Is wikileaks now an enemy of the United States? Is the news media an enemy of the United States?
If the answer is yes, why haven't we invaded them and taken them over?
Have you heard of this thing called the Internets? You put information on it, and *anyone* can access it!
You should also learn that not all enemies need to be attacked/destroyed; some are simply rivals or opposing interests that we have no interest in helping.
As far as war crimes Manning exposed, the "Collateral Murder" video was of US troops directly firing on civilians who were attempting to rescue people who were wounded, which violates the Geneva Conventions in two ways: You can't legally shoot civilians, and you can't shoot people who are rescuing wounded.
Accepting that that incident was a warcrime for the sake of argument, what then of all of those other documents he released?
Do you think that every document involved a crime; or is one justified in indiscriminately releasing documents if at least one of them involves a crime?
If Manning had only released that single video and focused on that, he could be considered a whistleblower. But that he released so many documents works against that being a valid defense.
But that was not his intention. Intent matters here.
Actions are declarations of intentions. If he did not mean to aid the enemy, perhaps he should have thought more carefully about leaking anything.
"I didn't intend to drunkenly T-bone that other car and kill that family" is not a valid legal or moral defense. I agreed to drive safely and to be liable for my actions when I got my driver's license and when I turned on my vehicle.
Do you want to live in a world where something you do unintentially that enables a terrorist to maybe derive some sort of vague advancement of his cause will lead you to being convicted of treason?
I can conceive of no rational universe in which I "unintentionally" take confidential documents and upload them to a stranger on the Internet. That he plead guilty already invalidates this line of defense - he chose to do what he did - it *was* intentional.
At best, Manning was being really really stupid. Dropping the book on him helps other really really stupid soldiers avoid making his mistake.
I'd add that Geneva is for protecting people who play within the rules in a war setting; those who plot terrorist mass murder are outside of those rules, and thus don't get the protection of the rules.
That they're locked up instead of summarily executed is already better treatment than they deserve; drone strikes (summary execution) are in fact the logical response to "no Gitmos".
Can someone explain to me why we have 50 million hungry in America, including 17 million children, while we lavish billions that will stretch into the trillions, for a fighter plane we don't need.
Because the federal gov't isn't responsible for feeding every US citizen, but it is responsible for defending the US as a nation.
A firefighter's job is to fight fires; not to be your personal gardener - it may be a job that needs to be done, but it's not the firefighter's responsibility. In the same way, the federal gov't is supposed to focus on foreign policy; domestic policy is really more of the state's job.
As for the planes, the modern US defense strategy has been to use technology as a force multiplier so we can use less soldiers and sustain fewer American casualties. Thus the expensive planes - they're insurance and deterrence against potential threats. They may not be completely *needed*, but they serve a goal that the US as a whole wants.
No. The burden of proof relies on you to conclusively prove that he was attempting to aid the enemy. Innocent until proven guilty... remember?
He knowingly released a large stash of documents that he did not have authorization to release, and for which he had no justification for releasing. (e.g. Whistleblowing)
He was entrusted with the access he had on the condition that he keep it confidential. He deliberately and knowingly violated that commitment, and that's all we need to find him guilty of to lock him up. He voluntarily entered that commitment, which is why he had any access; violating that commitment is why he's in the trouble he is in.
If he was attempting to aid the enemy he would have leaked them straight to the enemy.
Leaking them to wikileaks or the news *is* leaking them to the enemy. It's not as exclusive (everybody now knows the information is out there), but it has the exact same effect.
Now you could try and argue that his actions incidentally aided the enemy... but then you run up against the conclusive analysis that it had no practical effect.
That you know of. Would you like to set the bar even lower?
Where do you think you will be launching those missiles from? How do you think missiles hit their target? (amazingly, they use technology that stealth is designed against)
When you send up your drone-cessna, how do you know when to launch the missile, and at what? How reliable is that drone-cessna, by the way?
Recognizing a weapon requires thinking. Recognizing when one has been "put down" requires thinking. Recognizing whether the one carrying it is reaching for it to shoot or to put it down requires thinking.
For a robot to handle every single situation, you'd need some form of thinking.
To get "good enough" for peacekeeping, I think you can identify common weapons like AK47s without very advanced processing. Then you keep the rules it enforces simple - contact/no contact between the human heat signature and the ID'd metal weapon.
You do end up needing a good suite of sensors; this capability won't be cheap.
Recognizing a weapon requires thinking. Recognizing when one has been "put down" requires thinking. Recognizing whether the one carrying it is reaching for it to shoot or to put it down requires thinking.
Also, if the robot is incapable of learning (creating new rules), it's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to smuggle weapons past it, and do so succesfully every time from then on.
Am not a big fan of the idea that we build robots for everything. I'm just of the opinion that for the specific situation discussed, the robot doesn't need that level of capability. You're right that it's still a significant amount of work; but it doesn't need to be perfect, just good enough.
But since even the most basic useful capability will be a PITA to design, build, and deploy, I'd say that robot peacekeepers are a solution looking for a problem. It turns out that humans are incredibly cheap for the capability you get. Using expensive robots to keep "cheap" humans from killing each other honestly doesn't seem practical to me.
War has always been a primary driver of technology, even civilian programs like the space program was primarily a proxy for the military. Given that, there is little reason to assume that military conquest is an economicaly feasable way to aquire thechnology or resources, at least over the long term.
War does influence the development of technology, but I was talking about how a society's attitude towards war affects their growth potential.
A war-focused society (plunder everyone else!) is one where the best and brightest are drawn into the zero-sum game of taking other people's stuff. That results in an opportunity cost in other fields, like R&D for more economically productive technologies.
It's not a physical law, but there is a relationship that should be noted. Consider who won WWII, and think about how you would characterize the cultures of the ones who were involved.
"Wind power is in a middle ground," he says. "It is still one of the most scalable renewables, but our research suggests that we will need to pay attention to its limits and climatic impacts if we try to scale it beyond a few terawatts."
Sounds like Keith is recommending we invest a few terawatts worth into wind and that it's still one of the best renewable options out there. But your knee jerk response didn't give you the time to read the article much less his actual research.
No, Keith's suggesting that serious research needs to be done to scale wind beyond that point.
"The idea is feasible" is different than "we should execute the idea".
I'm going to suggest that creating a machine with a comprehensive list of rules & priority for enforcement is going to be much more feasible than creating a machine with the ability to think and apply reason.
It also has a better chain of responsibility in the case of things going FUBAR. "The CEO signed off on the robot applying this rule" vs. "the robot may have had a glitch in its Reason module, who knows?".
Different problem than what you stated, which was that modern practitioners weren't following the command to "genocide" they supposedly received.
But to take a stab at "genocide okay", that was the norm of warfare then, and recently, we've performed genocide on the culture of Nazism and Japan's Imperial cult without apology. Not many tears are shed over the destruction of those cultures.
Not all cultures are equal - and you're going to need to justify a view that absolutely claims all genocide for any reason is wrong.
Issued by their so called "merciful and loving" god, don't waste your time trying to justify the unjustifiable
Challenging you to pick better criticisms, that's all. Logical fallacies in the service of a correct conclusion are still fallacious - are you in pursuit of rational truth, or emotional satisfaction? My comment was aimed at the specific argument you offered. That you have better arguments in reserve does not fix your original point.
2) It does make war a bit more meaningless. If you aren't facing emotional losses, then there's little reason NOT to go to war. If it's not personalized... then who cares? Sure, even now we have sympathy for the other side and protests and such... but the majority of the people that care mostly care because our brothers / sisters / sons / daughters / etc. are out there possibly dying. So that helps push back the question "should we actually GO to war with them?"
War isn't about losing. War is about making the other guy agree to do things your way with force.
Having no emotional cost does not make war meaningless; it makes it dangerously cheap. "We'll send robots to conquer everyone and rule the world at no cost to ourselves!" (though, robots aren't cheap)
I agree that what you're describing is a bad thing, though. In the past, there have been countries who used their expertise at war to conquer everyone else and enrich themselves; eventually, someone better than them would come around, and destroy them. War may seem to be attractive in the short run, but has hidden costs that will bite back in the end.
One possible downside: a culture that uses war casually will retard its own technological innovation; why learn to produce useful widgets when you could just take them from your neighbors? But eventually you run out of people to plunder, or you piss off enough people that they ally against you and outfight you - and then what do you have?
I see you're used to Bible which contains thousands of contradictions and thus can't possibly be followed without massive cherry-picking. It does contain savage commandments like "when you approach a town, you need to issue an ultimatum: if the denizens surrender, kill only old women/the infirm/those uppity/etc and put the rest into slavery, taking their women as your wives and concubines -- but if they refuse to surrender, you must slaughter them all. Except for a list of tribes, which you're not allowed to spare and must slaughter without quarter, including livestock" -- yet no one takes such commandments seriously today, despite Jesus reaffirming the old law multiple times.
The commands you listed were specifically for the Israelite tribes conquering Canaan at that point in time.
They're different in nature than the ongoing commands about how the Israelites were supposed to live day by day; which was a condition for them to continue living in Canaan. Their descendants violated these laws. The Bible claims this is the reason their nation was destroyed and their people scattered, much as they did to the Canaanites before.
In turn, those commands are different than the commands that Christians are under; Christians are not Jews, though the religion has Jewish roots. The New Testament describes an early argument over how Gentiles were to be converted; the church leaders came to an agreement that Gentiles were not compelled to follow the entirety Jewish law.
You shouldn't blame people for not following commands that were never issued to them in the first place.
Also, a robot acting in real life cannot carefully think everything through. There's simply not enough time for that. This necessiates some kind of emotion-analogy to provide context for reflex and simple actions, just like it does on living beings.
Why does it need to think at all? It's applying rules, not creating them.
"Sir, my scans have detected unauthorized weapons. Please put them down or I will apply force."
I'm not sure what you mean by intrinsic value; a cup of water is free to the average person, but worth everything to a man stranded in the desert. There is no intrinsic value to the water; value is assigned to it by individuals based on their needs and wants.
You can average the value of everyone, but that still does not make it intrinsic to the object - it is all based on the perception by individuals.
As for changing the "perceived value" of something, what gov't can do is change the "perceived value" of its currency, which changes the currency price people pay for the things they want. The value of those things is not dependent on currency, which is why inflation and deflation can happen at all.
So it might be an interesting analogy, but fails at the most crucial point - a government is responsible for the value of the currency, a family merely uses the currency of the government.
A gov't has limited control of the "value" of currency.
If the gov't is printing money like there's no tomorrow, it triggers this effect called "hyperinflation" - and the value of money drops based both on the current amount in the market, and the expectation it will continue to drop in value.
The gov't *can* use inflation pay its own bills; but it does tremendous economic harm to society because it really boils down to an obfuscated wealth tax. (That hits the poor and middle class the most)
The original Founding Fathers created a republic for the people, if they can keep it. By the time of Lincoln, that was no longer the case - entire states full of people didn't want to keep the republic.
What should have happened is let the union split, or dissolve altogether. See, the ideal was just "one nation of liberty" (your words), not "one nation of liberty, and it has to include all these states in it, nobody can ever leave, EVER"
Does a single state have the right to dissolve the union? 2 states? 49% of the states? Majority? Supermajority?
Who decides if a state wants to leave the union? Its governor? Its legislature? A majority vote of its population? A supermajority of its population?
The Constitution provides no guidance on how to dissolve the republic, so the nation had to ad lib it.
It was a national divorce; with one side claiming no-fault divorce, and the other claiming that it must be with mutual consent. There are valid arguments for both. They could not resolve the dispute with words and there was no higher authority to appeal to, so it was resolved with force.
Needless to say, that sort of union leads to further problems down the road, so here we are today.
No matter how the Civil War was resolved, there would be problems for us today. But I would like to note that Democrats bear great responsibility for the current state of things (New Deal, Great Society), just as they were responsible for attempting to preserve slavery.
On a final note, a nation founded on the liberty to own slaves is unlikely to maintain "liberty" in any meaningful sense.
That's a poor attempt to Godel me. "Do not murder people" is absolutely a result of social scientific research. Take a look at ethics. There can be good societal reasons based on research for ethical behavior. Or do you beleive that we must necissarily inject religeous reasoning into our laws?
Nope. Murder laws predate social scientific research. Attempting to back-credit science for those laws is plagiarism; unless you'd like to cite how mankind developed murder laws through trial and error using a primitive form of the scientific method. (Such a history does not exist; murder laws exist as long as man has recorded it)
Scientific results are always provisional - "We haven't disproven this yet" As such, it doesn't provide any way to inform ethics. Remember eugenics? That was the Science of its day.
In fact, nothing about science makes its outputs ethical. It is only concerned with the repeatability of experiments and the reliability of data. Inethical behavior can be perfectly scientific.
That's before I even get into how unreliable scientific "results" can be. Just look at the science of human diet: eat meat; don't eat meat; Low fat; low carbs. Science hasn't even "solved" food, and you believe it should be used to "solve" politics? There are better methods with much better track records.
A false dichotomy claims there are fewer options than there are in reality.
The OP claimed that an extreme was unworkable. He advocated looking for a solution in between two identified extremes - in short, he acknowledged the existence of a SPECTRUM between the extremes. There was no false limiting of available options, so there is no "false dichotomy" or "black-white" thinking - it was the very opposite of what you were criticizing.
I did not agree that he made a strawman, either. I said that it *could* be a valid criticism. False dichotomy, on the other hand, is a completely invalid criticism for the reason I've laid out.
I don't get the impression that you comprehend a word of what I wrote. "Sometimes it's okay to kill people" is not compatible with moral absolutism. Contrast the statement, "Killing is always wrong," or even better, "Abortion is always wrong."
"Abortion is never wrong" is no less a morally absolute statement than "Abortion is always wrong". That overlaps with "Sometimes it's okay to kill people" - which you just claimed to be incompatible with moral absolutes. Care to rethink that, or are you happy to contradict yourself?
It seems that you think that morally absolute definitions cannot have exceptions. They can't have arbitrary exceptions, but they can have absolute exceptions. Ex: Killing a man is always wrong; unless he was first attempting to kill you without provocation. (a universal self-defense exception)
As for circular definitions, legal definitions of murder are not self-referencing. That people do not (perfectly) agree on what constitutes murder is tangential to whether or not "do not murder" is an absolute.
Your statements ("Depends," "...we're not sure...," "...have to make a judgement...") are about as far from absolute as you can get. So, thank you for proving my point. I recommend the wikipedia articles on moral absolutism, moral relativism, and moral universalism, so that you don't end up looking foolish when talking about what you believe in.
Belief that there is an absolute has nothing to do with having absolute certainty on how it would apply in a situation where the facts are unknown. I was acknowledging that it can be difficult to apply moral absolutes due to incomplete knowledge, but that is not moral relativity. If I believe the exact same judgement should be rendered upon the exact same circumstances, I am not being a moral relativist. (In reality, there are no exact same circumstances; but there are equivalent ones)
As to reading comprehension, I was criticizing someone for absolutely criticizing absolutism. It is a logical contradiction, and your responses have not and cannot salvage the position.
Favoring either party based on their founder (I realize Lincolns wasn't exactly a founder) is absurd. Lincoln expanded the role of government; Jackson shrunk it. Lincoln was more of an intellectual, Jackson more a man of the people. Democrats wouldn't elect Jackson today because he was a bigot. I can't see Lincoln arguing for more states rights, or flatting the tax base (he created the progressive tax system).
Founders are founders for a reason - they become leaders of their respective parties or nations because their ideas carried weight and aligned with the movements they led.
Parties are not monolithic, but a set of factions with a broad unifying ideology. The ideology that drove the Republican party of Lincoln was one to preserve US as a nation of liberty and ideals.
The modern conservative Republican who wishes to preserve the US as a nation of liberty and ideals is continuing (conserving!) that intellectual tradition.
As for Lincoln, he prioritized - free speech, slavery, and states' rights did not trump preserving the Union - which were pragmatic actions in service of the primary ideal - preserving the US as one nation of liberty. (Liberty to own slaves is rather oxymoronic, don't you think?)
Considering his judgement and moderation, I'd say he'd have nothing to do with the modern Democrat party, and he'd be a powerful intellectual leader for conserving the US as a nation of liberty. The modern welfare state is slavery by another name.
Slashdot Mirror
Is wikileaks now an enemy of the United States? Is the news media an enemy of the United States?
If the answer is yes, why haven't we invaded them and taken them over?
Have you heard of this thing called the Internets? You put information on it, and *anyone* can access it!
You should also learn that not all enemies need to be attacked/destroyed; some are simply rivals or opposing interests that we have no interest in helping.
As far as war crimes Manning exposed, the "Collateral Murder" video was of US troops directly firing on civilians who were attempting to rescue people who were wounded, which violates the Geneva Conventions in two ways: You can't legally shoot civilians, and you can't shoot people who are rescuing wounded.
Accepting that that incident was a warcrime for the sake of argument, what then of all of those other documents he released?
Do you think that every document involved a crime; or is one justified in indiscriminately releasing documents if at least one of them involves a crime?
If Manning had only released that single video and focused on that, he could be considered a whistleblower. But that he released so many documents works against that being a valid defense.
But that was not his intention. Intent matters here.
Actions are declarations of intentions. If he did not mean to aid the enemy, perhaps he should have thought more carefully about leaking anything.
"I didn't intend to drunkenly T-bone that other car and kill that family" is not a valid legal or moral defense. I agreed to drive safely and to be liable for my actions when I got my driver's license and when I turned on my vehicle.
Do you want to live in a world where something you do unintentially that enables a terrorist to maybe derive some sort of vague advancement of his cause will lead you to being convicted of treason?
I can conceive of no rational universe in which I "unintentionally" take confidential documents and upload them to a stranger on the Internet. That he plead guilty already invalidates this line of defense - he chose to do what he did - it *was* intentional.
At best, Manning was being really really stupid. Dropping the book on him helps other really really stupid soldiers avoid making his mistake.
I'd add that Geneva is for protecting people who play within the rules in a war setting; those who plot terrorist mass murder are outside of those rules, and thus don't get the protection of the rules.
That they're locked up instead of summarily executed is already better treatment than they deserve; drone strikes (summary execution) are in fact the logical response to "no Gitmos".
What does any of that have to do with the information that Manning leaked?
What war crimes was Manning whistleblowing?
Can someone explain to me why we have 50 million hungry in America, including 17 million children, while we lavish billions that will stretch into the trillions, for a fighter plane we don't need.
Because the federal gov't isn't responsible for feeding every US citizen, but it is responsible for defending the US as a nation.
A firefighter's job is to fight fires; not to be your personal gardener - it may be a job that needs to be done, but it's not the firefighter's responsibility. In the same way, the federal gov't is supposed to focus on foreign policy; domestic policy is really more of the state's job.
As for the planes, the modern US defense strategy has been to use technology as a force multiplier so we can use less soldiers and sustain fewer American casualties. Thus the expensive planes - they're insurance and deterrence against potential threats. They may not be completely *needed*, but they serve a goal that the US as a whole wants.
No. The burden of proof relies on you to conclusively prove that he was attempting to aid the enemy. Innocent until proven guilty... remember?
He knowingly released a large stash of documents that he did not have authorization to release, and for which he had no justification for releasing. (e.g. Whistleblowing)
He was entrusted with the access he had on the condition that he keep it confidential. He deliberately and knowingly violated that commitment, and that's all we need to find him guilty of to lock him up. He voluntarily entered that commitment, which is why he had any access; violating that commitment is why he's in the trouble he is in.
If he was attempting to aid the enemy he would have leaked them straight to the enemy.
Leaking them to wikileaks or the news *is* leaking them to the enemy. It's not as exclusive (everybody now knows the information is out there), but it has the exact same effect.
Now you could try and argue that his actions incidentally aided the enemy... but then you run up against the conclusive analysis that it had no practical effect.
That you know of. Would you like to set the bar even lower?
Where do you think you will be launching those missiles from? How do you think missiles hit their target? (amazingly, they use technology that stealth is designed against)
When you send up your drone-cessna, how do you know when to launch the missile, and at what? How reliable is that drone-cessna, by the way?
Recognizing a weapon requires thinking. Recognizing when one has been "put down" requires thinking. Recognizing whether the one carrying it is reaching for it to shoot or to put it down requires thinking.
For a robot to handle every single situation, you'd need some form of thinking.
To get "good enough" for peacekeeping, I think you can identify common weapons like AK47s without very advanced processing. Then you keep the rules it enforces simple - contact/no contact between the human heat signature and the ID'd metal weapon.
You do end up needing a good suite of sensors; this capability won't be cheap.
Recognizing a weapon requires thinking. Recognizing when one has been "put down" requires thinking. Recognizing whether the one carrying it is reaching for it to shoot or to put it down requires thinking.
Also, if the robot is incapable of learning (creating new rules), it's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to smuggle weapons past it, and do so succesfully every time from then on.
Am not a big fan of the idea that we build robots for everything. I'm just of the opinion that for the specific situation discussed, the robot doesn't need that level of capability. You're right that it's still a significant amount of work; but it doesn't need to be perfect, just good enough.
But since even the most basic useful capability will be a PITA to design, build, and deploy, I'd say that robot peacekeepers are a solution looking for a problem. It turns out that humans are incredibly cheap for the capability you get. Using expensive robots to keep "cheap" humans from killing each other honestly doesn't seem practical to me.
War has always been a primary driver of technology, even civilian programs like the space program was primarily a proxy for the military. Given that, there is little reason to assume that military conquest is an economicaly feasable way to aquire thechnology or resources, at least over the long term.
War does influence the development of technology, but I was talking about how a society's attitude towards war affects their growth potential.
A war-focused society (plunder everyone else!) is one where the best and brightest are drawn into the zero-sum game of taking other people's stuff. That results in an opportunity cost in other fields, like R&D for more economically productive technologies.
It's not a physical law, but there is a relationship that should be noted. Consider who won WWII, and think about how you would characterize the cultures of the ones who were involved.
"Wind power is in a middle ground," he says. "It is still one of the most scalable renewables, but our research suggests that we will need to pay attention to its limits and climatic impacts if we try to scale it beyond a few terawatts."
Sounds like Keith is recommending we invest a few terawatts worth into wind and that it's still one of the best renewable options out there. But your knee jerk response didn't give you the time to read the article much less his actual research.
No, Keith's suggesting that serious research needs to be done to scale wind beyond that point.
"The idea is feasible" is different than "we should execute the idea".
It's in a movie, it must be true!
"Not your pants, sir."
"Mooning a Robotic Law Enforcement Unit is a Class I misdemeanor. Applying taser."
I'm going to suggest that creating a machine with a comprehensive list of rules & priority for enforcement is going to be much more feasible than creating a machine with the ability to think and apply reason.
It also has a better chain of responsibility in the case of things going FUBAR. "The CEO signed off on the robot applying this rule" vs. "the robot may have had a glitch in its Reason module, who knows?".
Oh well, that makes genocide okay then
Different problem than what you stated, which was that modern practitioners weren't following the command to "genocide" they supposedly received.
But to take a stab at "genocide okay", that was the norm of warfare then, and recently, we've performed genocide on the culture of Nazism and Japan's Imperial cult without apology. Not many tears are shed over the destruction of those cultures.
Not all cultures are equal - and you're going to need to justify a view that absolutely claims all genocide for any reason is wrong.
Issued by their so called "merciful and loving" god, don't waste your time trying to justify the unjustifiable
Challenging you to pick better criticisms, that's all. Logical fallacies in the service of a correct conclusion are still fallacious - are you in pursuit of rational truth, or emotional satisfaction? My comment was aimed at the specific argument you offered. That you have better arguments in reserve does not fix your original point.
2) It does make war a bit more meaningless. If you aren't facing emotional losses, then there's little reason NOT to go to war. If it's not personalized... then who cares? Sure, even now we have sympathy for the other side and protests and such... but the majority of the people that care mostly care because our brothers / sisters / sons / daughters / etc. are out there possibly dying. So that helps push back the question "should we actually GO to war with them?"
War isn't about losing. War is about making the other guy agree to do things your way with force.
Having no emotional cost does not make war meaningless; it makes it dangerously cheap. "We'll send robots to conquer everyone and rule the world at no cost to ourselves!" (though, robots aren't cheap)
I agree that what you're describing is a bad thing, though. In the past, there have been countries who used their expertise at war to conquer everyone else and enrich themselves; eventually, someone better than them would come around, and destroy them. War may seem to be attractive in the short run, but has hidden costs that will bite back in the end.
One possible downside: a culture that uses war casually will retard its own technological innovation; why learn to produce useful widgets when you could just take them from your neighbors? But eventually you run out of people to plunder, or you piss off enough people that they ally against you and outfight you - and then what do you have?
I see you're used to Bible which contains thousands of contradictions and thus can't possibly be followed without massive cherry-picking. It does contain savage commandments like "when you approach a town, you need to issue an ultimatum: if the denizens surrender, kill only old women/the infirm/those uppity/etc and put the rest into slavery, taking their women as your wives and concubines -- but if they refuse to surrender, you must slaughter them all. Except for a list of tribes, which you're not allowed to spare and must slaughter without quarter, including livestock" -- yet no one takes such commandments seriously today, despite Jesus reaffirming the old law multiple times.
The commands you listed were specifically for the Israelite tribes conquering Canaan at that point in time.
They're different in nature than the ongoing commands about how the Israelites were supposed to live day by day; which was a condition for them to continue living in Canaan. Their descendants violated these laws. The Bible claims this is the reason their nation was destroyed and their people scattered, much as they did to the Canaanites before.
In turn, those commands are different than the commands that Christians are under; Christians are not Jews, though the religion has Jewish roots. The New Testament describes an early argument over how Gentiles were to be converted; the church leaders came to an agreement that Gentiles were not compelled to follow the entirety Jewish law.
You shouldn't blame people for not following commands that were never issued to them in the first place.
Also, a robot acting in real life cannot carefully think everything through. There's simply not enough time for that. This necessiates some kind of emotion-analogy to provide context for reflex and simple actions, just like it does on living beings.
Why does it need to think at all? It's applying rules, not creating them.
"Sir, my scans have detected unauthorized weapons. Please put them down or I will apply force."
AC, what previous post? All of them? = P
I'm not sure what you mean by intrinsic value; a cup of water is free to the average person, but worth everything to a man stranded in the desert. There is no intrinsic value to the water; value is assigned to it by individuals based on their needs and wants.
You can average the value of everyone, but that still does not make it intrinsic to the object - it is all based on the perception by individuals.
As for changing the "perceived value" of something, what gov't can do is change the "perceived value" of its currency, which changes the currency price people pay for the things they want. The value of those things is not dependent on currency, which is why inflation and deflation can happen at all.
So it might be an interesting analogy, but fails at the most crucial point - a government is responsible for the value of the currency, a family merely uses the currency of the government.
A gov't has limited control of the "value" of currency.
If the gov't is printing money like there's no tomorrow, it triggers this effect called "hyperinflation" - and the value of money drops based both on the current amount in the market, and the expectation it will continue to drop in value.
The gov't *can* use inflation pay its own bills; but it does tremendous economic harm to society because it really boils down to an obfuscated wealth tax. (That hits the poor and middle class the most)
The original Founding Fathers created a republic for the people, if they can keep it. By the time of Lincoln, that was no longer the case - entire states full of people didn't want to keep the republic.
What should have happened is let the union split, or dissolve altogether. See, the ideal was just "one nation of liberty" (your words), not "one nation of liberty, and it has to include all these states in it, nobody can ever leave, EVER"
Does a single state have the right to dissolve the union? 2 states? 49% of the states? Majority? Supermajority?
Who decides if a state wants to leave the union? Its governor? Its legislature? A majority vote of its population? A supermajority of its population?
The Constitution provides no guidance on how to dissolve the republic, so the nation had to ad lib it.
It was a national divorce; with one side claiming no-fault divorce, and the other claiming that it must be with mutual consent. There are valid arguments for both. They could not resolve the dispute with words and there was no higher authority to appeal to, so it was resolved with force.
Needless to say, that sort of union leads to further problems down the road, so here we are today.
No matter how the Civil War was resolved, there would be problems for us today. But I would like to note that Democrats bear great responsibility for the current state of things (New Deal, Great Society), just as they were responsible for attempting to preserve slavery.
On a final note, a nation founded on the liberty to own slaves is unlikely to maintain "liberty" in any meaningful sense.
That's a poor attempt to Godel me. "Do not murder people" is absolutely a result of social scientific research. Take a look at ethics. There can be good societal reasons based on research for ethical behavior. Or do you beleive that we must necissarily inject religeous reasoning into our laws?
Nope. Murder laws predate social scientific research. Attempting to back-credit science for those laws is plagiarism; unless you'd like to cite how mankind developed murder laws through trial and error using a primitive form of the scientific method. (Such a history does not exist; murder laws exist as long as man has recorded it)
Scientific results are always provisional - "We haven't disproven this yet" As such, it doesn't provide any way to inform ethics. Remember eugenics? That was the Science of its day.
In fact, nothing about science makes its outputs ethical. It is only concerned with the repeatability of experiments and the reliability of data. Inethical behavior can be perfectly scientific.
That's before I even get into how unreliable scientific "results" can be. Just look at the science of human diet: eat meat; don't eat meat; Low fat; low carbs. Science hasn't even "solved" food, and you believe it should be used to "solve" politics? There are better methods with much better track records.
A false dichotomy claims there are fewer options than there are in reality.
The OP claimed that an extreme was unworkable. He advocated looking for a solution in between two identified extremes - in short, he acknowledged the existence of a SPECTRUM between the extremes. There was no false limiting of available options, so there is no "false dichotomy" or "black-white" thinking - it was the very opposite of what you were criticizing.
I did not agree that he made a strawman, either. I said that it *could* be a valid criticism. False dichotomy, on the other hand, is a completely invalid criticism for the reason I've laid out.
I don't get the impression that you comprehend a word of what I wrote. "Sometimes it's okay to kill people" is not compatible with moral absolutism. Contrast the statement, "Killing is always wrong," or even better, "Abortion is always wrong."
"Abortion is never wrong" is no less a morally absolute statement than "Abortion is always wrong". That overlaps with "Sometimes it's okay to kill people" - which you just claimed to be incompatible with moral absolutes. Care to rethink that, or are you happy to contradict yourself?
It seems that you think that morally absolute definitions cannot have exceptions. They can't have arbitrary exceptions, but they can have absolute exceptions. Ex: Killing a man is always wrong; unless he was first attempting to kill you without provocation. (a universal self-defense exception)
As for circular definitions, legal definitions of murder are not self-referencing. That people do not (perfectly) agree on what constitutes murder is tangential to whether or not "do not murder" is an absolute.
Your statements ("Depends," "...we're not sure...," "...have to make a judgement...") are about as far from absolute as you can get. So, thank you for proving my point. I recommend the wikipedia articles on moral absolutism, moral relativism, and moral universalism, so that you don't end up looking foolish when talking about what you believe in.
Belief that there is an absolute has nothing to do with having absolute certainty on how it would apply in a situation where the facts are unknown. I was acknowledging that it can be difficult to apply moral absolutes due to incomplete knowledge, but that is not moral relativity. If I believe the exact same judgement should be rendered upon the exact same circumstances, I am not being a moral relativist. (In reality, there are no exact same circumstances; but there are equivalent ones)
As to reading comprehension, I was criticizing someone for absolutely criticizing absolutism. It is a logical contradiction, and your responses have not and cannot salvage the position.
Favoring either party based on their founder (I realize Lincolns wasn't exactly a founder) is absurd. Lincoln expanded the role of government; Jackson shrunk it. Lincoln was more of an intellectual, Jackson more a man of the people. Democrats wouldn't elect Jackson today because he was a bigot. I can't see Lincoln arguing for more states rights, or flatting the tax base (he created the progressive tax system).
Founders are founders for a reason - they become leaders of their respective parties or nations because their ideas carried weight and aligned with the movements they led.
Parties are not monolithic, but a set of factions with a broad unifying ideology. The ideology that drove the Republican party of Lincoln was one to preserve US as a nation of liberty and ideals.
The modern conservative Republican who wishes to preserve the US as a nation of liberty and ideals is continuing (conserving!) that intellectual tradition.
As for Lincoln, he prioritized - free speech, slavery, and states' rights did not trump preserving the Union - which were pragmatic actions in service of the primary ideal - preserving the US as one nation of liberty. (Liberty to own slaves is rather oxymoronic, don't you think?)
Considering his judgement and moderation, I'd say he'd have nothing to do with the modern Democrat party, and he'd be a powerful intellectual leader for conserving the US as a nation of liberty. The modern welfare state is slavery by another name.