Logic teaches you how to think. If everybody knew how to think, we wouldn't have any of the associated junk like PETA, fear of "death panels", or any of this Creationism crap.
Logical thinking goes against anthrocentrism in ethics just as much as is does in cosmology -- to believe that Homo sapiens have some magical quality such that they are the only beings whose interests matter, is not logical. Indeed ethical anthrocentrism is nothing but an echo of the illogical religious belief that only human beings have "souls". While PETA's tactics are sometimes counter-productive, associating the philosophy of animal rights with counter-factual belief in "death panels" or Creationism is ridiculous.
Do you really think you could understand the motives of a being who can create a universe?
According to some religions, I am "made" in that being's image, so, yeah, why not?
Churches (whether Wiccan, Hindu, or whatever) don't question their gods or the motives of their gods, nor should they.
Odd you should choose those two religions as an example. Not only do a lot of Wiccans and Hindus ask such deep questions, many (though by no means all) could be identified as pantheists, who do not believe in a creator god who pre-exists and stands outside the universe.
Anarchy does not 'deteriorate' into rule by strongmen, rule by (competing) strongman is form of anarchy.
No. When you have rule by strongmen, by definition you have rulers. When you have rulers, or any sort of power hierarchy, you don't have anarchy.
Rule by strongmen, by "alpha males" who intimidate others into submission, is the oldest form of government, and indeed all other forms of government (except perhaps direct democracy) are nothing but refinements of it.
I believe segregation was ended largely by the courts, not Congress.
The standard proposed was "1 out of every 3 people doesn't want it". Nothing to do with courts or Congress.
As for the Declaration of Independence it passed with 9/13 = 69%.
Again, I was speaking of the level of support among the general population. We don't have good information on what that might have been -- as I said, no Gallup polls. But if we had a time machine and a bunch of pollsters to find out, I'd bet you a nickel that at least 1 out of every 3 colonists was not in favor of a war for independence. (In fact, this page claims that the majority were neutral or Loyalists.)
Now, how anarchy avoids deteriorating into rule by strongmen, is a legitimate question for anarchists. But to identify Somalia with anarchy, is incorrect.
The best man that have ever lived, George Carlin, used to say "I was born in a christian family, and I was a christian... well until I reached the age of reason. So I was a christian for about 2 and a half years"
Carlin also said, "That's what all the big ones, all the big religions said, 'Love yourself, Love your God, Love your neighbor, because you're all basically the same person. We just don't have uniforms yet, that's all.'"
Carlin was a very spiritual man, at least in his earlier work; I'm not sure if he himself, or just his work, became more curmudgeonly over the years. After all, this is the same guy who both gave us the "Seven Dirty Words", and did narration for Thomas The Tank Engine. Pigeonhole him at your peril.
Point is, spirituality and religious dogma are orthogonal concepts. Spirituality is about developing a comfortable relationship with yourself and with the universe. One can be a spiritual person and an atheist or an agnostic. See, for example, Aldous Huxley, or Percy Bysshe Shelley, or Richard Feynman, or Carl Sagan.
It's an attempt to accurately define what spirituality is. And it appears that it's chemicals in your head.
It is a grave and fundamental error to confuse the objective, philological correlates of an experience with the subjective experience itself. They are entities of different realms of existence. It's like confusing a velocity vector with a thrown bullet.
I mean if 1 out of every 3 people doesn't want the law....
If we took that as a standard, then this nation would probably still be segregated.
Heck, taken strictly, this nation might not exist: we don't have any Gallup polls from 1776, but it's quite possible that support for the Declaration of Independence did not reach 67%.
I think that the question of "What is first-person conscious experience, and what is needed to generate it?" is still a worthwhile question, and one that I feel like functionalism sidesteps rather than approaches.
The problem is, until *you* can demonstrate to me that you have a "first-person conscious experience", asking a non-human intelligence to demonstrate that is has one is special pleading. If you can't demonstrate that something exists, you can't respond to questions about it by anything other than "sidestepping".
The difficulty arises if images are shown to provoke and promote illegal behaviour.
The actual violence of censorship is a greater evil than images that may provoke or promote violence. "I am worried that viewing these images may provoke you to violence, so I am going to send armed men to take them away from you by force."
Should society and the government have the authority to ban videos and literature detailing weapon manufacture and security-breaking techniques?
It's hard to "check the facts" when the health bill keeps mutating every week.
OMG! People are negotiating on a proposed law, trying to make it acceptable to more people! This must be stopped!
You just can't win with the teabagger mentality. If Congress doesn't change a bill, they're "not listening to the people!" If the do change a bill, it "keeps mutating every week", and how is Joe the Plumber supposed to keep up with that?
Also telling me that it's 750-950 penalty doesn't make it any more Constitutional.
Congress has Constitutional authority to pretty much tax anyone for anything. Not to say all uses of that power are wise, but it clearly exists.
After a Bill has become Law, if one-half of the Member States declare the U.S. Law to be "unconstitutional" it shall be null and void.
So the governments of 25 states could wipe out voting rights laws for the whole nation? Thank you, no.
There are very good reasons why the Federal government grew in power at the expense of states: because state governments often proved corrupt and hostile to liberty and justice. I'm all for respecting the Constitutional restrictions on the Federal government, which has clearly overstepped its bounds in some areas. But the idea that state governments are inherently wiser or better is ahistorical.
...$2500 fine to be levied against citizens who don't have health insurance. That law, once Obama signs it, will be clearly unconsitutional
The Feds can quite Constitutionally put a $2,500 tax on everyone who does not have a health insurance plan. Not to say it's a good idea -- a mandate without a public option is a give-away to the insurance companies -- just that they have legitimate Constitutional authority to do so.
Switching to loser-pays would go a lonnnnnnnnnnnnnng way towards reducing the perverse incentives.
And would also go a lonnnnnnnnnnnnnng way to eliminating the (already miniscule) power of ordinary citizens to seek redress in the courts against mega-corporations.
Here's why loser-pays is a horrible idea: "Mr. Jones, you claim that Atoyot Motors was negligent in failing to adequately test the accelerators in its cars, leading to an accident that killed your family. The jury has -- just barely -- decided that your evidence wasn't strong enough, and found in Atoyot's favor. You owe them $500,000 in legal fees." After that, nobody else dares to sue, and Atoyot keeps making defective product that kills people.
It's Florida's obscenity law, and Californians are not subject to Florida law (no legislation without representation).
Californians most certainly can be subject to Florida law, and it's a good thing too, else con men could get away with all sorts of mail or wire fraud schemes.
I'm certainly glad that Maryland law can bind all those damned "Delaware corporations" that do business here. Or what if I stand on the Maryland side of the Mason-Dixon line and throw trash into Pennsylvania? Am I subject to Pennsylvania's anti-littering law? You bet.
"No legislation without representation" is not any sort of legal principle.
It is not legal to watch child porn in the privacy of your own home.
What I'm going to say is not a popular view, and let me be clear that people who hurt children, and those who aid or support such harm, need to be removed from polite society. And let me be clear that personally, I find the very idea that someone would enjoy watching images that depicted such harm, to be disgusting and revolting.
However: there is no "child porn" exception to the First Amendment. The fact that an image was produced by harming another human being (for example, a lot of the stuff at rotten.com) does not mean that the state has legitimate power to criminalize the mere possession of such images. And "child porn" laws go far beyond that, criminalizing made-up, wholely fictitious images. These laws are based on the notion that these images will cause bad thoughts which will lead directly to bad actions: they are nothing more than "thoughtcrime" laws.
As far as your products crossing state lines goes.. that's a specious argument as well, since states are NOT allowed to favor commerce in their own state over another state. Its also Unconstitutional, just like censorship.
Banning a product entirely is not favoring local producers over ones in another state. Nor is allowing such products to be sold only by authorized vendors. It may be stupid and/or wrong, but it's not unconstitutional. (Except in cases where it interferes with Constitutionally protected rights: requiring all books to be sold only by state licensed bookshops is different than requiring all booze to be sold only by state licensed liquor stores.)
Which is not to justify this ruling in any way: the whole "community standards" concept is a steaming pile of shit-filled entrails, and any judge who invokes it should be laughed out of office and put in the stocks wearing a sign saying "I fear ideas".
Authors might have early works that they hate now, and they're glad only 2500 copies were printed, only 400 sold and the rest were pulped by the publisher. There is, to put it crudely, no fucking way anybody else should be able to come along and republish it. Not until after they're long dead, anyway.
No. There is no fucking way that the government should be pointing guns at people to keep them from making copies of a work that an author has abandoned out of embarrassment. That does not "promote the progress of science and useful arts".
I mean, if I want to "borrow" your car, but it's too difficult to find you, should I just take it?
If you could "take" my car in some way that did not damage it, put any miles or wear or tear on on it, or deprive me of its use -- in other words, if you could copy it and drive off in the copy, leaving me my car -- why not?
I've yet to hear *anyone* make a convincing argument as to *why* the *whole system* must be scrapped and rebuilt
No one is suggest totally scrapping the entire health care system. But the system be have now is the most expensive in the world, while producing sub-par results.
or even what in the Constitution gives the federal government the power to do these things.
Congress has the power to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States." Congress can lay any taxes they want and buy us all ponies, if they agree that it's in support of the "common Defence and general Welfare". Health care is at least as important to the national defense as the interstate highway system, justified as a defense program: not only is universal access to basic health care necessary to quickly detect bioterrorism, but in case of an emergency or foreign invasion, a sickly populace cannot defend itself.
Congress also has the power to "regulate Commerce...among the several States". I don't think there are any health insurance companies not engaged in interstate commerce.
We have a different system of government and social framework here that has made America a superpower and given our citizens the most personal liberty along with the highest standard of living on the planet.
We certainly are a military superpower, but I do not see the dominance of the military-industrial complex as something to crow about.
If all these countries' healthcare systems are so good, why do those who want the best care in the world, delivered in a timely manner, come to America if our healthcare is so bad?
Its an affront to liberty. What right do you have to force a free individual to pay for the health care of another?
What right do you have to force a free individual to pay for the military protection of another? For the police and fire protection of another? For roads used by another?
Taxes are not an affront to liberty. Money is a creation of the state. "Render on to Caesar what is Caesar's," as one Jewish philosopher put it. If you want to play the game of money-and-property, your ante is seeing that the basic human needs of everyone are met.
Government needs to do less, not more
Government needs to either do more to regulate big business, or less to enable big business to exist. I can think of one great way to reduce government power and also do a lot to fix healthcare: revoke all government-issued corporate charters for for-profit insurance companies.
But, since there's fsck-all chance of that happening, then so long as insurance companies have the wealth and power that they do, I'm all for having government do more to regulate them. The idea that consumers can get an organization with the economic power of a midsize country to behave by the mechanisms of the market is nothing but a fairy tale.
"A repeatable, explicit, and predictive mechanism capable of producing biologically significant responses (modulation dependent or not) from low-level RF fields has not been found."
I do not know if low-level RF fields cause significant biological effects or not, but I can think of mechanisms that would not involve breaking chemical bonds. For example, induced electrical currents might have a biological effect. Or uneven heating from microwaves, with some resonant substances heating up while the rest of the tissue remains cool, might do something nasty to a cell's metabolism.
Again, I'm not saying that such effects exist. I'm saying that the "RF radiation isn't ionizing!" argument relies on what well might be overly simplified ideas of complex biological systems.
You can accept quantum mechanics as a valid standard, or you can base your understanding upon who provided the funding.
Skipping over hysterical and paranoid articles by teabaggers, I find an actual paper co-authored by Ezekiel Emmanuel discussing the "complete lives" concept. It has nothing to to with eugenics, or even with general allocation of health care resources -- the paper specifically says that the "complete lives system is not appropriate for general distribution of health care resources".
Complete lives is a bioethical proposal about how to prioritize the allocation of scarce resources, like organs for transplant or doses of vaccine for serious illness. What do you do when you've got 100 people waiting for liver transplants and only 90 livers available, or 100 people waiting for 90 doses of vaccine in a deadly epidemic? Who gets treated?
Complete lives suggests that in such cases we consider a combination of age, prognosis, number of lives saved, instrumental value (but only in a public health emergency -- e.g, doctors and nurses get priority for vaccines) and a lottery, in order to make the decision.
It's certainly a hard and controversial topic and you might reasonably disagree with their proposal. But it has nothing to do with some paranoid idea about aborting fetuses declared "genetically unfit", or about rationing health care.
Nationalist: read about the history of the split between Ernest Thompson Seton and Robert Baden-Powell. Baden-Powell took Seton's woodcraft organization and twisted it into something meant to produce soldiers for the Empire; and that fed back into the American scouting movement. "The tone of militant patriotism, the concern for individual efficiency within a
nationalistic context, insistence on uniformity and centralization or authority, and the attraction of Scouting for preadolescent boys -- all these traits of British Scouting took root in America..." -- David Macleod
Anti-Freethinking: according to the wik, "Boy Scouts of America's position is that atheists and agnostics cannot participate as Scouts (youth members) or Scouters (adult leaders)". They have expelled young men for being atheist.
Homophobic:"Boy Scouts of America believes that homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the obligations in the Scout Oath and Scout Law to be morally straight and clean in thought, word, and deed....In the unlikely event that an older boy were to hold himself out as homosexual, he would not be able to continue in a youth leadership position." In 2005 a BSA employee was fired for being gay.
Please, whatever you are smoking, please stop. It's obviously damaged whatever feeble quantity of functional brain cells you had prior to starting.
Now that I have cured your ignorance, I will be glad to accept your apology for that insult whenever you are ready.
Slashdot Mirror
Logical thinking goes against anthrocentrism in ethics just as much as is does in cosmology -- to believe that Homo sapiens have some magical quality such that they are the only beings whose interests matter, is not logical. Indeed ethical anthrocentrism is nothing but an echo of the illogical religious belief that only human beings have "souls". While PETA's tactics are sometimes counter-productive, associating the philosophy of animal rights with counter-factual belief in "death panels" or Creationism is ridiculous.
According to some religions, I am "made" in that being's image, so, yeah, why not?
Odd you should choose those two religions as an example. Not only do a lot of Wiccans and Hindus ask such deep questions, many (though by no means all) could be identified as pantheists, who do not believe in a creator god who pre-exists and stands outside the universe.
No. When you have rule by strongmen, by definition you have rulers. When you have rulers, or any sort of power hierarchy, you don't have anarchy.
Rule by strongmen, by "alpha males" who intimidate others into submission, is the oldest form of government, and indeed all other forms of government (except perhaps direct democracy) are nothing but refinements of it.
The standard proposed was "1 out of every 3 people doesn't want it". Nothing to do with courts or Congress.
Again, I was speaking of the level of support among the general population. We don't have good information on what that might have been -- as I said, no Gallup polls. But if we had a time machine and a bunch of pollsters to find out, I'd bet you a nickel that at least 1 out of every 3 colonists was not in favor of a war for independence. (In fact, this page claims that the majority were neutral or Loyalists.)
Rule by gangs and by strongmen is not anarchy.
Now, how anarchy avoids deteriorating into rule by strongmen, is a legitimate question for anarchists. But to identify Somalia with anarchy, is incorrect.
Carlin also said, "That's what all the big ones, all the big religions said, 'Love yourself, Love your God, Love your neighbor, because you're all basically the same person. We just don't have uniforms yet, that's all.'"
Carlin was a very spiritual man, at least in his earlier work; I'm not sure if he himself, or just his work, became more curmudgeonly over the years. After all, this is the same guy who both gave us the "Seven Dirty Words", and did narration for Thomas The Tank Engine. Pigeonhole him at your peril.
Point is, spirituality and religious dogma are orthogonal concepts. Spirituality is about developing a comfortable relationship with yourself and with the universe. One can be a spiritual person and an atheist or an agnostic. See, for example, Aldous Huxley, or Percy Bysshe Shelley, or Richard Feynman, or Carl Sagan.
It is a grave and fundamental error to confuse the objective, philological correlates of an experience with the subjective experience itself. They are entities of different realms of existence. It's like confusing a velocity vector with a thrown bullet.
If we took that as a standard, then this nation would probably still be segregated.
Heck, taken strictly, this nation might not exist: we don't have any Gallup polls from 1776, but it's quite possible that support for the Declaration of Independence did not reach 67%.
The problem is, until *you* can demonstrate to me that you have a "first-person conscious experience", asking a non-human intelligence to demonstrate that is has one is special pleading. If you can't demonstrate that something exists, you can't respond to questions about it by anything other than "sidestepping".
The actual violence of censorship is a greater evil than images that may provoke or promote violence. "I am worried that viewing these images may provoke you to violence, so I am going to send armed men to take them away from you by force."
No. Absolutely not.
OMG! People are negotiating on a proposed law, trying to make it acceptable to more people! This must be stopped!
You just can't win with the teabagger mentality. If Congress doesn't change a bill, they're "not listening to the people!" If the do change a bill, it "keeps mutating every week", and how is Joe the Plumber supposed to keep up with that?
Congress has Constitutional authority to pretty much tax anyone for anything. Not to say all uses of that power are wise, but it clearly exists.
So the governments of 25 states could wipe out voting rights laws for the whole nation? Thank you, no.
There are very good reasons why the Federal government grew in power at the expense of states: because state governments often proved corrupt and hostile to liberty and justice. I'm all for respecting the Constitutional restrictions on the Federal government, which has clearly overstepped its bounds in some areas. But the idea that state governments are inherently wiser or better is ahistorical.
The Feds can quite Constitutionally put a $2,500 tax on everyone who does not have a health insurance plan. Not to say it's a good idea -- a mandate without a public option is a give-away to the insurance companies -- just that they have legitimate Constitutional authority to do so.
And would also go a lonnnnnnnnnnnnnng way to eliminating the (already miniscule) power of ordinary citizens to seek redress in the courts against mega-corporations.
Here's why loser-pays is a horrible idea: "Mr. Jones, you claim that Atoyot Motors was negligent in failing to adequately test the accelerators in its cars, leading to an accident that killed your family. The jury has -- just barely -- decided that your evidence wasn't strong enough, and found in Atoyot's favor. You owe them $500,000 in legal fees." After that, nobody else dares to sue, and Atoyot keeps making defective product that kills people.
...except when it's convenient to them. "Guantanamo? Nope, not in our jurisdiction, sorry!"
Californians most certainly can be subject to Florida law, and it's a good thing too, else con men could get away with all sorts of mail or wire fraud schemes.
I'm certainly glad that Maryland law can bind all those damned "Delaware corporations" that do business here. Or what if I stand on the Maryland side of the Mason-Dixon line and throw trash into Pennsylvania? Am I subject to Pennsylvania's anti-littering law? You bet.
"No legislation without representation" is not any sort of legal principle.
What I'm going to say is not a popular view, and let me be clear that people who hurt children, and those who aid or support such harm, need to be removed from polite society. And let me be clear that personally, I find the very idea that someone would enjoy watching images that depicted such harm, to be disgusting and revolting.
However: there is no "child porn" exception to the First Amendment. The fact that an image was produced by harming another human being (for example, a lot of the stuff at rotten.com) does not mean that the state has legitimate power to criminalize the mere possession of such images. And "child porn" laws go far beyond that, criminalizing made-up, wholely fictitious images. These laws are based on the notion that these images will cause bad thoughts which will lead directly to bad actions: they are nothing more than "thoughtcrime" laws.
Banning a product entirely is not favoring local producers over ones in another state. Nor is allowing such products to be sold only by authorized vendors. It may be stupid and/or wrong, but it's not unconstitutional. (Except in cases where it interferes with Constitutionally protected rights: requiring all books to be sold only by state licensed bookshops is different than requiring all booze to be sold only by state licensed liquor stores.)
Which is not to justify this ruling in any way: the whole "community standards" concept is a steaming pile of shit-filled entrails, and any judge who invokes it should be laughed out of office and put in the stocks wearing a sign saying "I fear ideas".
No. There is no fucking way that the government should be pointing guns at people to keep them from making copies of a work that an author has abandoned out of embarrassment. That does not "promote the progress of science and useful arts".
If you could "take" my car in some way that did not damage it, put any miles or wear or tear on on it, or deprive me of its use -- in other words, if you could copy it and drive off in the copy, leaving me my car -- why not?
No one is suggest totally scrapping the entire health care system. But the system be have now is the most expensive in the world, while producing sub-par results.
Congress has the power to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States." Congress can lay any taxes they want and buy us all ponies, if they agree that it's in support of the "common Defence and general Welfare". Health care is at least as important to the national defense as the interstate highway system, justified as a defense program: not only is universal access to basic health care necessary to quickly detect bioterrorism, but in case of an emergency or foreign invasion, a sickly populace cannot defend itself.
Congress also has the power to "regulate Commerce...among the several States". I don't think there are any health insurance companies not engaged in interstate commerce.
No. Take off your American flag blindfold and turn off the Fox News for a second, and you might see that we rank behind several other nations in GDP per capita and standard of living. We're 20th on the Press Freedom Index, and have the highest incarceration rate on the planet. We have neither the most personal liberty, nor the highest standeard of living.
We certainly are a military superpower, but I do not see the dominance of the military-industrial complex as something to crow about.
Healthcare tourism goes both ways. American go to Mexico or India for treatment -- an estimated 750,000 Americans traveled abroad for medical procedures in 2008.
What right do you have to force a free individual to pay for the military protection of another? For the police and fire protection of another? For roads used by another?
Health care is a public good, just like roads and armies and fire and police protection.
Taxes are not an affront to liberty. Money is a creation of the state. "Render on to Caesar what is Caesar's," as one Jewish philosopher put it. If you want to play the game of money-and-property, your ante is seeing that the basic human needs of everyone are met.
Government needs to either do more to regulate big business, or less to enable big business to exist. I can think of one great way to reduce government power and also do a lot to fix healthcare: revoke all government-issued corporate charters for for-profit insurance companies.
But, since there's fsck-all chance of that happening, then so long as insurance companies have the wealth and power that they do, I'm all for having government do more to regulate them. The idea that consumers can get an organization with the economic power of a midsize country to behave by the mechanisms of the market is nothing but a fairy tale.
I do not know if low-level RF fields cause significant biological effects or not, but I can think of mechanisms that would not involve breaking chemical bonds. For example, induced electrical currents might have a biological effect. Or uneven heating from microwaves, with some resonant substances heating up while the rest of the tissue remains cool, might do something nasty to a cell's metabolism.
Again, I'm not saying that such effects exist. I'm saying that the "RF radiation isn't ionizing!" argument relies on what well might be overly simplified ideas of complex biological systems.
Observation trumps theory, even quantum theory.
Skipping over hysterical and paranoid articles by teabaggers, I find an actual paper co-authored by Ezekiel Emmanuel discussing the "complete lives" concept. It has nothing to to with eugenics, or even with general allocation of health care resources -- the paper specifically says that the "complete lives system is not appropriate for general distribution of health care resources".
Complete lives is a bioethical proposal about how to prioritize the allocation of scarce resources, like organs for transplant or doses of vaccine for serious illness. What do you do when you've got 100 people waiting for liver transplants and only 90 livers available, or 100 people waiting for 90 doses of vaccine in a deadly epidemic? Who gets treated?
Complete lives suggests that in such cases we consider a combination of age, prognosis, number of lives saved, instrumental value (but only in a public health emergency -- e.g, doctors and nurses get priority for vaccines) and a lottery, in order to make the decision.
It's certainly a hard and controversial topic and you might reasonably disagree with their proposal. But it has nothing to do with some paranoid idea about aborting fetuses declared "genetically unfit", or about rationing health care.
Nationalist: read about the history of the split between Ernest Thompson Seton and Robert Baden-Powell. Baden-Powell took Seton's woodcraft organization and twisted it into something meant to produce soldiers for the Empire; and that fed back into the American scouting movement. "The tone of militant patriotism, the concern for individual efficiency within a nationalistic context, insistence on uniformity and centralization or authority, and the attraction of Scouting for preadolescent boys -- all these traits of British Scouting took root in America..." -- David Macleod
Anti-Freethinking: according to the wik, "Boy Scouts of America's position is that atheists and agnostics cannot participate as Scouts (youth members) or Scouters (adult leaders)". They have expelled young men for being atheist.
Homophobic:"Boy Scouts of America believes that homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the obligations in the Scout Oath and Scout Law to be morally straight and clean in thought, word, and deed....In the unlikely event that an older boy were to hold himself out as homosexual, he would not be able to continue in a youth leadership position." In 2005 a BSA employee was fired for being gay.
Now that I have cured your ignorance, I will be glad to accept your apology for that insult whenever you are ready.
Did I miss something? How is the ACLU involved in this?