First off the popular vote `in most areas' didn't go for Gore, or he would have had more electoral votes. The total popular vote was very slightly more for Gore than for Bush, but this was because some of the very populous states, such as California went for Gore.
And this brings us to the actual reason for the Electoral College, which is very different from what you suggest in your post. The founders were quite rightly worried that a few large states would be able to control federal elections in such a way that smaller states would have no voice at all, so they reached a compromise. The existence of the Electoral College requires that a presidential candidate build a broad base of support accross a range of states, thus ensuring that he better represents the entire nation.
In the absence of the Electoral College, no presidential candidate would ever have incentive to listen to any but a few of the largest states -- and would be much more the president of New Yorkifornia than of the United States.
Our current administration is authoritarian and too concerned about what's moral, correct, and in the best interest of scaring the populace. Free speech == bad in the eyes of the Bush regime.
`You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means'.
This world has lots of governments which could be described as `authoritarian regimes' without torturing logic and credibility as you do in your post. Perhaps you'd like to back up your claims here?
You have to admit... AT THE VERY LEAST.. that whether or not America is the only nation whose citizens enjoy so much freedom is NOT A FORGONE CONCLUSION. ie: (And I'm being nice here) it's at least *debatable*.
However, while most nations of the EU are at least free enough to earn `free' rating from Freedom House, I have a serious problem with considering any of the nations of the EU to be as free as the US. Here are a few of the reasons:
The European Treaty on Extraditions -- this is simply a showstopper, as it requires any EU nation to be ready to present any citizen for trial in any other EU nation without any form of judicial review -- even if the action the individual will be tried for is not a crime in the nation where it was committed. Criticize the Greek government (a crime in Greece) on a website in England, go to Greek Jail. Write an article for a website in Spain which violates the (quite strict) English definition of libel, go to an English jail. Do not pass go (or any sort of extradition hearing on either end), do not collect 200 Euros. As some EU nations score as low as `3' in Freedom House's index of civil liberties, I would argue that this treaty makes them all 3's.
Prior restraint on speech and the press -- from England's Official Secrets Act to similar laws in almost all EU nations, prior restraint is the norm in Europe. More troubling, recent rulings have extended this doctrine to the highest levels of the EUCHR, establishing a right for the government to silence criticism of governmental policies in defense of a `human right' of European citizens not to hear the EU criticized..
No right to keep and bear arms -- this is another one which I find troubling. From the earliest days of our culture, self-defense has been understood to be a basic human right. Taking away people's right to defend themselves effectively puts this right in question, with predictable results -- for example, the UK has seen a skyrocketing rate of violent crime since banning handguns completely a few years back, with London now being more dangerous than any large US city. France has seen similar results, with Paris similarly more dangerous than any large US city.
It's been a real pleasure debating with you. You argue like a gentleman. I hope we have the opportunity to be on the same side of an issue one day!;)
Again, read the passages cited (or better yet, the whole ruling). The court could very easily have taken the tack you suggest, and I would have no objection. Instead, they spoke not of the common employer's privilege to release an employee he is unhappy with, but of a special and separate `pressing public need' for EU citizens not to hear their government criticized by governmental employees. This `pressing need' was ruled to justify prior restraint, not merely reaction, and to be a valid grounds for more general overriding of the right to free speech.
Returning to our original topic, this is a marked difference from the American system, which does not recognize any form of prior restraint, and deals only with considerations of actual, measurable damage for such acts. No nation in Europe has such a fundamental view of free speech, and many (witness the official secrets act in the UK) have much worse concepts on the books even than this EU travesty.
And all the people in all the world's media are acting this way? Even in countries like Iraq, Saudi Arabia, or France where showing up the US would be a quick route to promotion and glory?
In every area of achievement, vast governmental bureaucracies have shown themself to be slow, inefficient, nonreactive, and generally unsuccessful -- as well as completely unable to keep a secret for very long. You want us to believe that if the government set out to control all the stories in all the world's media, the result would be any different? Really?
With due respect, the problem with all these claims of `moved polls' and so on is that even in an eighteen month investigation, none of the parties concerned were able to actually produce any significant number of people who were affected -- in fact it seems to be the case that the 2000 elections went much more smoothly in Florida then in other years.
As for `most of the information we have on September 11 being processed through the government', this is nonsense. Many, many news agencies from many, many nations have reported on this war, and these reports (including those from some of the nations who have aligned themselves against us) are freely available to anyone with an internet connection. So to maintain your claim, you have to somehow maintain that all the corporations reporting news in this nation and all other nations, including our enemies, are somehow under the control of a vast conspiracy of the US government.
And this claim, of course, runs aground on the same rocks that sink all such claims of vast and overarching governmental conspiracy -- the fact that such a conspiracy would require vast and overarching governmental competence, which is demonstrably in short supply.
The whole thing was such a mess that the only democratic thing to do would have been to rerun the election. Possibly with international observers. Too many of the people involved had an interest in the result going one way or another.
The whole thing wasn't `such a mess' -- it was held in accordance with the procedures established by the legislature in Florida under the power granted to them by the federal constitution. One party didn't like the results, and tried to find grounds for contesting them. That there were no such grounds is clear from the fact that every single recount performed since the elections, including those held by the standards Gore's people demanded in court, resulted in Bush winning by as much or more of a margin. When we consider that many of these recounts were performed by organizations such as the New York Times and the University of Chicago which went into the count with a stated belief that Gore had won, this is pretty damning to any claim that the election should have turned out differently.
Now if you want to know what would have been a mess, I'll tell you. Establishing a precedent that if you don't win an election all you have to do is go to court seeking to have the election overturned. That is a damage this country might never have recovered from.
How many of the alleged hijackers came from Afganistan, how many of them even held Afgan passports?
The vast majority of them came through Aghanistan at one point or another, including all of the leaders of the operation. The operations were planned and funded from Afghanistan, and more pressingly, the organization which planned them was in Afghanistan and was busy planning further attacks -- attacks which with the use of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons could be much deadlier than those we already suffered.
As to the claim that there is some economic incentive for us to spend billions (yes billions. with a `b') on Afghanistan, this is neatly debunked in
this article.
That this doesn't work is clear from a simple demonstration: our morality is based on a common set of beliefs in our culture, namely values of life and liberty going back to the enlightenment and with roots in ancient Greece and Judeo-Christian tradition. The morality of the Nazis was based in German culture, with roots in a pagan tradition almost as old. For at least a decade or two, this `morality' was shared throughout German society.
Now, if we take your definition, we have no right to complain about the actions of the Nazis. After all, such actions were `moral' within their society, and if we cannot objectively judge that our system of morality is closer to some standard of objective morality, we lose all grounds to complain about their actions.
Morality is certainly a tool that guides rational choice, but that still does not mean that "God" is required for morality to have arisen as an artifact of culture.
Absolutely -- any discussion of God's presence or absence is beyond the scope of my post. I am merely arguing that try as we might, we cannot escape the concept of an objective moral truth of some sort.
The problem with considering morality purely as a survival strategy, internalized or explicit is that there are many circumstances where the action most conducive to survival and the action which we consider most moral are in no way the same. As I mentioned elsewhere in this story's threads, consider the firefighters charging into the WTC on the morning of September 11. We consider what they did brave, and good, but clearly not because it aided their survival. So we must look elsewhere for the reason we praise their courage.
The key phrase in your paragraph above is "long term". In the long term, you are just as likely to accidentally leave your wad of cash somewhere as you are to find someone else's wad of cash lying around. You will be happier (less worried/paranoid) living in a world where you have a reasonable expectation of getting your lost cash back, than in a world where it's every man for himself. Not keeping the money you found is the price you pay for this sense of security, but in the long term, it is worth the sacrifice.
Certainly. As you point out, there is a tradeoff here, and when seeing that wad of money, I have to choose between goals -- having money or not having a negative effect on society. Where this tradeoff point lies will also very with the size of the wad of cash.
The key point is that there is a decision between two goods to be made here, and it is morality which helps one choose. (I'm also not convinced that the primary reason we don't take the money has to do with the effect we feel such a theft will have on society, but let's take that at face value for the moment).
Hm. I'd better expand my rules a bit. As the previous poster pointed out, biology plays a major role here. A person isn't solely interested in the care and maintenance of their own body, but also in the preservation of their genome. Which means that it is sometimes in people's 'best interest' (biologically speaking) to sacrifice themselves if that will help others who share their genes. This is seen in families, societies, and even regarding humanity as a whole (since we all share mostly the same genes...).
Perhaps, but I see two problems with this approach. The first is that if I die to save a single other person (a loved one, a respected figure, a stranger, doesn't matter), It's a net zero for the gene pool -- I'm not increasing or decreasing the gene pool with my action, yet we still consider this a good act. Secondly, while perhaps we can accept for the sake of argument that such a generalized biological imperative to preserve human genomes exist, there is clearly also a biological imperative to preserve a specific genome -- my own. In choosing between biological imperatives this way, there must be something else at work...
It's also largely a case of killing the goose which lays the golden egg. Let's embark on a simple thought experiment: the top 1% of Americans own about 50% of the wealth (whatever that means in a constantly growing economy). This means, plainly, that if we were to simply take everything from these people, and share it among everyone else, on average people would double their holdings. People should ask themselves honestly: If what I owned doubled, and then a year or two went by, how much of this windfall would I have left? For most people, the answer is `not much' -- and it's worse than that, because now your new top 1% are much less wealthy than the previous top 1%, so even if you repeat this process every few years,before too long you're not actually helping the poor very much at all.
Now let's look what happens when these people keep their money. The rich don't just stick their money under their mattress, they invest it. And this investment creates economic growth, and this growth helps everyone. To give a perfect example, here in the US, the bottom 20% of the population in 1990 had, earned, and consumed as much (adjusted for inflation) as the middle 20% had in 1950. No other system on earth, including those who tried the first approach, did anywhere near this much for those on the bottom of society.
There are two problems with this argument. The first is that you claim that biological imperatives cause you to seek long term happiness, but in truth biological imperatives cause you to seek a lot of things, from that cute girl accross the room to another slice of pizza. Many of these things are, in fact, in conflict. When you resolve these conflicts, you are making a rational choice, not following a biological imperative, and morality is the tool which guides these choices.
The second problem is that the goal of long term happiness and comfort is perfectly in accordance with a number of actions which are nonetheless not moral. When a guy leaves some money lying around, we agree (I assume) that it would not be moral to take that money even if you knew you would never be caught -- and yet such an action would certainly be only positive in terms of your happiness and comfort. Likewise, we believe that when someone gives their life to save others, as a number of firemen did on the morning of September 11, they are doing a good and moral thing. How can this be the case if their goal should actually be nothing more than their own long-term happiness?
You say that there is no `good', but then you proceed to make a number of moral judgements. For example, you say that `The man who does not fear death is a danger to society'. Leaving aside whether we agree to this, where do you get the idea that being a danger to society is a bad thing to do? Is this not a moral judgement, revealing that for all that, you do believe that some things are right or wrong?
Of course, there's a problem here: you judge that `being happy and comfortable' is what you should be seeking. Is not this a moral decision? Is it not true that you could have chose another goal, such as making others happy, or short term gratification, or who knows what else?
I maintain no such thing. I said that income and purchasing power are not in themselves indicative of the standard of living. They form metrics which, when combined with other metrics, can give someone an idea of the standard of living.
Certainly there are plenty of other conditions one might consider when deciding where to live -- climate, language, proximity to friends, you name it. Thus I will not say `the US is a better place to live for you'. I will say two things: first that more people move to the US each year than to any other nation on earth, and second that the US is the most free, the most democratic, and the most prosperous nation on earth, and to whatever degree you value these things, the US will do well in your measure.
Only if you count cash in hand. Americans are in fact more deeply in debt than swedes. Look. It comes down to the difference between net-worth and cashflow. Americans have high cashflow. Lots more cash in hand, but many more expenses. Swedes earn less, but don't need as much money to lead similar lives.
There are two problems with this claim. The first is that `savings' often does not include many forms of investments, and Americans as a nation are highly invested. The second, and more telling is that Americans consume so much more than Swedes do that you cannot claim that Americans could not save as much, if they wished to. This is a cultural difference, and largely reflects the fact that Americans are much more confident that they will see economic growth in the years ahead.
But ok. How about this [worldaudit.org] then?
How about it? It provides very little information about how it reaches its numbers, and many of the sources it cites are groups with noted biases in this area (Human Rights Watch comes immediately to mind). For a report of this sort which works harder to back its claims, see
Freedom House's annual report for 2001. Ironically, the audit you cite claims Freedom House as one of their main sources, but reaches very different results.
All this is well and good, but while science does not claim to be able to demonstrate objective truth, it necessarily acknowledges that such truth exists, and judges a theory according to that theory's inability to be shown to be in contradiction of that truth.
So a scientist would strongly disagree with your claim that these models can be allowed to be considered independently of the acknowledged objective truth which they model. That such models are necessarily inexact makes no difference when our discussion is at a high level of granularity: when I say that my arm moves when I move it, this is objectively true at the level of granularity I am talking at, even though some molecules which had been part of my arm no doubt remain where my arm had been, or even that at a lower level a number of particles moved in a way not predictable by newtonian physics.
Even a FEW 'incidences' of wholesale slaughter are WRONG and should NEVER happen.
But you haven't provided a credible cite for even one such incidence. And if you're about to say `Jenin', I would remind you that even
Arafat's official report of what happened at Jenin only claims that 56 Palestinians died, and acknowledges that those killed were combatants. Hamas' account of Jenin, as told to the Egyptian weekly al-Ahram similarly confirms that Jenin was a battle, not a massacre, and that those killed were combatants, and were killed in battle.
When even one solider starts taking pleasure in killing innocent civilians, then something is wrong.
Fine, but as far as I can tell the only ones celebrating the murder of civilians are on the Palestinian side, and they are the leaders of the Palestinian side, to boot.
How the hell is an anti-racist site racist? Because it depicts a bunch of cruel ass bastards being dickheads?
Care to defend your claim that the Israelis are `cruel-assed bastards being dickheads'? This type of statement is a slur, not an argument. As to the racism of the site linked to, well let's just say that comparing American blacks and civil rights workers to the Palestinians is a false analogy -- and extremely insulting to the former. Comparing the Israelis to the Klan is just as nonsensical and offensive.
Now nobody is defending the VIOLENT palestinians, just the ones who are getting their asses shot up and their children raped.
Can you provide any credible cite for these claims? Any? This is nonsense. Even Arafat isn't claiming this.
Fuck man, look at the pictures some time, both sides of that war are doing horrific shit, and civilians on both sides don't deserve it.
I'd say this is at best a false analogy. Let's look at the two sides, shall we?
On the one hand, we have a free, capitalist, democracy, with equal rights for all of its citizens (hint: there were 17 Arab members of Israel's parliament, the Knesset, last time I checked), which has been trying to trade land for peace for decades, and as of Oslo gave the other side everything that was asked of it, asking only an end to murder-sucide bombings in return. This side has gone out of its way to avoid harming civilians, including sending ground troops to fight house-to-house (at the cost of two a number of its own soldiers) instead of bombing from the air, which it could easily have done.
On the other side we have a dictatorship which has turned down every offer of peace and which sends its young men to blow themselves up in the childrens areas of restaurants, with the intention of killing as many civilians as possible. It does this because its stated goal is not to have peace but to destroy the other state and take the entire region for itself. Anyone on this side who even suggests peace or coexistance with Israel is brutally lynched by their own government.
How is this `both sides.. doing horrific shit' at all?
"until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by members in the exercise of this right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security."
How does this in any way contradict what I said? Or are you arguing that the security council has `taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security'? As we are daily stopping new attacks on US civilian and military targets, I would certainly beg to differ.
The same goes even if we accept your interpretation of resolution 1373, by the way. As article 51 of the UN Charter clearly states, we are free to act in our own defense until the UNSC makes such action unnecessary. They clearly have not done so.
Your reading of the Geneva convention is equally flawed. Neither the Taliban or al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan resemble a regular army or militia forming part thereof under Article 4, part A, paragraph 1 of the convention. Thus, as `other militias', they have to meet the conditions of Article 4, part A, paragraph 2. Their is no uncertainty about this, it is clear in the plain meaning of the treaty, and thus no hearing is called for by article 5.
It's funny that you deny that Canada, the UK, Sweden, Germany and others are free, and yet you claim that Afghanistan, which has not had an election in decades, is free. Also, your claims about the state of the nation now that the Taliban is gone sound an awful lot like what was said about the Taliban when they took over in the first place.
I can't speak for what you may have said about the Taliban when they took over the place, but I would like to point out that you are misrepresenting what I've said. None of the nations you name are as free as the US. All are relatively free compared to Afghanistan, which is in turn very free compared to the state it was in under the Taliban. Any questions?
This is all very well, but the fact remains that those (probable) complex networks of energy are organized in a fashion which can be suitably be described by a series of higher level models, ranging from conceptual atomic and subatomic particles up through objects, and into living beings, societies, and communities such as/. These models are objectively true to whatever extent they correspond to the underlying reality.
If you actually believed that no model above the superstring level had objective meaning, you certainly would not be here talking to us.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two problems with this post:
First off the popular vote `in most areas' didn't go for Gore, or he would have had more electoral votes. The total popular vote was very slightly more for Gore than for Bush, but this was because some of the very populous states, such as California went for Gore.
And this brings us to the actual reason for the Electoral College, which is very different from what you suggest in your post. The founders were quite rightly worried that a few large states would be able to control federal elections in such a way that smaller states would have no voice at all, so they reached a compromise. The existence of the Electoral College requires that a presidential candidate build a broad base of support accross a range of states, thus ensuring that he better represents the entire nation.
In the absence of the Electoral College, no presidential candidate would ever have incentive to listen to any but a few of the largest states -- and would be much more the president of New Yorkifornia than of the United States.
Our current administration is authoritarian and too concerned about what's moral, correct, and in the best interest of scaring the populace. Free speech == bad in the eyes of the Bush regime.
`You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means'.
This world has lots of governments which could be described as `authoritarian regimes' without torturing logic and credibility as you do in your post. Perhaps you'd like to back up your claims here?
Another example of how Iceland's civil liberties are rather far from perfect, from today's news.
Can you imagine the outcry if the US banned all members of a specific religion from entering the country?
You have to admit... AT THE VERY LEAST.. that whether or not America is the only nation whose citizens enjoy so much freedom is NOT A FORGONE CONCLUSION. ie: (And I'm being nice here) it's at least *debatable*.
Well, clearly it's `debatable' -- we're debating it. :-)
However, while most nations of the EU are at least free enough to earn `free' rating from Freedom House, I have a serious problem with considering any of the nations of the EU to be as free as the US. Here are a few of the reasons:
It's been a real pleasure debating with you. You argue like a gentleman. I hope we have the opportunity to be on the same side of an issue one day! ;)
Likewise. :-)
Again, read the passages cited (or better yet, the whole ruling). The court could very easily have taken the tack you suggest, and I would have no objection. Instead, they spoke not of the common employer's privilege to release an employee he is unhappy with, but of a special and separate `pressing public need' for EU citizens not to hear their government criticized by governmental employees. This `pressing need' was ruled to justify prior restraint, not merely reaction, and to be a valid grounds for more general overriding of the right to free speech.
Returning to our original topic, this is a marked difference from the American system, which does not recognize any form of prior restraint, and deals only with considerations of actual, measurable damage for such acts. No nation in Europe has such a fundamental view of free speech, and many (witness the official secrets act in the UK) have much worse concepts on the books even than this EU travesty.
And all the people in all the world's media are acting this way? Even in countries like Iraq, Saudi Arabia, or France where showing up the US would be a quick route to promotion and glory?
Really?
Put differently:
In every area of achievement, vast governmental bureaucracies have shown themself to be slow, inefficient, nonreactive, and generally unsuccessful -- as well as completely unable to keep a secret for very long. You want us to believe that if the government set out to control all the stories in all the world's media, the result would be any different? Really?
With due respect, the problem with all these claims of `moved polls' and so on is that even in an eighteen month investigation, none of the parties concerned were able to actually produce any significant number of people who were affected -- in fact it seems to be the case that the 2000 elections went much more smoothly in Florida then in other years.
As for `most of the information we have on September 11 being processed through the government', this is nonsense. Many, many news agencies from many, many nations have reported on this war, and these reports (including those from some of the nations who have aligned themselves against us) are freely available to anyone with an internet connection. So to maintain your claim, you have to somehow maintain that all the corporations reporting news in this nation and all other nations, including our enemies, are somehow under the control of a vast conspiracy of the US government.
And this claim, of course, runs aground on the same rocks that sink all such claims of vast and overarching governmental conspiracy -- the fact that such a conspiracy would require vast and overarching governmental competence, which is demonstrably in short supply.
The whole thing was such a mess that the only democratic thing to do would have been to rerun the election. Possibly with international observers. Too many of the people involved had an interest in the result going one way or another.
The whole thing wasn't `such a mess' -- it was held in accordance with the procedures established by the legislature in Florida under the power granted to them by the federal constitution. One party didn't like the results, and tried to find grounds for contesting them. That there were no such grounds is clear from the fact that every single recount performed since the elections, including those held by the standards Gore's people demanded in court, resulted in Bush winning by as much or more of a margin. When we consider that many of these recounts were performed by organizations such as the New York Times and the University of Chicago which went into the count with a stated belief that Gore had won, this is pretty damning to any claim that the election should have turned out differently.
Now if you want to know what would have been a mess, I'll tell you. Establishing a precedent that if you don't win an election all you have to do is go to court seeking to have the election overturned. That is a damage this country might never have recovered from.
How many of the alleged hijackers came from Afganistan, how many of them even held Afgan passports?
The vast majority of them came through Aghanistan at one point or another, including all of the leaders of the operation. The operations were planned and funded from Afghanistan, and more pressingly, the organization which planned them was in Afghanistan and was busy planning further attacks -- attacks which with the use of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons could be much deadlier than those we already suffered.
As to the claim that there is some economic incentive for us to spend billions (yes billions. with a `b') on Afghanistan, this is neatly debunked in this article.
That this doesn't work is clear from a simple demonstration: our morality is based on a common set of beliefs in our culture, namely values of life and liberty going back to the enlightenment and with roots in ancient Greece and Judeo-Christian tradition. The morality of the Nazis was based in German culture, with roots in a pagan tradition almost as old. For at least a decade or two, this `morality' was shared throughout German society.
Now, if we take your definition, we have no right to complain about the actions of the Nazis. After all, such actions were `moral' within their society, and if we cannot objectively judge that our system of morality is closer to some standard of objective morality, we lose all grounds to complain about their actions.
Clearly, that doesn't hold.
Morality is certainly a tool that guides rational choice, but that still does not mean that "God" is required for morality to have arisen as an artifact of culture.
Absolutely -- any discussion of God's presence or absence is beyond the scope of my post. I am merely arguing that try as we might, we cannot escape the concept of an objective moral truth of some sort.
The problem with considering morality purely as a survival strategy, internalized or explicit is that there are many circumstances where the action most conducive to survival and the action which we consider most moral are in no way the same. As I mentioned elsewhere in this story's threads, consider the firefighters charging into the WTC on the morning of September 11. We consider what they did brave, and good, but clearly not because it aided their survival. So we must look elsewhere for the reason we praise their courage.
The key phrase in your paragraph above is "long term". In the long term, you are just as likely to accidentally leave your wad of cash somewhere as you are to find someone else's wad of cash lying around. You will be happier (less worried/paranoid) living in a world where you have a reasonable expectation of getting your lost cash back, than in a world where it's every man for himself. Not keeping the money you found is the price you pay for this sense of security, but in the long term, it is worth the sacrifice.
Certainly. As you point out, there is a tradeoff here, and when seeing that wad of money, I have to choose between goals -- having money or not having a negative effect on society. Where this tradeoff point lies will also very with the size of the wad of cash.
The key point is that there is a decision between two goods to be made here, and it is morality which helps one choose. (I'm also not convinced that the primary reason we don't take the money has to do with the effect we feel such a theft will have on society, but let's take that at face value for the moment).
Hm. I'd better expand my rules a bit. As the previous poster pointed out, biology plays a major role here. A person isn't solely interested in the care and maintenance of their own body, but also in the preservation of their genome. Which means that it is sometimes in people's 'best interest' (biologically speaking) to sacrifice themselves if that will help others who share their genes. This is seen in families, societies, and even regarding humanity as a whole (since we all share mostly the same genes...).
Perhaps, but I see two problems with this approach. The first is that if I die to save a single other person (a loved one, a respected figure, a stranger, doesn't matter), It's a net zero for the gene pool -- I'm not increasing or decreasing the gene pool with my action, yet we still consider this a good act. Secondly, while perhaps we can accept for the sake of argument that such a generalized biological imperative to preserve human genomes exist, there is clearly also a biological imperative to preserve a specific genome -- my own. In choosing between biological imperatives this way, there must be something else at work...
Please mod parent up, insightful.
It's also largely a case of killing the goose which lays the golden egg. Let's embark on a simple thought experiment: the top 1% of Americans own about 50% of the wealth (whatever that means in a constantly growing economy). This means, plainly, that if we were to simply take everything from these people, and share it among everyone else, on average people would double their holdings. People should ask themselves honestly: If what I owned doubled, and then a year or two went by, how much of this windfall would I have left? For most people, the answer is `not much' -- and it's worse than that, because now your new top 1% are much less wealthy than the previous top 1%, so even if you repeat this process every few years,before too long you're not actually helping the poor very much at all.
Now let's look what happens when these people keep their money. The rich don't just stick their money under their mattress, they invest it. And this investment creates economic growth, and this growth helps everyone. To give a perfect example, here in the US, the bottom 20% of the population in 1990 had, earned, and consumed as much (adjusted for inflation) as the middle 20% had in 1950. No other system on earth, including those who tried the first approach, did anywhere near this much for those on the bottom of society.
There are two problems with this argument. The first is that you claim that biological imperatives cause you to seek long term happiness, but in truth biological imperatives cause you to seek a lot of things, from that cute girl accross the room to another slice of pizza. Many of these things are, in fact, in conflict. When you resolve these conflicts, you are making a rational choice, not following a biological imperative, and morality is the tool which guides these choices.
The second problem is that the goal of long term happiness and comfort is perfectly in accordance with a number of actions which are nonetheless not moral. When a guy leaves some money lying around, we agree (I assume) that it would not be moral to take that money even if you knew you would never be caught -- and yet such an action would certainly be only positive in terms of your happiness and comfort. Likewise, we believe that when someone gives their life to save others, as a number of firemen did on the morning of September 11, they are doing a good and moral thing. How can this be the case if their goal should actually be nothing more than their own long-term happiness?
You say that there is no `good', but then you proceed to make a number of moral judgements. For example, you say that `The man who does not fear death is a danger to society'. Leaving aside whether we agree to this, where do you get the idea that being a danger to society is a bad thing to do? Is this not a moral judgement, revealing that for all that, you do believe that some things are right or wrong?
Of course, there's a problem here: you judge that `being happy and comfortable' is what you should be seeking. Is not this a moral decision? Is it not true that you could have chose another goal, such as making others happy, or short term gratification, or who knows what else?
I maintain no such thing. I said that income and purchasing power are not in themselves indicative of the standard of living. They form metrics which, when combined with other metrics, can give someone an idea of the standard of living.
Certainly there are plenty of other conditions one might consider when deciding where to live -- climate, language, proximity to friends, you name it. Thus I will not say `the US is a better place to live for you'. I will say two things: first that more people move to the US each year than to any other nation on earth, and second that the US is the most free, the most democratic, and the most prosperous nation on earth, and to whatever degree you value these things, the US will do well in your measure.
Only if you count cash in hand. Americans are in fact more deeply in debt than swedes. Look. It comes down to the difference between net-worth and cashflow. Americans have high cashflow. Lots more cash in hand, but many more expenses. Swedes earn less, but don't need as much money to lead similar lives.
There are two problems with this claim. The first is that `savings' often does not include many forms of investments, and Americans as a nation are highly invested. The second, and more telling is that Americans consume so much more than Swedes do that you cannot claim that Americans could not save as much, if they wished to. This is a cultural difference, and largely reflects the fact that Americans are much more confident that they will see economic growth in the years ahead.
But ok. How about this [worldaudit.org] then?
How about it? It provides very little information about how it reaches its numbers, and many of the sources it cites are groups with noted biases in this area (Human Rights Watch comes immediately to mind). For a report of this sort which works harder to back its claims, see Freedom House's annual report for 2001. Ironically, the audit you cite claims Freedom House as one of their main sources, but reaches very different results.
So a scientist would strongly disagree with your claim that these models can be allowed to be considered independently of the acknowledged objective truth which they model. That such models are necessarily inexact makes no difference when our discussion is at a high level of granularity: when I say that my arm moves when I move it, this is objectively true at the level of granularity I am talking at, even though some molecules which had been part of my arm no doubt remain where my arm had been, or even that at a lower level a number of particles moved in a way not predictable by newtonian physics.
Even a FEW 'incidences' of wholesale slaughter are WRONG and should NEVER happen.
But you haven't provided a credible cite for even one such incidence. And if you're about to say `Jenin', I would remind you that even Arafat's official report of what happened at Jenin only claims that 56 Palestinians died, and acknowledges that those killed were combatants. Hamas' account of Jenin, as told to the Egyptian weekly al-Ahram similarly confirms that Jenin was a battle, not a massacre, and that those killed were combatants, and were killed in battle.
When even one solider starts taking pleasure in killing innocent civilians, then something is wrong.
Fine, but as far as I can tell the only ones celebrating the murder of civilians are on the Palestinian side, and they are the leaders of the Palestinian side, to boot.
How the hell is an anti-racist site racist? Because it depicts a bunch of cruel ass bastards being dickheads?
Care to defend your claim that the Israelis are `cruel-assed bastards being dickheads'? This type of statement is a slur, not an argument. As to the racism of the site linked to, well let's just say that comparing American blacks and civil rights workers to the Palestinians is a false analogy -- and extremely insulting to the former. Comparing the Israelis to the Klan is just as nonsensical and offensive.
Now nobody is defending the VIOLENT palestinians, just the ones who are getting their asses shot up and their children raped.
Can you provide any credible cite for these claims? Any? This is nonsense. Even Arafat isn't claiming this.
Fuck man, look at the pictures some time, both sides of that war are doing horrific shit, and civilians on both sides don't deserve it.
I'd say this is at best a false analogy. Let's look at the two sides, shall we?
On the one hand, we have a free, capitalist, democracy, with equal rights for all of its citizens (hint: there were 17 Arab members of Israel's parliament, the Knesset, last time I checked), which has been trying to trade land for peace for decades, and as of Oslo gave the other side everything that was asked of it, asking only an end to murder-sucide bombings in return. This side has gone out of its way to avoid harming civilians, including sending ground troops to fight house-to-house (at the cost of two a number of its own soldiers) instead of bombing from the air, which it could easily have done.
On the other side we have a dictatorship which has turned down every offer of peace and which sends its young men to blow themselves up in the childrens areas of restaurants, with the intention of killing as many civilians as possible. It does this because its stated goal is not to have peace but to destroy the other state and take the entire region for itself. Anyone on this side who even suggests peace or coexistance with Israel is brutally lynched by their own government.
How is this `both sides .. doing horrific shit' at all?
"until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by members in the exercise of this right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security."
How does this in any way contradict what I said? Or are you arguing that the security council has `taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security'? As we are daily stopping new attacks on US civilian and military targets, I would certainly beg to differ.
The same goes even if we accept your interpretation of resolution 1373, by the way. As article 51 of the UN Charter clearly states, we are free to act in our own defense until the UNSC makes such action unnecessary. They clearly have not done so.
Your reading of the Geneva convention is equally flawed. Neither the Taliban or al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan resemble a regular army or militia forming part thereof under Article 4, part A, paragraph 1 of the convention. Thus, as `other militias', they have to meet the conditions of Article 4, part A, paragraph 2. Their is no uncertainty about this, it is clear in the plain meaning of the treaty, and thus no hearing is called for by article 5.
It's funny that you deny that Canada, the UK, Sweden, Germany and others are free, and yet you claim that Afghanistan, which has not had an election in decades, is free. Also, your claims about the state of the nation now that the Taliban is gone sound an awful lot like what was said about the Taliban when they took over in the first place.
I can't speak for what you may have said about the Taliban when they took over the place, but I would like to point out that you are misrepresenting what I've said. None of the nations you name are as free as the US. All are relatively free compared to Afghanistan, which is in turn very free compared to the state it was in under the Taliban. Any questions?
This is all very well, but the fact remains that those (probable) complex networks of energy are organized in a fashion which can be suitably be described by a series of higher level models, ranging from conceptual atomic and subatomic particles up through objects, and into living beings, societies, and communities such as /. These models are objectively true to whatever extent they correspond to the underlying reality.
If you actually believed that no model above the superstring level had objective meaning, you certainly would not be here talking to us.
Yup, slashdot. And inflammatory sig linked to a racist flamebait page is unmodded, but a disagreement is modded down.