We should be applying the lessons learned from the Innocence Project to better our justice system, not giving up on the idea that guilty people are being found, tried, convicted, and properly sentenced.
Could you please explain the difference between someone dying in an state execution chamber and someone dying in their prison cell of organ failure ("old age")?
Seems like neither is desirable and each has the same effect. While we should certainly do all we can to ensure no innocent people are sentenced to anything, that doesn't extend to letting everyone out of prison because there might be somebody innocent locked up with all the guilty people.
How many? Could you please list confirmed innocent people who have been executed?
It's generally understood that no justice system is perfect. My guess is that for every person you can find who's been executed, then later found to have been innocent, I can find someone who died after decades in prison and was later found to have been innocent. Seems neither is particularly appealing and we should do all we can to avoid them. That doesn't mean letting everyone out of prison to ensure we don't ever punish innocent persons.
If the state sanctions it, it is not - by definition - murder.
Further, the family cannot be involved since the crime is committed against society as a whole; not the family. It is society pursuing justice within the context of the trial and sentencing; not the family.
No individual should ever be in the position to make that determination. There should be an objective, fair, efficient, evidence-based system making that determination and it should be regularly reviewed and reformed as needed to ensure it's continuing to be fair and effective. What we have today isn't that and we should work hard on fixing that quickly.
They're two separate issues. Prisons should be reformed such that they provide maximum possible rehabilitation for those who can be rehabilitated (and so that no one is released until they are properly rehabilitated) and for those where rehabilitation is impossible, execution should be swift, humane, and simple.
There are, admittedly, a lot of steps to get us from where we are today in the US to where the above is possible. However, I think those steps are worth taking considering the monumental cost of crime.
That some utilize execution in improper circumstances does not negate the fact that execution is proper in others. Executing someone because they're homosexual is wrong. Executing someone who sets children on fire is appropriate; not for any reason of vengeance, but rather to ensure they cannot bring harm to anyone else ever again.
I would extend that to all murderers. Anyone who intentionally extinguishes human life without hesitation or remorse is so fundamentally broken that they should be permanently removed from society. Prison guards are people too and shouldn't have to be exposed to those kinds of threats. It's simply solved, humanely put an end to those who murder. (and before you try and go there, please do look up the definition of the word "murder". The words "execution" and "murder" are not synonymous)
The purpose of the justice system is not to respect your arbitrary wishes.
Certainly not, but it is the collective opinions of individuals in a society that form its government and thus, by definition, its system of justice.
The question is, why do you wish that, and why you're not satisfied with life sentence and demand death.
Now that simply isn't true. I stated my reasons a number of times throughout my post:
1) such that there is no chance of them interacting with anyone ever again
2) nor do I wish to dump resources into attempting to fix somebody who's so broken
3) I merely want them removed so they're gone forever and nobody has to deal with them
4) a desire to have them permanently removed from society in the hope that the rest of us civil beings can live normal, happy lives without them
I thought I was quite clear on the issue of why.
The only rationale that you gave so far is not willing to "dump resources" on those people. The oft-quoted statistics is that it costs more to execute someone than to keep them in prison for the rest of their life, due to the complicated and lengthy appeals process associated with death penalty. You could say that we should just get rid of the process, but that will only increase the number of people who are executed wrongly (even with the current costly process, we still get it wrong often enough to be noticeable).
The existing system has a number of flaws which should be corrected with evidence-based reforms. We should not be treating people from different communities, races, families, or means any differently from one another. Rules of evidence should be reviewed in depth periodically (following an initial overhaul) to ensure they're based on the latest scientific understanding of what is and isn't an effective means to establish truth. The same should happen for investigative measures to ensure that fewer innocent people ever make it to a trial. Prisons should be completely reformed to rehabilitate effectively where possible and confine safely for execution where it is not possible. And all proceedings involved in executions should be overhauled and periodically reviewed to ensure that every possible effort is being made to ensure there is no chance of executing an innocent person.
That said, once the system itself is operating fairly, efficiently, and effectively to a certain degree, the delays associated with the high cost of modern execution sentences will have been reformed out of the system and the costs will decrease. Those costs may continue to be higher than keeping the individual in prison for life, but that seems a rather pointless endeavor to begin with. If the individual is such a threat that they can never be released, what is the point of having that individual alive at all? Seems as though you're merely reducing the threat they pose and forcing them on prison guards who are, themselves, law-abiding citizens who deserve protection from such threats. As such, establish guilt and execute. Threat is reduced to zero.
So in practice, the resource cost of keeping those people imprisoned is not for the sake of them if they're truly guilty; it's for the sake of giving a chance to someone who is actually innocent. So, how many innocents are you willing to sacrifice?
That's an unfair question. Let's take your question to the logical conclusion and state that we should simply release everyone in prison today, abolish the justice system, and abolish the police to ensure no innocent person is ever arrested, tried, convicted, imprisoned, etc. How many innocent people are we willing to confine in a cell for decades at a time?
We cannot have a perfect justice system, but we can certainly have one that's a lot better than what we have today. We should be constantly reforming and reviewing it from top to bottom, fixing perverse incentives, taking lessons from g
That's a flaw in the system which should be corrected. Obviously every reasonable effort should be made to ensure no one is executed who could possibly be innocent, but when guilt is beyond question, stop with the legal games and quickly and humanely put an end to their existence so they can no longer burden society with pain, terror, and destruction.
There's nothing wrong with removing an individual guilty of a certain level of harm from society permanently. Deterrent arguments aside, that individual will cause no further harm to society. It isn't about exacting vengeance, nor is it about righting the wrongs that person has done; it's about controlling the damage they can cause.
I do not support the death penalty nor any result handed out by the justice system when it is handed out as vengeance. What I do support is rehabilitation with amends where feasible and appropriate and removal of particularly destructive individuals from society on a permanent basis. To that end, humanely execute all murderers and others beyond redemption.
You quoted one line without the other; the other being the line in which the naivety was shown not to exist. They basically described what they'd like to see, then stated outright that it would never happen and why, and then you attacked them for being naive based on what they said they'd like to see happen.
How will you deal with people who rape children and murder people so they can eat them once the justice system is "abolished"?
I see what you're saying about the problems and even though I support the death penalty, I agree there are major issues that need to be resolved. I would support a science/evidence based approach to ensuring less innocent people get caught up in the system and that the system itself is an efficient and just machine treating everyone equally. Within that new, reformed system, I would like a method for permanently removing individuals who are zero net value to society. That begins with every murderer and extends outward from there.
I disagree. As a member of society, I have some say in what happens in my justice system. I wish for my justice system to permanently remove the individuals they described from society such that there is no chance of them interacting with anyone ever again. I do not believe we can, nor do I wish to dump resources into attempting to fix somebody who's so broken that they'll chop up human beings to eat them or set children on fire. I honestly don't care whether it's possible - in theory - to "fix" somebody like that. I merely want them removed so they're gone forever and nobody has to deal with them - including the prison guards.
That I'm willing to entertain methods of execution which cause those individuals no pain ought to demonstrate that I take no joy in their killings. The gut reaction seeking vengeance is to have them killed as painfully as they killed their victims. As a civil member of society, I'm content to have such persons go to sleep and die peacefully. There's no bloodlust there; merely a desire to have them permanently removed from society in the hope that the rest of us civil beings can live normal, happy lives without them.
It certainly deters that individual, doesn't it? I don't have the figures in front of me, but I should expect that the recidivism rates for those executed for their crimes to be exceedingly low.
Being distrustful of the judicial system seems to me to be merely recognizing what is really going on. Are you asserting that making informed judgements about reality is not to anyone's benefit?
If the legal professionals in general, and the judicial branch in particular weren't so prone to dissembling the spirit of the law with word games, there would not exist such distrust of the judicial system. It is that distrust - a result of the legal trickery allowed to infest the judicial system - which is to nobody's benefit as faith in the judicial system is a key pillar of the consent of the governed. As it crumbles, the peoples' consent comes with it. History has shown repeatedly that this is quite bad and should be reversed if possible.
Worst among the offenders driving this catastrophe are constitutional law professors and "experts". The US Constitution is quite exquisite in its simplicity; a common man with a common education can read it front to back and understand its meaning and spirit. It requires an "expert" only to pervert it into meaning what said "expert" would like it to mean; quite often the antithesis of the original and obvious, plaintext meaning.
And by the way, the kind of lawyering you pulled in your post has two effects. First, it makes people distrustful of language. Second, it makes them distrustful of the judicial system. Neither of those things is to anyone's benefit. The inevitable outcome is rather obvious with minimal extrapolation and/or a cursory understanding of history.
That was never the purpose of the Interstate Commerce clause. That clause has been abused six ways to Sunday. It was intended to ensure that states did not develop trade wars between one another such that cohesion was broken.
Of course, it's since been interpreted such that intrastate commercial activity and activity that isn't commercial at all falls under it, meaning that anything and everything that anyone does anywhere for any reason at any time falls under the Federal government's power. Bullshit like that is exactly why there's a massive 10th Amendment push happening all around the country. Bullshit like that is undermining the very intent of the Commerce Clause by creating a rift between states and the rest of the Union. States receive authority only as ceded to them by the people. The Federal government receives authority only as ceded to it by the states.
When the Feds pull crap like this, they're willfully ignoring the fact that they're twice removed from the source of power and authority and they need to back the fuck up.
Then surely this just backs up my point, which was that you can't use the current performance as a guarantee of future results. What I was using the past performance for was as proof of that exact point; not that past warming was proof of future warming but that the current pattern cannot be used as proof of the lack of future warming.
My point is that it goes both ways. An apparent 'pause' in warming doesn't predict warmer or cooler (or stable) temperatures tomorrow, next year, or over the next decade. A few decades of observed warming do not - themselves - predict future warming either.
Of course it didn't go back a long way. It was a graph showing more detail of the most recent temperatures to demonstrate how noisy the data is that you can't use a short term phenomenon as a predictor of long term trends. It was not the graph that I was referring to throughout the rest of my post about the previous lulls and drops in temperature not being harbingers of the end of global warming. I was looking at a PDF of a graph while I was writing, but I had intended to link to an online version in my post. Rather than me choose one that you might take issue with, why don't you do a Google search and find one yourself. Whichever you choose they demonstrate my point.
That wasn't really my point; my point was merely that we've only just very, very recently had satellite data added to the mix. And that data, though more complete than anything before it, is still subject to measurement issues. It marks an improvement in our toolbox, but that improvement has only provided an incredibly small amount of new data and we need a whole lot more.
We have a pretty good picture of temperatures dating back thousands of years from various sources like tree growth patterns and ice core samples. So do you really think that scientists suddenly get all stupid about interpreting the measurements made a hundred years ago? That they can't (or didn't think to) correlate between the various measuring stations at the time and factor equipment problems and local environmental changes?
It is no coincidence that temperature graphs for modern times all start in the mid to late 1800s. That is the time that scientists agree is when accurate enough records began. You might like to say that it is only the last 45 years that we have accurate measurements, but the scientific community would beg to differ on that assertion.
Until around the 1930s (in some places, the 1920s, but in vanishingly few places prior thereto), most places where temperature measurements were taken were not scientific labs. They were simple weather stations where the person doing the measuring simply looked at an old mercury thermometer located randomly (sometimes near a heat source). There was little to no training for that person for taking the measurements in a standard way, the equipment used was crude and uncalibrated (not that it would help considering the level of precision available with common thermometers at the time), there was no standard time of day for measurement taking, no verification of measurements, etc. Statistical smoothing (like the kind applied to the surface temperature reconstructions done for data collected prior to about the 1930s) can help weed out a few bad measurements here in there in a largely accurate and precise data set. What it cannot do is take hugely incomplete, inaccurate, imprecise data measured in non-standard ways with crude instruments and numerous unknown outside variables and turn that into something useful enough to demonstrate a fraction of a degree difference in temperature.
All that taken together, the margin of error for surface measurements taken between the early 1800s and the 1930s should be around 1-2C. It just isn't scientifically significant data in a discussion about temperature changes of
Suicidal? How can it be suicidal to reduce our carbon footpr
Do we know they injected this ray into our sun? The problem is, unless we have context surrounding the event (be it increased global temperatures, decreased solar output, etc), we're left with an incomplete understanding of what's driving it. We do know that there are cycles of solar activity, climate on Earth, etc. Some of those cycles we understand pretty well, like the changing of the seasons. We can observe it taking place, it happens at short, regular intervals, and it fits within our understanding of astrophysics. Other cycles are far less understood because there are so many complex interconnected variables at play and cycles sometimes interact with one another in very confusing ways. For instance, there may be a ten year cycle for solar activity in which activity decreases by X amount. There may be a thousand year cycle wherein said activity decreases, suddenly, by 10X amount due to a convergence of internal conditions. Even if we understand the ten year cycle, what are we to make of it when that thousand year cycle suddenly lands? Was it the aliens and their ray beams? A stray strand of negative energy?
You don't need the full 4.5 Billion year history of the Earth to gain a sufficient understanding of the inner workings of the climate and all its myriad cycles to work out what's normal and what's new, but to think you can do it with ~45 years of just-okay data is ludicrous.
As any investor will tell you, past performance is no guarantee of future results. I would further direct your attention to the fact that your link to the satellite data only goes back to about 1970. Prior to that, we had even less data sources with less data points. The further back you go (prior to around 1930, there wasn't even standardization or widespread training for temperature measurements at weather stations), the less accurate, precise, and available the data becomes. All in all, for a planet that's 4,500,000,000 years old, we have about ~45 years of decent climate data. That's akin to trying to measure the speed of a car by taking a very grainy, low resolution 30 second video, editing it down to just the last 0.3 microseconds, and using a collection of indirect methods to carry out the measurement, then trying to determine the cause of its movement.
We're still at the point of having a child's understanding of the incredibly complex climate on this planet. Multiple times a year, new inputs into that climate are discovered that have a measurable impact (even if we can't yet measure that impact). Do humans have some level of impact on the climate? Absolutely; any chaos theorist can tell you that. How much is that impact? We don't have enough understanding of the system to know that yet. Our methods of measurement are crude, imprecise, and disagree with one another (tree ring data disagrees with satellite data disagrees with oceanic data, disagrees with ground station data). We attempt to reconcile that with crude statistical analysis that seeks to essentially cut the difference down the middle and call it a day. When we don't even have those crude measurements available, we turn to even cruder measurements like ice cores and subjective weather descriptions.
We are a child trying to understand the inner workings of a nuclear power plant even as we struggle to master basic arithmetic. That doesn't mean we shouldn't continue learning more. That doesn't mean we'll never get there in our understanding. It doesn't mean we shouldn't fund the basic research that takes us forward. It doesn't mean we shouldn't take reasonable steps to reduce obvious negative impacts we have on our environment. It does mean that setting public policy based on the level of understanding we have today is foolish and that any attempt to purposely alter the climate through mass engineering efforts is downright suicidal.
Now we'll see the difference in the replies to me between a reasonable, rational individual who will agree that the goals of reducing our obvious, measurable, visible environmental impact are good and should be pursued and the AGW zealots who will demand that all believe as they believe, worship as they worship at the alter of the IPCC, and who will cast me out as a heretic and an infidel regardless of common goals.
Being prevented from possessing a small class of items is obviously different from complete prohibition which was discussed above.
Would you accept a "small class" of speech being prevented by the government? Say, political rallies for Democrats? If not, then why would you accept other rights being arbitrarily infringed by the government? Particularly rights whose existence is based on keeping governmental power and abuse in check.
If you are going to pretend to be so stupid so early in a post then I suggest not wasting so much time writing a long post that is not going to be read beyond the point of pretended stupidity. Maybe you were doing it to build a strawman in my name - I don't care - if you start with fake stupidity you are just wasting your time.
I'm going to assume this was written in lieu of a cogent counter-argument to the ideas I wrote in my post. I'll take that to mean you have no real argument. If you'd care to have a real discussion, I'm game. If you're unable or unwilling to do so, just say so up front.
Regulation is a very different story to prohibition, and since idiots like the NRA are off with the pixies demanding everyone should be able to have their own AK47 and a nanny state should put security guards in schools to protect kids from those AK47s then self regulation is not working - it's needs to be discussed at a different level than "I want!".
First you state (and I agree) that regulation is very different from prohibition, but then you imply that people shouldn't be allowed to have their own AK47 (a prohibition). The government should not be allowed to decide what tools for defense one can use. Arguments over which gun is a better tool garner as much attention as arguments over which caliber is best. Those are matters of opinion and as per Justice Jackson in WV State Board of Education v Barnette (1943) "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."
We certainly need to get away from the cretinous "but we need to a gun so we can overthrow the government" shit.
You're mischaracterizing the argument here, though I can't tell if it's intentionally or not. The argument about governmental overthrow is simple: the original purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that if the government that our founding fathers were creating ever became as tyrannical as the government they were fighting to overthrow, that the patriots of the time would have the tools available to do exactly what they were in the process of doing. As citizens of the nation they created with their actions, we have both a right to be prepared for that possible eventuality and a civic responsibility to be prepared for it. Is it that preparation which itself can help stave off tyranny for a government that understands the fact that it truly does govern by the consent of the people (not just on paper, but in reality). In other words, a government that knows it can be replaced at any time will not (at least outwardly) attempt to enact oppressive measures against its own people.
This is merely an extension of the ancient concept si vis pacem, para bellum.
All other arguments about hunting, sporting, and self defense against criminals are perfectly valid and should not be dismissed. The right to self defense is a basic human right. To deny common, non-violent people the right to have and carry tools for self defense is to effectively deny the right of self defense itself. I'm in favor of respecting human rights as much as I am in favor of respecting constitutional rights. I should hope everyone would be.
The typical compromise (see what I did there?) when a customer or Federal Government auditor wants to run scans of any sort on your private network is to agree on tools (to be provided by the auditing group if you don't already have them) running an agreed configuration/profile/whatever against an agreed limited scope target list (typically a VLAN or set of VLANs unless that entire network is devoted to just that one customer, which is sometimes the case, though less so these days with public/private/hybrid clouds being all the rage). When it comes to web application and database testing, you'll typically agree on a non-production target list that's a mirror of the production system (with appropriate verification of the two being a mirror outside the automated testing) so as to avoid impacting the production systems. When it comes time to run the tests, over-the-admins'-shoulder monitoring ensures the proper tools with the proper configurations hitting the proper targets is being done and that the output is being handed over unaltered.
Seen this done in plenty of places and 99% of the time, the auditing group is fine with it because at the end of the day, it's getting them exactly what they want; just in a slightly more red-tape riddled way. Meanwhile, the group being audited has the assurance that nothing is running wild all over their network unsupervised. If you don't have anything to hide, you're typically fine with this approach. If you aren't fine with this approach, something else is going on behind the scenes and most of the time that'll be something you're trying to hide.
Slashdot Mirror
We should be applying the lessons learned from the Innocence Project to better our justice system, not giving up on the idea that guilty people are being found, tried, convicted, and properly sentenced.
Could you please explain the difference between someone dying in an state execution chamber and someone dying in their prison cell of organ failure ("old age")?
Seems like neither is desirable and each has the same effect. While we should certainly do all we can to ensure no innocent people are sentenced to anything, that doesn't extend to letting everyone out of prison because there might be somebody innocent locked up with all the guilty people.
How many? Could you please list confirmed innocent people who have been executed?
It's generally understood that no justice system is perfect. My guess is that for every person you can find who's been executed, then later found to have been innocent, I can find someone who died after decades in prison and was later found to have been innocent. Seems neither is particularly appealing and we should do all we can to avoid them. That doesn't mean letting everyone out of prison to ensure we don't ever punish innocent persons.
If the state sanctions it, it is not - by definition - murder.
Further, the family cannot be involved since the crime is committed against society as a whole; not the family. It is society pursuing justice within the context of the trial and sentencing; not the family.
No individual should ever be in the position to make that determination. There should be an objective, fair, efficient, evidence-based system making that determination and it should be regularly reviewed and reformed as needed to ensure it's continuing to be fair and effective. What we have today isn't that and we should work hard on fixing that quickly.
They're two separate issues. Prisons should be reformed such that they provide maximum possible rehabilitation for those who can be rehabilitated (and so that no one is released until they are properly rehabilitated) and for those where rehabilitation is impossible, execution should be swift, humane, and simple.
There are, admittedly, a lot of steps to get us from where we are today in the US to where the above is possible. However, I think those steps are worth taking considering the monumental cost of crime.
That some utilize execution in improper circumstances does not negate the fact that execution is proper in others. Executing someone because they're homosexual is wrong. Executing someone who sets children on fire is appropriate; not for any reason of vengeance, but rather to ensure they cannot bring harm to anyone else ever again.
I would extend that to all murderers. Anyone who intentionally extinguishes human life without hesitation or remorse is so fundamentally broken that they should be permanently removed from society. Prison guards are people too and shouldn't have to be exposed to those kinds of threats. It's simply solved, humanely put an end to those who murder. (and before you try and go there, please do look up the definition of the word "murder". The words "execution" and "murder" are not synonymous)
The purpose of the justice system is not to respect your arbitrary wishes.
Certainly not, but it is the collective opinions of individuals in a society that form its government and thus, by definition, its system of justice.
The question is, why do you wish that, and why you're not satisfied with life sentence and demand death.
Now that simply isn't true. I stated my reasons a number of times throughout my post:
I thought I was quite clear on the issue of why.
The only rationale that you gave so far is not willing to "dump resources" on those people. The oft-quoted statistics is that it costs more to execute someone than to keep them in prison for the rest of their life, due to the complicated and lengthy appeals process associated with death penalty. You could say that we should just get rid of the process, but that will only increase the number of people who are executed wrongly (even with the current costly process, we still get it wrong often enough to be noticeable).
The existing system has a number of flaws which should be corrected with evidence-based reforms. We should not be treating people from different communities, races, families, or means any differently from one another. Rules of evidence should be reviewed in depth periodically (following an initial overhaul) to ensure they're based on the latest scientific understanding of what is and isn't an effective means to establish truth. The same should happen for investigative measures to ensure that fewer innocent people ever make it to a trial. Prisons should be completely reformed to rehabilitate effectively where possible and confine safely for execution where it is not possible. And all proceedings involved in executions should be overhauled and periodically reviewed to ensure that every possible effort is being made to ensure there is no chance of executing an innocent person.
That said, once the system itself is operating fairly, efficiently, and effectively to a certain degree, the delays associated with the high cost of modern execution sentences will have been reformed out of the system and the costs will decrease. Those costs may continue to be higher than keeping the individual in prison for life, but that seems a rather pointless endeavor to begin with. If the individual is such a threat that they can never be released, what is the point of having that individual alive at all? Seems as though you're merely reducing the threat they pose and forcing them on prison guards who are, themselves, law-abiding citizens who deserve protection from such threats. As such, establish guilt and execute. Threat is reduced to zero.
So in practice, the resource cost of keeping those people imprisoned is not for the sake of them if they're truly guilty; it's for the sake of giving a chance to someone who is actually innocent. So, how many innocents are you willing to sacrifice?
That's an unfair question. Let's take your question to the logical conclusion and state that we should simply release everyone in prison today, abolish the justice system, and abolish the police to ensure no innocent person is ever arrested, tried, convicted, imprisoned, etc. How many innocent people are we willing to confine in a cell for decades at a time?
We cannot have a perfect justice system, but we can certainly have one that's a lot better than what we have today. We should be constantly reforming and reviewing it from top to bottom, fixing perverse incentives, taking lessons from g
So the State, having decided that kidnapping is illegal, resorts to kidnapping as "punishment". That is hypocrisy of the highest order.
There we go. How's that look?
That's a flaw in the system which should be corrected. Obviously every reasonable effort should be made to ensure no one is executed who could possibly be innocent, but when guilt is beyond question, stop with the legal games and quickly and humanely put an end to their existence so they can no longer burden society with pain, terror, and destruction.
There's nothing wrong with removing an individual guilty of a certain level of harm from society permanently. Deterrent arguments aside, that individual will cause no further harm to society. It isn't about exacting vengeance, nor is it about righting the wrongs that person has done; it's about controlling the damage they can cause.
I do not support the death penalty nor any result handed out by the justice system when it is handed out as vengeance. What I do support is rehabilitation with amends where feasible and appropriate and removal of particularly destructive individuals from society on a permanent basis. To that end, humanely execute all murderers and others beyond redemption.
You quoted one line without the other; the other being the line in which the naivety was shown not to exist. They basically described what they'd like to see, then stated outright that it would never happen and why, and then you attacked them for being naive based on what they said they'd like to see happen.
That's rather unfair, isn't it?
How will you deal with people who rape children and murder people so they can eat them once the justice system is "abolished"?
I see what you're saying about the problems and even though I support the death penalty, I agree there are major issues that need to be resolved. I would support a science/evidence based approach to ensuring less innocent people get caught up in the system and that the system itself is an efficient and just machine treating everyone equally. Within that new, reformed system, I would like a method for permanently removing individuals who are zero net value to society. That begins with every murderer and extends outward from there.
I disagree. As a member of society, I have some say in what happens in my justice system. I wish for my justice system to permanently remove the individuals they described from society such that there is no chance of them interacting with anyone ever again. I do not believe we can, nor do I wish to dump resources into attempting to fix somebody who's so broken that they'll chop up human beings to eat them or set children on fire. I honestly don't care whether it's possible - in theory - to "fix" somebody like that. I merely want them removed so they're gone forever and nobody has to deal with them - including the prison guards.
That I'm willing to entertain methods of execution which cause those individuals no pain ought to demonstrate that I take no joy in their killings. The gut reaction seeking vengeance is to have them killed as painfully as they killed their victims. As a civil member of society, I'm content to have such persons go to sleep and die peacefully. There's no bloodlust there; merely a desire to have them permanently removed from society in the hope that the rest of us civil beings can live normal, happy lives without them.
It certainly deters that individual, doesn't it? I don't have the figures in front of me, but I should expect that the recidivism rates for those executed for their crimes to be exceedingly low.
Being distrustful of the judicial system seems to me to be merely recognizing what is really going on. Are you asserting that making informed judgements about reality is not to anyone's benefit?
If the legal professionals in general, and the judicial branch in particular weren't so prone to dissembling the spirit of the law with word games, there would not exist such distrust of the judicial system. It is that distrust - a result of the legal trickery allowed to infest the judicial system - which is to nobody's benefit as faith in the judicial system is a key pillar of the consent of the governed. As it crumbles, the peoples' consent comes with it. History has shown repeatedly that this is quite bad and should be reversed if possible.
Worst among the offenders driving this catastrophe are constitutional law professors and "experts". The US Constitution is quite exquisite in its simplicity; a common man with a common education can read it front to back and understand its meaning and spirit. It requires an "expert" only to pervert it into meaning what said "expert" would like it to mean; quite often the antithesis of the original and obvious, plaintext meaning.
And by the way, the kind of lawyering you pulled in your post has two effects. First, it makes people distrustful of language. Second, it makes them distrustful of the judicial system. Neither of those things is to anyone's benefit. The inevitable outcome is rather obvious with minimal extrapolation and/or a cursory understanding of history.
That was never the purpose of the Interstate Commerce clause. That clause has been abused six ways to Sunday. It was intended to ensure that states did not develop trade wars between one another such that cohesion was broken.
Of course, it's since been interpreted such that intrastate commercial activity and activity that isn't commercial at all falls under it, meaning that anything and everything that anyone does anywhere for any reason at any time falls under the Federal government's power. Bullshit like that is exactly why there's a massive 10th Amendment push happening all around the country. Bullshit like that is undermining the very intent of the Commerce Clause by creating a rift between states and the rest of the Union. States receive authority only as ceded to them by the people. The Federal government receives authority only as ceded to it by the states.
When the Feds pull crap like this, they're willfully ignoring the fact that they're twice removed from the source of power and authority and they need to back the fuck up.
Then surely this just backs up my point, which was that you can't use the current performance as a guarantee of future results. What I was using the past performance for was as proof of that exact point; not that past warming was proof of future warming but that the current pattern cannot be used as proof of the lack of future warming.
My point is that it goes both ways. An apparent 'pause' in warming doesn't predict warmer or cooler (or stable) temperatures tomorrow, next year, or over the next decade. A few decades of observed warming do not - themselves - predict future warming either.
Of course it didn't go back a long way. It was a graph showing more detail of the most recent temperatures to demonstrate how noisy the data is that you can't use a short term phenomenon as a predictor of long term trends. It was not the graph that I was referring to throughout the rest of my post about the previous lulls and drops in temperature not being harbingers of the end of global warming. I was looking at a PDF of a graph while I was writing, but I had intended to link to an online version in my post. Rather than me choose one that you might take issue with, why don't you do a Google search and find one yourself. Whichever you choose they demonstrate my point.
That wasn't really my point; my point was merely that we've only just very, very recently had satellite data added to the mix. And that data, though more complete than anything before it, is still subject to measurement issues. It marks an improvement in our toolbox, but that improvement has only provided an incredibly small amount of new data and we need a whole lot more.
We have a pretty good picture of temperatures dating back thousands of years from various sources like tree growth patterns and ice core samples. So do you really think that scientists suddenly get all stupid about interpreting the measurements made a hundred years ago? That they can't (or didn't think to) correlate between the various measuring stations at the time and factor equipment problems and local environmental changes?
It is no coincidence that temperature graphs for modern times all start in the mid to late 1800s. That is the time that scientists agree is when accurate enough records began. You might like to say that it is only the last 45 years that we have accurate measurements, but the scientific community would beg to differ on that assertion.
Until around the 1930s (in some places, the 1920s, but in vanishingly few places prior thereto), most places where temperature measurements were taken were not scientific labs. They were simple weather stations where the person doing the measuring simply looked at an old mercury thermometer located randomly (sometimes near a heat source). There was little to no training for that person for taking the measurements in a standard way, the equipment used was crude and uncalibrated (not that it would help considering the level of precision available with common thermometers at the time), there was no standard time of day for measurement taking, no verification of measurements, etc. Statistical smoothing (like the kind applied to the surface temperature reconstructions done for data collected prior to about the 1930s) can help weed out a few bad measurements here in there in a largely accurate and precise data set. What it cannot do is take hugely incomplete, inaccurate, imprecise data measured in non-standard ways with crude instruments and numerous unknown outside variables and turn that into something useful enough to demonstrate a fraction of a degree difference in temperature.
All that taken together, the margin of error for surface measurements taken between the early 1800s and the 1930s should be around 1-2C. It just isn't scientifically significant data in a discussion about temperature changes of
Suicidal? How can it be suicidal to reduce our carbon footpr
Do we know they injected this ray into our sun? The problem is, unless we have context surrounding the event (be it increased global temperatures, decreased solar output, etc), we're left with an incomplete understanding of what's driving it. We do know that there are cycles of solar activity, climate on Earth, etc. Some of those cycles we understand pretty well, like the changing of the seasons. We can observe it taking place, it happens at short, regular intervals, and it fits within our understanding of astrophysics. Other cycles are far less understood because there are so many complex interconnected variables at play and cycles sometimes interact with one another in very confusing ways. For instance, there may be a ten year cycle for solar activity in which activity decreases by X amount. There may be a thousand year cycle wherein said activity decreases, suddenly, by 10X amount due to a convergence of internal conditions. Even if we understand the ten year cycle, what are we to make of it when that thousand year cycle suddenly lands? Was it the aliens and their ray beams? A stray strand of negative energy?
You don't need the full 4.5 Billion year history of the Earth to gain a sufficient understanding of the inner workings of the climate and all its myriad cycles to work out what's normal and what's new, but to think you can do it with ~45 years of just-okay data is ludicrous.
As any investor will tell you, past performance is no guarantee of future results. I would further direct your attention to the fact that your link to the satellite data only goes back to about 1970. Prior to that, we had even less data sources with less data points. The further back you go (prior to around 1930, there wasn't even standardization or widespread training for temperature measurements at weather stations), the less accurate, precise, and available the data becomes. All in all, for a planet that's 4,500,000,000 years old, we have about ~45 years of decent climate data. That's akin to trying to measure the speed of a car by taking a very grainy, low resolution 30 second video, editing it down to just the last 0.3 microseconds, and using a collection of indirect methods to carry out the measurement, then trying to determine the cause of its movement.
We're still at the point of having a child's understanding of the incredibly complex climate on this planet. Multiple times a year, new inputs into that climate are discovered that have a measurable impact (even if we can't yet measure that impact). Do humans have some level of impact on the climate? Absolutely; any chaos theorist can tell you that. How much is that impact? We don't have enough understanding of the system to know that yet. Our methods of measurement are crude, imprecise, and disagree with one another (tree ring data disagrees with satellite data disagrees with oceanic data, disagrees with ground station data). We attempt to reconcile that with crude statistical analysis that seeks to essentially cut the difference down the middle and call it a day. When we don't even have those crude measurements available, we turn to even cruder measurements like ice cores and subjective weather descriptions.
We are a child trying to understand the inner workings of a nuclear power plant even as we struggle to master basic arithmetic. That doesn't mean we shouldn't continue learning more. That doesn't mean we'll never get there in our understanding. It doesn't mean we shouldn't fund the basic research that takes us forward. It doesn't mean we shouldn't take reasonable steps to reduce obvious negative impacts we have on our environment. It does mean that setting public policy based on the level of understanding we have today is foolish and that any attempt to purposely alter the climate through mass engineering efforts is downright suicidal.
Now we'll see the difference in the replies to me between a reasonable, rational individual who will agree that the goals of reducing our obvious, measurable, visible environmental impact are good and should be pursued and the AGW zealots who will demand that all believe as they believe, worship as they worship at the alter of the IPCC, and who will cast me out as a heretic and an infidel regardless of common goals.
Still incapable or unwilling to argue ideas which are actually on topic? Very well, my point stands and yours' refuted. Good day!
Being prevented from possessing a small class of items is obviously different from complete prohibition which was discussed above.
Would you accept a "small class" of speech being prevented by the government? Say, political rallies for Democrats? If not, then why would you accept other rights being arbitrarily infringed by the government? Particularly rights whose existence is based on keeping governmental power and abuse in check.
If you are going to pretend to be so stupid so early in a post then I suggest not wasting so much time writing a long post that is not going to be read beyond the point of pretended stupidity. Maybe you were doing it to build a strawman in my name - I don't care - if you start with fake stupidity you are just wasting your time.
I'm going to assume this was written in lieu of a cogent counter-argument to the ideas I wrote in my post. I'll take that to mean you have no real argument. If you'd care to have a real discussion, I'm game. If you're unable or unwilling to do so, just say so up front.
Regulation is a very different story to prohibition, and since idiots like the NRA are off with the pixies demanding everyone should be able to have their own AK47 and a nanny state should put security guards in schools to protect kids from those AK47s then self regulation is not working - it's needs to be discussed at a different level than "I want!".
First you state (and I agree) that regulation is very different from prohibition, but then you imply that people shouldn't be allowed to have their own AK47 (a prohibition). The government should not be allowed to decide what tools for defense one can use. Arguments over which gun is a better tool garner as much attention as arguments over which caliber is best. Those are matters of opinion and as per Justice Jackson in WV State Board of Education v Barnette (1943) "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."
We certainly need to get away from the cretinous "but we need to a gun so we can overthrow the government" shit.
You're mischaracterizing the argument here, though I can't tell if it's intentionally or not. The argument about governmental overthrow is simple: the original purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that if the government that our founding fathers were creating ever became as tyrannical as the government they were fighting to overthrow, that the patriots of the time would have the tools available to do exactly what they were in the process of doing. As citizens of the nation they created with their actions, we have both a right to be prepared for that possible eventuality and a civic responsibility to be prepared for it. Is it that preparation which itself can help stave off tyranny for a government that understands the fact that it truly does govern by the consent of the people (not just on paper, but in reality). In other words, a government that knows it can be replaced at any time will not (at least outwardly) attempt to enact oppressive measures against its own people.
This is merely an extension of the ancient concept si vis pacem, para bellum.
All other arguments about hunting, sporting, and self defense against criminals are perfectly valid and should not be dismissed. The right to self defense is a basic human right. To deny common, non-violent people the right to have and carry tools for self defense is to effectively deny the right of self defense itself. I'm in favor of respecting human rights as much as I am in favor of respecting constitutional rights. I should hope everyone would be.
The typical compromise (see what I did there?) when a customer or Federal Government auditor wants to run scans of any sort on your private network is to agree on tools (to be provided by the auditing group if you don't already have them) running an agreed configuration/profile/whatever against an agreed limited scope target list (typically a VLAN or set of VLANs unless that entire network is devoted to just that one customer, which is sometimes the case, though less so these days with public/private/hybrid clouds being all the rage). When it comes to web application and database testing, you'll typically agree on a non-production target list that's a mirror of the production system (with appropriate verification of the two being a mirror outside the automated testing) so as to avoid impacting the production systems. When it comes time to run the tests, over-the-admins'-shoulder monitoring ensures the proper tools with the proper configurations hitting the proper targets is being done and that the output is being handed over unaltered.
Seen this done in plenty of places and 99% of the time, the auditing group is fine with it because at the end of the day, it's getting them exactly what they want; just in a slightly more red-tape riddled way. Meanwhile, the group being audited has the assurance that nothing is running wild all over their network unsupervised. If you don't have anything to hide, you're typically fine with this approach. If you aren't fine with this approach, something else is going on behind the scenes and most of the time that'll be something you're trying to hide.