals and other perceived "deviants" back in the 1950s.
Because "accessing" isn't the actual statutory offense, and "possessing" is? But never let facts get in the way of mindless moral panic, eh?
Defend yourself?
The latter. Pollution was handled in civil court, as a "nuisance" claim. This would require that some individual claimed damages. It wouldn't have to be as direct as pollution going into someone's lungs---if there house was damaged by soot, their water polluted with chemicals, or whatever, that would be a sufficient tort. (Although I'm not sure why you think it's so difficult to show pollution entered someone's lungs---if they're breathing in the presence of the pollution, that the pollution entered their lungs is an obvious conclusion.)
To the point where you support pointing guns at innocent people?
Back when the government allowed people to challenge polluters in court, how do you think they did it? I don't know the details myself, but there are obviously ways of doing this since this is how it used to be done.
Or are you just looking for ways of shooting down an alternative, noncoercive solution to the problem of pollution?
Bring it on. Where I live, winter is six months long and there's only three-month growing season.
Really. So there are no crops grown in the tropics, eh?
The Slashdot summary implies this is about interest rates on existing loans. It's not:
So the failure of this bill will cause interest rates on new loans to jump to 6.8%. Increased costs will decrease demand for these loans, and thus less people will get sucked into the indentured servitude that is the student loan system. This is a good thing.
Bigots like him do run an awful lot of places.
Why? Because some people believe doom and damnation is coming if we don't do something? Devout religionists assert that belief in their religion is the difference between damnation and salvation, too. So the State should get back involved in making sure people's souls are saved?
Really. Read this article on free-market solutions to water and air pollution. Here's the pertinent section:
The article goes on to provide a few examples of specific cases, including one that eliminated the ability of collective victims (e.g., residents of an entire city) to use the common-law class-action process to enjoin polluters.
Does that sound like market failure to you? Or does it sound like the government itself caused the problem we now face, by passing laws and judgments giving immunity to polluters decades ago, and now the government wants to solve this problem---of its own making---by doing the only thing it knows how, passing more laws and regulations?
The "argument" here isn't on the science---it's what the government is trying to justify doing to people by using the science. When a person is trying to defend themselves against coercion, it's perfectly natural that they might resort to lying. If a victim of an inchoate robbery is able to ward off the thief by lying to him, don't you think that's a perfectly moral course of action?
One, why are you so sure it would cost tax money to divert?
Two, this question isn't an analogy to climate change. A more accurate question would be along the lines of "If a comet had a one in three chance of hitting the Earth, and then those odds were reduced to one in 1,000 only after comet-impact advocates had spent decades hyping the threat..." Climate change may be true; I'm not disputing that. But its ultimate effects are far from certain, and even some of its own proponents are now admitting the certain disasters they were predicting are overblown.
Would I lie about it? No. I try to get people to concentrate on the crux of the issue: The immorality of thieving from people to support issues others feel are important. But if some people want to defend themselves against that theft using other tactics, such as lying, that's their business.
Why is it so difficult to comprehend the idea that people are responsible for what they themselves do?
So long as the politicians keep trying to use climate change theory to shove new taxes, regulations, and laws down people's throats, people are going to defend themselves by whatever means they can, including trying to discredit the science in the first place.
Keep the state out of science, just like we learned to do with religion centuries ago, and people will stop trying to corrupt science.
Most American politics is about distraction. If the Republicans actually approached the issue by highlighting the ethical question here, some clever people might broaden that ethical question to other issues that would make the Republicans downright uncomfortable.
Okay, so when is it okay to initiate violence? And what's your justification for doing so?
You either control yourself or you don't. If you don't control yourself completely, then you don't at all---whatever "control" you think you have over yourself is merely at the whim of whoever else controls you. (In other words, any "rights" you have in a statist society is at the government's whim.)
Rothbard wrote about how to deal with pollution. The pertinent paragraph:
All irrelevant. None of that changes the fact that the U.S. Government's actions, not the actions of Syria, are the cause of the games industry collapse in Syria.