The last grovernment that tried to use genetics to modify it's society of illness didn't have the technology, so they just resorted to gassing millions of the "unfit" to protect the chosen.
If you kill the baby before birth because of a genetic code defect, it is the same result. Just less gas and mass of bodies, but the results are the same.
If the "lives" program were implemented as suggested by Rahm Emanuel then I would not have two wonderful children.
Sorry, you lost me here. Are you suggesting that Rahm Emanuel has been advocating some sort of forced eugenics program? Link, please?
Did they have downs? Nope, just similar gene issues, but mentally they are higher than their peers.
What the heck is "similar" to trisomy 21? Down's syndrome is not a subtle genetic alteration, it's a whole extra copy of a chromosome.
But I guess he wouldn't want to teach them to take responsiblities for their actions... no reason to teach that anymore.
Aborting a fetus rather than having a baby you can't properly care for, is responsible behavior. (Of course using contraception and not getting pregnant in the first place is even more responsible.)
The obvious problem with your statement is that you, in calling anyone whose views obviously differ from yours..."small minded trash", make it obvious that you are not open to other ideas (close minded),
Not directed at me, but...
Not at all. Rejecting ideas does not make one close minded provided that one does so after analyzing them. Having an open mind is necessary, but so is sorting through the trash that people will throw into it. Calling a racist or a homophobe "small minded" doesn't mean I'm small minded myself for rejecting their ideas: I've analyzed those ideas and found them wanting. The racist, etc., has either not considered the opposing proposition, or has badly damaged analytic ability.
and also you spoke hatefully those who disagree with you.
But I agree with you that "trash" is not a good thing to call people. Ideas may be garbage -- and most of the ideas promoted by Fox News are -- but people are not.
if I attack you with a knife and you break my arm, I'm going to argue that you had the easy option of simply dislocating my elbow, which can be corrected in about 30 seconds (I've done it, pops right back into place). Instead you caused a severe injury, which was extremely painful and took months to heal. This was excessive force, and I'm going to sue you for triple actual damages
You're now talking a civil suit rather than criminal prosecution, a whole different can o' worms.
You can sue anybody for anything in this great land of ours. If I were being faced with a suit like this, I'd call up a whole passel of expert witnesses on self-defense and martial arts to testify that no, there is no "easy option" to simply dislocate the elbow during the melee of life-threatening hand-to-hand combat. Again, nothing to do with "he got what he deserved", simply "I did what was necessary to defend myself, and the level of force I used was commensurate with the threat."
(And actually, if set properly in the long run a simple fracture is more likely to heal completely and fully than injury to the ligaments and joint capsule. Dislocations and sprains are a bitch, as connective tissue has little blood supply.)
(remember, the average IQ of college students in Education-related degree programs is lower even than Communications or Physical Education programs).
Citation?
The only thing I could find on this was here, which estimates IQ based on SAT scores -- inherently bogus. And it puts education majors ahead of "Parks, recreation, leisure and fitness", into which Physical Education would fall. Education is behind "Communication and journalism" in this list -- but so are "Legal professions", Psychology, and Business.
This chart shows the median IQ of high school teachers to be comparable to that of other professions, and just a hair under that for engineers and computer-related occupations. Kindergarten and elementary school teachers show up a littler lower, but I'd say they have more need for "social intelligence" than for a high IQ.
Scouting has been under attack for decades, a true shame since it encourages young men and women to go out and be active in their community and grow into thoughtful citizens
Meh. The Boy Scouts is an organization designed to mold young men into soldiers and subjects. We can do without its nationalist, homophobic, anti-freethinking training. (The Girl Scouts, though, seem more open-minded.)
Frankly, I trust my neighbors with guns more than I trust the politicians trying to "regulate" them.
And that, of course, depends on where you live.
I support the RKBA; but I also understand how people living in high-crime areas, where their neighbors may be gang members, drug dealers, etcetera, might trust politicians more than their armed neighbors.
It seems very simple: Adam and Bob got into a fight over some crack deal gone bad. Adam shot Bob. If Adam hadn't had a gun, he wouldn't have shot Bob. So let's ban guns.
The problem is, that gun ban is about as effective as the ban on crack.
We have all kinds of reasonable tests for things. There should be a reasonable test for assault that determines one thing: Did you deserve it? If you were physically threatening somebody else, unprovoked, in the course of committing a crime; then you need to stop bitching that someone dislocated your elbow and left you beaten, bruised, and sore.
Physically threatening someone is an assault. You have a right to use reasonable force to defend yourself or others against an assault. It's about what's needed to preserve your safety and remove the threat, and has nothing to do with justifications about how the attacker "deserved" it. You'd do yourself and everyone else a favor if you dropped that line of thinking.
Can you say for sure, where it definitely IS legal?
According to the wik (too lazy to track down the statutes at the moment), here in Maryland "Defense of others is a defense [against a charge of assault, I presume], and the defendant must be found not guilty if all of the following four factors are present: 1) The defendant actually believed that the person defended was in immediate and imminent danger of bodily harm. 2) The defendant's belief was reasonable. 3) The defendant used no more force than was reasonably necessary to defend the person defended in light of the threatened or actual force. 4) The defendant's purpose in using force was to aid the person defended."
if the economy collapses, the government must "rescue" it by completely controlling all economic activity (i.e. full socialism).
I do wish people would learn the difference between the capitalist/socialist axis, and the free market/command economy one. They are independent concepts, and one can have a capitalist command economy (the U.S. during WWII) or a free market socialism (as was found in anarchist-controled areas during the Spanish Civil War).
If you see a violent crime, the very least you should do is report it and identify the perpetrators.
In fact, this obligation goes all the way back to English common law, which required witnesses to a crime to raise a "hue and cry" against the criminal.
I can understand in the U.S. where the public school system is really bad
The U.S. doesn't have a public school system. It has thousands, run at the county level.
In five minutes I can drive from Baltimore City, with horribly failing public schools and a graduation rate of less than 35%, to Baltimore County, with generally adequate schools and one of the highest graduation rates in the nation, to Howard County, one of the richest counties in the U.S., where over 40% of students have participated in Gifted/Talented programs.
But the issue here is not the quality of schools, or the socialization that kids may (or may not) get by going to school. These parents were determined to keep their children ignorant of any information or teaching that conflicted with their religious beliefs. I'd call keeping kids ignorant a form of child abuse; but it's considered perfectly acceptable by many Americans.
So if I buy a house, I'm not allowed to rent it out?
If you buy a house and do nothing but rent it out -- you do not maintain it or otherwise contribute, merely exploit the land ownership granted you by the state -- you are an absentee landlord, a low form of scum. Ownership of real estate should be based on occupancy and use.
All that needs to happen is to make it so people can't SPECIFICALLY claim property just for the sake of passive income.
Exactly.
Of course, we also need to apply that to absentee landlords and absentee business investors. That pretty much destroys capitalism as we know it. I'm okay with that.
Nowadays, in a state ruled by representatives of the citizenry for the citizenry...
See, that's the problem. We don't have that. If we did, we wouldn't have the patent system that we do. What we have is a state ruled by representatives of big businesses for big businesses.
We need some sort of controls on barratry, not just to fight patent trolls but to stop SLAPPs.
For example, after Pearl Harbor the US was shaken out of isolationism, a lot of people thought that if we had been at war earlier, we could have stopped it from happening.
I know it's a popular myth that Pearl Harbor just came out of nowhere, but it's not so. We had been struggling with the Japanese for control of the Pacific for years, and had just placed an embargo on them. Tactically, the attack was a surprise; but strategically, the coming war was obvious.
As for violent internally, that is highly subjective.
No, it is not. It is an objective fact that the U.S. has a high rate of violent crime compared to other industrialized nations.
The US has some areas that are scarcely populated, in those areas its possible to commit a violent crime without being seen, without having any witnesses and its quite possible to get away with it.
The violent crime rate is actually higher where the population density is high. I don't understand if you're just confused, or if you have some point here.
Either the people with a lot of wealth will maintain control giving peace
Oppression by a ruling class of a lower class that is unable to effectively resist is not peace.
Trade and wealth are essential for preserving peace
Hmmm. Why is it then that a nation as wealthy as ours is so often at war, and so violent internally?
When wealth is built by a handful by exploiting the many, when trade is unfair because of deep inequalities of power, then, no, peace will not be preserved.
However a quality ad supported product is a pipe dream.
Some 1940s and 50s radio shows were of such quality that there are still many fans of them decades later. They were ad supported product.
Except for premium pay channels and PBS, television has been an ad supported product from the start. There have been some quality shows -- certainly a minority amidst the dreck, but extant.
My local ad-supported alt-weekly paper has been of higher quality than Baltimore's daily (The Baltimore Sun) for many years now.
So, on what basis do you say that "quality ad supported product is a pipe dream"?
There seems to be some assumption that "community" means "unpaid". Not at all. The Free Software community includes a whole lot of people who get paid to use software to meet the needs of employers. If meeting those needs involves improving bits of Free Software, the employer benefits from having those contributions integrated into the product.
Thanks to Section 109 of the copyright law, you already HAVE permission to lend that book.
That's like saying I have permission to wear a purple t-shirt. There's no law that says "Men may wear purple t-shirts", and one would be superfluous: you can only have "permission" to do something if there is someone who can legitimately deny you from doing it.
There is no legitimate federal government power to prevent me from selling or lending an item that I own (unless I'm doing so to someone in another state). If Section 109 went away, I would still be entirely within my legal and ethical rights to lend someone a book.
Having permission to lend a book, does not equal to sharing a copy on the P2P network as mention earlier in this thread.
Many arguments made against sharing on P2P networks also apply to lending dead trees books.
For example, "Sharing on P2P networks makes works available to people who do not pay for them, and so must be stopped." A more formal presentation of this argument would be, "If X makes works available to people who do not pay for them, it must be stopped. Sharing on P2P networks makes works available to people who do not pay for them. Therefore, sharing on P2P networks must be stopped." However, we can apply the same argument form to lending dead trees books and conclude that lending dead trees books must be stopped. If we agree that such a conclusion is invalid, then we know that the argument is bogus -- even though dead tree book lending is not equivalent to sharing on P2P networks.
The other problem with your comparison is that libraries have permission to lend books
Since when does anyone need "permission" to lend out an item that they own? I lend books to people all the time. I neither have, nor require, permission to do so.
While science does try to minimize axioms, it requires a belief in an objective material universe about which observations can be accurately made and reported, even second- or third-hand. Some philosophers would question the existence of objective reality. And the unreliability of eyewitness observations, much less hearsay, is known to many lawyers.
So not at all like religion, which doesn't inquire, and doesnt answer those questions.
The histories of some religions are full of inquiry -- Thomas Aquinas in Catholicism comes to mind. And most religions answer fundamental questions. Now, they may have been doing the inquiry in a way that's not back by empirical reasoning ("I was wondering about XYZ, so I looked it up in the Bible, and I prayed really hard") and so get answers that are wrong ("God did it"), but religion most definitely can feature inquiry about fundamental questions.
Axioms are beliefs: They're taken as true and do not require proofs.
Not really. Axioms are assumptions. You can move back and forth freely between sets of assumptions, something you can't do with beliefs. Yes, people do change their beliefs, but it's generally a slow and difficult process, whereas a mathematician might move between the axioms of Euclidean and hyperbolic geometry several times in an hour.
Slashdot Mirror
The Nazis were just more vigorously implementing a eugenics concept that originated in the U.S., where compulary sterilization was carried out on over 60,000 people. (The SCOTUS okayed this in Buck v. Bell, which has not been overturned.)
You can't kill a "baby" before it's born., because it's not a "baby" yet. It's a fetus, embryo, blastocyst, or zygote. The distinction is very important: selecting which of several embryos to implant in order to avoid creating a person with a genetic disorder, is not the same as killing a three month old infant.
Sorry, you lost me here. Are you suggesting that Rahm Emanuel has been advocating some sort of forced eugenics program? Link, please?
What the heck is "similar" to trisomy 21? Down's syndrome is not a subtle genetic alteration, it's a whole extra copy of a chromosome.
Aborting a fetus rather than having a baby you can't properly care for, is responsible behavior. (Of course using contraception and not getting pregnant in the first place is even more responsible.)
No, but neither do astronomers, cosmologists, epidemiologists, paleontologists...
The ability to run experiments is not a necessary condition for a field to be a science.
Sounds a lot like my experience in an optics lab class, where I disproved almost every single principle of the field.
Not directed at me, but...
Not at all. Rejecting ideas does not make one close minded provided that one does so after analyzing them. Having an open mind is necessary, but so is sorting through the trash that people will throw into it. Calling a racist or a homophobe "small minded" doesn't mean I'm small minded myself for rejecting their ideas: I've analyzed those ideas and found them wanting. The racist, etc., has either not considered the opposing proposition, or has badly damaged analytic ability.
But I agree with you that "trash" is not a good thing to call people. Ideas may be garbage -- and most of the ideas promoted by Fox News are -- but people are not.
You're now talking a civil suit rather than criminal prosecution, a whole different can o' worms.
You can sue anybody for anything in this great land of ours. If I were being faced with a suit like this, I'd call up a whole passel of expert witnesses on self-defense and martial arts to testify that no, there is no "easy option" to simply dislocate the elbow during the melee of life-threatening hand-to-hand combat. Again, nothing to do with "he got what he deserved", simply "I did what was necessary to defend myself, and the level of force I used was commensurate with the threat."
(And actually, if set properly in the long run a simple fracture is more likely to heal completely and fully than injury to the ligaments and joint capsule. Dislocations and sprains are a bitch, as connective tissue has little blood supply.)
Citation?
The only thing I could find on this was here, which estimates IQ based on SAT scores -- inherently bogus. And it puts education majors ahead of "Parks, recreation, leisure and fitness", into which Physical Education would fall. Education is behind "Communication and journalism" in this list -- but so are "Legal professions", Psychology, and Business.
This chart shows the median IQ of high school teachers to be comparable to that of other professions, and just a hair under that for engineers and computer-related occupations. Kindergarten and elementary school teachers show up a littler lower, but I'd say they have more need for "social intelligence" than for a high IQ.
Meh. The Boy Scouts is an organization designed to mold young men into soldiers and subjects. We can do without its nationalist, homophobic, anti-freethinking training. (The Girl Scouts, though, seem more open-minded.)
And that, of course, depends on where you live.
I support the RKBA; but I also understand how people living in high-crime areas, where their neighbors may be gang members, drug dealers, etcetera, might trust politicians more than their armed neighbors.
It seems very simple: Adam and Bob got into a fight over some crack deal gone bad. Adam shot Bob. If Adam hadn't had a gun, he wouldn't have shot Bob. So let's ban guns.
The problem is, that gun ban is about as effective as the ban on crack.
Physically threatening someone is an assault. You have a right to use reasonable force to defend yourself or others against an assault. It's about what's needed to preserve your safety and remove the threat, and has nothing to do with justifications about how the attacker "deserved" it. You'd do yourself and everyone else a favor if you dropped that line of thinking.
According to the wik (too lazy to track down the statutes at the moment), here in Maryland "Defense of others is a defense [against a charge of assault, I presume], and the defendant must be found not guilty if all of the following four factors are present: 1) The defendant actually believed that the person defended was in immediate and imminent danger of bodily harm. 2) The defendant's belief was reasonable. 3) The defendant used no more force than was reasonably necessary to defend the person defended in light of the threatened or actual force. 4) The defendant's purpose in using force was to aid the person defended."
I do wish people would learn the difference between the capitalist/socialist axis, and the free market/command economy one. They are independent concepts, and one can have a capitalist command economy (the U.S. during WWII) or a free market socialism (as was found in anarchist-controled areas during the Spanish Civil War).
In fact, this obligation goes all the way back to English common law, which required witnesses to a crime to raise a "hue and cry" against the criminal.
Um, is there somewhere where using reasonable force to come to the defense of a mugging victim is not legal?
The U.S. doesn't have a public school system. It has thousands, run at the county level.
In five minutes I can drive from Baltimore City, with horribly failing public schools and a graduation rate of less than 35%, to Baltimore County, with generally adequate schools and one of the highest graduation rates in the nation, to Howard County, one of the richest counties in the U.S., where over 40% of students have participated in Gifted/Talented programs.
But the issue here is not the quality of schools, or the socialization that kids may (or may not) get by going to school. These parents were determined to keep their children ignorant of any information or teaching that conflicted with their religious beliefs. I'd call keeping kids ignorant a form of child abuse; but it's considered perfectly acceptable by many Americans.
If you buy a house and do nothing but rent it out -- you do not maintain it or otherwise contribute, merely exploit the land ownership granted you by the state -- you are an absentee landlord, a low form of scum. Ownership of real estate should be based on occupancy and use.
Exactly.
Of course, we also need to apply that to absentee landlords and absentee business investors. That pretty much destroys capitalism as we know it. I'm okay with that.
See, that's the problem. We don't have that. If we did, we wouldn't have the patent system that we do. What we have is a state ruled by representatives of big businesses for big businesses.
We need some sort of controls on barratry, not just to fight patent trolls but to stop SLAPPs.
I know it's a popular myth that Pearl Harbor just came out of nowhere, but it's not so. We had been struggling with the Japanese for control of the Pacific for years, and had just placed an embargo on them. Tactically, the attack was a surprise; but strategically, the coming war was obvious.
No, it is not. It is an objective fact that the U.S. has a high rate of violent crime compared to other industrialized nations.
The violent crime rate is actually higher where the population density is high. I don't understand if you're just confused, or if you have some point here.
Oppression by a ruling class of a lower class that is unable to effectively resist is not peace.
Hmmm. Why is it then that a nation as wealthy as ours is so often at war, and so violent internally?
When wealth is built by a handful by exploiting the many, when trade is unfair because of deep inequalities of power, then, no, peace will not be preserved.
Some 1940s and 50s radio shows were of such quality that there are still many fans of them decades later. They were ad supported product.
Except for premium pay channels and PBS, television has been an ad supported product from the start. There have been some quality shows -- certainly a minority amidst the dreck, but extant.
My local ad-supported alt-weekly paper has been of higher quality than Baltimore's daily (The Baltimore Sun) for many years now.
So, on what basis do you say that "quality ad supported product is a pipe dream"?
There seems to be some assumption that "community" means "unpaid". Not at all. The Free Software community includes a whole lot of people who get paid to use software to meet the needs of employers. If meeting those needs involves improving bits of Free Software, the employer benefits from having those contributions integrated into the product.
That's like saying I have permission to wear a purple t-shirt. There's no law that says "Men may wear purple t-shirts", and one would be superfluous: you can only have "permission" to do something if there is someone who can legitimately deny you from doing it.
There is no legitimate federal government power to prevent me from selling or lending an item that I own (unless I'm doing so to someone in another state). If Section 109 went away, I would still be entirely within my legal and ethical rights to lend someone a book.
Many arguments made against sharing on P2P networks also apply to lending dead trees books.
For example, "Sharing on P2P networks makes works available to people who do not pay for them, and so must be stopped." A more formal presentation of this argument would be, "If X makes works available to people who do not pay for them, it must be stopped. Sharing on P2P networks makes works available to people who do not pay for them. Therefore, sharing on P2P networks must be stopped." However, we can apply the same argument form to lending dead trees books and conclude that lending dead trees books must be stopped. If we agree that such a conclusion is invalid, then we know that the argument is bogus -- even though dead tree book lending is not equivalent to sharing on P2P networks.
Since when does anyone need "permission" to lend out an item that they own? I lend books to people all the time. I neither have, nor require, permission to do so.
While science does try to minimize axioms, it requires a belief in an objective material universe about which observations can be accurately made and reported, even second- or third-hand. Some philosophers would question the existence of objective reality. And the unreliability of eyewitness observations, much less hearsay, is known to many lawyers.
The histories of some religions are full of inquiry -- Thomas Aquinas in Catholicism comes to mind. And most religions answer fundamental questions. Now, they may have been doing the inquiry in a way that's not back by empirical reasoning ("I was wondering about XYZ, so I looked it up in the Bible, and I prayed really hard") and so get answers that are wrong ("God did it"), but religion most definitely can feature inquiry about fundamental questions.
Not really. Axioms are assumptions. You can move back and forth freely between sets of assumptions, something you can't do with beliefs. Yes, people do change their beliefs, but it's generally a slow and difficult process, whereas a mathematician might move between the axioms of Euclidean and hyperbolic geometry several times in an hour.