Please use Sharia to create a credible defense of human rights and which respect the rights of a person to have equal rights to a Muslim in a Muslim society even if one is a non-muslim, in a way that is in accordance with the interpretations of the Sunnah which are considered mainstream in Islam. Bonus points if these non-muslims are non-Abrahamaic polytheists.
The right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment is a human right enshrined in the UNUDHR. Specifically:
Article 5.
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
2,000 lashings is inhuman and degrading. 10 years prison time is cruel for a petty infraction. The punishment is entirely germane when determining if a human rights violation has occurred.
Our private insurance system is also responsible for driving up health costs themselves, which deflates your argument considerably. There is a reason health costs in the US per capita are so far outside the norm for developed countries.
Namely, "private efficiency" isn't about cost/benefit efficiency, but rather profitability.
I did look for a neutral estimate beforehand, one not tied to single-payer advocates or defenders of the medical insurance industry......then I made the effort moot by typing "billion" instead of "trillion", just as you said. Oh for an "edit" button. Thanks!
Fortunately, international human rights laws are not required satisfy such pedantry. The laws apply despite cultural relativist arguments that they shouldn't.
As to whether morals themselves are relative, that's a parlour game, and has no bearing on international law. Biological research has consistently demonstrated that a lot of our supposed morality does, in fact, precede and work independently of the "moral traditions" various religions have tried to usurp. The holy books of the three Abrahamaic religions teach us that it is good to punish the non-believer, and yet I have never met a Jew, Christian, or Muslim that has tried to physically sanction me for not believing as their god says I must. One could theorize an objective morality that killing someone who is not a threat to you is more deeply rooted in our morality (whether or not you want to call that objective), and that to overcome this morality requires religious zealotry to the point where faith is considered more persuasive than reason.
I've known many Canadians and Britons (both when I lived in the UK and after). Although this is at best clearly merely anecdotal evidence, the only of them that ever preferred the US system to the national system they grew up in (or were still covered by) were two people whose incomes were well into the six digits.
Most of the fear-mongering about the UK's NHS and the Candian equivalent in the US is by people who have never had any experience of either system.
> The hundreds of thousands of service denials from Medicare and the VA should wise you up
Presumably, being denied service by Medicare and the VA is MUCH worse than being denied service because of a corporation instead of a government? Or is it supposed to sting less if I'm not being "denied" service so much as being offered something I could not possibly afford?
Private medical insurance doesn't solve the problem, and it manages to add another income-crippling profit sinkhole to the mix, all the while profoundly increasing costs at every level of the system.
The problem with this moral relativism argument is that it supposes that there are no objective standards to measure any sort of oppression, and that if one finds a culture willing to hide away its women, enforce religious practice on all people, and murder people for petty crimes, then that is just fine "for them".
Under international law, these are not culturally relative rights, and if they were, they wouldn't be rights. The authors of the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights aren't merely recontextualizing what human rights mean for them in "their culture", this document seeks to eliminate the concept while remaining opaque enough that those not familiar with Islam, the hadith, and sharia law can be tricked into thinking that both of these documents are actually about the same thing. The UIHDR dismisses human reason, which can never come to a more appropriate conclusion than "the teachings of Islam" which represent "Divine guidance in its final and perfect form".
You can defend cultural relativism, but international law doesn't allow such considerations for the abrogation human rights. If you want to argue against the entire platform of international law on the basis of moral relativism, I can only wonder what motivates you to do so. At best, this is a sophist's objection.
No, they're not, under international law. There is no way to justify Sharia law with human rights other than by abandoning the concept of human rights altogether.
In fact, most Islamic countries try to do exactly this because they don't have a legal construct by which human rights can be acknowledged. Under Sharia, humans don't have rights, god has rights, humans only have responsibilities to god.
In the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights, one has the right to obey god without question or hesitation. Here, "rights" are derived from divine law, and though there is lip service paid to the freedom of religion, every country that has adopted it has interpreted it as intended, that is, that everyone has the right to obey the Koran, the hadith, and the sunnah.
As opposed to the health insurance industry, which is a billion dollar a year boondoggle whose only functions are to determine who gets billed for what, and to deny benefits in order to increase "shareholder value".
Even fairly incompetent governments around the world have been shown to be able to manage a single-payer system without it becoming such a drain on the GDP.
It's amusing that you think the tight jeans and raw denim fad that goes with it are exclusive to women. Also, what troglodyte carries a phone in their ass pocket?
Unlike most people at her organization, CEO hiring and firing policies ensure that she will be well-compensated no matter the outcome, so making a flashy change that brings attention to her management is more important than the results of that change.
Game shows (except QI which isn't really a game show so much as a chat comedy show, which I download) and soap operas are so far out of my peripheral vision that I sometimes forget they still exist. I don't have a cable subscription or use broadcast television, so anything I watch is something I stream or download.
My last connection to them was when I still lived with my parents during high school, and my mother had a few favourites she'd watch. The entire idea of watching a show at a pre-scheduled time is practically alien to me these days, and I suspect the same is true for most people younger than me.
I was referring to shows that have run for decades without any real secondary market: shows like Guiding Light, As the World Turns General Hospital, Days of Our Lives, and One Life to Live.
If you want to power through those, that is a dark place and I cannot join you.
The history of the last ten years is one of the RIAA and MPAA trying and failing to put this genie back in the bottle via lawsuits and legislation.
Frankly, I find these failures a bit of a back-guard action. We need to decide, as a society, whether or not we want to be participants or mere consumers in our culture. Never-ending copyrights run contrary to the intent of copyright law (assuring a productive public domain), and contrary to participation in the culture (record labels looking for a paycheck every time someone remixes, samples, or plays anything). Five years - no extensions - would be sufficient in a world where culture travels at the speed of light around the world.
Because copying data is exactly what the internet is for. If this "incredible level of infrastructure" - the internet, the power grid, and modern computing - ever goes away, I'll have much bigger concerns than idly thinking about the fact that someone out there has a hard drive with Dr. Who episodes that they can no longer watch.
Short of that sort of civilizational collapse, that content is effectively around forever.
It took three years for OiNK to archive 200,000 torrents. It took nine months for the biggest of the trackers that OiNK's closure caused to get to that point, six more months to double to 400,000, and has grown since.
So, yes, I have faith that either the internet will archive this content adequately, presuming the shit doesn't hit the fan so hard that video entertainment and the preservation of history is the least of our worries.
I'm not a fan of the series in any incarnation, but assuming the report is accurate, I'm thrilled that those that are fans may finally be able to dig a little deeper into the archives.
And thanks to the internet being the world's most effective copying machine, if these episodes do release, we'll never have to worry about this particular series going dark again.
I'm always a little intrigued by some of the other long-running shows where archival is not (at the time) a financially sound move. I have to wonder exactly how many episodes of, say, daytime soap operas are lost. Many? Most? The airing schedule on some of the longest-running is so frequent that catching up from a series from beginning to end (if it were possible) would take 6 or so years if you tried to plow through at 40 hours a week.
At least with tech, we've got some recourse in places like Tom's and Anandtech, where qualified reviewers who know the subject very well get into the details.
The state of professional videogame review, however, is so bad that almost nobody writing "professionally" can risk getting shut out by a big studio by completely panning a major release. It's to the point where what at first glance looks like critical reviews is, for all intents and purposes, outsourced marketing.
I don't have such a hard time with movie, music, or book reviews as I do with videogame reviews, since for the first three types, I've generally found people and communities which are reliable recommendation sources (which is to say more than anything else, they match my personal tastes, or when they don't exactly match, I know how and why they don't).
A person's emotional attachment to some long-beloved piece of technology may not be in proportion to its rarity. I have fond memories of my Atari 400, C64, and Amiga 500s. They were at times wonderful, frustrating, and enthralling. The thing is, though, that these are some of the best-selling computers of the 8-bit and 16-bit eras.
>In some countries, like the UK, with strict, old-fashioned prurient laws about the nudey, pictures of boobs and front-bottoms (male and female) could land you in jail with a conviction as a sexual pervert.
And a boobs-only shot could land you on page three.
I was describing my own approach to Metacritic to someone the other day, particularly in regards to videogame reviews.
User reviews tend to be 70% fawning praise, and "Professional" reviews more like 80% fawning praise with little or no comment to any title's drawbacks. I've found the only way I can extract any useful information from Metacritic regarding whether I will actually like the game is:
1: Ignore all professiona/critic reviews. 2: Ignore all positive and neutral user reviews. 3: Read only the negative user reviews and then:
a: Ignore all the illiterate or retarded reviews.
b: Focus on the specific complaints of the few remaining reviews and decide whether or not those particular issues matter to me.
Otherwise, if I just read the positive reviews, it's a +1 Like This sea of "Best Game Ever".
Slashdot Mirror
Please use Sharia to create a credible defense of human rights and which respect the rights of a person to have equal rights to a Muslim in a Muslim society even if one is a non-muslim, in a way that is in accordance with the interpretations of the Sunnah which are considered mainstream in Islam. Bonus points if these non-muslims are non-Abrahamaic polytheists.
I'll wait.
The right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment is a human right enshrined in the UNUDHR. Specifically:
Article 5.
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
2,000 lashings is inhuman and degrading. 10 years prison time is cruel for a petty infraction. The punishment is entirely germane when determining if a human rights violation has occurred.
Our private insurance system is also responsible for driving up health costs themselves, which deflates your argument considerably. There is a reason health costs in the US per capita are so far outside the norm for developed countries.
Namely, "private efficiency" isn't about cost/benefit efficiency, but rather profitability.
Sadly, I ran out of mod points a few hours ago.
+1 insightful
I did look for a neutral estimate beforehand, one not tied to single-payer advocates or defenders of the medical insurance industry... ...then I made the effort moot by typing "billion" instead of "trillion", just as you said. Oh for an "edit" button. Thanks!
Fortunately, international human rights laws are not required satisfy such pedantry. The laws apply despite cultural relativist arguments that they shouldn't.
As to whether morals themselves are relative, that's a parlour game, and has no bearing on international law. Biological research has consistently demonstrated that a lot of our supposed morality does, in fact, precede and work independently of the "moral traditions" various religions have tried to usurp. The holy books of the three Abrahamaic religions teach us that it is good to punish the non-believer, and yet I have never met a Jew, Christian, or Muslim that has tried to physically sanction me for not believing as their god says I must. One could theorize an objective morality that killing someone who is not a threat to you is more deeply rooted in our morality (whether or not you want to call that objective), and that to overcome this morality requires religious zealotry to the point where faith is considered more persuasive than reason.
I've known many Canadians and Britons (both when I lived in the UK and after). Although this is at best clearly merely anecdotal evidence, the only of them that ever preferred the US system to the national system they grew up in (or were still covered by) were two people whose incomes were well into the six digits.
Most of the fear-mongering about the UK's NHS and the Candian equivalent in the US is by people who have never had any experience of either system.
> The hundreds of thousands of service denials from Medicare and the VA should wise you up
Presumably, being denied service by Medicare and the VA is MUCH worse than being denied service because of a corporation instead of a government? Or is it supposed to sting less if I'm not being "denied" service so much as being offered something I could not possibly afford?
Private medical insurance doesn't solve the problem, and it manages to add another income-crippling profit sinkhole to the mix, all the while profoundly increasing costs at every level of the system.
Put that way, I can't object. This is efficiency ... of a sort.
The problem with this moral relativism argument is that it supposes that there are no objective standards to measure any sort of oppression, and that if one finds a culture willing to hide away its women, enforce religious practice on all people, and murder people for petty crimes, then that is just fine "for them".
Under international law, these are not culturally relative rights, and if they were, they wouldn't be rights. The authors of the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights aren't merely recontextualizing what human rights mean for them in "their culture", this document seeks to eliminate the concept while remaining opaque enough that those not familiar with Islam, the hadith, and sharia law can be tricked into thinking that both of these documents are actually about the same thing. The UIHDR dismisses human reason, which can never come to a more appropriate conclusion than "the teachings of Islam" which represent "Divine guidance in its final and perfect form".
You can defend cultural relativism, but international law doesn't allow such considerations for the abrogation human rights. If you want to argue against the entire platform of international law on the basis of moral relativism, I can only wonder what motivates you to do so. At best, this is a sophist's objection.
No, they're not, under international law. There is no way to justify Sharia law with human rights other than by abandoning the concept of human rights altogether.
In fact, most Islamic countries try to do exactly this because they don't have a legal construct by which human rights can be acknowledged. Under Sharia, humans don't have rights, god has rights, humans only have responsibilities to god.
This is why the UN Declaration of Human Rights: http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml
Is drastically re-written by most Islamic countries:
http://www.alhewar.com/ISLAMDECL.html
In the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights, one has the right to obey god without question or hesitation. Here, "rights" are derived from divine law, and though there is lip service paid to the freedom of religion, every country that has adopted it has interpreted it as intended, that is, that everyone has the right to obey the Koran, the hadith, and the sunnah.
Human rights are not judged according to cultural relativism. Sharia law is a violation of human rights, regardless of the religion of the victim.
As opposed to the health insurance industry, which is a billion dollar a year boondoggle whose only functions are to determine who gets billed for what, and to deny benefits in order to increase "shareholder value".
Even fairly incompetent governments around the world have been shown to be able to manage a single-payer system without it becoming such a drain on the GDP.
It's amusing that you think the tight jeans and raw denim fad that goes with it are exclusive to women. Also, what troglodyte carries a phone in their ass pocket?
Unlike most people at her organization, CEO hiring and firing policies ensure that she will be well-compensated no matter the outcome, so making a flashy change that brings attention to her management is more important than the results of that change.
Paid to fail.
Game shows (except QI which isn't really a game show so much as a chat comedy show, which I download) and soap operas are so far out of my peripheral vision that I sometimes forget they still exist. I don't have a cable subscription or use broadcast television, so anything I watch is something I stream or download.
My last connection to them was when I still lived with my parents during high school, and my mother had a few favourites she'd watch. The entire idea of watching a show at a pre-scheduled time is practically alien to me these days, and I suspect the same is true for most people younger than me.
I was referring to shows that have run for decades without any real secondary market: shows like Guiding Light, As the World Turns General Hospital, Days of Our Lives, and One Life to Live.
If you want to power through those, that is a dark place and I cannot join you.
The history of the last ten years is one of the RIAA and MPAA trying and failing to put this genie back in the bottle via lawsuits and legislation.
Frankly, I find these failures a bit of a back-guard action. We need to decide, as a society, whether or not we want to be participants or mere consumers in our culture. Never-ending copyrights run contrary to the intent of copyright law (assuring a productive public domain), and contrary to participation in the culture (record labels looking for a paycheck every time someone remixes, samples, or plays anything). Five years - no extensions - would be sufficient in a world where culture travels at the speed of light around the world.
Because copying data is exactly what the internet is for. If this "incredible level of infrastructure" - the internet, the power grid, and modern computing - ever goes away, I'll have much bigger concerns than idly thinking about the fact that someone out there has a hard drive with Dr. Who episodes that they can no longer watch.
Short of that sort of civilizational collapse, that content is effectively around forever.
It took three years for OiNK to archive 200,000 torrents. It took nine months for the biggest of the trackers that OiNK's closure caused to get to that point, six more months to double to 400,000, and has grown since.
So, yes, I have faith that either the internet will archive this content adequately, presuming the shit doesn't hit the fan so hard that video entertainment and the preservation of history is the least of our worries.
I'm not a fan of the series in any incarnation, but assuming the report is accurate, I'm thrilled that those that are fans may finally be able to dig a little deeper into the archives.
And thanks to the internet being the world's most effective copying machine, if these episodes do release, we'll never have to worry about this particular series going dark again.
I'm always a little intrigued by some of the other long-running shows where archival is not (at the time) a financially sound move. I have to wonder exactly how many episodes of, say, daytime soap operas are lost. Many? Most? The airing schedule on some of the longest-running is so frequent that catching up from a series from beginning to end (if it were possible) would take 6 or so years if you tried to plow through at 40 hours a week.
That's a very good point, particularly for the larger organizations with a bit more floor space.
At least with tech, we've got some recourse in places like Tom's and Anandtech, where qualified reviewers who know the subject very well get into the details.
The state of professional videogame review, however, is so bad that almost nobody writing "professionally" can risk getting shut out by a big studio by completely panning a major release. It's to the point where what at first glance looks like critical reviews is, for all intents and purposes, outsourced marketing.
I don't have such a hard time with movie, music, or book reviews as I do with videogame reviews, since for the first three types, I've generally found people and communities which are reliable recommendation sources (which is to say more than anything else, they match my personal tastes, or when they don't exactly match, I know how and why they don't).
A person's emotional attachment to some long-beloved piece of technology may not be in proportion to its rarity. I have fond memories of my Atari 400, C64, and Amiga 500s. They were at times wonderful, frustrating, and enthralling. The thing is, though, that these are some of the best-selling computers of the 8-bit and 16-bit eras.
>In some countries, like the UK, with strict, old-fashioned prurient laws about the nudey, pictures of boobs and front-bottoms (male and female) could land you in jail with a conviction as a sexual pervert.
And a boobs-only shot could land you on page three.
This is just a comment to the previous news story about the issue. How is this reaction to said news story newsworthy?
I was describing my own approach to Metacritic to someone the other day, particularly in regards to videogame reviews.
User reviews tend to be 70% fawning praise, and "Professional" reviews more like 80% fawning praise with little or no comment to any title's drawbacks. I've found the only way I can extract any useful information from Metacritic regarding whether I will actually like the game is:
1: Ignore all professiona/critic reviews.
2: Ignore all positive and neutral user reviews.
3: Read only the negative user reviews and then:
a: Ignore all the illiterate or retarded reviews.
b: Focus on the specific complaints of the few remaining reviews and decide whether or not those particular issues matter to me.
Otherwise, if I just read the positive reviews, it's a +1 Like This sea of "Best Game Ever".