Parent's definition of bigotry is perfectly correct. What you're describing is inductive reasoning, in which the reasoner attempts to establish the truth of a general rule by looking at lots of particular instances. For example: From the experience of meeting many, many, many stupid, bigoted, hypocritical and lying Christians -- and plenty of other so-called Christians who may not be personally bigoted or stupid, but who realize their brethren are and yet have absolutely nothing to say about it -- someone might conclude that all Christians are intolerant and stupid liars.
Of course, this doesn't absolutely falsify the possibility that there are, somewhere on the surface of this planet, professed Christians who actually follow Christ's teachings. But as an heuristic for making sense of the contemporary American political scene, it's not half-bad.
If they're going corporate, they've lost the thread:
"No sense being a grifter if it's just like being a citizen." -- Paul Newman, playing confidence man Henry Gondorf in "The Sting".
You start out by saying:
Well, I have evidence for the existence of God that's probably about on par with aliens that we haven't seen yet... But you end the paragraph by saying:
Granted, it doesn't prove that God exists, but it does provide that data point that we can use to extrapolate the possibility of the existence of God. Forgive me, but I thought we were going to get a real data point first, and then the extrapolation. I fail to see how an inference, from the existence of simulation programming, that an entity may exist that now stands in relation to this universe just as a simulation programmer would to his program, is somehow just as strong on evidentiary grounds as the inference, from the existence of hundreds of thousands of living species on the planet Earth, with literally trillions of members, that life may exist on other planets.
That's reasoning by *analogy*, not reasoning from *evidence*.
You are citing an *analogy* between other complex created things (WOW, Spore; hey, why don't you throw in pocket watches!) and human life as though the analogy itself were evidence demonstrating that human life was created. Your analogy proves no such thing (as do all analogies).
We have *evidence* that life exists on this planet. We *infer* from that (not analogize from it) that there may be life on other planets. And we are looking for evidence that it does (and no, nobody has yet proved that it does).
I don't mind people considering the religion weird, but I do wish they'd be a bit better informed about it. Hey, cool. And Wikileaks is really just helping you achieve that swell wish of yours, right?
Oh yes, I agree. After we off them, let's be sure to make soap out of the fat in their bodies, too. Humans have no existence beyond their economic significance, anyway, so we wouldn't want all that butchered flesh to be completely wasted, right?
I'm one of those atheistic, left-wing nutjobs who also get mocked on this site. Just out of fellow feeling for another (presumably) US citizen with strong opinions, I would like not to mock you further. But all I can say is: WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN? This is the administration that religious folks like you wanted and voted for in overwhelming numbers back in 1999 -- and this is nothing like the most outrageous or transparently corrupt attack on the Constitution to come out of this regime in the last 8 years. Where were you when the horrendous "Patriot Act" was passed? Were you in the streets demonstrating when they were arresting and detaining US citizens, on US soil, without charge or counsel, for years? Have we heard from you yet on John Yoo's ridiculous, cowardly, criminal, Mafia-consigliere-style arguments excusing torture? How about the 1,000+ Bush signing statements, which have de facto constituted him as a shadow legislature and judiciary?
Sorry if this seems trollish, but brother, you owe me a lot more outrage than this.
Of course it is (again, trivially) true that all human institutions are reflections of human characteristics. What matters for the human impact of those human characteristics is the force-multiplier that the form of institution provides. Individual Huns were little nomads whose particular species of bloody-minded clannishness was not particularly unique or scary. But when pushed out of their grounds by the economics of famine and overpopulation, and organized as shock cavalry under the leadership of Attila, they committed mass murders in Europe on a scale that only the 20th century could equal.
I honestly have no idea what you mean about corporations offering major advantages in terms of control vs. non-corporate forms of organization. Major corporations can get just as out of control as a criminal gang. Jeremy Scahill has already documented how Blackwater Int uses the corporate veil and not-so-secret political connections to operate essentially outside the law. No organ of law-enforcement or other government institution seems able or willing to take them on; after all, they are a legitimate corporation! Are you going to suggest that a billion-dollar private army, operating in the United States and controllable by no authority other than its mostly secret board of directors, is doing no more damage to the nation than, say, some gang of SOF-reading vets robbing a few banks in Idaho? David Korten and many, many others -- from Ralph Nader to Naomi Klein -- have documented how the Supreme Court's Buckley decision, giving corporations the same privileges as individuals in making political contributions, has had enormous deleterious impacts on American democracy for over 30 years. Every attempt to pass legislation to control this influence has ended up doing essentially nothing. Why? Do you really doubt for even a moment that this lack of success has any other cause than the influence of corporate money?
My friend, what's missing from your discussion (and perhaps your thinking) in this area is any consideration of the public interest. I consider that an essential entity. It's the very foundation of my country. It was the first item on the "To Do" list for the Framers of the US Constitution, which is all about defining the public interest, and separating activities supporting that interest (like the press) from all the many legitimate private interests (like other forms of commerce) the constitution also protects.
Please don't mistake me: I don't hate corporations. They represent human art and industry, as well as evil and greed, and as you say, create wealth. There are many good ones who take the public interest seriously and do their bit to promote it in addition to making a profit (I believe I work for one). What I despise, and fear, are contemporary politicians, and the media reporting on them, who seem to take as an article of faith that there actually is no such thing as the public interest -- only competing private interests, which can be organized or not, and supported or not. Your comments above suggest that you (I don't say that you actually do) think the same way. If so, then I really am very surprised indeed, and would invite you to consider more seriously, or at all, the point I'm making. Because if that really is your opinion, and lots of other Americans think the same way, then I'm afraid that a lot more than just the newspaper is dying.
Sorry, but I think that's only trivially true. I don't think the damage done by, say, Blackwater International, really equates to anything Proctor & Gamble have ever been accused of.
Interesting: 3. Smart take, but that sure doesn't sound like a newspaper to me. That sounds like AP/Reuters/AFP (which would also make it nothing new). I notice all the aggregators (at Yahoo/Google level) already offer those as feeds, and the blogs link to them with abandon. So I guess that's already happened, too.
4. I think you beg my question here, when you actually answered it in your (2) reply: Trust, with news orgs as with any other big business, is all about brand building and brand protection. Which, frankly, I find pretty scary. The institution of "the press" has an explicit constitutional role in the US democracy. Yet, on your take, the basis of trust in that institution is explicitly a form of corporate value that bears no real relation to constitutional principles.
I suppose I sound like a nervous nellie, since Franklin and Adams and the rest intended the press to remain in private hands. But more and more, I seem to find myself living in the world of Bill Gibson's "Count Zero", where corporatism is really the only ideology and the nation/state, and with it any thought of government being constituted to serve some notion of the public welfare, have withered away completely.
All this assumes that the US population as a whole were still able to think and had working bullshit detectors. If that were true, idiots like Tim Russert, Chris Mathews, Joe Klein, Bill Kristol, Britt Hume, and Charles Krauthammer -- all of whom have demonstrated obscene levels of bias and been consistently wrong about practically EVERYTHING for almost a decade -- would be laughed off the stage.
Good points all, and I don't necessarily disagree with any of them. But: 1. Let's not forget that what we're talking about here is a kind of enterprise that depends on certain economies of scale. You cannot produce a real newspaper without running a geographically dispersed network of trained professionals. Doing that is very expensive, so you must have a mass of customers to support it. Newspapers are therefore essentially a form of mass media, and simply will not work as a business proposition once that mass audience is sufficiently eroded. Yeah, Gibson's Law is true: Media, like any other kind of technology, never really die. But many technologies (from the model T to the celluloid collar) are of craft or historical interest only once their rationale for mass production dies. 2. I agree that there will continue to be demand for trustworthy information generated according to some professional standard, and that current blogosphereic media mostly don't meet that need for all the reasons you outline. But will that trusty info be packaged as something resembling the kind of newspapers we know today? With the business model eroded below a sustainable level, I really don't see how it can. 3. Looking at the evolution of American newspapers, I think we're much more likely to see an expansion of weblogs on the model of 1980s-era oil-industry newsletters, where one or more insiders who obviously know what's up are either writing (or working with pro editors and writers to write) the news in their area of expertise, for a small audience of near-insiders who are in a position to understand what's trustworthy and what's bull or speculation. But sooner or later, that raises questions of bias and trust. The more "mass" version of this will be a "Poor Richards Almanac" kind of publication, where Uncle Ben tells you all kinds of stuff, along with what he considers the news. None of this, however, addresses the need for trustworthy info. We know that a "Poor Dick's Alamanac", with Uncle Dick Cheney on the masthead, knows what's really going on in the Vice President's office. But would you actually trust such a publication to tell you the truth? 4. Which gets to the essential question: What the heck does it mean for a publication to have your trust? A lot of the contribution of amateur web media over the last 8 years has been to erode public trust in professional media. Rathergate and Media Matters for America are just two among dozens of examples of this (if you're like me, you can also point to Fox News Channel as an example of pro media eroding trust in pro media). Whether you believe any of them accurate or not, or think they have been a bane or beneficial, they represent lines of enterprise reporting with huge audiences in their own right. They're having a strong effect on the way many pros approach stories, and thus on what constitutes media "trust".
BTW: Thanks for a thoughtful, literate post on slashdot. I didn't think such a thing was still possible. Wish I had mod points to give you.
Precisely my issue as well. Believe it or don't, but there are plenty of *Democrats* out here who are terrified of what Hil or Obama might do to the country with the powers Bush, Cheney and Addison have arrogated to themselves. That we actually have to fear such a possibility is the true measure of the very deep damage this pack of vile thugs who claim they are Republicans have done to the nation.
Sorry, but a veto is a simple check on the power of congress, not oversight of its affairs and conduct. The oversight function goes a great deal farther than, for instance, overriding the executive's veto by a two-thirds majority, which is congress' *check* on -- not *oversight* of -- the executive. For instance, the executive has no inherent right to investigate the affairs and conduct of congress (although it can, under the function of law enforcement, investigate alleged criminal conduct on the part of individual congresspersons, which does not constitute oversight of *congress as a body*).
In short, the two are about as analogous as, say, your face and my ass. And as long as we're still prescribing for each other's conditions: Dictionaries. Very useful in helping you know what the fuck you're talking about. Find out about 'em.
Note that moto's mishmosh of received opinion from talk radio is +5 Insightful. Another example disproving the assumption that/. moderators are all leftists (or have IQs above 5).
THANK YOU for finally injecting a little INFORMATION into this stupid discussion. I'm getting so tired of/. "political" threads that never rise above the level of a Limbaugh-hosted fact-free reactionary phone-in session. BAH.
Which leaves your reason 2, which is closer to the truth. The real reason these idiots walked out are: 1. To make a stink about not passing the telecom immunity act the way the President wanted. 2. To spare themselves the popular heat of voting against the contempt of congress resolution. Had they done so, they're going to look awfully phony once Miers and Bolton testify and the Justice Department scandal blows up again.
That's a completely disingenous take on both issues in the congress, as well as the constitutional powers involved, and the Washington case: 1. In addition to separation of powers, the constitution confers on Congress both the authority and the *duty* to conduct oversight on the operations of the executive. The executive has no comparable duty with respect to Congress. The powers conferred on congress by the constitution includes otherwise-judicial powers, including service of subpoenas and the right of enforcement of said subpoenas. 2. In the Washington case, Congress was exercising that authority. Washington *did* comply by providing the papers requested to the Congressional body with authority to oversee his actions: the Senate. He did not stonewall congress on this. 3. Congress is now attempting to exercise this same authority with respect to allegations of political manipulation of the Justice Department. The executive has denied access not only to papers and documents, but gagged witnesses Harriet Meirs and Josh Bolton, telling them that they may not testify to congress in any form. This is completely outside the scope of executive privilege, and congress has allowed the executive to get away with this stonewalling for over a year. 4. Congress has (finally) gotten around to voting on a contempt of congress resolution, which is the first step to enforcing those subpoenas. We will indeed have a court test of this, and fairly soon -- but the idea that the courts are "unlikely" to support congress' privileges in this is pretty silly.
1. Dateline and TDS are exact equivalents because they're both *really* only about selling ad time. 2. All commercial TV is about hypnotizing people into watching ads, so all such programming is utterly worthless. 3. The only non-commercial media outlets are "welfare", so they're worthless and stupid too. 4. All of us out here are suckass tards because we bother to even discuss the relative merits of any of these features of our lives.
I'm honestly not trying to straw-man you. But, bottom line, is there *anything* you're not completely cynical about? I mean, it sounds like, to you, infants and disaster victims are all just obvious parasites trying to cage free goodies, right?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Parent's definition of bigotry is perfectly correct. What you're describing is inductive reasoning, in which the reasoner attempts to establish the truth of a general rule by looking at lots of particular instances. For example: From the experience of meeting many, many, many stupid, bigoted, hypocritical and lying Christians -- and plenty of other so-called Christians who may not be personally bigoted or stupid, but who realize their brethren are and yet have absolutely nothing to say about it -- someone might conclude that all Christians are intolerant and stupid liars. Of course, this doesn't absolutely falsify the possibility that there are, somewhere on the surface of this planet, professed Christians who actually follow Christ's teachings. But as an heuristic for making sense of the contemporary American political scene, it's not half-bad.
Same moron who modded you -1 offtopic, I guess.
If they're going corporate, they've lost the thread: "No sense being a grifter if it's just like being a citizen." -- Paul Newman, playing confidence man Henry Gondorf in "The Sting".
Unless you are inept, which, given that this is a corporate system, could be a plausible explanation here.
There, fixed that for you.
That's reasoning by *analogy*, not reasoning from *evidence*. You are citing an *analogy* between other complex created things (WOW, Spore; hey, why don't you throw in pocket watches!) and human life as though the analogy itself were evidence demonstrating that human life was created. Your analogy proves no such thing (as do all analogies). We have *evidence* that life exists on this planet. We *infer* from that (not analogize from it) that there may be life on other planets. And we are looking for evidence that it does (and no, nobody has yet proved that it does).
I don't mind people considering the religion weird, but I do wish they'd be a bit better informed about it.
Hey, cool. And Wikileaks is really just helping you achieve that swell wish of yours, right?
Oh yes, I agree. After we off them, let's be sure to make soap out of the fat in their bodies, too. Humans have no existence beyond their economic significance, anyway, so we wouldn't want all that butchered flesh to be completely wasted, right?
I'm one of those atheistic, left-wing nutjobs who also get mocked on this site. Just out of fellow feeling for another (presumably) US citizen with strong opinions, I would like not to mock you further. But all I can say is: WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN? This is the administration that religious folks like you wanted and voted for in overwhelming numbers back in 1999 -- and this is nothing like the most outrageous or transparently corrupt attack on the Constitution to come out of this regime in the last 8 years. Where were you when the horrendous "Patriot Act" was passed? Were you in the streets demonstrating when they were arresting and detaining US citizens, on US soil, without charge or counsel, for years? Have we heard from you yet on John Yoo's ridiculous, cowardly, criminal, Mafia-consigliere-style arguments excusing torture? How about the 1,000+ Bush signing statements, which have de facto constituted him as a shadow legislature and judiciary?
Sorry if this seems trollish, but brother, you owe me a lot more outrage than this.
Of course it is (again, trivially) true that all human institutions are reflections of human characteristics. What matters for the human impact of those human characteristics is the force-multiplier that the form of institution provides. Individual Huns were little nomads whose particular species of bloody-minded clannishness was not particularly unique or scary. But when pushed out of their grounds by the economics of famine and overpopulation, and organized as shock cavalry under the leadership of Attila, they committed mass murders in Europe on a scale that only the 20th century could equal.
I honestly have no idea what you mean about corporations offering major advantages in terms of control vs. non-corporate forms of organization. Major corporations can get just as out of control as a criminal gang. Jeremy Scahill has already documented how Blackwater Int uses the corporate veil and not-so-secret political connections to operate essentially outside the law. No organ of law-enforcement or other government institution seems able or willing to take them on; after all, they are a legitimate corporation! Are you going to suggest that a billion-dollar private army, operating in the United States and controllable by no authority other than its mostly secret board of directors, is doing no more damage to the nation than, say, some gang of SOF-reading vets robbing a few banks in Idaho? David Korten and many, many others -- from Ralph Nader to Naomi Klein -- have documented how the Supreme Court's Buckley decision, giving corporations the same privileges as individuals in making political contributions, has had enormous deleterious impacts on American democracy for over 30 years. Every attempt to pass legislation to control this influence has ended up doing essentially nothing. Why? Do you really doubt for even a moment that this lack of success has any other cause than the influence of corporate money?
My friend, what's missing from your discussion (and perhaps your thinking) in this area is any consideration of the public interest. I consider that an essential entity. It's the very foundation of my country. It was the first item on the "To Do" list for the Framers of the US Constitution, which is all about defining the public interest, and separating activities supporting that interest (like the press) from all the many legitimate private interests (like other forms of commerce) the constitution also protects.
Please don't mistake me: I don't hate corporations. They represent human art and industry, as well as evil and greed, and as you say, create wealth. There are many good ones who take the public interest seriously and do their bit to promote it in addition to making a profit (I believe I work for one). What I despise, and fear, are contemporary politicians, and the media reporting on them, who seem to take as an article of faith that there actually is no such thing as the public interest -- only competing private interests, which can be organized or not, and supported or not. Your comments above suggest that you (I don't say that you actually do) think the same way. If so, then I really am very surprised indeed, and would invite you to consider more seriously, or at all, the point I'm making. Because if that really is your opinion, and lots of other Americans think the same way, then I'm afraid that a lot more than just the newspaper is dying.
Sorry, but I think that's only trivially true. I don't think the damage done by, say, Blackwater International, really equates to anything Proctor & Gamble have ever been accused of.
Interesting:
3. Smart take, but that sure doesn't sound like a newspaper to me. That sounds like AP/Reuters/AFP (which would also make it nothing new). I notice all the aggregators (at Yahoo/Google level) already offer those as feeds, and the blogs link to them with abandon. So I guess that's already happened, too.
4. I think you beg my question here, when you actually answered it in your (2) reply: Trust, with news orgs as with any other big business, is all about brand building and brand protection. Which, frankly, I find pretty scary. The institution of "the press" has an explicit constitutional role in the US democracy. Yet, on your take, the basis of trust in that institution is explicitly a form of corporate value that bears no real relation to constitutional principles.
I suppose I sound like a nervous nellie, since Franklin and Adams and the rest intended the press to remain in private hands. But more and more, I seem to find myself living in the world of Bill Gibson's "Count Zero", where corporatism is really the only ideology and the nation/state, and with it any thought of government being constituted to serve some notion of the public welfare, have withered away completely.
All this assumes that the US population as a whole were still able to think and had working bullshit detectors. If that were true, idiots like Tim Russert, Chris Mathews, Joe Klein, Bill Kristol, Britt Hume, and Charles Krauthammer -- all of whom have demonstrated obscene levels of bias and been consistently wrong about practically EVERYTHING for almost a decade -- would be laughed off the stage.
Good points all, and I don't necessarily disagree with any of them. But:
1. Let's not forget that what we're talking about here is a kind of enterprise that depends on certain economies of scale. You cannot produce a real newspaper without running a geographically dispersed network of trained professionals. Doing that is very expensive, so you must have a mass of customers to support it. Newspapers are therefore essentially a form of mass media, and simply will not work as a business proposition once that mass audience is sufficiently eroded. Yeah, Gibson's Law is true: Media, like any other kind of technology, never really die. But many technologies (from the model T to the celluloid collar) are of craft or historical interest only once their rationale for mass production dies.
2. I agree that there will continue to be demand for trustworthy information generated according to some professional standard, and that current blogosphereic media mostly don't meet that need for all the reasons you outline. But will that trusty info be packaged as something resembling the kind of newspapers we know today? With the business model eroded below a sustainable level, I really don't see how it can.
3. Looking at the evolution of American newspapers, I think we're much more likely to see an expansion of weblogs on the model of 1980s-era oil-industry newsletters, where one or more insiders who obviously know what's up are either writing (or working with pro editors and writers to write) the news in their area of expertise, for a small audience of near-insiders who are in a position to understand what's trustworthy and what's bull or speculation. But sooner or later, that raises questions of bias and trust. The more "mass" version of this will be a "Poor Richards Almanac" kind of publication, where Uncle Ben tells you all kinds of stuff, along with what he considers the news. None of this, however, addresses the need for trustworthy info. We know that a "Poor Dick's Alamanac", with Uncle Dick Cheney on the masthead, knows what's really going on in the Vice President's office. But would you actually trust such a publication to tell you the truth?
4. Which gets to the essential question: What the heck does it mean for a publication to have your trust? A lot of the contribution of amateur web media over the last 8 years has been to erode public trust in professional media. Rathergate and Media Matters for America are just two among dozens of examples of this (if you're like me, you can also point to Fox News Channel as an example of pro media eroding trust in pro media). Whether you believe any of them accurate or not, or think they have been a bane or beneficial, they represent lines of enterprise reporting with huge audiences in their own right. They're having a strong effect on the way many pros approach stories, and thus on what constitutes media "trust".
BTW: Thanks for a thoughtful, literate post on slashdot. I didn't think such a thing was still possible. Wish I had mod points to give you.
It *must* be April 1.
Precisely my issue as well. Believe it or don't, but there are plenty of *Democrats* out here who are terrified of what Hil or Obama might do to the country with the powers Bush, Cheney and Addison have arrogated to themselves. That we actually have to fear such a possibility is the true measure of the very deep damage this pack of vile thugs who claim they are Republicans have done to the nation.
Sorry, but a veto is a simple check on the power of congress, not oversight of its affairs and conduct. The oversight function goes a great deal farther than, for instance, overriding the executive's veto by a two-thirds majority, which is congress' *check* on -- not *oversight* of -- the executive. For instance, the executive has no inherent right to investigate the affairs and conduct of congress (although it can, under the function of law enforcement, investigate alleged criminal conduct on the part of individual congresspersons, which does not constitute oversight of *congress as a body*).
In short, the two are about as analogous as, say, your face and my ass. And as long as we're still prescribing for each other's conditions: Dictionaries. Very useful in helping you know what the fuck you're talking about. Find out about 'em.
Note that moto's mishmosh of received opinion from talk radio is +5 Insightful. Another example disproving the assumption that /. moderators are all leftists (or have IQs above 5).
I remember when all you warty old farts were horny teens.
THANK YOU for finally injecting a little INFORMATION into this stupid discussion. I'm getting so tired of /. "political" threads that never rise above the level of a Limbaugh-hosted fact-free reactionary phone-in session. BAH.
If veto=oversight, then a police arrest=investigation. Not.
BTW: You really should do something about that cold. It's starting to lower your IQ.
Batman is, as usual, a completely biased right-wing idiot. FISA had almost nothing to do with the walkout yesterday. That there is such confusion about it on this site is just another demonstration of how really wonderful and effective the right wing are at obfuscating reality.
Ringdev, your reasons 1 and 3 are just plain wrong. Republicans didn't prevent the contempt issue from being "settled". Democrats had a quorum and passed the contempt of congress resolution yesterday.
Which leaves your reason 2, which is closer to the truth. The real reason these idiots walked out are:
1. To make a stink about not passing the telecom immunity act the way the President wanted.
2. To spare themselves the popular heat of voting against the contempt of congress resolution. Had they done so, they're going to look awfully phony once Miers and Bolton testify and the Justice Department scandal blows up again.
That's a completely disingenous take on both issues in the congress, as well as the constitutional powers involved, and the Washington case:
1. In addition to separation of powers, the constitution confers on Congress both the authority and the *duty* to conduct oversight on the operations of the executive. The executive has no comparable duty with respect to Congress. The powers conferred on congress by the constitution includes otherwise-judicial powers, including service of subpoenas and the right of enforcement of said subpoenas.
2. In the Washington case, Congress was exercising that authority. Washington *did* comply by providing the papers requested to the Congressional body with authority to oversee his actions: the Senate. He did not stonewall congress on this.
3. Congress is now attempting to exercise this same authority with respect to allegations of political manipulation of the Justice Department. The executive has denied access not only to papers and documents, but gagged witnesses Harriet Meirs and Josh Bolton, telling them that they may not testify to congress in any form. This is completely outside the scope of executive privilege, and congress has allowed the executive to get away with this stonewalling for over a year.
4. Congress has (finally) gotten around to voting on a contempt of congress resolution, which is the first step to enforcing those subpoenas. We will indeed have a court test of this, and fairly soon -- but the idea that the courts are "unlikely" to support congress' privileges in this is pretty silly.
Oh please, that old crap again.
Let me see if I have all of this right:
:-)
1. Dateline and TDS are exact equivalents because they're both *really* only about selling ad time.
2. All commercial TV is about hypnotizing people into watching ads, so all such programming is utterly worthless.
3. The only non-commercial media outlets are "welfare", so they're worthless and stupid too.
4. All of us out here are suckass tards because we bother to even discuss the relative merits of any of these features of our lives.
I'm honestly not trying to straw-man you. But, bottom line, is there *anything* you're not completely cynical about? I mean, it sounds like, to you, infants and disaster victims are all just obvious parasites trying to cage free goodies, right?