The difference is if the gunman carrys a knife, not like he can kill 30+ people.
Julius Caesar, Ghengis Khan, Alexander of Macedonia, and a whole bunch of pre-firearms warriors would be interested in hearing that.
Oh, it takes a bit of strength and training, and might take a little longer, but in a room of 30+ people where only one has a big-ass knife, and the determination to use it? A knife can indeed be a tool of mass killing.
Those people aren't crazy by any legal definition: They can tell right from wrong and they know exactly what they're doing
The legal definition of sanity is a load of fetid dingo's kidneys.
Anyone who kills, or attempts to kill, another human being without provokation or need, has shown that they in fact do not know "right" from "wrong" (or at least did not at the moment of the attack).
If the jurisdiction has given police a blanket exemption from traffic laws even in non-emergency situations, for whatever reason
If there are traffic laws that cops can routinely break and not endanger people, then those laws are not doing anything to promote safety and should be removed from the books.
while YOU may not think it's just but how different is copying vs. representing the author?
Very different. Lying about or concealing the authorship of a work is an incidence of fraud; making a copy of a work is not.
i don't mind equating copyright with theft. if someone steals my photo, digital or print, and can reproduce it without paying me how is that NOT theft?
Stealing something deprives you of it's use; someone who copies our works does not do this, any more than someone who lights a torch off my campfire "steals" my fire.
Is it useful that creators get compensated for their work? Sure. (Just like if I'm the only guy around can make a fire, it's good to keep me happy.) Is a state-created monopoly on copies a good way to make this happen? No. If it ever was, it's not any more, not in an age of widely distributed digital computers.
For several years I've been arguing for a "royalty right" for for-profit use instead of copyright. Making copyies should be unrestricted, but sell a copy and you owe the author a cut. It's similar to songwriter royalties; I can play a Bob Dylan song at home or around the campfire with friends, and be fine, but if I play at a bar to pull in people, or sell CDs with a cover recording, he gets his nickel.
Examples include a student not receiving authorship on written work, or having a professor take credit for their work.
These are not "intellectual property" rights, they are "moral rights" of authors.
The distinction is important because one can be opposed to copyright as an artifical right created by the state but still be in favor of natural moral rights.
I don't think it's just to use force to prevent you from making a copy of one of my poems; but represent yourself as its author and I'll kick your ass.
Sharing does not imply contributing to a commons, as you suggest. It is an act between individuals
"Sharing" should be considered a transitive verb. With whom is the sharing done? The answer may be with one person ("I shared a bottle of wine with my girlfriend"), or with a community ("Einstein shared his genius with the world").
The Free Software Movement is about building and sharing with a community.
But regardless of the object of the verb, if the thing being shared is not returned back equally (at least roughly), then as Bruce points out it's not sharing, but a gift (or a theft). If I pass my girlfriend that bottle of wine and she drinks the whole thing herself, we have not shared it.
The GPL ensures that people have to pass the bottle back.
It's grossly ignorant to suggest it's not a series of chemical reactions
It's grossly ignorant to confuse experiences of subjective personal realities, with observations of objective consensus reality. (Also beware of confusing maps with territories, menus and meals, equations with things, and summer days with pretty girls.)
unlike numeracy (which is human construct), what we know as love existed long before Homo Sapiens came along.
You're suggesting that numbers did not exist until humans came along?
Not only does that make figuring out the physics of the early universe interesting, trying to write equations without numbers and all; but it is known that non-human animals have some basic concepts of numbers.
if those of use that do believe in God are wrong what do we have to lose? However if you are wrong and there is a God...well then my friend there is hell to pay.
Pascal's wager is crap. First its assumes that one can choose one's beliefs regardless of evidence. Second it ignores that problem of multiple contradictory dogmas about god(s). Third it assumes that blind faith is rewarded - what is there's a god who rewards skepticism and intellectual rigor? Finally it assumes that belief has no cost, but holding beliefs in the absense of evidence is inherently intellectually corrosive.
It's also just a "might makes right" argument. If there was a being that condemned sentitent beings to afterlives of eternal suffering, it would be my ethical duty to resist this evil being, not to worship it. It's not possible to earn eternal suffering in a finite lifetime.
I find it disappointing how many people miss that love is a series of chemical reactions, or are uncomfortable discussing it as such.
Love is a subjective experience, the objective physiological correlates of which are certain types of chemical reactions.
To say love is this set of chemcial reactions is the same sort of error as saying that the number 17 is a certain pattern of beads on an abacus or of charge in my computer's circuits.
I believe what I believe no matter what science says because of the personal impact it's had on my life.
You've made the all-to-common error of confusing the subjective and the objective.
Your religious practices have had a positive effect on your personal, subjective exeperience of your life? Great. Rock on. Pray, chant, dance, meditate, use whatever myths and stories help get you through, that help you understand and deal with the human experience.
There is only one truth and being "open" to other ideas is completely contrary to having faith.
When dealing with subjective reality, there are billions of truths, because there are billions of subjective universes. You're entitled to your own.
For objective reality, there may be only one truth; blind faith is no way to arrive at it. Only by being open to and examining different hypothesis can we get closer to the truth.
If your faith commands you to not look at other ideas, then quite frankly your faith is stupid.
Think of it like this: What does it matter if the air quality is good when your economy has collapsed?
Excuse me, but you've got it completely ass-backwards: the question is, what does it matter if your economy is good, if the air is poisoned?
You can fix the economy a lot easier than you can fix poisoned air and water.
Rule number one for people in a self-contained space habitat, whether a Vostok caspule or a planetary ecosystem, is: Do not fuck with the spaceship's life support system.
when a democrat claims that nuclear power is bad, people pretty much buy it hook, line, and sinker.
Certainly saying "nukes are bad, umkay?" is anti-science.
Taking a long good look at the safety (no, pebble-bed reactors are not all that safe), security (Iran's in the news again), waste disposal (still don't have a place to put it), and limited fuel availablity issues involved with fission and concluding that it is a poor choice for our long-term energy needs, is not. (Note that there are other nuclear power technologies, like thorium spallation "energy amplifiers", and of course fusion, that hold more promise, and we ought to be directing resources toward researching and developing these rather than on fission.)
Indeed, much of the support for fission seems to be based more on techno-fetishism, on a desire to relize a myth of Man as Master, holding the Power of the Mighty Atom, than on sound scientific analysis.
huge amounts of surplus food every year that costs EU taxpayers a fortune. There is no political will to curb this waste as (especially in France) the farmers have too much political clout).
It's not necessarily waste to have more land than you need today under cultivation. Tomorrow there may very well be a drought or blight that reduces production per acre; keeping that extra land cultivated can be a very useful form of insurance, even if the food rots.
A corporation exists according to state law, not federal. There's a BIG difference.
Corporations are chartered by states, but certainly "exist according to" federal law, with a variety of recognitions, tax laws not least, in federal statutes.
But the fact that it's a state government and not the feds is irrelevant to the fact that the creation of corporations is an intervention into the marketplace.
Have you ever wondered why the third world is poor compared to the first world?... The primary reason that the third world is not the first world is because the governments of the third world fail miserably at defining and protecting private property rights.
No, the primary reason is a legacy of colonialism and exploitation from the age of European empires. (The opportunity to form such empires being largely a result of geographic advantages.)
Inf fact, modern third-world governments do a fine job of protecting property rights - of multinational corporations. It's actual citizens who lose out.
Property rights are useful tool for ensuring that primary natural rights are respected and fulfilled. Human beings need homes and tools and toys. We need the ability to make private decisions, and without some private property, we can't do that; if i don't own my guitar, I can't choose what songs to play.
All well and good. But when property becomes destructive of those ends, when property becomes a tool for hoarding the resources of the planet, for concentrating control of capital into the hands of a state-backed owning and ruling class, then we need to realize that ideas that can usefully be applied to guitars, cannot necessarily be usefully applied to large tracts of land, natural resources, or ideas - and certainly not to shares in control of, and profit from, the actions of immortal fictitious citizens created by government fiat.
Mistaking property as a primary right is the fundamental error of most strains of "libertarian capitalism".
The corporation is responsible for the economic growth of the last three hundred years
Especially as the price of WMDs comes down, we cannot safely sustain such a bizarre arrangement.
You are suggesting that we should remove from our legal framework the very structures that permit us to define and adjudicate those property rights most efficiently...The government does not "interfere" in the marketplace by allowing certain legal constructs to exist that facilitate its role in adjudicating private property disputes through the civil judicial system.
Creating modern publicly-traded corporations is not "adjudicating private property disputes"; it is the state giving birth to immortal sociopaths, with all the rights and almost none of the responsibilities of actual human citizens.
The fact that a large corporation has a similar coercive power to government is inconvenient ideologically and is thus ignored.
I always like to point out that corporations are chartered by the government; discussion of reducing government power to interfere in the marketplace should start with the revokation of most corporate charters (along with government-issued copyrights, patents, and land and resource deeds).
This gets interesting reactions from people who identify as "libertarian capitalists".
The "natural rights" are the basic things people need, as a consequence of human nature, in order to have the possibility of widespread general contentment. Even with them fulfilled, you might not be happy, that's a personal issue.
I would disagree with the premise here, because some of those things require the "taking" from another, under penalty of force.
You perfectly illustrate Thornley's point: rather than asking "what can we do in voluntary co-operation to see that everyone's needs are met," you immediately start to try to argue that some basic needs aren't basic needs.
I would suggest that forcing medical care upon people who don't desire or require it is a violation of human right or liberty.
Sure, competent adults rightfully can decide what sort of medical care to accept or reject. What's the relevance?
Not understanding what "Libery" is, is a fatal flaw of modern socialism and socialistic beliefs.
Not understanding what "socialism" is, is a fatal flaw of modern capitalism, especially libertarian capitalism.
Liberty is PERSONAL freedom. It is what you are born with, requires no intervention by government or society to grant.
How in the world do you read any disagreement with this into Thornley's words? But, liberty is just one of the natural rights.
Some of the same rights you probably don't agree with are also enumerated in the Bill of Rights, right to be secure in person, freedom of speech, right to bear arms etc all have been severely curtailed, and most often not by the political "right" but rather the political "left", though the right seems to be holding its own in this regard lately.
Again, how you read anything into my words or those of Thornley that I quote, that I am opposed to any of the rights you mention, is beyond me.
How you assign the decay of any of these rights more to the left is also beyond me, given that steady rightward slide of American government. Despite the supposed liberal conspiracy against the RKBA, even the Second Amendment is more respected by the far left than the far right; it was Reagan who signed the Mulford Act in order to disarm the leftist Black Panthers.
But certainly authoritarianism comes in both rightist and leftish flavors.
You think you have free speech? Go on National TV and say the N word.
Free speech includes the rights of others to call me an asshole if I use words or express ideas they don't like.
And for all the uproar I might get if I said "n*gger" on TV, if I said "boy I'd like to f*ck her" on TV I'd get heavy fines for "obsenity" from the radically conservative FCC; the right-wing version of political correctness is much more chilling than anything from the left.
Only the creator of a thing can guarantee anything.
Nonsense. First, third party guarntees are common in a variety of human endeavours; second, rights are an attribute of human beings, so no more have a "creator" than color vision or warm-bloodedness.
Which is why you think government is the granter and guaranteer of rights.
Er, no. What part of Thornley's statement that "no government can ever guarantee anything except death and taxes" do you not understand?
Which is why you seem to think that forcibly taking something is a right, in the case of Medical Care.
Nope, never said that.
People need medical care. That makes it a natural right. In a society that respects natural rights, people will have access to medical care.
(a) Ineffectual: writing or congresspersons, letters to the editor, voting.
(b) (Typically) Crazy: armed revolt.
It's like none of us (including me) knows how to navigate the territory between those two extremes.
What is takes is both.
The power structure can ignore a fairly large movement is there's no potential for it to spark into something radical; it can ignore a radical spark if there's no "fuel" of a larger movement that it might ignite.
We didn't get much progress in civil rights for people of African descent in this country until we had both the peaceful politics of Martin Luther King, and the armed direction action of Heuy Newton. Imagine looking at the 250,000 people at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and thinking, "What if they picked up guns like the Black Panthers?" Suddenly listening to them while they're still peaceful protestors seems like a good idea.
(Of course, the other side of that is "we need to do anything possible to prevent that spark", so you get COINTELPRO, agents provocateur sent into radical groups, and so on...never mind that that make for more chances of a spark.)
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Julius Caesar, Ghengis Khan, Alexander of Macedonia, and a whole bunch of pre-firearms warriors would be interested in hearing that.
Oh, it takes a bit of strength and training, and might take a little longer, but in a room of 30+ people where only one has a big-ass knife, and the determination to use it? A knife can indeed be a tool of mass killing.
The legal definition of sanity is a load of fetid dingo's kidneys.
Anyone who kills, or attempts to kill, another human being without provokation or need, has shown that they in fact do not know "right" from "wrong" (or at least did not at the moment of the attack).
As the late great Kurt Vonnegut put it, "We are only healthy to the extent that our ideas are humane."
If there are traffic laws that cops can routinely break and not endanger people, then those laws are not doing anything to promote safety and should be removed from the books.
I can't believe I've read this far down with no one mentioning Google.
...which is why the recycling process separates the plastic from the metal.
I remember stumbling across that playing at a friend's house...still think of it whenever the topic of software Easter eggs comes up.
No more so than mathematical equations "encode" a virtual device. Software is mathematics, and allowing mathematical formulas to be patented violates centuries of prcedent as well as good sense.
Ah, there's some confusion here.
"Moral rights" is in this case a legal term, a translation of the French term "droit moral," refering to legal rights of creators regarding personal and reputational value of a work.
Very different. Lying about or concealing the authorship of a work is an incidence of fraud; making a copy of a work is not.
Stealing something deprives you of it's use; someone who copies our works does not do this, any more than someone who lights a torch off my campfire "steals" my fire.
Is it useful that creators get compensated for their work? Sure. (Just like if I'm the only guy around can make a fire, it's good to keep me happy.) Is a state-created monopoly on copies a good way to make this happen? No. If it ever was, it's not any more, not in an age of widely distributed digital computers.
For several years I've been arguing for a "royalty right" for for-profit use instead of copyright. Making copyies should be unrestricted, but sell a copy and you owe the author a cut. It's similar to songwriter royalties; I can play a Bob Dylan song at home or around the campfire with friends, and be fine, but if I play at a bar to pull in people, or sell CDs with a cover recording, he gets his nickel.
These are not "intellectual property" rights, they are "moral rights" of authors.
The distinction is important because one can be opposed to copyright as an artifical right created by the state but still be in favor of natural moral rights.
I don't think it's just to use force to prevent you from making a copy of one of my poems; but represent yourself as its author and I'll kick your ass.
No, it's not.
"Sharing" should be considered a transitive verb. With whom is the sharing done? The answer may be with one person ("I shared a bottle of wine with my girlfriend"), or with a community ("Einstein shared his genius with the world").
The Free Software Movement is about building and sharing with a community.
But regardless of the object of the verb, if the thing being shared is not returned back equally (at least roughly), then as Bruce points out it's not sharing, but a gift (or a theft). If I pass my girlfriend that bottle of wine and she drinks the whole thing herself, we have not shared it.
The GPL ensures that people have to pass the bottle back.
It's grossly ignorant to confuse experiences of subjective personal realities, with observations of objective consensus reality. (Also beware of confusing maps with territories, menus and meals, equations with things, and summer days with pretty girls.)
You're suggesting that numbers did not exist until humans came along?
Not only does that make figuring out the physics of the early universe interesting, trying to write equations without numbers and all; but it is known that non-human animals have some basic concepts of numbers.
Pascal's wager is crap. First its assumes that one can choose one's beliefs regardless of evidence. Second it ignores that problem of multiple contradictory dogmas about god(s). Third it assumes that blind faith is rewarded - what is there's a god who rewards skepticism and intellectual rigor? Finally it assumes that belief has no cost, but holding beliefs in the absense of evidence is inherently intellectually corrosive.
It's also just a "might makes right" argument. If there was a being that condemned sentitent beings to afterlives of eternal suffering, it would be my ethical duty to resist this evil being, not to worship it. It's not possible to earn eternal suffering in a finite lifetime.
Love is a subjective experience, the objective physiological correlates of which are certain types of chemical reactions.
To say love is this set of chemcial reactions is the same sort of error as saying that the number 17 is a certain pattern of beads on an abacus or of charge in my computer's circuits.
You've made the all-to-common error of confusing the subjective and the objective.
Your religious practices have had a positive effect on your personal, subjective exeperience of your life? Great. Rock on. Pray, chant, dance, meditate, use whatever myths and stories help get you through, that help you understand and deal with the human experience.
But concluding from that, that the metaphysical dogmas associated with whatever you practice have anything to do with objective consensus reality, is a fallacy. "I chanted Hare Krisha and I felt better about my life" doesn't mean that the ISKCON's allegations that the Apollo missions were faked, since the Vedas state that the Moon is farther from the Earth than the Sun, hold any water.
When dealing with subjective reality, there are billions of truths, because there are billions of subjective universes. You're entitled to your own.
For objective reality, there may be only one truth; blind faith is no way to arrive at it. Only by being open to and examining different hypothesis can we get closer to the truth.
If your faith commands you to not look at other ideas, then quite frankly your faith is stupid.
Excuse me, but you've got it completely ass-backwards: the question is, what does it matter if your economy is good, if the air is poisoned?
You can fix the economy a lot easier than you can fix poisoned air and water.
Rule number one for people in a self-contained space habitat, whether a Vostok caspule or a planetary ecosystem, is: Do not fuck with the spaceship's life support system.
Certainly saying "nukes are bad, umkay?" is anti-science.
Taking a long good look at the safety (no, pebble-bed reactors are not all that safe), security (Iran's in the news again), waste disposal (still don't have a place to put it), and limited fuel availablity issues involved with fission and concluding that it is a poor choice for our long-term energy needs, is not. (Note that there are other nuclear power technologies, like thorium spallation "energy amplifiers", and of course fusion, that hold more promise, and we ought to be directing resources toward researching and developing these rather than on fission.)
Indeed, much of the support for fission seems to be based more on techno-fetishism, on a desire to relize a myth of Man as Master, holding the Power of the Mighty Atom, than on sound scientific analysis.
It's not necessarily waste to have more land than you need today under cultivation. Tomorrow there may very well be a drought or blight that reduces production per acre; keeping that extra land cultivated can be a very useful form of insurance, even if the food rots.
Corporations are chartered by states, but certainly "exist according to" federal law, with a variety of recognitions, tax laws not least, in federal statutes.
But the fact that it's a state government and not the feds is irrelevant to the fact that the creation of corporations is an intervention into the marketplace.
No, the primary reason is a legacy of colonialism and exploitation from the age of European empires. (The opportunity to form such empires being largely a result of geographic advantages.)
Inf fact, modern third-world governments do a fine job of protecting property rights - of multinational corporations. It's actual citizens who lose out.
Property rights are useful tool for ensuring that primary natural rights are respected and fulfilled. Human beings need homes and tools and toys. We need the ability to make private decisions, and without some private property, we can't do that; if i don't own my guitar, I can't choose what songs to play.
All well and good. But when property becomes destructive of those ends, when property becomes a tool for hoarding the resources of the planet, for concentrating control of capital into the hands of a state-backed owning and ruling class, then we need to realize that ideas that can usefully be applied to guitars, cannot necessarily be usefully applied to large tracts of land, natural resources, or ideas - and certainly not to shares in control of, and profit from, the actions of immortal fictitious citizens created by government fiat.
Mistaking property as a primary right is the fundamental error of most strains of "libertarian capitalism".
Growth that has left us with half the planet living on two dollars a day or less; that has the richest handful of human beings controlling more wealth than the combined GDP of a quarter of all the world's nations; has left a large part of the human race feeling that subsistence vegetable farming would be a step up.
This strikes me as a highly suboptimal result.
Especially as the price of WMDs comes down, we cannot safely sustain such a bizarre arrangement.
Creating modern publicly-traded corporations is not "adjudicating private property disputes"; it is the state giving birth to immortal sociopaths, with all the rights and almost none of the responsibilities of actual human citizens.
I always like to point out that corporations are chartered by the government; discussion of reducing government power to interfere in the marketplace should start with the revokation of most corporate charters (along with government-issued copyrights, patents, and land and resource deeds).
This gets interesting reactions from people who identify as "libertarian capitalists".
I didn't say you had a right to be happy.
The "natural rights" are the basic things people need, as a consequence of human nature, in order to have the possibility of widespread general contentment. Even with them fulfilled, you might not be happy, that's a personal issue.
You perfectly illustrate Thornley's point: rather than asking "what can we do in voluntary co-operation to see that everyone's needs are met," you immediately start to try to argue that some basic needs aren't basic needs.
Sure, competent adults rightfully can decide what sort of medical care to accept or reject. What's the relevance?
Not understanding what "socialism" is, is a fatal flaw of modern capitalism, especially libertarian capitalism.
How in the world do you read any disagreement with this into Thornley's words? But, liberty is just one of the natural rights.
Again, how you read anything into my words or those of Thornley that I quote, that I am opposed to any of the rights you mention, is beyond me.
How you assign the decay of any of these rights more to the left is also beyond me, given that steady rightward slide of American government. Despite the supposed liberal conspiracy against the RKBA, even the Second Amendment is more respected by the far left than the far right; it was Reagan who signed the Mulford Act in order to disarm the leftist Black Panthers.
But certainly authoritarianism comes in both rightist and leftish flavors.
Free speech includes the rights of others to call me an asshole if I use words or express ideas they don't like.
And for all the uproar I might get if I said "n*gger" on TV, if I said "boy I'd like to f*ck her" on TV I'd get heavy fines for "obsenity" from the radically conservative FCC; the right-wing version of political correctness is much more chilling than anything from the left.
Nonsense. First, third party guarntees are common in a variety of human endeavours; second, rights are an attribute of human beings, so no more have a "creator" than color vision or warm-bloodedness.
Er, no. What part of Thornley's statement that "no government can ever guarantee anything except death and taxes" do you not understand?
Nope, never said that.
People need medical care. That makes it a natural right. In a society that respects natural rights, people will have access to medical care.
People also need
What is takes is both.
The power structure can ignore a fairly large movement is there's no potential for it to spark into something radical; it can ignore a radical spark if there's no "fuel" of a larger movement that it might ignite.
We didn't get much progress in civil rights for people of African descent in this country until we had both the peaceful politics of Martin Luther King, and the armed direction action of Heuy Newton. Imagine looking at the 250,000 people at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and thinking, "What if they picked up guns like the Black Panthers?" Suddenly listening to them while they're still peaceful protestors seems like a good idea.
(Of course, the other side of that is "we need to do anything possible to prevent that spark", so you get COINTELPRO, agents provocateur sent into radical groups, and so on...never mind that that make for more chances of a spark.)
The "right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances" is indeed a right to protest.