Sorry, but I can't help but wonder what makes someone believe in a such a large delusion (perhaps you don't, and are just debating for kicks). If I am running, and you are running, then we are both running. There is no mention of "how fast" or "how slow" one is running needed in that statement of fact. The fact that we are both running is not changed by either of those things.
Ugh. I can't believe this is expanding. It's getting past ridiculous. If you're running and a Jesse Owens in his prime is also running, then yes, you can certainly say that you're both running. Unless you happen to be a world-class athlete, to suggest that the running you are doing and the running he is doing are equivalent would be nonsense.
If a person is clinically dead, they have met the criteria for being dead. If the person was lucky enough to be revived, the fact that they were revived does not change the fact that they were clinically dead. There is no scaling to say "well, he was mostly dead". The person was either dead, or not dead.
But the fact that the dead/alive cutoff point is a moving target and the fact that even medical professionals can't always determine the state definitely (people still wake up in the morgue from time to time) suggests that it's not so cut and dried any more.
All of these things are called facts, and facts are not variable.
Neither is a perfect mathematical circle variable. Trouble is, we don't live in a Platonic universe. We live in one where, to the best of our knowledge (and even this isn't a cold, hard fact that we know for certain), we can never know both the exact position and speed of a particle. All of our facts are approximations and statistics. We have very high certainty for some of them, but the true "facts" you're talking about are unknown and perhaps unknowable (although whether they're truly unknowable may be unknowable).
As with above, the fact that I was 10 minutes late or 60 minutes late does not change the fact that I was late. Your punishment for being late will of course very on "why" you were late, and "how late you were", but the state of being late is never magically changed based on those criteria.
But you apply a quantity and units to how late you are. It's right there in your own examples. I don't understand how you can argue that one.
The "not possible" relates to your statement that one or both of those situations changes the state of guilt. The state of guilt can not be changed, any more than the state of lateness can changed, or the state of being dead can be changed. The state of guilt can not be "more" or "less", the state is either "yes" or "no". That state never changes. The only thing that _can_ change is the circumstances that lead us to be in the state.
But the part you quoted didn't say that one or both of those situations changes the state of guilt, it said that both situations represent guilt, but they are qualitatively different. I suppose it hinges on semantics again, whether it is the situation or the guilt that is qualitatively different. I personally hold that it's hold that it's both that are qualitatively different with one being dependent on the other, so your objection is actually consistent with your broader argument, and with your rigid to the point of near uselessness binary definition of "guilt". I still hold that, if the definition of guilt truly is binary, then it is a unique property for every instance and can't be compared at all. In other words, if your rigid definition is the only possible one, and person A is guilty of crime X and person B is guilty of crime Y, you can't really say that A and B are both guilty, you can only say that A is guilty of X and B is guilty of Y.
You start correctly, then get illogical. Are you late? The answer is "yes" or "no", not "well I'm fuzzy". I never asked "how late were you?", I asked "Are you la
But so it was a form of energy that still possesses mass in some way before, and a form of energy that still posesses mass after, so if it's counted in the reaction products, then there was never any mass lost to the reaction. If it's not counted in the reaction products, then there was mass lost.
I assume that the mass you're talking about is the mass inherent in the energy from the chemical bonds that are broken. To say that mass is decreased then should depend on how you define the "reaction products". If the reaction products include the heat that comes from the reaction, then shouldn't the mass of the heat account for all of the lost mass?
But mens rea doesn't refer only to people who have absolutely no grasp on reality as you're implying. The principle of mens rea does introduce variability to guilt. It actually adds an extra dimension of guilt for someone to be guilty on, and it does have a range. It can include the completely demented individual who doesn't even recognize object's they're holding or motions they're making or an individual who does know they have a hammer, and is angry at the victim who the court decides has been subjected to sufficient anguish at the hands of the victim that it was justifiable. That's not as common these days as it used to be, but it still happens from time to time.
Go read the definition of "Accountable" if you have doubts.
A you may have finally said it there. That may be the word I was looking for. The one that you use to describe a range where I would simply use the word guilt. That could be where we have this little semantic issue.
I agree with this statement absolutely. I have said this from the start. The punishment for a crime is variable.
Yes, the punishment is variable. It's relative to the degree of guilt. If you're not using the word "guilt" for the quality that punishment is relative to, you must be using some other word. What word do you use?
That is absolutely false. The whole point of a definition and debate is for clarity.
The point of definitions is for clarity, to be sure. But not only does language drift and fork and converge, fork and reconverge, it also predates dictionaries. English certainly pre-dates any English dictionaries. Dictionaries are developed by people hoping to rationalize language. The definitions in the earliest dictionaries come from scholars who examined the usage of words in context and attempted to define them. Later dictionaries use older dictionaries as sources, but also do their own research into historical and contemporary usage.
One is absolutely One (using my previous example). I can not have more "One" than you, or less "One" than you. If we both have "One", we both have "One".
But we don't. If we're talking about real world things, the "One" that you have is different from the "One" I have. If it's feathers or rocks, it doesn't matter. Pigeon-holing the objects is a way to rationalize the universe, but the map is not the terrain. For example, one liter of real-world gasoline is not equivalent to another gallon of gasoline. The chemical composition, quality, temperature, precise quantity, etc. are different. We have standards enforced to ensure that one is enough like another that we can treat them as identical for purposes of trade and usage in engines, etc. Technically speaking, even with those standards, neither liter actually needs to have a single chemical in common for them to still be considered equivalent liters of gasoline.
As another example, let's say that I have "One" child and you have "One" child. We both take them to the playground and we each take home "One" child. Are our co-parents at home going to be very happy when the "One" we arrive home with isn't the "One" we left with?
Guilt is exactly the same classification of term. If we are both guilty of theft, we have both committed thievery. If you stole a diamond and I stole an apple, the fact that we are "Guilty" does not change and can not be metered or scaled. There is no fuzzy definition for it, no matter how bad you want there to be. And if you don't like "One" and "Guilt", lets say "Running" or "Died" or "Born" or perhaps "Late" or "Early". All of those things are clearly defined and binary. You are either late, or you are not late. You are dead, or not dead. You are either running, or not running.
This is still all only if there is only one possible definition of guilt which must be binary. That just doesn't agree with real-world common usage. Heck, even if you were correct that it's the only acceptable usage of the term guilty, you'd be wrong to use it that way. Even if it's a boolean and we call "stole a diamond" A and "stole an apple" B, A and B both being true wouldn't create a relationship between them. You have multiple guilty/innocent values that each stand alone. You keep saying that I want this or that. Please stop projecting desires and motivations onto me. I have no desire for fuzzy definitions but I do recognize that, when they model the real world, they are necessarily fuzzy.
As for "Running", "Died", "Late" and "Early", perhaps even "Born", those are all, in fact, not as clearly defined as you imply, and not necessarily binary. I've met numerous people who say that they have died, and try discussing with a physician sometime the vagaries of determining an exact time of death. Then consider medical advances. If we ever develop a way to revive people an hour after their heart stops and they stop breathing, what does that say about the bright line between
Actually it does contain the contradiction I mentioned.
You've never actually specified the contradiction, only claimed it was there and offered a quotation of what I said as if it were self-evident. It does not seem to be as obvious as you think it is.
That statement backs what I said, which is that the "class" of crime is dictating the punishment. Not "how guilty" someone is, because being more or less guilty is not logically possible.
But the "class" of crime almost always dictates a range of possible punishment with discretion over that punishment being given to judges, juries and prosecutors depending on the situation. Then, after the trial, how much punishment is also often subject to parole boards and other actors who take into consideration such factors as remorse, which is just a synonym for guilt (in the personal sense). 'Being more or less guilty" is only "not logically possible" when you are precisely defining guilt as a binary state. That depends on the precise definition of guilt. You don't seem to deny that, aside from the simple yes/no of "did the defendant do it" there is a quality which can be expressed as a point on a range which determines culpability. So we're really just arguing over whether or not we can call that quality degree of guilt, or if it has a different name. Semantics.
There is no such thing as being more or less guilty, and pulling at a poorly worded definition to back your point is really grasping at straws. Did you even notice that the definition you provided states very clearly "The opposite of innocent". If what you said was true, it would say something like "maybe not innocent" or something foolish like that. It does not, it shows very clearly a binary operation.
I should have cited the definition better. It was from: _A Law Dictionary, Adapted to the Constitution and Laws of the United States_. By John Bouvier. Published 1856. Considering that your definition came from Webster's, you really shouldn't be throwing stones. You also don't quite seem to understand how definitions or language itself work. Definitions are never ironclad. One part of a definition is not meant to override the other parts, merely to give a broader sense of the connotations of the word. Also, as hot is the opposite of cold, and vice versa, does that then mean that temperature is a binary condition? Binary opposition is a useful structuralist tool but, outside the SAT's, it's important to be able to look beyond it to underlying reality which is seldom that simple. In any case, the source I was citing essentially defines "innocence" as "an absence of guilt", so taking "the opposite of innocent" as the important part of the first definition would define both terms circularly.
Your logic is broken still, but does not seem like you care to admit it.
My logic is not broken. Once again, we are both being logical, we're just starting with very slightly different axioms based on our understanding of the term "guilt".
That has NOTHING to do with a varying level of Guilt! Read it again! It does not even imply that someone could be more guilty of a crime, or less guilty of a crime "because". It states that given a certain situation, like insanity, a person can not be held "guilty" for a crime.
It holds that they cannot be held "guilty" of the crime because they lack mens rea. Meaning that they are technically guilty, but that their psychological state and/or the psychological state and/or actions of the victim reduces their guilt. Look additionally at people being let off easy due to age or lack of priors, or people being sent away for life due to three strikes laws. The law certainly seems to view guilt as a quality a person can possess in greater or lesser degree regardless of the facts of the particular case before the court. Look at the history of the concept of guilt in culture. Look at _The Story of the Children who Play
Ok, I can't resist this one. I know it was just a mis-phrasing, but I'm going to say it anyway. Since it's biologically unlikely that the daughter in question is much more than a toddler, is her weight really a concern yet?
A lot of smokers do seem to spend a good 20%-30% percent of their workday on smoke breaks, not to mention the loss of attention after the high wears off and they start to get antsy for their next fix. Of course, maybe the nicotine rush increases their productivity for a short burst and makes up for it, but I'm not so sure it doesn't just return them back to baseline. To give them the benefit of the doubt, they may actually still be thinking about their work and talking about it with co-workers as they cluster in entrance ways and, in any case, breaks have been shown many times shown to improve most people's work.
As soon as I saw the word 'cure' I knew this was hyped up, because in all of mans history we have never once found a cure for any virus, ever.
There actually is that one guy they cured HIV/AIDs in while fixing his cancer. Considering what his health must be like now, he would have been better off on long-term treatments if they hadn't also needed to do something about the cancer. It's also my understanding that some retroviruses can be weakened with anti-retrovirals to the point that the immune system can clean them out of the system. Generally those are infections that are generally defeated by the immune system in the end anyway, of course.
It is? I thought it was more normal to keep these things, and recycle them for scrap metal.
Sorry, should have been more clear. I meant in cases of abandonment. Because of a storm that makes it impractical to continue towing a barge or because the vessel doing the towing has been recalled for other duties. Also when a disaster such as a fire forces a vessel to be abandoned. True, that sort of thing is probably a lot less common these days when it's a lot easier to track and locate an abandoned vessel.
Agreed on the scuttling with a nuclear bomb. It doesn't make a lot of practical sense. Viewed as a political move or publicity stunt, it makes a lot more sense (principally because those don't have to make sense). If you think of it as an anti-environmentalist version of the cultural revolution, cutting ties with mankind's past, paving the way for a glorious future, then it makes more sense. The "problem" is taken care of permanently and immediately with no looking back.
Honestly I don't believe I am reading anything other than what you wrote. If you note the whole paragraph I quoted, you will see that you contradict yourself. This backs what I pointed out, in that people believe in something rather delusional.
The "paragraph" you quoted was:
Except you're forgetting that the punishments often vary even for these individual named crimes specifically because the legal system recognizes that people who have committed these crimes may have different degrees of guilt. The individual, named forms of homicide, after all, are only a way to pigeonhole acts from an entire spectrum of human behaviour.
It contains no contradiction that I can see. You certainly didn't point one out, you just claimed that I was "exactly stat[ing] that [I] agree with [you]" and that I "want someone to be 'more guilty' or 'less guilty' of a crime based on what ever criteria you toss out there." Your argument may be very obvious to you based on your personal understanding of the meaning of the term "guilt", but you never actually presented your analysis, just repeated my words as if your claimed contradiction should be self-evident. If you have a contradiction to show, please illustrate more clearly. All I see is myself saying that there are individual named crimes that represent different areas in a spectrum of actual human activities. The named crimes narrow things down, but still can't precisely characterize the precise nature of the actual event.
Lets go a bit further: How can you believe in a different definition of guilt other than what is in the dictionary?
There are a lot of dictionaries. One definition I can find is:
That quality which renders criminal and liable to punishment; or it is that disposition to violate the law, which has manifested itself by some act already done. The opposite of innocence
That definition defines guilt as a "quality" which certainly does not need to be a binary statement of fact. The Merriam-Webster definition you provide says:
1 : the fact of having committed a breach of conduct especially violating law and involving a penalty; broadly : guilty conduct 2 a : the state of one who has committed an offense especially consciously
b : feelings of culpability especially for imagined offenses or from a sense of inadequacy : self-reproach 3 : a feeling of culpability for offenses
Those definitions cover guilt as simple fact, as emotion, and as a state one may be considered to be in as a result of criminal activity. Still not as cut and dried as you make it out to be. A state certainly doesn't have to be just on or off. I'm not pulling out the semantics card here, it's inherent in the discussion.
That last point is the delusion that many people believe in (or perhaps a better way of defining the delusion). If I have one block of stone, or one feather, I still have exactly "one" item. No matter how big the stone or how small the feather, the definition of "One" can not be changed. It's the same with being guilty of something. It would be the same as being innocent of something. There is no scale of committing an act. You either "did" or "did not" do something.
And yet, if you have two feathers, despite each one being exactly "one" item, they are both still unique items, qualitatively different. One feather may be longer or wider or have more barbs, have a different color and pattern and texture, etc. In precisely the same way, one "guilty of murder in the second degree" is going to be qualitatively different than any other "guilty of murder in the second degree" (barring double jeopardy). Each individual criminal act stands alone. It's true that the defendant either did it or didn't do it, but no two crimes were done in exactly the same way under exactly the same circumstances with exactly the same emotions, intentions, motives, etc.
Anyway, look at it this way, if the legal system saw guilt the way you insist they must, why does it have "not guilty by reason of ____" verdicts for people who definitely committed the act?
The insufficient light problem was after he hijacked the ship and took it off its normal course/orientation. He set up additional lighting to compensate. It can be rationalized by concluding that most of the light the forests survived on was from artificial lighting with just a little supplemental light from the sun and that moving the ship dropped that supplemental light just below the required threshold. Or maybe movie makers just don't always fact-check very well.
As for blowing them up rather than just leaving them derelict, that could simply be a matter of applying traditional nautical practice to spacecraft. Scuttling abandoned vessels, barges, whatever seems to be accepted practice as opposed to letting them drift around. Otherwise, it could have been a political decision to quiet opposition. The main character couldn't have been the only one who objected to abandoning the last forests. If they blew the domes up, they wouldn't have to keep fielding pushes to retrieve them.
Yet you are claiming that I'm wrong because you want someone to be "more guilty" or "less guilty" of a crime based on what ever criteria you toss out there.
You're putting words in my mouth. I want no such thing. I'm simply recognizing that categorization, while often necessary, is only a way of modeling the real world. Models are always imperfect. Consider the simple binary question of whether an object is black or white. How simple is it really?
We actually seem to agree on the reality of the situation, but disagree on the semantics. To me, there are binary facts such as "did the defendant kill the deceased" and then a range of what I call guilt (based on other facts, of course) when the the answer is "yes". To you, the binary facts of the case are the boolean "guilt" value, then there's another unnamed range (we could call it culpability) to determine how much fault the defendant has. You can break that up into lots of little binary guilt values, but you're obviously a computer professional, so you know that you can describe a point on a range with any precision you want with enough binary values. So, I say we're just arguing semantics. I happen to thing the popular usage of the terminology among legal professionals is closer to the way I see it than you, but it's not really worth too much strife.
You have been conditioned in to believing a false reality.
You're really reading way too much into what I said. I was just replying to your statement that:
Claiming that I'm more guilty based on what I stole is ludicrous.
By my definition of guilt, that statement doesn't hold up. By your definition of guilt, it just might. The problem is that your definition of guilt in that case seems to be a simple binary question of "did the defendant do it" with no consideration of what "it" is. Most people in the world think that it matters whether "it" is a grain of salt or a transplant organ. I think you also think it matters, but you're defining "guilty" far too narrowly.
Generally, when we talk about renewable fuels, we're talking about fuels that are renewed at a rate at least as high as they are used. As for fossil fuels, it generally means fuel from ancient dead things preserved in the ground. So oil and natural gas count as well. "dead matter on the bottom of the ocean" sounds like the precursor to fossil fuels to me. There also isn't enough dead stuff on the bottom of the ocean actually ending up as oil to keep up with the rate we're using it. Maybe if we were harvesting the algae directly, but I doubt even a tenth of a percent of it actually ends up as recoverable oil. So, from where I'm standing, oil, coal and natural gas are all non-renewable fossil fuels.
Do you actually live in an industrial block, though? I would be interested in knowing if industrial electrical power hookups are as unstable as mere consumer power hookups.
Ouch. Didn't realize the bar was that low when I replied to the GP a moment ago. Should have read the linked article first. Frankly, with the bar set that low, the 6% and 25% are almost disgracefully high. Even a minimum wage worker should at least earn close to a million dollars in their lifetime even if they don't retain it.
Only some 6% of the wealthy inherited their money, with another 25% gaining wealth with a combination of work and inheritance.
I'm interested how that statistic is actually calculated. Take Bill Gates. Certainly born to wealth, privilege, influence and opportunity, but went from a mere millionaire to a billionaire. In those statistics, is he a member of the 6%, the 25%, or the remaining 69%? What about rich people who were born rich but lost most of their money, but are still rich? What about people who technically didn't inherit their wealth, but got one form of nepotistic appointment or another?
This new petition requirement is still only about 0.03% of the public. I would actually be more interested if they raised the requirement to 3+ million signatures. It would be interesting to see if they would still blow off the questions when an entire 1% of the population were asking them. You can look at the way it works now and say that, based on the turnout, 3 million signatures would never be achievable. On the other hand, requiring that many signatures would also strongly imply that they would take the results more seriously, attracting more people. If they then didn't take the questions seriously, the negative fallout would presumably be something that would actually affect them.
Can you define "non-inflating gold" for us? How is this gold different from the regular inflating type that's risen around 300% in the last ten years? Is "non-inflating" gold a short hand for gold value adjusted for the current position in the gold boom-bust cycle?
Some parts still grow. Cartilaginous structures like ears and noses are the main example. Fat cells also tend to stop growing in number, but can certainly grow in size.
Guilt viewed as a simple binary state for each potential infraction sure. That does not tend to be the way most people, including most lawyers seem to think of guilt. Guilt there seems to be generally seen on a scale. Consider homicide. Someone can be guilty or not guilty of homicide. Either they caused the death of another human being or they didn't, but there's an entire scale of homicide (even if we ignore self-defence) all the way from indirectly causing a death through negligence to entirely premeditated murder. There are a lot of individual named crimes on that scale, and you're claiming that each of those is a separate act that someone is either guilty or not guilty of, so guilt is binary. Except you're forgetting that the punishments often vary even for these individual named crimes specifically because the legal system recognizes that people who have committed these crimes may have different degrees of guilt. The individual, named forms of homicide, after all, are only a way to pigeonhole acts from an entire spectrum of human behaviour.
You know what else imposes a firewall by default: not having an Internet connection in the first place. Or, how about not hooking up any computers to the network connection. And hey, if you have any screws to loosen or tighten: butterknife! Nails to pound in? How about a nice shoe heel?
Slashdot Mirror
"Ice brides". Great typo there. Meant "bridges" obviously, but "brides" has so many comedic possibilities.
Aside from ice brides and land rafts, they could almost certainly swim. Modern elephants have been witnessed swimming 300 miles.
Sorry, but I can't help but wonder what makes someone believe in a such a large delusion (perhaps you don't, and are just debating for kicks). If I am running, and you are running, then we are both running. There is no mention of "how fast" or "how slow" one is running needed in that statement of fact. The fact that we are both running is not changed by either of those things.
Ugh. I can't believe this is expanding. It's getting past ridiculous. If you're running and a Jesse Owens in his prime is also running, then yes, you can certainly say that you're both running. Unless you happen to be a world-class athlete, to suggest that the running you are doing and the running he is doing are equivalent would be nonsense.
If a person is clinically dead, they have met the criteria for being dead. If the person was lucky enough to be revived, the fact that they were revived does not change the fact that they were clinically dead. There is no scaling to say "well, he was mostly dead". The person was either dead, or not dead.
But the fact that the dead/alive cutoff point is a moving target and the fact that even medical professionals can't always determine the state definitely (people still wake up in the morgue from time to time) suggests that it's not so cut and dried any more.
All of these things are called facts, and facts are not variable.
Neither is a perfect mathematical circle variable. Trouble is, we don't live in a Platonic universe. We live in one where, to the best of our knowledge (and even this isn't a cold, hard fact that we know for certain), we can never know both the exact position and speed of a particle. All of our facts are approximations and statistics. We have very high certainty for some of them, but the true "facts" you're talking about are unknown and perhaps unknowable (although whether they're truly unknowable may be unknowable).
As with above, the fact that I was 10 minutes late or 60 minutes late does not change the fact that I was late. Your punishment for being late will of course very on "why" you were late, and "how late you were", but the state of being late is never magically changed based on those criteria.
But you apply a quantity and units to how late you are. It's right there in your own examples. I don't understand how you can argue that one.
The "not possible" relates to your statement that one or both of those situations changes the state of guilt. The state of guilt can not be changed, any more than the state of lateness can changed, or the state of being dead can be changed. The state of guilt can not be "more" or "less", the state is either "yes" or "no". That state never changes. The only thing that _can_ change is the circumstances that lead us to be in the state.
But the part you quoted didn't say that one or both of those situations changes the state of guilt, it said that both situations represent guilt, but they are qualitatively different. I suppose it hinges on semantics again, whether it is the situation or the guilt that is qualitatively different. I personally hold that it's hold that it's both that are qualitatively different with one being dependent on the other, so your objection is actually consistent with your broader argument, and with your rigid to the point of near uselessness binary definition of "guilt". I still hold that, if the definition of guilt truly is binary, then it is a unique property for every instance and can't be compared at all. In other words, if your rigid definition is the only possible one, and person A is guilty of crime X and person B is guilty of crime Y, you can't really say that A and B are both guilty, you can only say that A is guilty of X and B is guilty of Y.
You start correctly, then get illogical. Are you late? The answer is "yes" or "no", not "well I'm fuzzy". I never asked "how late were you?", I asked "Are you la
But so it was a form of energy that still possesses mass in some way before, and a form of energy that still posesses mass after, so if it's counted in the reaction products, then there was never any mass lost to the reaction. If it's not counted in the reaction products, then there was mass lost.
I assume that the mass you're talking about is the mass inherent in the energy from the chemical bonds that are broken. To say that mass is decreased then should depend on how you define the "reaction products". If the reaction products include the heat that comes from the reaction, then shouldn't the mass of the heat account for all of the lost mass?
But mens rea doesn't refer only to people who have absolutely no grasp on reality as you're implying. The principle of mens rea does introduce variability to guilt. It actually adds an extra dimension of guilt for someone to be guilty on, and it does have a range. It can include the completely demented individual who doesn't even recognize object's they're holding or motions they're making or an individual who does know they have a hammer, and is angry at the victim who the court decides has been subjected to sufficient anguish at the hands of the victim that it was justifiable. That's not as common these days as it used to be, but it still happens from time to time.
Go read the definition of "Accountable" if you have doubts.
A you may have finally said it there. That may be the word I was looking for. The one that you use to describe a range where I would simply use the word guilt. That could be where we have this little semantic issue.
I agree with this statement absolutely. I have said this from the start. The punishment for a crime is variable.
Yes, the punishment is variable. It's relative to the degree of guilt. If you're not using the word "guilt" for the quality that punishment is relative to, you must be using some other word. What word do you use?
That is absolutely false. The whole point of a definition and debate is for clarity.
The point of definitions is for clarity, to be sure. But not only does language drift and fork and converge, fork and reconverge, it also predates dictionaries. English certainly pre-dates any English dictionaries. Dictionaries are developed by people hoping to rationalize language. The definitions in the earliest dictionaries come from scholars who examined the usage of words in context and attempted to define them. Later dictionaries use older dictionaries as sources, but also do their own research into historical and contemporary usage.
One is absolutely One (using my previous example). I can not have more "One" than you, or less "One" than you. If we both have "One", we both have "One".
But we don't. If we're talking about real world things, the "One" that you have is different from the "One" I have. If it's feathers or rocks, it doesn't matter. Pigeon-holing the objects is a way to rationalize the universe, but the map is not the terrain. For example, one liter of real-world gasoline is not equivalent to another gallon of gasoline. The chemical composition, quality, temperature, precise quantity, etc. are different. We have standards enforced to ensure that one is enough like another that we can treat them as identical for purposes of trade and usage in engines, etc. Technically speaking, even with those standards, neither liter actually needs to have a single chemical in common for them to still be considered equivalent liters of gasoline.
As another example, let's say that I have "One" child and you have "One" child. We both take them to the playground and we each take home "One" child. Are our co-parents at home going to be very happy when the "One" we arrive home with isn't the "One" we left with?
Guilt is exactly the same classification of term. If we are both guilty of theft, we have both committed thievery. If you stole a diamond and I stole an apple, the fact that we are "Guilty" does not change and can not be metered or scaled. There is no fuzzy definition for it, no matter how bad you want there to be. And if you don't like "One" and "Guilt", lets say "Running" or "Died" or "Born" or perhaps "Late" or "Early". All of those things are clearly defined and binary. You are either late, or you are not late. You are dead, or not dead. You are either running, or not running.
This is still all only if there is only one possible definition of guilt which must be binary. That just doesn't agree with real-world common usage. Heck, even if you were correct that it's the only acceptable usage of the term guilty, you'd be wrong to use it that way. Even if it's a boolean and we call "stole a diamond" A and "stole an apple" B, A and B both being true wouldn't create a relationship between them. You have multiple guilty/innocent values that each stand alone. You keep saying that I want this or that. Please stop projecting desires and motivations onto me. I have no desire for fuzzy definitions but I do recognize that, when they model the real world, they are necessarily fuzzy.
As for "Running", "Died", "Late" and "Early", perhaps even "Born", those are all, in fact, not as clearly defined as you imply, and not necessarily binary. I've met numerous people who say that they have died, and try discussing with a physician sometime the vagaries of determining an exact time of death. Then consider medical advances. If we ever develop a way to revive people an hour after their heart stops and they stop breathing, what does that say about the bright line between
Actually it does contain the contradiction I mentioned.
You've never actually specified the contradiction, only claimed it was there and offered a quotation of what I said as if it were self-evident. It does not seem to be as obvious as you think it is.
That statement backs what I said, which is that the "class" of crime is dictating the punishment. Not "how guilty" someone is, because being more or less guilty is not logically possible.
But the "class" of crime almost always dictates a range of possible punishment with discretion over that punishment being given to judges, juries and prosecutors depending on the situation. Then, after the trial, how much punishment is also often subject to parole boards and other actors who take into consideration such factors as remorse, which is just a synonym for guilt (in the personal sense). 'Being more or less guilty" is only "not logically possible" when you are precisely defining guilt as a binary state. That depends on the precise definition of guilt. You don't seem to deny that, aside from the simple yes/no of "did the defendant do it" there is a quality which can be expressed as a point on a range which determines culpability. So we're really just arguing over whether or not we can call that quality degree of guilt, or if it has a different name. Semantics.
There is no such thing as being more or less guilty, and pulling at a poorly worded definition to back your point is really grasping at straws. Did you even notice that the definition you provided states very clearly "The opposite of innocent". If what you said was true, it would say something like "maybe not innocent" or something foolish like that. It does not, it shows very clearly a binary operation.
I should have cited the definition better. It was from: _A Law Dictionary, Adapted to the Constitution and Laws of the United States_. By John Bouvier. Published 1856. Considering that your definition came from Webster's, you really shouldn't be throwing stones. You also don't quite seem to understand how definitions or language itself work. Definitions are never ironclad. One part of a definition is not meant to override the other parts, merely to give a broader sense of the connotations of the word. Also, as hot is the opposite of cold, and vice versa, does that then mean that temperature is a binary condition? Binary opposition is a useful structuralist tool but, outside the SAT's, it's important to be able to look beyond it to underlying reality which is seldom that simple. In any case, the source I was citing essentially defines "innocence" as "an absence of guilt", so taking "the opposite of innocent" as the important part of the first definition would define both terms circularly.
Your logic is broken still, but does not seem like you care to admit it.
My logic is not broken. Once again, we are both being logical, we're just starting with very slightly different axioms based on our understanding of the term "guilt".
That has NOTHING to do with a varying level of Guilt! Read it again! It does not even imply that someone could be more guilty of a crime, or less guilty of a crime "because". It states that given a certain situation, like insanity, a person can not be held "guilty" for a crime.
It holds that they cannot be held "guilty" of the crime because they lack mens rea. Meaning that they are technically guilty, but that their psychological state and/or the psychological state and/or actions of the victim reduces their guilt. Look additionally at people being let off easy due to age or lack of priors, or people being sent away for life due to three strikes laws. The law certainly seems to view guilt as a quality a person can possess in greater or lesser degree regardless of the facts of the particular case before the court. Look at the history of the concept of guilt in culture. Look at _The Story of the Children who Play
Ok, I can't resist this one. I know it was just a mis-phrasing, but I'm going to say it anyway. Since it's biologically unlikely that the daughter in question is much more than a toddler, is her weight really a concern yet?
A lot of smokers do seem to spend a good 20%-30% percent of their workday on smoke breaks, not to mention the loss of attention after the high wears off and they start to get antsy for their next fix. Of course, maybe the nicotine rush increases their productivity for a short burst and makes up for it, but I'm not so sure it doesn't just return them back to baseline. To give them the benefit of the doubt, they may actually still be thinking about their work and talking about it with co-workers as they cluster in entrance ways and, in any case, breaks have been shown many times shown to improve most people's work.
As soon as I saw the word 'cure' I knew this was hyped up, because in all of mans history we have never once found a cure for any virus, ever.
There actually is that one guy they cured HIV/AIDs in while fixing his cancer. Considering what his health must be like now, he would have been better off on long-term treatments if they hadn't also needed to do something about the cancer. It's also my understanding that some retroviruses can be weakened with anti-retrovirals to the point that the immune system can clean them out of the system. Generally those are infections that are generally defeated by the immune system in the end anyway, of course.
It is? I thought it was more normal to keep these things, and recycle them for scrap metal.
Sorry, should have been more clear. I meant in cases of abandonment. Because of a storm that makes it impractical to continue towing a barge or because the vessel doing the towing has been recalled for other duties. Also when a disaster such as a fire forces a vessel to be abandoned. True, that sort of thing is probably a lot less common these days when it's a lot easier to track and locate an abandoned vessel.
Agreed on the scuttling with a nuclear bomb. It doesn't make a lot of practical sense. Viewed as a political move or publicity stunt, it makes a lot more sense (principally because those don't have to make sense). If you think of it as an anti-environmentalist version of the cultural revolution, cutting ties with mankind's past, paving the way for a glorious future, then it makes more sense. The "problem" is taken care of permanently and immediately with no looking back.
Honestly I don't believe I am reading anything other than what you wrote. If you note the whole paragraph I quoted, you will see that you contradict yourself. This backs what I pointed out, in that people believe in something rather delusional.
The "paragraph" you quoted was:
Except you're forgetting that the punishments often vary even for these individual named crimes specifically because the legal system recognizes that people who have committed these crimes may have different degrees of guilt. The individual, named forms of homicide, after all, are only a way to pigeonhole acts from an entire spectrum of human behaviour.
It contains no contradiction that I can see. You certainly didn't point one out, you just claimed that I was "exactly stat[ing] that [I] agree with [you]" and that I "want someone to be 'more guilty' or 'less guilty' of a crime based on what ever criteria you toss out there." Your argument may be very obvious to you based on your personal understanding of the meaning of the term "guilt", but you never actually presented your analysis, just repeated my words as if your claimed contradiction should be self-evident. If you have a contradiction to show, please illustrate more clearly. All I see is myself saying that there are individual named crimes that represent different areas in a spectrum of actual human activities. The named crimes narrow things down, but still can't precisely characterize the precise nature of the actual event.
Lets go a bit further: How can you believe in a different definition of guilt other than what is in the dictionary?
There are a lot of dictionaries. One definition I can find is:
That quality which renders criminal and liable to punishment; or it is that disposition to violate the law, which has manifested itself by some act already done. The opposite of innocence
That definition defines guilt as a "quality" which certainly does not need to be a binary statement of fact. The Merriam-Webster definition you provide says:
1 : the fact of having committed a breach of conduct especially violating law and involving a penalty; broadly : guilty conduct
2 a : the state of one who has committed an offense especially consciously
b : feelings of culpability especially for imagined offenses or from a sense of inadequacy : self-reproach
3 : a feeling of culpability for offenses
Those definitions cover guilt as simple fact, as emotion, and as a state one may be considered to be in as a result of criminal activity. Still not as cut and dried as you make it out to be. A state certainly doesn't have to be just on or off. I'm not pulling out the semantics card here, it's inherent in the discussion.
That last point is the delusion that many people believe in (or perhaps a better way of defining the delusion). If I have one block of stone, or one feather, I still have exactly "one" item. No matter how big the stone or how small the feather, the definition of "One" can not be changed. It's the same with being guilty of something. It would be the same as being innocent of something. There is no scale of committing an act. You either "did" or "did not" do something.
And yet, if you have two feathers, despite each one being exactly "one" item, they are both still unique items, qualitatively different. One feather may be longer or wider or have more barbs, have a different color and pattern and texture, etc. In precisely the same way, one "guilty of murder in the second degree" is going to be qualitatively different than any other "guilty of murder in the second degree" (barring double jeopardy). Each individual criminal act stands alone. It's true that the defendant either did it or didn't do it, but no two crimes were done in exactly the same way under exactly the same circumstances with exactly the same emotions, intentions, motives, etc.
Anyway, look at it this way, if the legal system saw guilt the way you insist they must, why does it have "not guilty by reason of ____" verdicts for people who definitely committed the act?
The insufficient light problem was after he hijacked the ship and took it off its normal course/orientation. He set up additional lighting to compensate. It can be rationalized by concluding that most of the light the forests survived on was from artificial lighting with just a little supplemental light from the sun and that moving the ship dropped that supplemental light just below the required threshold. Or maybe movie makers just don't always fact-check very well.
As for blowing them up rather than just leaving them derelict, that could simply be a matter of applying traditional nautical practice to spacecraft. Scuttling abandoned vessels, barges, whatever seems to be accepted practice as opposed to letting them drift around. Otherwise, it could have been a political decision to quiet opposition. The main character couldn't have been the only one who objected to abandoning the last forests. If they blew the domes up, they wouldn't have to keep fielding pushes to retrieve them.
Yet you are claiming that I'm wrong because you want someone to be "more guilty" or "less guilty" of a crime based on what ever criteria you toss out there.
You're putting words in my mouth. I want no such thing. I'm simply recognizing that categorization, while often necessary, is only a way of modeling the real world. Models are always imperfect. Consider the simple binary question of whether an object is black or white. How simple is it really?
We actually seem to agree on the reality of the situation, but disagree on the semantics. To me, there are binary facts such as "did the defendant kill the deceased" and then a range of what I call guilt (based on other facts, of course) when the the answer is "yes". To you, the binary facts of the case are the boolean "guilt" value, then there's another unnamed range (we could call it culpability) to determine how much fault the defendant has. You can break that up into lots of little binary guilt values, but you're obviously a computer professional, so you know that you can describe a point on a range with any precision you want with enough binary values. So, I say we're just arguing semantics. I happen to thing the popular usage of the terminology among legal professionals is closer to the way I see it than you, but it's not really worth too much strife.
You have been conditioned in to believing a false reality.
You're really reading way too much into what I said. I was just replying to your statement that:
Claiming that I'm more guilty based on what I stole is ludicrous.
By my definition of guilt, that statement doesn't hold up. By your definition of guilt, it just might. The problem is that your definition of guilt in that case seems to be a simple binary question of "did the defendant do it" with no consideration of what "it" is. Most people in the world think that it matters whether "it" is a grain of salt or a transplant organ. I think you also think it matters, but you're defining "guilty" far too narrowly.
Generally, when we talk about renewable fuels, we're talking about fuels that are renewed at a rate at least as high as they are used. As for fossil fuels, it generally means fuel from ancient dead things preserved in the ground. So oil and natural gas count as well. "dead matter on the bottom of the ocean" sounds like the precursor to fossil fuels to me. There also isn't enough dead stuff on the bottom of the ocean actually ending up as oil to keep up with the rate we're using it. Maybe if we were harvesting the algae directly, but I doubt even a tenth of a percent of it actually ends up as recoverable oil. So, from where I'm standing, oil, coal and natural gas are all non-renewable fossil fuels.
Do you actually live in an industrial block, though? I would be interested in knowing if industrial electrical power hookups are as unstable as mere consumer power hookups.
Ouch. Didn't realize the bar was that low when I replied to the GP a moment ago. Should have read the linked article first. Frankly, with the bar set that low, the 6% and 25% are almost disgracefully high. Even a minimum wage worker should at least earn close to a million dollars in their lifetime even if they don't retain it.
Only some 6% of the wealthy inherited their money, with another 25% gaining wealth with a combination of work and inheritance.
I'm interested how that statistic is actually calculated. Take Bill Gates. Certainly born to wealth, privilege, influence and opportunity, but went from a mere millionaire to a billionaire. In those statistics, is he a member of the 6%, the 25%, or the remaining 69%? What about rich people who were born rich but lost most of their money, but are still rich? What about people who technically didn't inherit their wealth, but got one form of nepotistic appointment or another?
This new petition requirement is still only about 0.03% of the public. I would actually be more interested if they raised the requirement to 3+ million signatures. It would be interesting to see if they would still blow off the questions when an entire 1% of the population were asking them. You can look at the way it works now and say that, based on the turnout, 3 million signatures would never be achievable. On the other hand, requiring that many signatures would also strongly imply that they would take the results more seriously, attracting more people. If they then didn't take the questions seriously, the negative fallout would presumably be something that would actually affect them.
Can you define "non-inflating gold" for us? How is this gold different from the regular inflating type that's risen around 300% in the last ten years? Is "non-inflating" gold a short hand for gold value adjusted for the current position in the gold boom-bust cycle?
Of course, the things producing all the CO2 also tend to be using up non-renewable fossil fuels and producing all kinds of other pollutants as well.
Some parts still grow. Cartilaginous structures like ears and noses are the main example. Fat cells also tend to stop growing in number, but can certainly grow in size.
Guilt viewed as a simple binary state for each potential infraction sure. That does not tend to be the way most people, including most lawyers seem to think of guilt. Guilt there seems to be generally seen on a scale. Consider homicide. Someone can be guilty or not guilty of homicide. Either they caused the death of another human being or they didn't, but there's an entire scale of homicide (even if we ignore self-defence) all the way from indirectly causing a death through negligence to entirely premeditated murder. There are a lot of individual named crimes on that scale, and you're claiming that each of those is a separate act that someone is either guilty or not guilty of, so guilt is binary. Except you're forgetting that the punishments often vary even for these individual named crimes specifically because the legal system recognizes that people who have committed these crimes may have different degrees of guilt. The individual, named forms of homicide, after all, are only a way to pigeonhole acts from an entire spectrum of human behaviour.
You know what else imposes a firewall by default: not having an Internet connection in the first place. Or, how about not hooking up any computers to the network connection. And hey, if you have any screws to loosen or tighten: butterknife! Nails to pound in? How about a nice shoe heel?