Assuming you aren't just woefully misinformed on the definition of "sociopath", as most people apparently are...
If you think it's even possible to have a society that requires shared, collective resources and people in positions of power in order to manage them, and then to somehow collectively vet and judge those leaders in order to weed out the "sociopaths" before they reach positions of authority, then you don't actually live in reality. The fact that you suggest oppressive and undemocratic government as a means to this end is just downright hilarious.
As to the Libertarians, some of their ideals are decidedly unlibertarian; their main push is against taxes, but taxes don't take your liberty away and in some cases can increase your liberty.
One of the major consequences of a party focused on liberty is the idea that everyone should have liberty, not that hard working or intelligent people should have their liberty restricted for the benefit of lazy idiots.
I'd like to see a Social Libertarian party, that was both for government-run universal health care and legalization of gambling and prostitution.
And people accuse libertarians of being irresponsible... At least they pay for their own gonorrhea.
I think you're missing the most crucial difference, which is that the US is not actually a state.
Regardless, the right to privacy is not really "strongly" guaranteed by the US constitution. In fact it is not specifically mentioned at all. It is protected along with all other un-enumerated rights by the 9th amendment. The right to pee standing up is equally as protected.
The rights protected by the US constitution are only negative rights. Positive rights such as food and shelter and education are not included, mostly because as I mentioned the US is not a state but also because positive rights are dumb and tend to require contradictions, conflict, corruption, classification and slavery and whatnot.
The study itself (or the article at least) makes several leaping assumptions that are not indicated by the data, which consists of basically a 15% change in the responses to some fairly complex, contrived scenarios. You've added at least a half a dozen more unfounded assumptions involving inferring thought processes and such, along with some rather poor comprehension of the questions asked in the experiment.
Add in the completely subjective nature of morality, and overall I'm not impressed with your analysis, which frankly I find to be facile, uninteresting, and likely wrong.
Which is all based on abstract reasoning and considering the hypothetical consequences of your actions, not a post-facto evaluation of whether or not your action resulted in a good or bad result (no matter how society judges good and bad outcomes). This is the distinction being made.
I don't think it is. You're just distinguishing between pre- and post-facto judgement, not moral judgement and judgement based on outcomes.
the fact that there's an area of the brain that judges actions as moral apart from their consequences is fascinating. It makes sense to judge actions based on known outcomes, but what's the evolutionary advantage to being moral in the abstract?
The assumption has mostly been that morality is a social construct, and that individuals (pre-)judge actions based on their consequences and then compare those consequences to whatever their socially accepted morality may be. This study seems to indicate otherwise, that there is in fact a short-circuit that tells people to judge actions in a way that is not at all based on consequences.
abstract... (morality is) the only kind of morality that has any utility at all.
That's not even empirically correct.
If you're particularly stupid or incompetent, you would be much better off simply not poisoning people out of actual morality rather than trying to poison someone and failing. In fact, that's more of an ethical question even. But the vast majority of people would probably be better off being completely, actually moral, in other words doing whatever it is that the majority of their society do and believe is correct, which is probably something along the lines of poisoning people from other tribes. And in fact this tends to be borne out by observation.
Oh man, thank you. That's exactly what I was hoping for. There is so much crazy in this post, it's amazing.
I like how you start out with the assumption of "common healthcare resources", as though we mine healthcare from a hole in the ground or something.
And then, it would be okay not to wear a seatbelt in private, like doing crack or abusing puppies or something, but doing so in public is just a slap in your face. Respect my authoritay!
Of course, let's just bypass the fact that you shouldn't even be able to see whether another driver is wearing a seatbelt or not, if you're really paying attention to your driving.
And I'm robbing you by not wearing a seatbelt, that's rich. The driving, that's fine. Crashing, you apparently have no problem with that. In fact, I like how it's kind of just assumed that crashing will happen. But it's the lack of seatbelt that really costs you money. And it costs you money because, I guess, when you wreck into me, it might cost you more to pay for my healthcare? That's your argument?
Because, I mean, clearly you don't seem to have any kind of problem with taking money out of anyone else's wallet. Your entire post is pretty much predicated on the assumption of "common resources" and insurance and whatnot. It's just that, I guess you're just concerned that we take the least amount of money from others as possible, or something? So, I mean, helmets too then I guess?
But I really like how you give the impression that it's the seatbelt that is the lynchpin in the entire highway full of one-ton objects travelling at 80 mph. Without the seatbelts, the entire thing would come crashing down into a bloody mess of mangled bodies requiring healthcare "resources" taken directly from your wallet.
Sounds like you could use a magnetic headband. But then again, letting you wear one would probably just amount to an aggressive, in-your-face insult showing how little you care for everyone else's right to the shared magnet resources. What to do.. what to do...
Causing other people to take time out of their lives to scrape you off the asphalt and sew you back together, all while having my taxes and/or health insurance premiums pay for it
See what I mean? People lose their shit along with all sense of causality whenever driving without wearing a seatbelt is mentioned. I would even guess that this guy is in the majority.
And by the same argument, people like this shouldn't leave the house without wearing a helmet, for the benefit of everyone else of course.
For example, subjects were asked to judge how permissible it is for a man to let his girlfriend walk across a bridge he knows to be unsafe, even if she ends up making it across safely. In such cases, a judgment based solely on the outcome would hold the perpetrator morally blameless, even though it appears he intended to do harm.
Tripe like this, apparently.
I'm beginning to wonder whether we should let these researchers continue their morally ambiguous research.
The thought occurred to me that many mutations that are disabling below some certain threshold would tend to propagate, due to the selective advantage of having a set of two parents with similar genetic defects, and the tendency of people to seek out mates with similar habits and abilities.
So, for instance, a deaf child with two deaf parents would tend to do better than a deaf child with only one deaf parent. And a deaf person might seek out a deaf mate. So this (even small) selective pressure would over time tend to segregate people by major disability and help to propagate them.
It's not just that cheaper means less healthy. It's that cheaper tends to mean newer. And newer foods tend to be unhealthy to at least some subset of the population. Some groups still haven't even become accustomed to milk or refined bread.
Really? Is that really how fucking stupid you are?
I'm complaining about immigration and a destroyed economy, and you think I'm a fucking Republican?
How old are you? Judging by your uid, I'd guess around twelve.
Nevermind, let me give you a history lesson. You see, there is absolutely no fucking difference between Republicans and Democrats in the US. No matter which is in power, they both happily hold hands and fuck over America, the one to benefit corporate interests, and the other because they are fucking retarded.
And, yes, if Republicans had done anything in the eight years they were in power to stem immigration or imbalanced trade or anything else the federal government was fucking created to do, then most of their other idiotic policies like subsidized unregulated banking and retarded unwinnable wars and tax breaks to help the wealthy flee the sinking ship that is America would have had little or no consequence to the average person, instead of completely decimating the middle class and guaranteeing decades of debt and depression supporting a new permanent underclass and a new faux-constitutional-scholar president who instead of actually changing any of them can only manage to grow fucking watermelons on the white house lawn and print money to hand out to his friends like some sort of fucking third world despot.
No, it is harmful per se. It's exactly equivalent to someone moving into your house under the guise of renting a room and then having kids and deciding to live there forever and wanting to trade in exchange for mowing your lawn or something. Oh and if you can't find enough work for them (and their five kids) to do they'll probably steal your stuff so you'll need to hire a security guard also.
if the immigration process weren't so long and cumbersome
The immigration process is cumbersome because Americans have a standard of living twice that of Mexicans. If we didn't make it difficult to immigrate here, we would have the same (low) standard of living.
The USA doesn't have a 0% unemployment rate either.
Well, we would if worthless Mexicans hadn't invaded our country and bred us into poverty, destroying our economy.
This will likely have the beneficial result of better working conditions, and better wages for the workers (while still low), and pushing up low end wages for all workers (a good thing for Americans in general, even if big business and its minions in Congress hate it).
And what fantasy land do you live in where increasing the number of workers results in rising wages? Wait, let me guess, California?
No, I wouldn't, by definition, because anyone capable of actually adding revenue to the country is capable of immigrating legally.
But it's already been pointed out in this thread that upwards of 90% of people are completely worthless anyways. So it's not the case either that the ability to pay $10,000 or whatever it costs to immigrate legally means that a legal immigrant is worth anything more than a one-time $10,000 increase in government bureaucracy followed by an untold number of lifetimes of unproductive resource consumption.
So if you'd like to discuss "worthwhile" immigration as opposed to "worthless" immigration, let's be clear that this is completely separate from the issue of "legal" versus "illegal" immigration. And, besides, I seriously doubt your concept of "revenue source for the country" is at all in line with reality.
Illegal immigration is a primary reason the economy isn't doing well.
The dipshits in the US government sent 200,000 Americans off to fight a worthless war, opened the borders and let ten million Mexicans in to replace them, used tax dollars to pay the immigrants to build giant uninsulated houses that we can't afford the energy to maintain, and looked the other way as Wall Street defrauded everyone and sold America for scrap to the Chinese in order to fund all of it.
Now that the worthless war has nearly run it's course, the dipshits in the US government are trying to pass the costs of healthcare for all their failed injured soldiers onto the insurance companies, and offering up the rest of us as a sacrifice in exchange. Meanwhile the Mexicans are still here, real unemployment is pushing 20%, the real estate market has collapsed and the Fed is busy printing dollars and borrowing from foreigners trying to pretend that everything is okey-dokey while sending the worthless soldiers to school to try to learn nuclear engineering in time to rebuild some kind of fucking economy before we kill another few million people converting the last bits of our fossil fuel reserves into air pollution and global warming. We live in a god damn banana republic.
Slashdot Mirror
wxWindows gives you native widgets on all major platforms but it is somewhat of a pain to use.
and I suppose they should put warnings on all of their movies that they are recycled Shakespearean plays?
Assuming you aren't just woefully misinformed on the definition of "sociopath", as most people apparently are...
If you think it's even possible to have a society that requires shared, collective resources and people in positions of power in order to manage them, and then to somehow collectively vet and judge those leaders in order to weed out the "sociopaths" before they reach positions of authority, then you don't actually live in reality. The fact that you suggest oppressive and undemocratic government as a means to this end is just downright hilarious.
They had to infect the computers with Office 2010.
As to the Libertarians, some of their ideals are decidedly unlibertarian; their main push is against taxes, but taxes don't take your liberty away and in some cases can increase your liberty.
One of the major consequences of a party focused on liberty is the idea that everyone should have liberty, not that hard working or intelligent people should have their liberty restricted for the benefit of lazy idiots.
I'd like to see a Social Libertarian party, that was both for government-run universal health care and legalization of gambling and prostitution.
And people accuse libertarians of being irresponsible... At least they pay for their own gonorrhea.
I think you're missing the most crucial difference, which is that the US is not actually a state.
Regardless, the right to privacy is not really "strongly" guaranteed by the US constitution. In fact it is not specifically mentioned at all. It is protected along with all other un-enumerated rights by the 9th amendment. The right to pee standing up is equally as protected.
The rights protected by the US constitution are only negative rights. Positive rights such as food and shelter and education are not included, mostly because as I mentioned the US is not a state but also because positive rights are dumb and tend to require contradictions, conflict, corruption, classification and slavery and whatnot.
The study itself (or the article at least) makes several leaping assumptions that are not indicated by the data, which consists of basically a 15% change in the responses to some fairly complex, contrived scenarios. You've added at least a half a dozen more unfounded assumptions involving inferring thought processes and such, along with some rather poor comprehension of the questions asked in the experiment.
Add in the completely subjective nature of morality, and overall I'm not impressed with your analysis, which frankly I find to be facile, uninteresting, and likely wrong.
Lack of proper education in three-value logic, I'd guess.
Which is all based on abstract reasoning and considering the hypothetical consequences of your actions, not a post-facto evaluation of whether or not your action resulted in a good or bad result (no matter how society judges good and bad outcomes). This is the distinction being made.
I don't think it is. You're just distinguishing between pre- and post-facto judgement, not moral judgement and judgement based on outcomes.
the fact that there's an area of the brain that judges actions as moral apart from their consequences is fascinating. It makes sense to judge actions based on known outcomes, but what's the evolutionary advantage to being moral in the abstract?
The assumption has mostly been that morality is a social construct, and that individuals (pre-)judge actions based on their consequences and then compare those consequences to whatever their socially accepted morality may be. This study seems to indicate otherwise, that there is in fact a short-circuit that tells people to judge actions in a way that is not at all based on consequences.
abstract... (morality is) the only kind of morality that has any utility at all.
That's not even empirically correct.
If you're particularly stupid or incompetent, you would be much better off simply not poisoning people out of actual morality rather than trying to poison someone and failing. In fact, that's more of an ethical question even. But the vast majority of people would probably be better off being completely, actually moral, in other words doing whatever it is that the majority of their society do and believe is correct, which is probably something along the lines of poisoning people from other tribes. And in fact this tends to be borne out by observation.
Oh man, thank you. That's exactly what I was hoping for. There is so much crazy in this post, it's amazing.
I like how you start out with the assumption of "common healthcare resources", as though we mine healthcare from a hole in the ground or something.
And then, it would be okay not to wear a seatbelt in private, like doing crack or abusing puppies or something, but doing so in public is just a slap in your face. Respect my authoritay!
Of course, let's just bypass the fact that you shouldn't even be able to see whether another driver is wearing a seatbelt or not, if you're really paying attention to your driving.
And I'm robbing you by not wearing a seatbelt, that's rich. The driving, that's fine. Crashing, you apparently have no problem with that. In fact, I like how it's kind of just assumed that crashing will happen. But it's the lack of seatbelt that really costs you money. And it costs you money because, I guess, when you wreck into me, it might cost you more to pay for my healthcare? That's your argument?
Because, I mean, clearly you don't seem to have any kind of problem with taking money out of anyone else's wallet. Your entire post is pretty much predicated on the assumption of "common resources" and insurance and whatnot. It's just that, I guess you're just concerned that we take the least amount of money from others as possible, or something? So, I mean, helmets too then I guess?
But I really like how you give the impression that it's the seatbelt that is the lynchpin in the entire highway full of one-ton objects travelling at 80 mph. Without the seatbelts, the entire thing would come crashing down into a bloody mess of mangled bodies requiring healthcare "resources" taken directly from your wallet.
Sounds like you could use a magnetic headband. But then again, letting you wear one would probably just amount to an aggressive, in-your-face insult showing how little you care for everyone else's right to the shared magnet resources. What to do.. what to do...
Causing other people to take time out of their lives to scrape you off the asphalt and sew you back together, all while having my taxes and/or health insurance premiums pay for it
See what I mean? People lose their shit along with all sense of causality whenever driving without wearing a seatbelt is mentioned. I would even guess that this guy is in the majority.
And by the same argument, people like this shouldn't leave the house without wearing a helmet, for the benefit of everyone else of course.
I can't think of anything that's morally wrong that doesn't cause harm.
You can't possibly be serious. There are lots of examples but an easy one is driving without wearing a seatbelt.
what's the evolutionary advantage to being moral in the abstract?
Being able to guilt others into raising your illegitimate children, aka "religion" or "politics".
But it's not "being moral" so much as the tendency to infer intentionality where there is none, or conflating indifference with harmful intent.
For example, subjects were asked to judge how permissible it is for a man to let his girlfriend walk across a bridge he knows to be unsafe, even if she ends up making it across safely. In such cases, a judgment based solely on the outcome would hold the perpetrator morally blameless, even though it appears he intended to do harm.
Tripe like this, apparently.
I'm beginning to wonder whether we should let these researchers continue their morally ambiguous research.
The thought occurred to me that many mutations that are disabling below some certain threshold would tend to propagate, due to the selective advantage of having a set of two parents with similar genetic defects, and the tendency of people to seek out mates with similar habits and abilities.
So, for instance, a deaf child with two deaf parents would tend to do better than a deaf child with only one deaf parent. And a deaf person might seek out a deaf mate. So this (even small) selective pressure would over time tend to segregate people by major disability and help to propagate them.
It's not just that cheaper means less healthy. It's that cheaper tends to mean newer. And newer foods tend to be unhealthy to at least some subset of the population. Some groups still haven't even become accustomed to milk or refined bread.
Really? Is that really how fucking stupid you are?
I'm complaining about immigration and a destroyed economy, and you think I'm a fucking Republican?
How old are you? Judging by your uid, I'd guess around twelve.
Nevermind, let me give you a history lesson. You see, there is absolutely no fucking difference between Republicans and Democrats in the US. No matter which is in power, they both happily hold hands and fuck over America, the one to benefit corporate interests, and the other because they are fucking retarded.
And, yes, if Republicans had done anything in the eight years they were in power to stem immigration or imbalanced trade or anything else the federal government was fucking created to do, then most of their other idiotic policies like subsidized unregulated banking and retarded unwinnable wars and tax breaks to help the wealthy flee the sinking ship that is America would have had little or no consequence to the average person, instead of completely decimating the middle class and guaranteeing decades of debt and depression supporting a new permanent underclass and a new faux-constitutional-scholar president who instead of actually changing any of them can only manage to grow fucking watermelons on the white house lawn and print money to hand out to his friends like some sort of fucking third world despot.
illegal immigration isn't harmful per si
No, it is harmful per se. It's exactly equivalent to someone moving into your house under the guise of renting a room and then having kids and deciding to live there forever and wanting to trade in exchange for mowing your lawn or something. Oh and if you can't find enough work for them (and their five kids) to do they'll probably steal your stuff so you'll need to hire a security guard also.
if the immigration process weren't so long and cumbersome
The immigration process is cumbersome because Americans have a standard of living twice that of Mexicans. If we didn't make it difficult to immigrate here, we would have the same (low) standard of living.
The USA doesn't have a 0% unemployment rate either.
Well, we would if worthless Mexicans hadn't invaded our country and bred us into poverty, destroying our economy.
This will likely have the beneficial result of better working conditions, and better wages for the workers (while still low), and pushing up low end wages for all workers (a good thing for Americans in general, even if big business and its minions in Congress hate it).
And what fantasy land do you live in where increasing the number of workers results in rising wages? Wait, let me guess, California?
No, I wouldn't, by definition, because anyone capable of actually adding revenue to the country is capable of immigrating legally.
But it's already been pointed out in this thread that upwards of 90% of people are completely worthless anyways. So it's not the case either that the ability to pay $10,000 or whatever it costs to immigrate legally means that a legal immigrant is worth anything more than a one-time $10,000 increase in government bureaucracy followed by an untold number of lifetimes of unproductive resource consumption.
So if you'd like to discuss "worthwhile" immigration as opposed to "worthless" immigration, let's be clear that this is completely separate from the issue of "legal" versus "illegal" immigration. And, besides, I seriously doubt your concept of "revenue source for the country" is at all in line with reality.
Define "enemy". (without using the term "combatant")
combatants... combatants blah blah combatants.. Non-combatants blah combatants.. "Enemy combatant" blah blah combatants
Is this something they taught you in law school, or are you ex-military as well?
Illegal immigration is a primary reason the economy isn't doing well.
The dipshits in the US government sent 200,000 Americans off to fight a worthless war, opened the borders and let ten million Mexicans in to replace them, used tax dollars to pay the immigrants to build giant uninsulated houses that we can't afford the energy to maintain, and looked the other way as Wall Street defrauded everyone and sold America for scrap to the Chinese in order to fund all of it.
Now that the worthless war has nearly run it's course, the dipshits in the US government are trying to pass the costs of healthcare for all their failed injured soldiers onto the insurance companies, and offering up the rest of us as a sacrifice in exchange. Meanwhile the Mexicans are still here, real unemployment is pushing 20%, the real estate market has collapsed and the Fed is busy printing dollars and borrowing from foreigners trying to pretend that everything is okey-dokey while sending the worthless soldiers to school to try to learn nuclear engineering in time to rebuild some kind of fucking economy before we kill another few million people converting the last bits of our fossil fuel reserves into air pollution and global warming. We live in a god damn banana republic.
No, you're absolutely right. It's not the government's job to create jobs.
IT'S THE GOVERNMENT'S JOB TO PATROL THE FUCKING BORDER
Not even the japaneese have a robot that can pick a cotton or grape field for the cost/quality that you get from a poor human
And that's just a complete fucking lie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_picker
A cotton harvester can economically out-perform dozens of poor humans. And grape pickers aren't that far behind.