It was immoral and wrong for him to commit suicide.
Oh, have they made morality absolute now? That's gonna solve a whole bunch of problems!
"Morality is relative" is an absolute statement, which can't exist in a moral universe that contains no absolute statements about morality, ergo "morality is relative" is self-contradictory.
So we know that there exist some moral absolutes, then all the relative statements can be expressed as being relative to the absolutes, and thus you can derive absolutes from them. It requires intellectual effort, and that's your real problem with it.
What the hell is this? A death star for ants? How can we be expected to deploy storm troopers to destroy planets... if they can't even fit inside the building?
I don't want to hear your excuses! It will have to be... at least three times as big.
It's no worse than the President ending speeches with "God bless America", or opening sessions of Congress with group prayer,...
.. which the Democrats do because they can't win elections without paying lip service to Christianity. That's why, for example, Nancy Pelosi calls herself a "good Catholic girl" even though she supports legalizing late term abortion, and it's why liberals like Bill Maher know that Obama is probably a "secular humanist" despite his various protestations that he's Christian. (Of a church that he attended for 20 years without, apparently, hearing any sermons or discussing them, etc.)
There is, for liberals, no higher principle than holding elected office. And their constituents are quite happy to be lied to and go along with the charade.
"The Administration does not support blowing up planets"
Unless, of course, said planet was populated with opponents of Israel and/or in a position to disrupt status quo in hydrocarbon trade and acquisition. Or tried to kill my daddy.
Who tried to kill Obama's father? Oh wait, you are so desperate to deflect for Obama that you need to keep going back to the previous president
In fairness, the GP was also ready to blame it on Jews.
You can always inflate your way out of debt - or else blow your creditors to smithereens!
The current serious proposal being debated in Washington is to mint a trillion dollar platinum coin. You'd need a whole Senate of Christine O'Donnel's to come up with something crazier and dumber than that.
"Cut spending." "You're fucking insane! We'll descend into anarchy! Racist!"
vs.
"Mint a trillion dollar platinum coin." "That may sound crazy, but let's seriously consider this proposal."
It's possible he was depressed enough that he didn't make a choice, in which case the discussion is moot, so I'll assume he was culpable or at least largely culpable.
He chose to take his own life. It was his decision. I don't agree with it, and I don't endorse it as a reasonable choice, but it was his decision.
You lack the vocabulary to even describe this.
It was immoral and wrong for him to commit suicide. It's immoral simply because human life is not an expendable asset that you can manufacture or dispose of at will, and that includes yours. There are quite a few nations on this planet right now where the authorities believe they can, and they are a nightmare to live in.
That doesn't mean we can make laws against it, after all, we can't exactly make you any deader than you already are. The best people can do is point out that it's wrong, explain why, but it's naturally up to that person to make the decision. That you have the capacity to do a great evil is what makes your free will a significant thing.
In person protests also affect commerce. Last summer, in Montreal, there were weeks of protests with hundreds of thousands of people clogging the entire downtown core. It was incredibly disruptive for a whole lot of businesses.
Yes, and those protests are not free speech but civil disobedience. The first reality of civil disobedience is that you should expect to wind up in jail. The second reality is you probably deserve it.
Virtually all those protests do violate the rights of others. People really do have a right to go freely about their business, and you don't have any right to scream in someone's face.
In aggregate, society benefits from these protests and they're a necessary part of the political dynamic. Many times people just won't listen until you raise all hell.
But that's an appeal to the greater good, fundamentally arguing that the ends justify the means. They don't. If you've ever been part of those protests, you owe those people an apology.
s/speech/expression/g as needed. I'm not sure what the case law says, and I don't really care. Morally and ethically, shouting someone down is not speech, it's denying them their right to speak. It's insane to hide behind freedom of speech when you're doing that. It's also depressingly common.
Those who need to be able to pick out a tune on the piano will learn it fairly quickly. There's no use teaching the rest because they'll have forgotten it all again by the time the actually need it.
I'm not suggesting we go for a 90+% literacy rate, but most people in office jobs should be user-level expert in the software they use, and programming literate, because that's shaping up to be their job.
And, really, I've seen plenty of non-engineers where I work who are what I'd call "programming literate," in that they can hammer together code. It's awful, but they can get stuff done.
It seems to me that a great deal of people have this idea in their heads that any and everyone is able to do any and everything.
The term "literacy" suggests that it's about developing a basic understanding, as opposed to expertise. Using written language as the example, we've got a 98% literacy rate, but fewer than 1% are qualified to be professional writers.
"most of them deserve it and would not contribute to society in any meaningful way" Fuck you, you poor excuse for a limp wristed cum stain.
YOU and people like YOU are clueless fucks that would watch society burn to the ground to hold onto you belief instead of thinking. They need help. Most haven't even been taught how to plan or work, then suddenly they are on the streets becasue they are lazy. The do nothing parent scratch their head and can't figure out why ignoring a child for 18 years has lead to them being 'lazy'.
So, do you have any proof of that, or just vitriol? I ask because you claim the GP wasn't thinking.
Most indications are that parenting doesn't really affect children all that much. Plenty of surveys of twins and siblings have proven this. If talent, drive and such are randomly distributed, it's seems inevitable that a good portion of people will wind up with the short end of the stick.
And if you were an honest person, you'd realize that laziness is a universal temptation. If you didn't have to go to work tomorrow, didn't have a wife and kids to look after, and had no real ambitions, it'd be all too easy to just say, fuck it, I'm not working.
The problem is that self-righteous idiots like yourself will demand that we hand out all kinds of "help", by which you mean cash, to assuage your feelings of guilt. We're supposed to just throw money at people who suck at working even though they probably could eke out some sort of living if they really had to. You get them stuck in this miserable life of dependence, robbing them of whatever dignity they might have had.
He was made to stand at attention, naked. He was made to sleep, naked. He was made to sleep with the lights on. He was forbidden to sit with his back against the wall. FOR YEARS.
That is torture.
Wow. You really have to be full of shit if you think even that (blatantly dishonest propaganda) is "torture". It's a fucking prison, not a five star hotel.
You know what's medieval torture? What the Taliban did to the informants they caught because of those leaks. They like to remove people's fingernails, place hot needles in there, snip muscles with wire cutters, you know, actual medieval torture. In a real fucking dungeon.
Manning was in a hostile environment with NO friends and with leaders who were corrupt and untrustworthy.
Talk about prejudices, do you have any source that shows his leadership was corrupt?
I was in the Army for six years... there have been guys who were fairly universally disliked, but there are enough personalities that everyone inevitably has buddies.
while trying to expose the corruption of his government.
If he wanted, to, he could have made an IA complaint, or wrote to his Representative or Senator, both of which bypass his leadership. And everyone knows about those channels because people will file complaints against their drill sergeants in basic.
He didn't take that course of action. What he chose to do cost lives, mostly likely some poor bastards in Afghanistan who we paid for information were tortured to death by the Taliban. He didn't care about their lives, he didn't care about the lives of his fellow soldiers, he just wanted revenge on everyone who he felt had wronged him, and he wanted attention.
That is cruel and unusual punishment, a stone's throw away from medieval dungeons with assorted torture devices.
Yes, except for the three meals a day, regulation cot, freshly laundered clothes, shower, toilet, heating and air conditioning, material to read, contact with family, mental health counseling, religious counseling, legal counsel and lack of torture devices, it's almost identical to a medieval dungeon with torture devices.
the mainstream virtualization wares used at enterprise level already use 64 bit time
some control and embedded system are more like to be troublesome, but the failures will be sporadic. stay out of your bomb shelter and laugh at the companies who lose
You cunning son of a bitch... You're just saying that to lure me out of my bomb shelter!
In the short term the price of gas goes up and down. However in the long term the price of gas goes up and up. It is almost like oil is a non-renewable resource or something. Nah that is crazy commy talk.
No, it's called "inflation," and it happens with all sorts of commodities. We measure it with the Consumer Price Index.
The real cost of commodities generally declines over time. In fact, Julian Simon and Paul Erlich made a famous bet about this. Paul Erlich, you'll recall, was the doomsayer who predicted the population bomb and recommended eugenics, sterilization and a global government control over all resources. (Notably, the coauthor for his book laying all this out was John Holdren, now Obama's chief science adviser.)
I'm disappointed that someone who feels that the free market will provide is using roads that are provided by the tax payers. We should cut this budget cost and move it to the road users.
It would cost about another $4 or so per gallon to cover the cost of the road system in the US (or you could come up with some other solution. Technology would allow most roads to be toll roads). Of course, if this huge tax payer subsidy is removed then other forms of transportation would immediately become viable. In other words, trains and buses would become cost effective and the US would get an environmentally friendly transport network.
So, I support you totally in your efforts to tell your socialist representatives to stop subsidizing roads with tax dollars. Please feel free to post copies of the letters you send to them here (or elsewhere).
As another free marketer, I'd be perfectly happy if all government subsidies were removed from all forms of transit, and all the roads were tolled and privately owned, buses were privatized and taxi cartels were eliminated.
We'd get all those tax dollars back, there would be transit services going where customers wanted to go, not mapping out political districts, and the constant traffic jams would be a thing of the past.
Dr. Wang Yifang, Mr. Mi’s surgeon and head of neurosurgery at No. 454 Hospital of the People’s Liberation Army in Nanjing, said he’d performed the ablative surgery about 1,000 times to treat schizophrenia mostly, but also to treat depression and epilepsy. Michael Shulder, president of the American Society for Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery was astounded at the number, telling the Journal the amount was “completely off the charts” and that even 10 would be considered “highly controversial.”
Is the real problem that China has sociopathic nuts who are surgeons? Not all sociopaths get their kicks from killing people, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
It was immoral and wrong for him to commit suicide.
Oh, have they made morality absolute now? That's gonna solve a whole bunch of problems!
"Morality is relative" is an absolute statement, which can't exist in a moral universe that contains no absolute statements about morality, ergo "morality is relative" is self-contradictory.
So we know that there exist some moral absolutes, then all the relative statements can be expressed as being relative to the absolutes, and thus you can derive absolutes from them. It requires intellectual effort, and that's your real problem with it.
and that includes yours.
Why?
No lives are expendable, ergo any particular life is not.
It was immoral and wrong for him to commit suicide.
Is depression now a choice?
Reading comprehension time:
It's possible he was depressed enough that he didn't make a choice, in which case the discussion is moot...
So due to some "rules" declared as societal law
No, due to the innate nature of human life.
so are you saying it is nobody's?
It's not a property or an asset that can be owned, that is correct.
The USA can't afford $471?
Forget Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, etc. I found it on Amazon!
http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Star-Wars-Death-10188/dp/B002EEP3NO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1358010617&sr=8-1&keywords=death+star
What the hell is this? A death star for ants? How can we be expected to deploy storm troopers to destroy planets... if they can't even fit inside the building?
I don't want to hear your excuses! It will have to be... at least three times as big.
It's no worse than the President ending speeches with "God bless America", or opening sessions of Congress with group prayer, ...
.. which the Democrats do because they can't win elections without paying lip service to Christianity. That's why, for example, Nancy Pelosi calls herself a "good Catholic girl" even though she supports legalizing late term abortion, and it's why liberals like Bill Maher know that Obama is probably a "secular humanist" despite his various protestations that he's Christian. (Of a church that he attended for 20 years without, apparently, hearing any sermons or discussing them, etc.)
There is, for liberals, no higher principle than holding elected office. And their constituents are quite happy to be lied to and go along with the charade.
You're on Slashdot and you don't recognize this line?
That was from Star Trek, right?
"The Administration does not support blowing up planets"
Unless, of course, said planet was populated with opponents of Israel and/or in a position to disrupt status quo in hydrocarbon trade and acquisition.
Or tried to kill my daddy.
Who tried to kill Obama's father? Oh wait, you are so desperate to deflect for Obama that you need to keep going back to the previous president
In fairness, the GP was also ready to blame it on Jews.
But think of it as stimulus!
You can always inflate your way out of debt - or else blow your creditors to smithereens!
The current serious proposal being debated in Washington is to mint a trillion dollar platinum coin. You'd need a whole Senate of Christine O'Donnel's to come up with something crazier and dumber than that.
"Cut spending." "You're fucking insane! We'll descend into anarchy! Racist!"
vs.
"Mint a trillion dollar platinum coin." "That may sound crazy, but let's seriously consider this proposal."
It's possible he was depressed enough that he didn't make a choice, in which case the discussion is moot, so I'll assume he was culpable or at least largely culpable.
He chose to take his own life. It was his decision. I don't agree with it, and I don't endorse it as a reasonable choice, but it was his decision.
You lack the vocabulary to even describe this.
It was immoral and wrong for him to commit suicide. It's immoral simply because human life is not an expendable asset that you can manufacture or dispose of at will, and that includes yours. There are quite a few nations on this planet right now where the authorities believe they can, and they are a nightmare to live in.
That doesn't mean we can make laws against it, after all, we can't exactly make you any deader than you already are. The best people can do is point out that it's wrong, explain why, but it's naturally up to that person to make the decision. That you have the capacity to do a great evil is what makes your free will a significant thing.
In person protests also affect commerce. Last summer, in Montreal, there were weeks of protests with hundreds of thousands of people clogging the entire downtown core. It was incredibly disruptive for a whole lot of businesses.
Yes, and those protests are not free speech but civil disobedience. The first reality of civil disobedience is that you should expect to wind up in jail. The second reality is you probably deserve it.
Virtually all those protests do violate the rights of others. People really do have a right to go freely about their business, and you don't have any right to scream in someone's face.
In aggregate, society benefits from these protests and they're a necessary part of the political dynamic. Many times people just won't listen until you raise all hell.
But that's an appeal to the greater good, fundamentally arguing that the ends justify the means. They don't. If you've ever been part of those protests, you owe those people an apology.
s/speech/expression/g as needed. I'm not sure what the case law says, and I don't really care. Morally and ethically, shouting someone down is not speech, it's denying them their right to speak. It's insane to hide behind freedom of speech when you're doing that. It's also depressingly common.
Those who need to be able to pick out a tune on the piano will learn it fairly quickly. There's no use teaching the rest because they'll have forgotten it all again by the time the actually need it.
I'm not suggesting we go for a 90+% literacy rate, but most people in office jobs should be user-level expert in the software they use, and programming literate, because that's shaping up to be their job.
And, really, I've seen plenty of non-engineers where I work who are what I'd call "programming literate," in that they can hammer together code. It's awful, but they can get stuff done.
It seems to me that a great deal of people have this idea in their heads that any and everyone is able to do any and everything.
The term "literacy" suggests that it's about developing a basic understanding, as opposed to expertise. Using written language as the example, we've got a 98% literacy rate, but fewer than 1% are qualified to be professional writers.
Coincidentally I am in Portland.
"most of them deserve it and would not contribute to society in any meaningful way"
Fuck you, you poor excuse for a limp wristed cum stain.
YOU and people like YOU are clueless fucks that would watch society burn to the ground to hold onto you belief instead of thinking.
They need help. Most haven't even been taught how to plan or work, then suddenly they are on the streets becasue they are lazy.
The do nothing parent scratch their head and can't figure out why ignoring a child for 18 years has lead to them being 'lazy'.
So, do you have any proof of that, or just vitriol? I ask because you claim the GP wasn't thinking.
Most indications are that parenting doesn't really affect children all that much. Plenty of surveys of twins and siblings have proven this. If talent, drive and such are randomly distributed, it's seems inevitable that a good portion of people will wind up with the short end of the stick.
And if you were an honest person, you'd realize that laziness is a universal temptation. If you didn't have to go to work tomorrow, didn't have a wife and kids to look after, and had no real ambitions, it'd be all too easy to just say, fuck it, I'm not working.
The problem is that self-righteous idiots like yourself will demand that we hand out all kinds of "help", by which you mean cash, to assuage your feelings of guilt. We're supposed to just throw money at people who suck at working even though they probably could eke out some sort of living if they really had to. You get them stuck in this miserable life of dependence, robbing them of whatever dignity they might have had.
He was made to stand at attention, naked. He was made to sleep, naked. He was made to sleep with the lights on. He was forbidden to sit with his back against the wall. FOR YEARS.
That is torture.
Wow. You really have to be full of shit if you think even that (blatantly dishonest propaganda) is "torture". It's a fucking prison, not a five star hotel.
You know what's medieval torture? What the Taliban did to the informants they caught because of those leaks. They like to remove people's fingernails, place hot needles in there, snip muscles with wire cutters, you know, actual medieval torture. In a real fucking dungeon.
Manning was in a hostile environment with NO friends and with leaders who were corrupt and untrustworthy.
Talk about prejudices, do you have any source that shows his leadership was corrupt?
I was in the Army for six years... there have been guys who were fairly universally disliked, but there are enough personalities that everyone inevitably has buddies.
while trying to expose the corruption of his government.
If he wanted, to, he could have made an IA complaint, or wrote to his Representative or Senator, both of which bypass his leadership. And everyone knows about those channels because people will file complaints against their drill sergeants in basic.
He didn't take that course of action. What he chose to do cost lives, mostly likely some poor bastards in Afghanistan who we paid for information were tortured to death by the Taliban. He didn't care about their lives, he didn't care about the lives of his fellow soldiers, he just wanted revenge on everyone who he felt had wronged him, and he wanted attention.
That is cruel and unusual punishment, a stone's throw away from medieval dungeons with assorted torture devices.
Yes, except for the three meals a day, regulation cot, freshly laundered clothes, shower, toilet, heating and air conditioning, material to read, contact with family, mental health counseling, religious counseling, legal counsel and lack of torture devices, it's almost identical to a medieval dungeon with torture devices.
the mainstream virtualization wares used at enterprise level already use 64 bit time
some control and embedded system are more like to be troublesome, but the failures will be sporadic. stay out of your bomb shelter and laugh at the companies who lose
You cunning son of a bitch... You're just saying that to lure me out of my bomb shelter!
In the short term the price of gas goes up and down. However in the long term the price of gas goes up and up. It is almost like oil is a non-renewable resource or something. Nah that is crazy commy talk.
No, it's called "inflation," and it happens with all sorts of commodities. We measure it with the Consumer Price Index.
The real cost of commodities generally declines over time. In fact, Julian Simon and Paul Erlich made a famous bet about this. Paul Erlich, you'll recall, was the doomsayer who predicted the population bomb and recommended eugenics, sterilization and a global government control over all resources. (Notably, the coauthor for his book laying all this out was John Holdren, now Obama's chief science adviser.)
They bet on the prices of various commodities, and every single one of them went down. Simon won his bet, and Erlich had to pay up.
But it doesn't matter how many times you loons are wrong, you'll just keep predicting doom, over and over again.
Try moving to Sweden! You pay $3.51 a gallon we pay on average $7.65 a gallon! All because of your wars!
And it has nothing to do with your government soaking you for $4 a gallon in taxes.
I'm disappointed that someone who feels that the free market will provide is using roads that are provided by the tax payers. We should cut this budget cost and move it to the road users.
It would cost about another $4 or so per gallon to cover the cost of the road system in the US (or you could come up with some other solution. Technology would allow most roads to be toll roads). Of course, if this huge tax payer subsidy is removed then other forms of transportation would immediately become viable. In other words, trains and buses would become cost effective and the US would get an environmentally friendly transport network.
So, I support you totally in your efforts to tell your socialist representatives to stop subsidizing roads with tax dollars. Please feel free to post copies of the letters you send to them here (or elsewhere).
As another free marketer, I'd be perfectly happy if all government subsidies were removed from all forms of transit, and all the roads were tolled and privately owned, buses were privatized and taxi cartels were eliminated.
We'd get all those tax dollars back, there would be transit services going where customers wanted to go, not mapping out political districts, and the constant traffic jams would be a thing of the past.
Psst buddy: here's a new year's resolution for you:
Starting in 2013, I will no longer use the made-up word "sheeple" which instantly brands me as an underemployed political talk radio addict.
And for you, a resolution to learn what a "parody" is.
Dr. Wang Yifang, Mr. Mi’s surgeon and head of neurosurgery at No. 454 Hospital of the People’s Liberation Army in Nanjing, said he’d performed the ablative surgery about 1,000 times to treat schizophrenia mostly, but also to treat depression and epilepsy. Michael Shulder, president of the American Society for Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery was astounded at the number, telling the Journal the amount was “completely off the charts” and that even 10 would be considered “highly controversial.”
Is the real problem that China has sociopathic nuts who are surgeons? Not all sociopaths get their kicks from killing people, after all.
Nope: American cars can't stand reggae, much the same way Martians can't stand country music.
On the contrary, the American cars were jammin, jammin, jammin, jammin right straight from yah.