Yes, I absolutely do. In the sense that it is a tiny group of power whores on one side against a tiny group of power whores on the other, the vast majority of their "subjects" do not give a flying fuck about the "conflict".
I think that's wrong primarily because of the religious nature of the conflict. It's far more widespread than a tiny group in power on either side. The vast majority of the population DOES care about and support the conflict, if only out of religious and ethnic pride. Pakistan is a country where school textbooks talk about one Muslim soldier equaling 10 Hindu soldiers.
Then on top of that you have a huge number of groups that benefit from it. The Pakistan army is the largest, and their reasons are real -- national security, control of water, strategic positions, maintenance of a terrorist network, and the guidance of that terrorist network to outside enemies.
Then you have the religious leaders, too many to even name, who count India, Israel, and the US as the axis of evil (type in raw cia and google will autocomplete mossad for you, that's how commonly linked together their intelligence agencies are). Most of the population listens to them and supports them.
And then there's the civil society, the rich, the upper middle class, who don't want to live like barbarians under Muslim law (i.e. they drink and have parties and listen to music) but see themselves as better than Indians. They hate Indians out of nationalistic pride, absolutely enraged that India is growing more powerful while Pakistan is waning. They also support the Army as a bastion against domestic Muslim terrorism and rule, and thus they back the Army on its goals.
So that's the Pakistani side at least. I don't know as much about India unfortunately.
It remains to be seen how stable the US is.
It remains to be seen how stable any country is. So any example you have where equality of wealth promotes stability can be equally dismissed.
But it's not up for debate that 2006 USA is more stable than 2006 Tunisia and Egypt. We have the benefit of history to see that.
The Gini coefficient is used to measure relative wealth, I said nothing of wealth, in fact what I said was that it is not the amount of dollars in a country that makes for a stable country, it is the divide between rich and poor.
The divide between rich and poor is defined by the wealth of the rich compared to the wealth of the poor. If there were no gap between the wealth of the rich and the wealth of the poor, they wouldn't be rich and poor! So I'm having a hard time understanding what you're trying to say. If you're not trying to talk about wealth or the amount of dollars, can you say it a different way than talking about the rich and the poor?
I should probably have said underclass and ruling class, but the divide is the important part.
Can you point to the country where the ruling class is poor and the underclass is rich, or even equal in wealth? In reality those are pretty much synonyms.
The popes could and did excommunicate kings, and when they did it often gave licence for other people to overthrow those kings, and certainly meant that the kings' supporters were no longer obliged to help or support them.
I think maybe you're thinking of one of a handful of really powerful kings or emperors and ignoring most of the time period and most of the nations. You know Italy by itself had dozens of small kingdoms. There was a king of Naples for instance. You think he was some kind of all-powerful dictator?
I think one of the big differences between Christian kingdoms and Islamic kingdoms was the scope of their goal. Islam has always tried to be universal in both religion and state. There was only ever supposed to be one religion and one state (the caliphate), whereas in Christianity there was supposed to be one religion but having many kingdoms was perfectly fine.
The separation of Church and State in Christian lands made kings less powerful, but it also made religious leaders less powerful. (By separation I don't mean the modern idea, but simply the idea that they were separate authorities.. your regional Bishop or Cardinal didn't impose taxes, and your king didn't tell you how to pray. The Church and the State were otherwise very intertwined, of course.)
There were other constraints on the kings of Europe, of course, but they were non-religious (such as pressure from the nobles, Magna Carta, etc) and probably had some impact on Islamic rulers as well (though not as strong of an impact).
Not did Islam have its origins in the late Roman Empire
Hmm, did you reply to the wrong post? Out of your points, only 1 (constraint on kings) really makes sense as a reply. I don't see where Anon claimed Islam originated IN the Roman Empire. The closest statement is "at the later years of the Roman empire, when both Christianity and islam came to be" but of course that's referring to the time period.
Quite tragic for iranian citizenry under shah regime [wikipedia.org]. Britality of this regime caused 1979 revolution.
I disagree. While the Shah did engage in brutality, he had reason to -- perhaps brutality was a legitimate response to the rising power of leftist and Muslim religious groups. I mean take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leftist_guerrilla_groups_of_Iran When you have such a list of guerrilla groups operating in your country, trying to undermine the government and the economy, what are you supposed to do? Look at their ideology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology_of_the_Iranian_Revolution You have people who want to fight you simply because you are too Western, as if being Western is bad. Those kinds of people are irrational and impossible to deal with or negotiate with.
I've never lived in Iran and I didn't live through the times in question but from what I've read Pahlavi also brought about many positive (I mean Western of course) advances in Iran -- women's rights, education and literacy, land reform, health initiatives. This list is quite impressive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Revolution
Now of course I'm not saying Pahlavi was perfect, but I will say that he was better than what came after the revolution!
A hungry tiger in a confined space is a very real enemy, a pakistani not so much.
We're not talking about individuals here but states.
The slights are imagined, the dispute is over some backwater mountain region none of the countries actually want, except because their neighbor does.
You think slights are behind the conflicts between India and Pakistan? Like one of them lost a cricket match and decided to start a war? Wars have real reasons, the foremost in this case being "who is in charge of the land and the people and the water that goes with it?" I'm sure there's also an element (a real element) of Pakistan simply wanting to raise the price of control for India. Because of Pakistan's support of terrorism and extremism, India has to maintain a huge and costly military presence in Kashmir and Pakistan sees that as a bonus for themselves.
PS: It is not the amount of dollars available that makes for a stable country, it is the (lack of) divide between rich and poor. The greater the gap, the larger risk of violent upheaval - you know the kind where they roll out the guillotines.
Know who had greater equality than the US (measured by Gini coefficient) in 2006-2007? Tunisia, Egypt, Pakistan among many others... I highlighted those because you would be insane to think that they were more stable than US. A few years after these measurements were taken, of course, Tunisia and Egypt fell into revolution. Pakistan seems to be always on the verge of collapse.
I think you should recheck your assumptions about wealth. The actual conditions of poverty matter more than any gap or inequality. Compare the poor Pakistani living on $1/day and getting 75% of his daily caloric intake from government subsidized naan (bread) to a poor American living in free housing in a city with public transportation and receiving free meals for his entire family plus perhaps a stipend of spending money for having a disability of some kind.
I agree that it has to be made more fun. One fun thing is making money.
Many high schools let clubs do fundraising activities, and the computer club is a good place to showcase money making software. In my high school days, I wrote a matchmaking program that matched people up based on a survey. We printed out surveys and gave them to everybody in the school a few days before Valentine's day. Then on Valentine's day, we set up tables at the cafeteria and people could buy their matchmaking results for 50 cents. We made a ton of money with over 100% participation since many people took the survey multiple times to see who they would be matched up with for different answers. For the rest of the year the computer club had regular movie outings and pizza at meetings.
The best part was the feeling of being responsible for a very popular event and having schoolwide recognition for coming up with something entertaining. Everybody in the club was happy. We went from 4-5 regulars to 10-15 pretty quickly.
Hopefully you are American, otherwise most of your reasons don't make ANY sense.
I know there are people like you, even in America, who hate other countries because of some random issue that they just can't get over. Like some people hate Sweden, not because Sweden has done anything to them, but because Sweden is too socialist and *hypothetically* they wouldn't want to live there, therefore they HATE Sweden... it's just so retarded.
Nobody's saying Pakistan is a strong country. Pakistan is weak. That's why we have to help them so much, despite their open hatred of us and our well-deserved hatred of them. We wouldn't want their nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of terrorists.. that's the most common excuse you hear anyway.
Why did we go after bin Laden in secret? Because Pakistan would have intervened and moved bin Laden to a safer location.
Do you understand that? WE KNOW they would have aided the most wanted terrorist in the world. That's why we couldn't coordinate with them. Keep in mind this is "our most important ally in the war on terror" according to our government.
India does not have "imaginary" enemies. Pakistan is a really shitty enemy to have, and they also have nuclear weapons.
As for poverty India has seen a huge increase in wealth over the last few decades as they've become more Western friendly (instead of allied with the Soviets, vs. Pakistan and America) and more capitalist. I'm sure top-down programs like space programs and defense are good for their economy. It's better to have everybody get richer, yet maintain a rich-poor divide (like America's economy) than to try to bring up the low end and ignore the high end (like America's public education system, e.g. No Child Left Behind). We are the richest and most powerful country in the world due to the former, and have one of the worst public education systems of the developed world thanks to the latter.
Regarding Iran, their current, rather precarious condition their citizenry suffers is direct result of US and Britain intervention [wikipedia.org].
Iran's current state is an indirect result of the 1953 coup. It's a direct result of the 1979 revolution and the idiocy of leftists teaming up with Muslim groups. They used the Muslim groups as the muscle and assumed they would step aside and let the leftist intellectuals rule when the dirty work was done. Quite a tragic miscalculation, though obvious in hindsight.
The only reason western powers fear so much of iranian nukes is that since Iran acquires some nukes, US and friends won't be able to "bring democracy" to Iran as they brought it to Iraq or Libya.
That's a common theory but it doesn't make sense.. if anybody wanted to invade Iran, why wouldn't they do so RIGHT NOW before Iran has nukes? And yet it doesn't happen...
Restraint doesn't mean you never do something, it means "under control or within limits."
The wisdom of using the first ever nukes in the biggest war in history before all the consequences were well understood is debatable (personally I think it was fine), but America's history since then does not show a lack of restraint. Quite the opposite -- we are so restrained with our nukes that nobody is scared of them.
My thoughts exactly. I'm done with Kickstarter until they offer equity stakes.
Kickstarter is a great idea, and I've participated a handful of times (and gotten burned). But at this point it leans too much towards charity and good will.
I wonder if anybody else remembers some issues of Ranger Rick having BASIC program listings? My first program was typing in one of those, which ended up playing a tune from Bach on the computer speaker. I was really blown away by that.
I made so many typos that it didn't work the first 3 or 4 times I entered it.
If you're technically murdering babies right now, then we need a new word for when someone is really murdered. Your threshold for blame is too low to be meaningful anymore.
So we should all stay home in case some douchebag videos us?
This is honest advice -- if you empathize with this girl and could see yourself committing suicide because of an embarrassing video of something that you might do in public anyway, then yes, stay at home until you get some help. It's like playing with a loaded gun. If you sense you're even heading in that direction, you should get medication and counseling and it will help you a lot.
I think the most likely cases for embarrassment leading to suicide are people who are exposed while doing something very private. If you are a closet homosexual and you are outted on the Facebook and all your friends, family, and coworkers see it, I could see that leading to extreme depression and maybe suicide. If you are secretly into child porn and you get caught, and your photo is published in the news and your family, friends, and coworkers are talking about it on Facebook, that would be very embarrassing.
Someone in a camp like that probably knows already to be careful about what they do in public -- and they should do so. Some people like that can still get help to accept who they are, like the closet homosexual, whereas the pedophile simply has to hide for his entire life if he doesn't want to be embarrassed to death.
Those to me would be "understandable" cases of suicide. The girl in this story doesn't fit. She went to a party of her peers, and acted like her peers, and then killed herself out of embarrassment. That tells me there's something wrong with her.
And this is relevant how? If you drive somebody to suicide you can't pretend it has nothing to do with you just because you didn't physically attack them. Numbers have nothing to do with it.
Sorry, I didn't highlight what I was responding to -- your use of the word "often". You claim that "Like I said you don't always have to physically commit murder. Often inflicting psychological damage can do the job just as well."
1/1000 would not be often, and 300/1000 would not be credible.
So, how about pointing out the fact that the person is a bully? Announce it in newspapers, every time you see him, punch him and damage his property. Any time he is in a public place, film him, especially if he is being beaten up, then post the videos online.
Now I have to wonder what definition of bullying YOU have that would exclude this behavior?
Seriously, with the whole "smart gun" debate, and the political capital of child porn and underage sexting, I'm surprised camera companies aren't targets. The most basic thing would be a universal identifier embedded into pictures linking them to the source. Then there would be stuff like requiring an adult to copy pictures from a camera so underaged people can't send picture texts or upload pictures to the internet. Then we just need some algorithms that identify questionable images and automatically send them to the government for review before they can be transmitted anywhere. There would be some false positives, but those would be cleared up by the review staff.
Alcohol companies don't do a thing to prevent underage people from drinking. All of this could have been avoided with smart kegs that validate age and limit the amount of alcohol one user can draw from the tap.
Camera companies don't do a thing to prevent people from uploading inappropriate photos. All of this could have been avoided if an adult's permission was required to download photos and videos from a phone/camera to a computer.
Why do you feel Facebook is more responsible than the other companies involved?
If it's not cruel to blame the victim then what's wrong with it?
You took GP's statement and widened it significantly -- from the specific "drunk in a bathroom at the age of 14" to the general "anything stupid and embarrassing in front of someone else."
You're missing the crucial point -- for this particular girl, being drunk in a bathroom at age 14 was embarrassing enough to make her kill herself.
If something is embarrassing enough that if it got out, you would kill yourself, then don't do it in front of others. Really simple.
Indirectly yes. You don't have to stab somebody or shoot them to kill them. Psychological harm can be just as effective.
If you accept that kind of indirect blame, then right now you're murdering a starving African child.
The only real choices made here were (a) to film this unfortunate girl in a compromising position and (b) to post it on Facebook for the world to see. Everything else was a consequence.
What about the choice to go to the party, and the choice to start drinking and maybe doing drugs, and the choice to keep drinking until she got drunk? Those choices were even more fundamental than the ones you listed.
Like I said you don't always have to physically commit murder. Often inflicting psychological damage can do the job just as well.
Out of 1000 murders, how many do you think have no physical interaction, just psychological damage?
Unlikely unless you have the luxury of not adjusting your sleep schedule due to DST. Keep getting up an hour early and you're likely to be hungry an hour earlier as well.
The early metric folks tried to redefine calendars and clocks too. It didn't work. Doesn't work for angles either. In my opinion, Celsius has absolutely no benefits over Fahrenheit.
All you really like about the metric system is the SI prefixes. Nothing is stopping someone from measuring in kilofeet or millipounds.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I absolutely do. In the sense that it is a tiny group of power whores on one side against a tiny group of power whores on the other, the vast majority of their "subjects" do not give a flying fuck about the "conflict".
I think that's wrong primarily because of the religious nature of the conflict. It's far more widespread than a tiny group in power on either side. The vast majority of the population DOES care about and support the conflict, if only out of religious and ethnic pride. Pakistan is a country where school textbooks talk about one Muslim soldier equaling 10 Hindu soldiers.
Then on top of that you have a huge number of groups that benefit from it. The Pakistan army is the largest, and their reasons are real -- national security, control of water, strategic positions, maintenance of a terrorist network, and the guidance of that terrorist network to outside enemies.
Then you have the religious leaders, too many to even name, who count India, Israel, and the US as the axis of evil (type in raw cia and google will autocomplete mossad for you, that's how commonly linked together their intelligence agencies are). Most of the population listens to them and supports them.
And then there's the civil society, the rich, the upper middle class, who don't want to live like barbarians under Muslim law (i.e. they drink and have parties and listen to music) but see themselves as better than Indians. They hate Indians out of nationalistic pride, absolutely enraged that India is growing more powerful while Pakistan is waning. They also support the Army as a bastion against domestic Muslim terrorism and rule, and thus they back the Army on its goals.
So that's the Pakistani side at least. I don't know as much about India unfortunately.
It remains to be seen how stable the US is.
It remains to be seen how stable any country is. So any example you have where equality of wealth promotes stability can be equally dismissed.
But it's not up for debate that 2006 USA is more stable than 2006 Tunisia and Egypt. We have the benefit of history to see that.
The Gini coefficient is used to measure relative wealth, I said nothing of wealth, in fact what I said was that it is not the amount of dollars in a country that makes for a stable country, it is the divide between rich and poor.
The divide between rich and poor is defined by the wealth of the rich compared to the wealth of the poor. If there were no gap between the wealth of the rich and the wealth of the poor, they wouldn't be rich and poor! So I'm having a hard time understanding what you're trying to say. If you're not trying to talk about wealth or the amount of dollars, can you say it a different way than talking about the rich and the poor?
I should probably have said underclass and ruling class, but the divide is the important part.
Can you point to the country where the ruling class is poor and the underclass is rich, or even equal in wealth? In reality those are pretty much synonyms.
Haha, well America and the West in general has never been accused of being far-thinking.
By the fifth century, the Roman Empire had no trace of democracy, it was a brutal dictatorship.
Anon's post did not claim the Roman Empire was a democracy.
Nor did kings have any real restraint in medieval Europe.
That's not true: During medieval times who constrained the political power of the kings and great nobles?
The popes could and did excommunicate kings, and when they did it often gave licence for other people to overthrow those kings, and certainly meant that the kings' supporters were no longer obliged to help or support them.
I think maybe you're thinking of one of a handful of really powerful kings or emperors and ignoring most of the time period and most of the nations. You know Italy by itself had dozens of small kingdoms. There was a king of Naples for instance. You think he was some kind of all-powerful dictator?
I think one of the big differences between Christian kingdoms and Islamic kingdoms was the scope of their goal. Islam has always tried to be universal in both religion and state. There was only ever supposed to be one religion and one state (the caliphate), whereas in Christianity there was supposed to be one religion but having many kingdoms was perfectly fine.
The separation of Church and State in Christian lands made kings less powerful, but it also made religious leaders less powerful. (By separation I don't mean the modern idea, but simply the idea that they were separate authorities.. your regional Bishop or Cardinal didn't impose taxes, and your king didn't tell you how to pray. The Church and the State were otherwise very intertwined, of course.)
There were other constraints on the kings of Europe, of course, but they were non-religious (such as pressure from the nobles, Magna Carta, etc) and probably had some impact on Islamic rulers as well (though not as strong of an impact).
Not did Islam have its origins in the late Roman Empire
Hmm, did you reply to the wrong post? Out of your points, only 1 (constraint on kings) really makes sense as a reply. I don't see where Anon claimed Islam originated IN the Roman Empire. The closest statement is "at the later years of the Roman empire, when both Christianity and islam came to be" but of course that's referring to the time period.
Quite tragic for iranian citizenry under shah regime [wikipedia.org]. Britality of this regime caused 1979 revolution.
I disagree. While the Shah did engage in brutality, he had reason to -- perhaps brutality was a legitimate response to the rising power of leftist and Muslim religious groups. I mean take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leftist_guerrilla_groups_of_Iran When you have such a list of guerrilla groups operating in your country, trying to undermine the government and the economy, what are you supposed to do? Look at their ideology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology_of_the_Iranian_Revolution You have people who want to fight you simply because you are too Western, as if being Western is bad. Those kinds of people are irrational and impossible to deal with or negotiate with.
I've never lived in Iran and I didn't live through the times in question but from what I've read Pahlavi also brought about many positive (I mean Western of course) advances in Iran -- women's rights, education and literacy, land reform, health initiatives. This list is quite impressive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Revolution
Now of course I'm not saying Pahlavi was perfect, but I will say that he was better than what came after the revolution!
A hungry tiger in a confined space is a very real enemy, a pakistani not so much.
We're not talking about individuals here but states.
The slights are imagined, the dispute is over some backwater mountain region none of the countries actually want, except because their neighbor does.
You think slights are behind the conflicts between India and Pakistan? Like one of them lost a cricket match and decided to start a war? Wars have real reasons, the foremost in this case being "who is in charge of the land and the people and the water that goes with it?" I'm sure there's also an element (a real element) of Pakistan simply wanting to raise the price of control for India. Because of Pakistan's support of terrorism and extremism, India has to maintain a huge and costly military presence in Kashmir and Pakistan sees that as a bonus for themselves.
PS: It is not the amount of dollars available that makes for a stable country, it is the (lack of) divide between rich and poor. The greater the gap, the larger risk of violent upheaval - you know the kind where they roll out the guillotines.
Know who had greater equality than the US (measured by Gini coefficient) in 2006-2007? Tunisia, Egypt, Pakistan among many others... I highlighted those because you would be insane to think that they were more stable than US. A few years after these measurements were taken, of course, Tunisia and Egypt fell into revolution. Pakistan seems to be always on the verge of collapse.
I think you should recheck your assumptions about wealth. The actual conditions of poverty matter more than any gap or inequality. Compare the poor Pakistani living on $1/day and getting 75% of his daily caloric intake from government subsidized naan (bread) to a poor American living in free housing in a city with public transportation and receiving free meals for his entire family plus perhaps a stipend of spending money for having a disability of some kind.
I agree that it has to be made more fun. One fun thing is making money.
Many high schools let clubs do fundraising activities, and the computer club is a good place to showcase money making software. In my high school days, I wrote a matchmaking program that matched people up based on a survey. We printed out surveys and gave them to everybody in the school a few days before Valentine's day. Then on Valentine's day, we set up tables at the cafeteria and people could buy their matchmaking results for 50 cents. We made a ton of money with over 100% participation since many people took the survey multiple times to see who they would be matched up with for different answers. For the rest of the year the computer club had regular movie outings and pizza at meetings.
The best part was the feeling of being responsible for a very popular event and having schoolwide recognition for coming up with something entertaining. Everybody in the club was happy. We went from 4-5 regulars to 10-15 pretty quickly.
Hopefully you are American, otherwise most of your reasons don't make ANY sense.
I know there are people like you, even in America, who hate other countries because of some random issue that they just can't get over. Like some people hate Sweden, not because Sweden has done anything to them, but because Sweden is too socialist and *hypothetically* they wouldn't want to live there, therefore they HATE Sweden... it's just so retarded.
Nobody's saying Pakistan is a strong country. Pakistan is weak. That's why we have to help them so much, despite their open hatred of us and our well-deserved hatred of them. We wouldn't want their nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of terrorists.. that's the most common excuse you hear anyway.
Why did we go after bin Laden in secret? Because Pakistan would have intervened and moved bin Laden to a safer location.
Do you understand that? WE KNOW they would have aided the most wanted terrorist in the world. That's why we couldn't coordinate with them. Keep in mind this is "our most important ally in the war on terror" according to our government.
Yes, this. I don't think anybody on Earth can adequately justify America's dysfunctional and submissive relationship with Pakistan.
Harboring bin Laden was an act of war.
India does not have "imaginary" enemies. Pakistan is a really shitty enemy to have, and they also have nuclear weapons.
As for poverty India has seen a huge increase in wealth over the last few decades as they've become more Western friendly (instead of allied with the Soviets, vs. Pakistan and America) and more capitalist. I'm sure top-down programs like space programs and defense are good for their economy. It's better to have everybody get richer, yet maintain a rich-poor divide (like America's economy) than to try to bring up the low end and ignore the high end (like America's public education system, e.g. No Child Left Behind). We are the richest and most powerful country in the world due to the former, and have one of the worst public education systems of the developed world thanks to the latter.
Regarding Iran, their current, rather precarious condition their citizenry suffers is direct result of US and Britain intervention [wikipedia.org].
Iran's current state is an indirect result of the 1953 coup. It's a direct result of the 1979 revolution and the idiocy of leftists teaming up with Muslim groups. They used the Muslim groups as the muscle and assumed they would step aside and let the leftist intellectuals rule when the dirty work was done. Quite a tragic miscalculation, though obvious in hindsight.
The only reason western powers fear so much of iranian nukes is that since Iran acquires some nukes, US and friends won't be able to "bring democracy" to Iran as they brought it to Iraq or Libya.
That's a common theory but it doesn't make sense.. if anybody wanted to invade Iran, why wouldn't they do so RIGHT NOW before Iran has nukes? And yet it doesn't happen...
That's not what anybody "really" said.
Restraint doesn't mean you never do something, it means "under control or within limits."
The wisdom of using the first ever nukes in the biggest war in history before all the consequences were well understood is debatable (personally I think it was fine), but America's history since then does not show a lack of restraint. Quite the opposite -- we are so restrained with our nukes that nobody is scared of them.
You didn't do much research! This is a true story from 2010.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1265136/NHS-relax-superbug-safeguards-Muslim-staff--just-days-Christian-nurse-banned-wearing-crucifix-health-safety-reasons.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7576357/Muslim-staff-escape-NHS-hygiene-rule.html
My thoughts exactly. I'm done with Kickstarter until they offer equity stakes.
Kickstarter is a great idea, and I've participated a handful of times (and gotten burned). But at this point it leans too much towards charity and good will.
I wonder if anybody else remembers some issues of Ranger Rick having BASIC program listings? My first program was typing in one of those, which ended up playing a tune from Bach on the computer speaker. I was really blown away by that.
I made so many typos that it didn't work the first 3 or 4 times I entered it.
Technically that's true.
If you're technically murdering babies right now, then we need a new word for when someone is really murdered. Your threshold for blame is too low to be meaningful anymore.
So we should all stay home in case some douchebag videos us?
This is honest advice -- if you empathize with this girl and could see yourself committing suicide because of an embarrassing video of something that you might do in public anyway, then yes, stay at home until you get some help. It's like playing with a loaded gun. If you sense you're even heading in that direction, you should get medication and counseling and it will help you a lot.
I think the most likely cases for embarrassment leading to suicide are people who are exposed while doing something very private. If you are a closet homosexual and you are outted on the Facebook and all your friends, family, and coworkers see it, I could see that leading to extreme depression and maybe suicide. If you are secretly into child porn and you get caught, and your photo is published in the news and your family, friends, and coworkers are talking about it on Facebook, that would be very embarrassing.
Someone in a camp like that probably knows already to be careful about what they do in public -- and they should do so. Some people like that can still get help to accept who they are, like the closet homosexual, whereas the pedophile simply has to hide for his entire life if he doesn't want to be embarrassed to death.
Those to me would be "understandable" cases of suicide. The girl in this story doesn't fit. She went to a party of her peers, and acted like her peers, and then killed herself out of embarrassment. That tells me there's something wrong with her.
And this is relevant how? If you drive somebody to suicide you can't pretend it has nothing to do with you just because you didn't physically attack them. Numbers have nothing to do with it.
Sorry, I didn't highlight what I was responding to -- your use of the word "often". You claim that "Like I said you don't always have to physically commit murder. Often inflicting psychological damage can do the job just as well."
1/1000 would not be often, and 300/1000 would not be credible.
This is the suggestion for dealing with bullies:
So, how about pointing out the fact that the person is a bully? Announce it in newspapers, every time you see him, punch him and damage his property. Any time he is in a public place, film him, especially if he is being beaten up, then post the videos online.
Now I have to wonder what definition of bullying YOU have that would exclude this behavior?
Seriously, with the whole "smart gun" debate, and the political capital of child porn and underage sexting, I'm surprised camera companies aren't targets. The most basic thing would be a universal identifier embedded into pictures linking them to the source. Then there would be stuff like requiring an adult to copy pictures from a camera so underaged people can't send picture texts or upload pictures to the internet. Then we just need some algorithms that identify questionable images and automatically send them to the government for review before they can be transmitted anywhere. There would be some false positives, but those would be cleared up by the review staff.
Alcohol companies don't do a thing to prevent underage people from drinking. All of this could have been avoided with smart kegs that validate age and limit the amount of alcohol one user can draw from the tap.
Camera companies don't do a thing to prevent people from uploading inappropriate photos. All of this could have been avoided if an adult's permission was required to download photos and videos from a phone/camera to a computer.
Why do you feel Facebook is more responsible than the other companies involved?
If it's not cruel to blame the victim then what's wrong with it?
You took GP's statement and widened it significantly -- from the specific "drunk in a bathroom at the age of 14" to the general "anything stupid and embarrassing in front of someone else."
You're missing the crucial point -- for this particular girl, being drunk in a bathroom at age 14 was embarrassing enough to make her kill herself.
If something is embarrassing enough that if it got out, you would kill yourself, then don't do it in front of others. Really simple.
Perhaps you think you're being clever by asking this question over and over, but really, I can assure you that you're not.
If you feel disconnected from people who haven't raised teenagers, why don't you go to a forum where the people have raised teenagers? A quick google search reveals: http://www.medhelp.org/forums/Parenting-Teens-12-17/show/183
I did plenty of chores and sport and it never solved any bullying problems for me.
You're alive to post about it, so perhaps it solved the "I got bullied so I must kill myself" problem.
Indirectly yes. You don't have to stab somebody or shoot them to kill them. Psychological harm can be just as effective.
If you accept that kind of indirect blame, then right now you're murdering a starving African child.
The only real choices made here were (a) to film this unfortunate girl in a compromising position and (b) to post it on Facebook for the world to see. Everything else was a consequence.
What about the choice to go to the party, and the choice to start drinking and maybe doing drugs, and the choice to keep drinking until she got drunk? Those choices were even more fundamental than the ones you listed.
Like I said you don't always have to physically commit murder. Often inflicting psychological damage can do the job just as well.
Out of 1000 murders, how many do you think have no physical interaction, just psychological damage?
Unlikely unless you have the luxury of not adjusting your sleep schedule due to DST. Keep getting up an hour early and you're likely to be hungry an hour earlier as well.
The early metric folks tried to redefine calendars and clocks too. It didn't work. Doesn't work for angles either. In my opinion, Celsius has absolutely no benefits over Fahrenheit.
All you really like about the metric system is the SI prefixes. Nothing is stopping someone from measuring in kilofeet or millipounds.