Lets list some top shelf, recent bad things happening at the big tech giants: - Google is suppressing relevant links in your search results that don't agree with their world view and/or whatever country you are searching from. If a conservative organization that controlled 90% of all search was doing this, it would be wall to wall media coverage, but the truth is Google is warping reality, rather than using straight relevancy to your search terms, now they are also deciding what is relevant.
Google must be regulated as a common carrier to protect the free exchange of ideas (a ubiquitous search engine is the very definition of a common carrier), and only a very narrow list should be censorable, and that list must be defined by the government with federal oversight and transparency and accountability to the people, not some unaccountable corporation. For example, sites inciting actual unjustified violence (in their content, not in some random user generated comment), sites promoting violent jihad, sites promoting harming children, etc. https://www.wsws.org/en/articl... https://www.usnews.com/opinion... https://www.reddit.com/r/googl...
- Google and Facebook combined control 60% of all advertising revenue on the web, and routinely block content from receiving revenue if they don't agree with it (conservative video blogs on Youtube for example.) No other entity has more than 5% market share of online advertising. http://fortune.com/2017/07/28/... - Google recently fired an employee who was asked for input on their internal hiring policies. When he highlighted a number of reasonable, demonstrable facts that contradict Google's diversity initiatives, one of his upper level managers leaked his memo to the press and he was subsequently fired (they are now facing a massive class action lawsuit, and more and more stories of the fascist intolerant alt left behavior at Google are coming out.) (no citation needed, well documented on slashdot.) - Facebook first facilitated Russian (and likely Chinese and others) meddling by allowing false advertising stories to run during the election, then they tried to implement news censors, the vast majority of which were targeted against conservative sites, to the point that there was massive backlash and they got hauled in front of congress to explain WTF they were doing. They utilized blatantly biased censors as well as sites like politifact (which has very little facts beyond the actual name, and is a demonstrated shill for the alt left and not some non-partisan group) and the ADL (also an alt left hit squad group with zero credibility to anyone who has been paying attention). https://gizmodo.com/former-fac... https://www.washingtontimes.co... Some concrete examples of conservative banning: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/20...
- Twitter has been caught red handed gleefully describing how they shadow ban people for expressing political views with which they disagree, rather than advocating anything objectively wrong. The political bans have been 90% right leaning people. Those on the left who have been banned have been advocating actual violence, and often associated with the terrorist group Antifa.
Humans are driven by a duality. One driver is the organic, emotions and instincts. The other driver is reason and logic. In a society where your every need is met with ease and you are largely shielded from the consequences of your irrational (emotion driven) behavior, many people have almost completely surrendered to their biological side, being driven by emotions and base organic drives (sex, food, drunkenness, etc.) That is not to say that they do not have the capacity for reason and logic, they have just given it up in the pursuit of hedonism.
Fire is clearly not alive because we can define and predict it's behavior 100% using chemical and thermal models (this is how the combustion engine, turbine engine, etc. are able to work). You cannot say the same for animals and clearly not for humans. Insects and bacterium are probably not alive in the true (not modern) definition. (They are biological machines designed to carry out tasks, but are 100% predictable and operate according to very complex biological algorithms with a few limited learning algorithms).
The rock is not alive because we can examine it a the molecular level and determine that there are no organized, active chemical process going on.
It was a nice thought from a philosophical POV, but we also have this thing called science that informs our understanding of the world.
Knowledge is not what gives you sentience, since computers contain vast amounts of knowledge but are clearly not sentient. Sentience is the as of yet un-duplicatable spark that allows a person to say "I am here, I exist and I can choose what to do next." Sentient life is that thing that disappears when a person dies. Biologically, nothing that was there a moment before death has left, but the "breath of life" the soul, is gone and after an hour at room temperature, there is nothing we can do to give that corpse, which is biologically the same, life again, which is why Frankenstein is still a work of fiction.
1. Sentient by way of self awareness, awareness of our own existence and the ability to make choices outside of biological instinct, based on complex reason and logic. It is not a difficult distinction in the real world, regardless of what your pointy headed professor may have taught you in college as he tried to brainwash you.
2. God is not imaginary, you just want him to be so you don't have to listen to him or consider the spiritual implications of your behavior. There are mountains of evidence for God, but I will give you two simple facts.
2a. Mater is not eternal, it has a finite life, therefore the universe and all the mater in it had a beginning. Atheists believe that "nothing" exploded and created all the mater in the universe (or the previous universe collapsed into nothing and then exploded, but there is no mechanisim for the collapse, no evidence for it and still doesn't explain the original origin of the mater, basically it's just a wild ass guess with nothing to back it up). I believe that an extra-dimensional being called God created the universe, who later revealed himself and his power to millions of people in very public ways over the last 6000 years. My theory of the origin of mater has a rational framework based on documented history and reason. Atheists believe in an irrational fairy tale with zero hard science or historical documentation to back it up.
2b. Life on earth is extremely complex and design intent is everywhere for anyone willing to see. Thousands upon thousands of design features contain irreducible complexity which cannot be explained by evolution (which has failed as a theory, and has never been observed or demonstrated in a lab, fails to explain DNA, whose whole existence is to prevent mutation, etc.), to the point where many honest biologists are now turning to ancient aliens as the source for life on earth because it is a more rational explanation than evolution (though the evolution orthodoxy is still vigorously protected by academia and they will fire you and blacklist you if you question evolution). They are getting closer to the truth, but it was an extra-dimensional alien we know as God who did it, and he left the account of his activities in Genesis.
3. Yes, when you make something illegal, it does not completely eliminate the practice, though by definition the law abiding people will stop doing it. However, lack of following the law is not a consideration when making just laws. Should we make bank robbery legal? By your logic, some bank robbers get injured when they rob banks, so we should make it legal so they don't have to worry about getting hurt when they rob a bank... No, that is now how morally just laws work. By the time most women know they are pregnant, the baby is fully formed with arms and legs, a beating heart and brain waves (how we define being alive as humans), and an abortion kills that living little defenseless human. All it takes to convince most women to carry their child to term is a single 3D ultrasound. The lay person has no trouble seeing and understanding that the life inside the womb is a baby after that simple observation. Calling it a parasite is both cold bordering on inhuman and inaccurate.
The world is not a perfect place. Not all people are good, and not all adoptive families are ideal, but give 13 year old kids who went through the "adoption racket" a choice of either staying in the "adoption racket" or a firing squad and see which one they overwhelmingly chose...
1. Human life alone is sentient, has a soul and is a gift from God. As soon as you get away from that simple fact, you are keeping company with Hitler, Stalin, Mao and the other mass murdering genocidal maniacs of the last century. Plants, fish, insects may respirate, but are clearly not sentient. Some large animals are soulish, but still not self aware and are driven mostly by instinct. Brain size alone does not impart a soul. Only the foolish who are enamored with nature without actually living in it think that animal life is the same as human life...
2. The purpose of sex is multifaceted. Sex creates a bond between two people at a physical, emotional and spiritual level. Sex is pleasurable. It also makes babies. You can ignore these basic realities, but it makes them no less true. God created a framework called (monogamous, lifelong) marriage in which sex can be enjoyed to the fullest and practiced often, which also creates an inherent support structure for the inevitable children that result.
3. If we were to close down all legal abortion, I agree that some people would still be irresponsible, but they could still use other forms of contraception, and those couples that did become pregnant would either get married or put the child up for adoption. The consequences are pretty easy to predict, Abortion was illegal for the last 200 years until 4 unelected lawyers in black robes pulled the "right" to an abortion out of their collective asses...
Resisting arrest or fleeing police after committing a capital crime are not misunderstandings. Police give each other the benefit of the doubt, which they deserve from all of us as well. Our system of justice is very good, but not perfect. Compare it to any other justice system in the world. Criminals have more rights and protections than anywhere else, even if they are caught red handed with multiple angles of video.
I am a fan of a reciprocity law that states that tampering with evidence or giving false testimony gives you (regardless of police officer or other citizen) the same penalty as the person on trial (i.e. death penalty case, perjure yourself or tamper with evidence and risk the death penalty).
The US police don't focus on de-escalation, that is for European sheep, they focus on overwhelming force. More people are killed by police in the US because we are an armed society and because of our demographics and violent gang sub cultures. It has little to do with the police.
As a society, we have this thing called adoption for irresponsible parents (it takes two) who get pregnant but are not equipped emotionally, mentally, financially, etc. There are a lot of responsible adults waiting to take these "unwanted" children.
You are proposing a false dichotomy. It is not either murder the baby or have a nanny state care for the mother and child in perpetuity. There is a third option, called adoption, so please get your facts straight.
Your argument, my ass...
And no, pro life people are not anti sex. There are literally dozens of effective birth control methods (the pill, condoms, tubal ligation, etc.) and once you get married, you get to have more sex safely in the right context than any single person ever will have and hopefully experience the joy of having children (the actual purpose of sex)...
I suspect George Soros, after all, currency manipulation is his shtick. That guy has truly harmed millions of people over his evil money destroying schemes as he made himself and his investors rich.
Except he didn't kill the guy he intended to Swat, but his neighbor. More similar to shooting at someone you intend to murder but have bad aim and kill the neighbor out watering his lawn.
I don't think that with the current infrastructure EMS has the capability to determine if a number is being spoofed. This is part of the problem, not the fault of the police, but the politicians who are too busy buying votes will social programs to implement infrastructure upgrades that would make spoofing impossible, or at least alert EMS that the caller is spoofing the origination point.
Software engineers make on average $92k per year; how much risk to your life does your job pose? Officers get paid on average $55k. Would that be enough for you to put your ass in the line of fire for a stranger? No, it probably wouldn't...
There were officers at the scene pretty quickly, but not enough officers responded initially to safely enter and sweep the school. The Columbine massacre went on for almost an hour, where if police had breached and entered in the first few minutes, many lives would have been saved (this was one of the key findings incorporated into law enforcement by a fact finding committee, which is why these days they respond en mass to an active shooter threat and enter ASAFP in most cases, the most notable exception being the Las Vegas shooting).
"don't know how many of these cases were when an officer dropped a gun next to the dead person, but I do know that can happen." Well shit buddy, if the cops are that dirty, we should just get rid of all 900,000 of them because of 5 bad cops a year and strap on a gun when we get up in the morning. Lets just have wild wild west justice and we can shoot each other for stealing a TV...
You are pointing out that our current system is not perfect, I agree, but then you go full retard (never go full retard) and say all the cops are bad and suspect, when the facts just don't support that conclusion...
For your own safety, I will clarify a couple of glaring errors in your post in an effort to save your life on that of another reader that is misinformed by your ignorant post:
An officer in most US states can shoot your ass dead if you are resisting arrest and start getting the upper hand, because officers are allowed to use whatever force required (up to deadly force) to subdue a suspect, so sorry, but you are wrong, resisting arrest can carry a death sentence in the moment. Don't do it. It is even more dangerous because your perception and the officers perception of resisting arrest may not align, and the courts will side with him/her if you show any meaningful resistance.
Also, an officer in most if not all US states can shoot your ass dead in the back while fleeing if he reasonably believes that you are a continued eminent threat to the community (i.e. you just shot someone and are fleeing towards other people with a gun or you just shot someone and you are running towards an occupied car to car jack someone or you are fleeing in a car and are showing reckless disregard for other drivers or pedestrians safety. They can and will shoot you DEAD for that shit. Don't do it...
I don't want a police state, and you clearly have no clue what a police state is (that is what they have in Russia, China and Venezuela. If anyone in the US truly tried to enforce a police state, they would be facing 60,000,000 armed citizens, and it would not end well.
I want law and order, and I don't mind a pile of dead criminals to get it, they made the choice to break the laws and put innocents in harms way. It is a tragedy when innocent people are accidentally killed in the course of law enforcement, but we live in an imperfect world. 35,000 people die every year in car accidents and you are shitting a brick over 5 murders by police out of 900,000 police and 11,000,000 arrests? You need to get a better grasp on statistics.
It is asinine to reject the best most fair law enforcement in the world because it is not 100% perfect. I think body cameras and dash cameras are the way to go, and we should have a federal law that protects recording of law enforcement at any time, that is an improvement on our current system to ensure that the people we hire to be cops are doing their job right, but enough with the BS about all cops being killers and trigger happy, the facts just don't support it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... (pick 2015 and hit the drop down to see the distribution of suspect circumstance (armed with a gun/knife/toy gun/unarmed/etc).
The risk is what they get paid for. Not killing innocent people is what their job is supposed to be about.
Really?? What are you 12 years old? Cops make an average of $52k/year, the average software engineer makes $92k. How much risk does your job entail? They sure as hell do not get paid commensurate with the risk that they put themselves in. They don't do it for the money, most cops do it because they want to help people and protect society from bad guys... If you can't figure that out, you may need to lay off your medical marijuana, because it's making you stupid.
The police shoot fewer of you Europeans because you're a bunch of milquetoast, disarmed beta sheep. You are no threat to anyone who is a little better trained in hand to hand and a little stronger. Two cops with a taser can easily deal with any twit with a bat or knife.
Over in the USA we are all a bunch of bad-asses who have enough guns and ammo to literally kill everyone and everything else on the planet with plenty of ammo to spare. There's a gun for every man, woman and child over here. Therefore, the cops over here are a lot more cautious if they perceive a threat. Most serious criminals are armed with firearms. (this paragraph is tongue in cheek, in case you missed it, though it is mostly true).
Honestly though, our stats aren't as bad as you make them out to be.
According to the FBI UCR, the total number of arrests (not traffic stops but arrests) in 2015 was 10,797,088. Out of all those arrests, approximately 965 were fatally shot. Of those, 564 were armed with a gun, 281 had a weapon of some kind, only 90 were unarmed and essentially all of them were attacking officers, resisting arrest or attempting to flee.
OTOH, there have only been about 54 unjustified police killings in the last 10 years, or about 5 per year So the actual numbers say if you are being arrested, you have a roughly 5 in 11 million chance of being unjustifiably killed by police. I will take those odds any day.
If you pull a gun on the cops, you are 110x more likely to be shot and killed, which most people over here feel is appropriate.
The assessment was that the shooter had called and confessed to shooting and murdering his parents and holding his sister hostage (or something similar). The police officer killed an innocent man in retrospect, but at the moment he fired, that was what the assessment was.
The asshole who perpetrated the swatting pulled the trigger with his phone call, as far as I am concerned. He has a history of bomb threats and swattings and he apparently is skilled at doing this. Justice would be taking this piece of human excrement sociopath out in a field with a blindfold and giving a rifle to every person in the dead man's family. Let them get justice for their loved one.
Everyone shoots to kill. Shooting to wound or at the other guy's gun is a Hollywood fantasy. Criminals don't survive being shot because the cop was trying to wound them, they survive because they got lucky.
Shields and armor are only resistant, not bullet proof, and there are many exposed areas (neck, face, arms, legs) where a bullet can kill you even with body armor, to say nothing of hitting an artery and you bleed out in a minute. Unless you want the cops knocking in doors with APCs, they are still very much at risk when entering a home where violence has occurred.
If someone gets out a gun, aims and pulls the trigger, that is intent. In this case, the guy has a long history of putting people in danger, and pointing entire SWAT teams of guns at innocent victims. His words pulled the trigger as far as any reasonable person looking at all the evidence can conclude.
He made the call, he said the words with malice. THAT is intent, and all the bullshit you lay out is just that. Pseudoscience is no substitute for common sense, apparently.
They aren't, but they are ready to shoot a guy who calls up and says he just shot and murdered his parents and is holding his sister hostage (or whatever the swatting perpetrator said exactly, something to that effect). The bottom line is they thought they were confronting an armed murderer. You would be all keyed up and ready to shoot at any unexpected or threatening movement too, since you anticipate that your life, your fellow cops lives and the life of any hostages are on the line.
Bottom line, if cops come to your door with guns drawn, freeze and move very slowly following their directions exactly. If you are at all confused, just freeze and let them repeat their commands. They are trained not to shoot a motionless person. If you are an innocent victim, you can all laugh about it over a beer in an hour. The majority of police in the US far and away are good people just trying to help people and make it home at the end of the day to their families.
How many fatal encounters do you think there are, exactly? Let me enlighten you with some actual facts:
According to the FBI UCR, the total number of arrests (not traffic stops but arrests) in 2015 was 10,797,088. Probably double that for traffic tickets and other "interactions". Out of all those arrests, approximately 965 were fatally shot. Of those, 564 were armed with a gun, 281 had a weapon of some kind, only 90 were unarmed and essentially all of them were attacking officers, resisting arrest or felony attempting to flee.
OTOH, there have only been about 54 unjustified police killings in the last 10 years, or about 5 per year So the actual numbers say if you are being arrested, you have a roughly 5 in 11 million chance of being unjustifiably killed by police. I will take those odds any day.
So you live in your fantasy world where 5 unjustified killings per year makes 11 million arrests (probably 25 million "interactions") super dangerous and the cops are loose cannons who are going to shoot you on sight. I will live in the real world where statistics are a thing and cops are still the good guys far and away.
Just driving your car to work is more likely to kill you, with 35,485 deaths in 2015 (or 709,700% more fatalities than unjustified shootings by police), yet you don't give that a second thought. Might be time to fix your perception of reality...
Consider that we as a society do want the police to shoot people though. If the man who had been shot had actually just murdered his parents and was holding his siblings hostage (or whatever the swatter had said) then we would have congratulated the police on a job well done and moved on. The error here wasn't in shooting someone, the error was shooting the wrong person. If we treated the police as you suggest, no good people would want to be police, and we would be left with the equivalent of the federales of Mexico, who are all a bunch of crooked criminals who routinely steal from anyone and everyone.
Would you do your job for 30% less pay, the risk of being shot and killed if you hesitate for half a second and the risk of going to prison for 10 years if you made a split second mistake and shot a confessed murderer who wasn't compliant with lawful orders? No you would not. That officer will have to live with the trauma of killing an innocent man for the rest of his life, but it was clearly a mistake with extenuating circumstances. People need to give police the same consideration that they would want to have in the same situation. The asshole swatter is the only person here who is guilty, and he should be punished severely.
Two points: 1. If you ever have someone threatening to swat you, don't give them any address and immediately call your local police yourself to report it as a threat of violence against your person. They can often find the twit with a few screenshots and a call to the company that hosts the servers you are playing on. If nothing else, it puts you on the radar of the police, and they will be less likely to come in guns ready if you do ever get swatted since your complaint will be tied to your physical address when the emergency operator pulls it up.
2. The police would not be doing their jobs if they don't respond to an active shooter/hostage situation with overwhelming force. They are catching hell for not getting to the Las Vegas shooter sooner. They knew where he was within a couple of minutes. Much of the carnage during the Columbine shooting happened because only a few officers were on scene at first, and they had to wait for more police to arrive before moving in. If they had responded en mass, the casualty count would have been lower. One or two cops going into an active shooter situation does no one any good because they don't know how many they are facing or where they are, so they need a team (a la SWAT team) to move in and clear all the corners and hide holes that a shooter could find concealment and then either escape or shoot them from behind.
The manslaughter charge is actually under charging the swatting perpetrator. A more reasonable charge would be negligent homicide or Murder 2. If suicide by cop is a thing, swatting is essentially murder by cop or attempted murder, depending. It is equivalent in culpability to putting on a blindfold and firing into a crowded street. You are not trying to kill anyone by aiming at them, but by taking those actions, any reasonable person can assume that someone is likely to be killed. Much like a gun, police officers responding to active shooter/hostage situations can be counted on to act a specific way, and like a gun they are deadly in their intent.
Manslaughter is more along the lines of a bar fight where you are both equally responsible for starting the altercation, but the other guy has a bad heart and dies during the fight. You didn't mean to kill the guy and his death was not an expected outcome of some drunken fisticuffs.
Cops are trained to behave a certain way when responding to a violent felony/murder/hostage situation. They are keyed up expecting to be facing an armed person who just killed an innocent victim and is likely to do so again at a moments notice. They are still imperfect humans that make mistakes of a fraction of a second, and the fact that an innocent person was killed in this case is a tragedy that that police officer will have to live with for the rest of his life.
All the pinheads saying the cop is a murderer need to look up the definition of murder, namely, that the perpetrator needs malicious intent specifically against the victim. The cop who fatally shot the victim never laid eyes on him before that moment and by definition harbored no ill will against him, it was the victims bad luck that he made some sudden move, innocent though it may have actually been, that caused the officer to shoot, expecting to protect innocent lives and/or his fellow officers from what he understood to be an armed murderer.
I hope the swatting perpetrator gets a very public trial and gets the maximum sentence as well as a civil suit that takes every penny he ever makes. Swatting as a practice needs to be severely punished and treated as attempted murder with every incident and investigated both locally and by the FBI. A few more cases like this and we might actually get some investment in proper infrastructure that eliminates spoofing caller IDs (all emergency lines should be able to trace the call back to a house number, IP phones should either be blocked from emergency services, or require a credit card/drivers license pre-authentication to a physical address to access emergency numbers over VOIP). Sure, there will still be a few hundred people on the planet who can place emergency calls anonymously, but no system is perfect, the perpetrator in this case certainly is no hacking genius.
I have always wondered why, when sentencing white collar criminals, they don't make the jail sentence equal to the amount of money they stole divided by the average American wage. So for example, this guy facilitated stealing $100 million, and the average US wage is $51,000/year. So this asshat would get 1,960 years in jail, because that is the effective amount of time he stole from his victims. Give him the option of lethal injection, but either way his life should be over and he should die in prison.
The moral of the story is don't steal other peoples money, because money is quite literally other peoples lives, multiplied by a weighting factor of how valuable they are to society (at least for the working people, don't get me started on passive income).
I am all for a federal referendum process to create legislation and Amendments directly, similar to what California and other states have (150,000 signatures to get on the ballot, and then vote directly on the measure every 2 years). However, for day to day operations of the government, most people are too ill informed to vote with any competence.
That has nothing to do with computers though, paper ballots still work fine for the referendum process.
Slashdot Mirror
"Much of this techlash is misguided."
Lets list some top shelf, recent bad things happening at the big tech giants:
- Google is suppressing relevant links in your search results that don't agree with their world view and/or whatever country you are searching from. If a conservative organization that controlled 90% of all search was doing this, it would be wall to wall media coverage, but the truth is Google is warping reality, rather than using straight relevancy to your search terms, now they are also deciding what is relevant.
Google must be regulated as a common carrier to protect the free exchange of ideas (a ubiquitous search engine is the very definition of a common carrier), and only a very narrow list should be censorable, and that list must be defined by the government with federal oversight and transparency and accountability to the people, not some unaccountable corporation. For example, sites inciting actual unjustified violence (in their content, not in some random user generated comment), sites promoting violent jihad, sites promoting harming children, etc.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articl...
https://www.usnews.com/opinion...
https://www.reddit.com/r/googl...
- Google and Facebook combined control 60% of all advertising revenue on the web, and routinely block content from receiving revenue if they don't agree with it (conservative video blogs on Youtube for example.) No other entity has more than 5% market share of online advertising. http://fortune.com/2017/07/28/...
- Google recently fired an employee who was asked for input on their internal hiring policies. When he highlighted a number of reasonable, demonstrable facts that contradict Google's diversity initiatives, one of his upper level managers leaked his memo to the press and he was subsequently fired (they are now facing a massive class action lawsuit, and more and more stories of the fascist intolerant alt left behavior at Google are coming out.) (no citation needed, well documented on slashdot.)
- Facebook first facilitated Russian (and likely Chinese and others) meddling by allowing false advertising stories to run during the election, then they tried to implement news censors, the vast majority of which were targeted against conservative sites, to the point that there was massive backlash and they got hauled in front of congress to explain WTF they were doing. They utilized blatantly biased censors as well as sites like politifact (which has very little facts beyond the actual name, and is a demonstrated shill for the alt left and not some non-partisan group) and the ADL (also an alt left hit squad group with zero credibility to anyone who has been paying attention).
https://gizmodo.com/former-fac...
https://www.washingtontimes.co...
Some concrete examples of conservative banning: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/20...
- Twitter has been caught red handed gleefully describing how they shadow ban people for expressing political views with which they disagree, rather than advocating anything objectively wrong. The political bans have been 90% right leaning people. Those on the left who have been banned have been advocating actual violence, and often associated with the terrorist group Antifa.
Humans are driven by a duality. One driver is the organic, emotions and instincts. The other driver is reason and logic. In a society where your every need is met with ease and you are largely shielded from the consequences of your irrational (emotion driven) behavior, many people have almost completely surrendered to their biological side, being driven by emotions and base organic drives (sex, food, drunkenness, etc.) That is not to say that they do not have the capacity for reason and logic, they have just given it up in the pursuit of hedonism.
Fire is clearly not alive because we can define and predict it's behavior 100% using chemical and thermal models (this is how the combustion engine, turbine engine, etc. are able to work). You cannot say the same for animals and clearly not for humans. Insects and bacterium are probably not alive in the true (not modern) definition. (They are biological machines designed to carry out tasks, but are 100% predictable and operate according to very complex biological algorithms with a few limited learning algorithms).
The rock is not alive because we can examine it a the molecular level and determine that there are no organized, active chemical process going on.
It was a nice thought from a philosophical POV, but we also have this thing called science that informs our understanding of the world.
Knowledge is not what gives you sentience, since computers contain vast amounts of knowledge but are clearly not sentient. Sentience is the as of yet un-duplicatable spark that allows a person to say "I am here, I exist and I can choose what to do next." Sentient life is that thing that disappears when a person dies. Biologically, nothing that was there a moment before death has left, but the "breath of life" the soul, is gone and after an hour at room temperature, there is nothing we can do to give that corpse, which is biologically the same, life again, which is why Frankenstein is still a work of fiction.
1. Sentient by way of self awareness, awareness of our own existence and the ability to make choices outside of biological instinct, based on complex reason and logic. It is not a difficult distinction in the real world, regardless of what your pointy headed professor may have taught you in college as he tried to brainwash you.
2. God is not imaginary, you just want him to be so you don't have to listen to him or consider the spiritual implications of your behavior. There are mountains of evidence for God, but I will give you two simple facts.
2a. Mater is not eternal, it has a finite life, therefore the universe and all the mater in it had a beginning. Atheists believe that "nothing" exploded and created all the mater in the universe (or the previous universe collapsed into nothing and then exploded, but there is no mechanisim for the collapse, no evidence for it and still doesn't explain the original origin of the mater, basically it's just a wild ass guess with nothing to back it up). I believe that an extra-dimensional being called God created the universe, who later revealed himself and his power to millions of people in very public ways over the last 6000 years. My theory of the origin of mater has a rational framework based on documented history and reason. Atheists believe in an irrational fairy tale with zero hard science or historical documentation to back it up.
2b. Life on earth is extremely complex and design intent is everywhere for anyone willing to see. Thousands upon thousands of design features contain irreducible complexity which cannot be explained by evolution (which has failed as a theory, and has never been observed or demonstrated in a lab, fails to explain DNA, whose whole existence is to prevent mutation, etc.), to the point where many honest biologists are now turning to ancient aliens as the source for life on earth because it is a more rational explanation than evolution (though the evolution orthodoxy is still vigorously protected by academia and they will fire you and blacklist you if you question evolution). They are getting closer to the truth, but it was an extra-dimensional alien we know as God who did it, and he left the account of his activities in Genesis.
3. Yes, when you make something illegal, it does not completely eliminate the practice, though by definition the law abiding people will stop doing it. However, lack of following the law is not a consideration when making just laws. Should we make bank robbery legal? By your logic, some bank robbers get injured when they rob banks, so we should make it legal so they don't have to worry about getting hurt when they rob a bank... No, that is now how morally just laws work. By the time most women know they are pregnant, the baby is fully formed with arms and legs, a beating heart and brain waves (how we define being alive as humans), and an abortion kills that living little defenseless human. All it takes to convince most women to carry their child to term is a single 3D ultrasound. The lay person has no trouble seeing and understanding that the life inside the womb is a baby after that simple observation. Calling it a parasite is both cold bordering on inhuman and inaccurate.
The world is not a perfect place. Not all people are good, and not all adoptive families are ideal, but give 13 year old kids who went through the "adoption racket" a choice of either staying in the "adoption racket" or a firing squad and see which one they overwhelmingly chose...
1. Human life alone is sentient, has a soul and is a gift from God. As soon as you get away from that simple fact, you are keeping company with Hitler, Stalin, Mao and the other mass murdering genocidal maniacs of the last century. Plants, fish, insects may respirate, but are clearly not sentient. Some large animals are soulish, but still not self aware and are driven mostly by instinct. Brain size alone does not impart a soul. Only the foolish who are enamored with nature without actually living in it think that animal life is the same as human life...
2. The purpose of sex is multifaceted. Sex creates a bond between two people at a physical, emotional and spiritual level. Sex is pleasurable. It also makes babies. You can ignore these basic realities, but it makes them no less true. God created a framework called (monogamous, lifelong) marriage in which sex can be enjoyed to the fullest and practiced often, which also creates an inherent support structure for the inevitable children that result.
3. If we were to close down all legal abortion, I agree that some people would still be irresponsible, but they could still use other forms of contraception, and those couples that did become pregnant would either get married or put the child up for adoption. The consequences are pretty easy to predict, Abortion was illegal for the last 200 years until 4 unelected lawyers in black robes pulled the "right" to an abortion out of their collective asses...
Resisting arrest or fleeing police after committing a capital crime are not misunderstandings. Police give each other the benefit of the doubt, which they deserve from all of us as well. Our system of justice is very good, but not perfect. Compare it to any other justice system in the world. Criminals have more rights and protections than anywhere else, even if they are caught red handed with multiple angles of video.
I am a fan of a reciprocity law that states that tampering with evidence or giving false testimony gives you (regardless of police officer or other citizen) the same penalty as the person on trial (i.e. death penalty case, perjure yourself or tamper with evidence and risk the death penalty).
The US police don't focus on de-escalation, that is for European sheep, they focus on overwhelming force. More people are killed by police in the US because we are an armed society and because of our demographics and violent gang sub cultures. It has little to do with the police.
Or, you know, adopt them into loving families, because we are not actually wild animals and have empathy, love and altruism...
As a society, we have this thing called adoption for irresponsible parents (it takes two) who get pregnant but are not equipped emotionally, mentally, financially, etc. There are a lot of responsible adults waiting to take these "unwanted" children.
You are proposing a false dichotomy. It is not either murder the baby or have a nanny state care for the mother and child in perpetuity. There is a third option, called adoption, so please get your facts straight.
Your argument, my ass...
And no, pro life people are not anti sex. There are literally dozens of effective birth control methods (the pill, condoms, tubal ligation, etc.) and once you get married, you get to have more sex safely in the right context than any single person ever will have and hopefully experience the joy of having children (the actual purpose of sex)...
I suspect George Soros, after all, currency manipulation is his shtick. That guy has truly harmed millions of people over his evil money destroying schemes as he made himself and his investors rich.
Remember when he screwed over the British pound: https://priceonomics.com/the-t...
Or when he screwed over Thailand: http://www.businessinsider.com...
Or when he was caught illegally insider trading: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12...
Canada man, now giving Florida man a run for his money as the top contender...
Except he didn't kill the guy he intended to Swat, but his neighbor. More similar to shooting at someone you intend to murder but have bad aim and kill the neighbor out watering his lawn.
I don't think that with the current infrastructure EMS has the capability to determine if a number is being spoofed. This is part of the problem, not the fault of the police, but the politicians who are too busy buying votes will social programs to implement infrastructure upgrades that would make spoofing impossible, or at least alert EMS that the caller is spoofing the origination point.
Software engineers make on average $92k per year; how much risk to your life does your job pose? Officers get paid on average $55k. Would that be enough for you to put your ass in the line of fire for a stranger? No, it probably wouldn't...
There were officers at the scene pretty quickly, but not enough officers responded initially to safely enter and sweep the school. The Columbine massacre went on for almost an hour, where if police had breached and entered in the first few minutes, many lives would have been saved (this was one of the key findings incorporated into law enforcement by a fact finding committee, which is why these days they respond en mass to an active shooter threat and enter ASAFP in most cases, the most notable exception being the Las Vegas shooting).
"don't know how many of these cases were when an officer dropped a gun next to the dead person, but I do know that can happen." Well shit buddy, if the cops are that dirty, we should just get rid of all 900,000 of them because of 5 bad cops a year and strap on a gun when we get up in the morning. Lets just have wild wild west justice and we can shoot each other for stealing a TV...
You are pointing out that our current system is not perfect, I agree, but then you go full retard (never go full retard) and say all the cops are bad and suspect, when the facts just don't support that conclusion...
For your own safety, I will clarify a couple of glaring errors in your post in an effort to save your life on that of another reader that is misinformed by your ignorant post:
An officer in most US states can shoot your ass dead if you are resisting arrest and start getting the upper hand, because officers are allowed to use whatever force required (up to deadly force) to subdue a suspect, so sorry, but you are wrong, resisting arrest can carry a death sentence in the moment. Don't do it. It is even more dangerous because your perception and the officers perception of resisting arrest may not align, and the courts will side with him/her if you show any meaningful resistance.
Also, an officer in most if not all US states can shoot your ass dead in the back while fleeing if he reasonably believes that you are a continued eminent threat to the community (i.e. you just shot someone and are fleeing towards other people with a gun or you just shot someone and you are running towards an occupied car to car jack someone or you are fleeing in a car and are showing reckless disregard for other drivers or pedestrians safety. They can and will shoot you DEAD for that shit. Don't do it...
I don't want a police state, and you clearly have no clue what a police state is (that is what they have in Russia, China and Venezuela. If anyone in the US truly tried to enforce a police state, they would be facing 60,000,000 armed citizens, and it would not end well.
I want law and order, and I don't mind a pile of dead criminals to get it, they made the choice to break the laws and put innocents in harms way. It is a tragedy when innocent people are accidentally killed in the course of law enforcement, but we live in an imperfect world. 35,000 people die every year in car accidents and you are shitting a brick over 5 murders by police out of 900,000 police and 11,000,000 arrests? You need to get a better grasp on statistics.
It is asinine to reject the best most fair law enforcement in the world because it is not 100% perfect. I think body cameras and dash cameras are the way to go, and we should have a federal law that protects recording of law enforcement at any time, that is an improvement on our current system to ensure that the people we hire to be cops are doing their job right, but enough with the BS about all cops being killers and trigger happy, the facts just don't support it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
(pick 2015 and hit the drop down to see the distribution of suspect circumstance (armed with a gun/knife/toy gun/unarmed/etc).
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-t...
The risk is what they get paid for. Not killing innocent people is what their job is supposed to be about.
Really?? What are you 12 years old? Cops make an average of $52k/year, the average software engineer makes $92k. How much risk does your job entail? They sure as hell do not get paid commensurate with the risk that they put themselves in. They don't do it for the money, most cops do it because they want to help people and protect society from bad guys... If you can't figure that out, you may need to lay off your medical marijuana, because it's making you stupid.
The police shoot fewer of you Europeans because you're a bunch of milquetoast, disarmed beta sheep. You are no threat to anyone who is a little better trained in hand to hand and a little stronger. Two cops with a taser can easily deal with any twit with a bat or knife.
Over in the USA we are all a bunch of bad-asses who have enough guns and ammo to literally kill everyone and everything else on the planet with plenty of ammo to spare. There's a gun for every man, woman and child over here. Therefore, the cops over here are a lot more cautious if they perceive a threat. Most serious criminals are armed with firearms. (this paragraph is tongue in cheek, in case you missed it, though it is mostly true).
Honestly though, our stats aren't as bad as you make them out to be.
According to the FBI UCR, the total number of arrests (not traffic stops but arrests) in 2015 was 10,797,088. Out of all those arrests, approximately 965 were fatally shot. Of those, 564 were armed with a gun, 281 had a weapon of some kind, only 90 were unarmed and essentially all of them were attacking officers, resisting arrest or attempting to flee.
OTOH, there have only been about 54 unjustified police killings in the last 10 years, or about 5 per year So the actual numbers say if you are being arrested, you have a roughly 5 in 11 million chance of being unjustifiably killed by police. I will take those odds any day.
If you pull a gun on the cops, you are 110x more likely to be shot and killed, which most people over here feel is appropriate.
The assessment was that the shooter had called and confessed to shooting and murdering his parents and holding his sister hostage (or something similar). The police officer killed an innocent man in retrospect, but at the moment he fired, that was what the assessment was.
The asshole who perpetrated the swatting pulled the trigger with his phone call, as far as I am concerned. He has a history of bomb threats and swattings and he apparently is skilled at doing this. Justice would be taking this piece of human excrement sociopath out in a field with a blindfold and giving a rifle to every person in the dead man's family. Let them get justice for their loved one.
Everyone shoots to kill. Shooting to wound or at the other guy's gun is a Hollywood fantasy. Criminals don't survive being shot because the cop was trying to wound them, they survive because they got lucky.
Shields and armor are only resistant, not bullet proof, and there are many exposed areas (neck, face, arms, legs) where a bullet can kill you even with body armor, to say nothing of hitting an artery and you bleed out in a minute. Unless you want the cops knocking in doors with APCs, they are still very much at risk when entering a home where violence has occurred.
If someone gets out a gun, aims and pulls the trigger, that is intent. In this case, the guy has a long history of putting people in danger, and pointing entire SWAT teams of guns at innocent victims. His words pulled the trigger as far as any reasonable person looking at all the evidence can conclude.
He made the call, he said the words with malice. THAT is intent, and all the bullshit you lay out is just that. Pseudoscience is no substitute for common sense, apparently.
They aren't, but they are ready to shoot a guy who calls up and says he just shot and murdered his parents and is holding his sister hostage (or whatever the swatting perpetrator said exactly, something to that effect). The bottom line is they thought they were confronting an armed murderer. You would be all keyed up and ready to shoot at any unexpected or threatening movement too, since you anticipate that your life, your fellow cops lives and the life of any hostages are on the line.
Bottom line, if cops come to your door with guns drawn, freeze and move very slowly following their directions exactly. If you are at all confused, just freeze and let them repeat their commands. They are trained not to shoot a motionless person. If you are an innocent victim, you can all laugh about it over a beer in an hour. The majority of police in the US far and away are good people just trying to help people and make it home at the end of the day to their families.
How many fatal encounters do you think there are, exactly? Let me enlighten you with some actual facts:
According to the FBI UCR, the total number of arrests (not traffic stops but arrests) in 2015 was 10,797,088. Probably double that for traffic tickets and other "interactions". Out of all those arrests, approximately 965 were fatally shot. Of those, 564 were armed with a gun, 281 had a weapon of some kind, only 90 were unarmed and essentially all of them were attacking officers, resisting arrest or felony attempting to flee.
OTOH, there have only been about 54 unjustified police killings in the last 10 years, or about 5 per year So the actual numbers say if you are being arrested, you have a roughly 5 in 11 million chance of being unjustifiably killed by police. I will take those odds any day.
So you live in your fantasy world where 5 unjustified killings per year makes 11 million arrests (probably 25 million "interactions") super dangerous and the cops are loose cannons who are going to shoot you on sight. I will live in the real world where statistics are a thing and cops are still the good guys far and away.
Just driving your car to work is more likely to kill you, with 35,485 deaths in 2015 (or 709,700% more fatalities than unjustified shootings by police), yet you don't give that a second thought. Might be time to fix your perception of reality...
Consider that we as a society do want the police to shoot people though. If the man who had been shot had actually just murdered his parents and was holding his siblings hostage (or whatever the swatter had said) then we would have congratulated the police on a job well done and moved on. The error here wasn't in shooting someone, the error was shooting the wrong person. If we treated the police as you suggest, no good people would want to be police, and we would be left with the equivalent of the federales of Mexico, who are all a bunch of crooked criminals who routinely steal from anyone and everyone.
Would you do your job for 30% less pay, the risk of being shot and killed if you hesitate for half a second and the risk of going to prison for 10 years if you made a split second mistake and shot a confessed murderer who wasn't compliant with lawful orders? No you would not. That officer will have to live with the trauma of killing an innocent man for the rest of his life, but it was clearly a mistake with extenuating circumstances. People need to give police the same consideration that they would want to have in the same situation. The asshole swatter is the only person here who is guilty, and he should be punished severely.
Two points:
1. If you ever have someone threatening to swat you, don't give them any address and immediately call your local police yourself to report it as a threat of violence against your person. They can often find the twit with a few screenshots and a call to the company that hosts the servers you are playing on. If nothing else, it puts you on the radar of the police, and they will be less likely to come in guns ready if you do ever get swatted since your complaint will be tied to your physical address when the emergency operator pulls it up.
2. The police would not be doing their jobs if they don't respond to an active shooter/hostage situation with overwhelming force. They are catching hell for not getting to the Las Vegas shooter sooner. They knew where he was within a couple of minutes. Much of the carnage during the Columbine shooting happened because only a few officers were on scene at first, and they had to wait for more police to arrive before moving in. If they had responded en mass, the casualty count would have been lower. One or two cops going into an active shooter situation does no one any good because they don't know how many they are facing or where they are, so they need a team (a la SWAT team) to move in and clear all the corners and hide holes that a shooter could find concealment and then either escape or shoot them from behind.
The manslaughter charge is actually under charging the swatting perpetrator. A more reasonable charge would be negligent homicide or Murder 2. If suicide by cop is a thing, swatting is essentially murder by cop or attempted murder, depending. It is equivalent in culpability to putting on a blindfold and firing into a crowded street. You are not trying to kill anyone by aiming at them, but by taking those actions, any reasonable person can assume that someone is likely to be killed. Much like a gun, police officers responding to active shooter/hostage situations can be counted on to act a specific way, and like a gun they are deadly in their intent.
Manslaughter is more along the lines of a bar fight where you are both equally responsible for starting the altercation, but the other guy has a bad heart and dies during the fight. You didn't mean to kill the guy and his death was not an expected outcome of some drunken fisticuffs.
Cops are trained to behave a certain way when responding to a violent felony/murder/hostage situation. They are keyed up expecting to be facing an armed person who just killed an innocent victim and is likely to do so again at a moments notice. They are still imperfect humans that make mistakes of a fraction of a second, and the fact that an innocent person was killed in this case is a tragedy that that police officer will have to live with for the rest of his life.
All the pinheads saying the cop is a murderer need to look up the definition of murder, namely, that the perpetrator needs malicious intent specifically against the victim. The cop who fatally shot the victim never laid eyes on him before that moment and by definition harbored no ill will against him, it was the victims bad luck that he made some sudden move, innocent though it may have actually been, that caused the officer to shoot, expecting to protect innocent lives and/or his fellow officers from what he understood to be an armed murderer.
I hope the swatting perpetrator gets a very public trial and gets the maximum sentence as well as a civil suit that takes every penny he ever makes. Swatting as a practice needs to be severely punished and treated as attempted murder with every incident and investigated both locally and by the FBI. A few more cases like this and we might actually get some investment in proper infrastructure that eliminates spoofing caller IDs (all emergency lines should be able to trace the call back to a house number, IP phones should either be blocked from emergency services, or require a credit card/drivers license pre-authentication to a physical address to access emergency numbers over VOIP). Sure, there will still be a few hundred people on the planet who can place emergency calls anonymously, but no system is perfect, the perpetrator in this case certainly is no hacking genius.
I have always wondered why, when sentencing white collar criminals, they don't make the jail sentence equal to the amount of money they stole divided by the average American wage. So for example, this guy facilitated stealing $100 million, and the average US wage is $51,000/year. So this asshat would get 1,960 years in jail, because that is the effective amount of time he stole from his victims. Give him the option of lethal injection, but either way his life should be over and he should die in prison.
The moral of the story is don't steal other peoples money, because money is quite literally other peoples lives, multiplied by a weighting factor of how valuable they are to society (at least for the working people, don't get me started on passive income).
I am all for a federal referendum process to create legislation and Amendments directly, similar to what California and other states have (150,000 signatures to get on the ballot, and then vote directly on the measure every 2 years). However, for day to day operations of the government, most people are too ill informed to vote with any competence.
That has nothing to do with computers though, paper ballots still work fine for the referendum process.