I do think it's more stupid to believe in miracles that happened 170 years ago
If you mean that it's more stupid for people in 1830 to believe in the supernatural then I think you have a valid point. If you think it's more stupid to believe supernatural things happened in 1830 vs. 1030 than I think you don't. So I'm guessing you meant the former, but I'm not sure.
Yes, with a twist: long enough after the supposedly supernatural event, the evidence needed to verify or disprove it has faded. The relevant people have died, the stones have been buried or whatever, and you have only the account of the event. In 30 A.D. it was not reasonable to expect people to subject Jesus's tricks to skeptical scrutiny. In 1830, it was. Believing Joesph Smith today even though he refused to submit to the methods of proof well known and available at the time of his revelations in 1826-30 is much stupider than believing in Jesus today; the methods of disproof available in 1830 were not available in 30 A.D, so it is not a black mark on Jesus that he did not subject himself to those tests.
Your religion teaches that there was an advanced civilization of white people in America before the Native Americans.
Actually it teaches no such thing. They were neither "white" in any conventional sense nor were they the first inhabitants in the Americas.
Whatever. The whiteness and firstness parts aren't important; the important part is that they were a non-Native Americans with an advanced civilization that predated the thirteen colonies. Again, archeology demonstrates that this is false.
Joseph Smith, while in jail in violation of double jeopardy, was shot and killed by a mob of over 100 people. So it's also historical fact that people hated the man. The governor of Illinois issued a famous "extermination proclamation" that all Mormons had to leave the state or they would be executed. So it's obvious that this hatred extended to government officials acting in their capacity as such. Given these historical facts, do you really think it's significant that he was found guilty of a crime?
Yes, since the conviction predated all the religious stuff for which he was hated. He didn't publish the Book of Mormon until about four years after his conviction. Or is your theory that the state government figured out that he was the type who might later try to start a hated religion, and therefore they needed to taint him with a fraud conviction before he got his religion off the ground?
Joseph translated 116 pages. He gave the pages to Martin Harrison. Martin Harrison lost the pages. Joseph Smith believed that they had been altered so that if he retranslated them the re translation would not match the original. Thus he did not retranslate them.
This is some seriously weak sauce, and pretty convenient if he was a fraud. If he seriously thought Harrison altered his translations, he could have found a trusted third party and then translated the documents several times with the third party vouching for the similarity or dissimilarity of these subsequent translations.
he enjoyed enormous personal gain when people believed him.
This is utter rubbish. Joseph Smith enjoyed nothing but deprivation and persecution as a result of his claims. He lived in poverty virtually his entire life. He may have enjoyed some brief measure of comfort in Nauvoo in the years before he was killed, but the fact is that if he wanted to make a bunch of cash it would have been trivial to do so, given his talents, without going through all the trouble of getting himself driven out of several states and eventually shot to death.
Um, he was the leader of a religion of over ten thousand by the time he was assassinated. He had numerous wives, including one whom he married when she was 14. He had a COMPOUND. If this does not sound like some serious indulgence to you, I don't know what to say. Also, he likely did not anticipate bein
Not being persons, they have no such inherent right, only the rights that we the people choose to bestow on them. This is correct. Even as a matter of constitutional law, corporations cannot, for example, invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid incriminating themselves.
But there is no real correlation between intelligence and wealth. The wealthy can afford better schools, but education != intelligence. False. "The American Psychological Association's report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns[13] states that IQ scores account for about one-fourth of the social status variance and one-sixth of the income variance." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Income
I'm simply stating that a lot of Mormons accept culture as doctrine when it's quite clear that Mormonism is actually a very, very liberal and individualistic religion. From the Handbook on Wikileaks:
Homosexual behavior violates the commandments of God, is contrary to the purposes of human sexuality, distorts loving relationships, and deprives people of the blessings that can be found in family life and in the saving ordinances of the gospel.
What about Moses 7:8? How liberal is it to believe that black people are black because of spiritual transgressions? How is it liberal to ban women from becoming priests, or to refuse them entry to heaven unless and until their husbands freely and with no moral obligation choose to grant it to them?
There is nothing liberal about Mormonism. It is one of the most socially regressive religions in America.
Mormonism involves supernatural occurrences. This doesn't make it more or less stupid than any other religion. It just happens to be 170 years old instead of 1,700 years old.
I'm not trying to troll, and I actually agree that all religion is pretty stupid, but I do think it's more stupid to believe in miracles that happened 170 years ago -- when we understood much of nature, the scientific method, modern archeology, and kept accurate records of everything -- than 2000-4000 years ago, when humanity was ignorant of all of those things and essentially had no written language.
If you found someone who had no modern education or understanding of natural phenomena but was nevertheless intelligent and rational, and you told him that thunder is the raging of an angry god, he might well believe you. But even very stupid people with a modern education would laugh at you. This is the fundamental difference between believing in supernatural occurrences 2000 years ago and believing in them 170 years ago.
Your religion teaches that there was an advanced civilization of white people in America before the Native Americans. Archeology shows us that that claim is false. This is not a matter of opinion or even honest belief; the science is quite clear that there was no such civilization. Your religion is premised on taking the word of a convicted con man that he could read ancient inscriptions off of gold plates, even though (1) no one ever saw the gold plates, (2) he could not reproduce the readings even when challenged, and (3) he enjoyed enormous personal gain when people believed him.
This critique covers only the positive claims of the religion. It does not address what I think are the many enormously unethical positions the Church holds, from its persecution of gays to the many ways it subjugates women to its relentless torment of people who leave the religion.
Again, this is not a troll. There has to be room in our discourse for legitimate condemnation of a farcical set of claims, and having its adherents insist that it is a religion does not immunize it from criticism.
And this from the most liberal federal circuit.] Eh. Probably true, but easily overstated. The Ninth Circuit has 28 judges from places as far-flung as Hawaii and Idaho. It takes only three judges to make up a panel, so you can end up with some extremely conservative permutations. Really, the most noteworthy aspect of Ninth Circuit jurisprudence is how politically unpredictable it is, since so much can turn on which three judges you draw. It makes for extremely fractured jurisprudence, as each panel tries to distinguish the facts of its case from those of the last panel so as not to be bound by it.
The downside is in the jet lag, waste of time, and inconvenience to both attorney and client. A criminal defense lawyer prominent enough to represent a wealthy Saudi defendant accused of terrorism likely doesn't have any trouble billing as many hours as he is willing to work. I assure you that this guy would much rather be working on an interesting legal problem than snoozing on an airport seat. I think your cynicism is going too far.
That's an interesting theory, but shot down in the first two paragraphs of the article:
PORTLAND, Ore. Thomas Nelson, an Oregon lawyer, has lived in a state of perpetual jet lag for the last two years. Every few weeks, he boards a plane in Portland and flies to the Middle East to meet with a high-profile Saudi client who cannot enter the United States because he faces charges here of financing terrorism.
Mr. Nelson says he does not dare to phone this client or send him e-mail messages because of what many prominent criminal defense lawyers say is a well-founded fear that all of their contacts are being monitored by the United States government.
You can't sue the owners of an incorporated company as they are shielded.
Yes, I know that. I'm a few steps ahead of you. You sue the corporation; the settlement (and it always settles) comes out of the corporation's treasury, which means the corporation owns fewer assets, which means the stock is less valuable, which means the share price drops, which means people who own the shares just cumulatively lost an amount of money exactly equal to the price of the settlement. In other words, as I said, the shareholders bear the loss.
The only time shareholders' limited liability makes a difference would be if the company were sued (and lost) for more than its entire market capitalization -- in other words, for a number larger than the value of all the outstanding stock combined. Then it goes into bankruptcy and it's true that shareholders are not personally liable for the negative value of the corporation. But I would be shocked if that happened here. Telecoms are enormous creatures.
I'll even give you a hint... where do TelCo's get their money?
In this case? Shareholders, ultimately. Telecoms' prices are already set at the profit-maximizing point. If they could make more money by raising prices, they would already have done so.
The benefit of liability would be that next time a shareholder chose which telecom company to invest in, he'd pick one that made the most credible promises not to spy on its customers, and crime would be deterred.
And most likely means things like switchgrass farms, or some other dedicated farming, so its concentrated in one place (easy for processing and transport). But then you have the problem of that farm land competing with our food growing farm land...which causes land prices to rise, causing increased food costs. Right, well, compare that with the cost of stabilizing the Middle East and bargaining with OPEC. I'd happily pay an extra $0.10 per pound of corn if it meant that gas prices dropped by $2 per gallon. It's pretty clear that we'd be way better off by adopting this technology. The question is whether it works, not whether we should use it if it does.
Any political benefits politicians could get from the oil business would absolutely pale in comparison to the benefit they could get from promising the electorate $1/gal gasoline. Campaign contributions work at the margins, but not against a headline issue like this.
In fact, nobody really know what will happen when the machine is switched on.
Well, no one knows what happens on the subatomic scale when the particles collide. On the macro, visible-to-the-human-eye scale, you could say that we know exactly what will happen: basically nothing. This sort of particle collision must happen all the time in the sun or near its rays, so the fact that the planets in our solar system and sun haven't already been swallowed by strangelets or black holes or singularities suggests that we probably don't have to worry about those things.
I don't have a lot of respect for arrogant scientists blithely telling us everything is safe when history keeps proving them wrong over and over again, or for people that use science like a bible to bash people with.
Huh? Who here is using science like a bible? Is this rant related to the topic of discussion, or just sort of an extracurricular?
That would be voidable on public policy grounds. For some reason, Americans find even the voluntary sale of organs distasteful. Unfortunately, that squeamishness means a lot of innocent people have to die for lack of an available transplant.
All the more reason to legalize the sale of organs. Then there can be a universal tracing system, nearly impossible to evade since every organ carries with it the indelible ID tag of its DNA, and it would be that much easier to track down the source of the hot organs and thus the criminals behind them.
While my own faith has no problem with stripping me for parts, rolling what's left up in a newspaper, and chucking it from the window of a speeding truck, someone else's beliefs may assign much more importance to leaving an intact corpse.
Sure, but there have to be limits. If I proclaimed that my faith exempted me from paying taxes, the IRS would gently suggest that perhaps this isn't the right country for me to live in.
Giving organs saves lives. Every person who leaves behind healthy organs that cannot be harvested because of their faith lets other people die who could otherwise be saved. Why do you have any more of a right to be assured that your organs will rot with your corpse after you die than not to pay taxes, especially when it means that innocent people will die?
But if a doctor who is responsible for saving my life is thinking anywhere in his mind, "There's a kid in Tennesee who could really use this guy's liver" and decides not to try so hard to keep me alive, I'm going to do whatever I can to keep that from happening even if it means my organs go to waste.
Of course, perhaps it would be easier for the doctor to keep you alive if there were more transplantable organs on the market. There are two sides to this coin, and the side you're talking about is much more easily addressable (through regulation, reputation, and the threat of medical malpractice liability) than the other.
If healthcare resources are so scarce that we are unable to effectively treat all members of society, then society must decide how to distribute those resources. As I stated above, it's not justice to award those scarce resources to only one class of people. In the original position, one would likely decide to allocate them either based on an attribute other than wealth, or more likely, allocate them in a random distribution (i.e., if there are two people with terminal cancer, and society can only afford to cure one of them, there's a coin flip).
It's an appealing thought, in part because we humans get very prickly when it comes to deciding who lives and who dies. But isn't this idea -- the idea of allocating scarce resources based on who can and will pay the most -- basically the definition of capitalism? If you really think drugs, organs, or other medical treatments should not fit this model, why should ferraris, fine cuisine, and iPods?
Here's the problem, reduced to its essence: Suppose I can take some action that will save your life. But imagine that the action is really costly to me; it entails giving up a kidney, or expending resources in pharmaceutical research, or something of the like. Suppose the precise cost to me of saving your life is $1 million.
Under a free market system, if you offer me more than $1 million, I will do it and we will both be better off.
Under a system that encumbers the free market -- say, by nationalizing my patent, banning the sale of organs, or setting price ceilings for drugs -- I won't. Not only will I not receive the surplus value of someone willing to pay more than the cost to me, but the people who would have been willing to pay must die instead.
In that case, perhaps filet mignon was a bad example because it is not expensive enough. At some point, people die. Usually, that death can be delayed with medical care. But the further you delay it, the more money it costs, and the cost progression is exponential or perhaps hyperbolic to infinity. So no matter what, eventually you have to pull the plug because you can't afford the next stage of treatment. It's sad, and hopefully someday when our consciousness has been transplanted into circuitry that will not be the case, but until then, we're going to have to continue to put prices on human's lives.
wouldn't an international super power war pretty much immediately mean the downing of every satellite in orbit?
Of course. But would also pretty much immediately mean the ballistic nuking of both superpowers and possibly all their allies.
These days, disputes between superpowers are resolved with diplomacy and economic sanctions. If things ever progress to another total war, it will probably be the end of the world.
This site hosts this video to explain the launch of two exploratory projects -- first, a Change Congress movement, and second, my own decision whether to run for Congress in the California 12th.
I have decided I want to give as much energy as I can to the Change Congress movement. I will decide in the next week or so whether it makes sense to advance that movement by running for Congress.
Many friends have weighed in on that decision -- both strongly in favor and strongly opposed. Many more have joined draftlessig.org and a Facebook group asking me to consider it.
Watch or listen and you will understand some of my reasoning. Feel free to send your thoughts or advice to lessig@lessig08.org (though please excuse any slowness in my response).
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I do think it's more stupid to believe in miracles that happened 170 years ago If you mean that it's more stupid for people in 1830 to believe in the supernatural then I think you have a valid point. If you think it's more stupid to believe supernatural things happened in 1830 vs. 1030 than I think you don't. So I'm guessing you meant the former, but I'm not sure.
Yes, with a twist: long enough after the supposedly supernatural event, the evidence needed to verify or disprove it has faded. The relevant people have died, the stones have been buried or whatever, and you have only the account of the event. In 30 A.D. it was not reasonable to expect people to subject Jesus's tricks to skeptical scrutiny. In 1830, it was. Believing Joesph Smith today even though he refused to submit to the methods of proof well known and available at the time of his revelations in 1826-30 is much stupider than believing in Jesus today; the methods of disproof available in 1830 were not available in 30 A.D, so it is not a black mark on Jesus that he did not subject himself to those tests.
Your religion teaches that there was an advanced civilization of white people in America before the Native Americans. Actually it teaches no such thing. They were neither "white" in any conventional sense nor were they the first inhabitants in the Americas.
Whatever. The whiteness and firstness parts aren't important; the important part is that they were a non-Native Americans with an advanced civilization that predated the thirteen colonies. Again, archeology demonstrates that this is false.
Joseph Smith, while in jail in violation of double jeopardy, was shot and killed by a mob of over 100 people. So it's also historical fact that people hated the man. The governor of Illinois issued a famous "extermination proclamation" that all Mormons had to leave the state or they would be executed. So it's obvious that this hatred extended to government officials acting in their capacity as such. Given these historical facts, do you really think it's significant that he was found guilty of a crime?
Yes, since the conviction predated all the religious stuff for which he was hated. He didn't publish the Book of Mormon until about four years after his conviction. Or is your theory that the state government figured out that he was the type who might later try to start a hated religion, and therefore they needed to taint him with a fraud conviction before he got his religion off the ground?
Joseph translated 116 pages. He gave the pages to Martin Harrison. Martin Harrison lost the pages. Joseph Smith believed that they had been altered so that if he retranslated them the re translation would not match the original. Thus he did not retranslate them.
This is some seriously weak sauce, and pretty convenient if he was a fraud. If he seriously thought Harrison altered his translations, he could have found a trusted third party and then translated the documents several times with the third party vouching for the similarity or dissimilarity of these subsequent translations.
he enjoyed enormous personal gain when people believed him. This is utter rubbish. Joseph Smith enjoyed nothing but deprivation and persecution as a result of his claims. He lived in poverty virtually his entire life. He may have enjoyed some brief measure of comfort in Nauvoo in the years before he was killed, but the fact is that if he wanted to make a bunch of cash it would have been trivial to do so, given his talents, without going through all the trouble of getting himself driven out of several states and eventually shot to death.
Um, he was the leader of a religion of over ten thousand by the time he was assassinated. He had numerous wives, including one whom he married when she was 14. He had a COMPOUND. If this does not sound like some serious indulgence to you, I don't know what to say. Also, he likely did not anticipate bein
What about Moses 7:8? How liberal is it to believe that black people are black because of spiritual transgressions? How is it liberal to ban women from becoming priests, or to refuse them entry to heaven unless and until their husbands freely and with no moral obligation choose to grant it to them?
There is nothing liberal about Mormonism. It is one of the most socially regressive religions in America.
I'm not trying to troll, and I actually agree that all religion is pretty stupid, but I do think it's more stupid to believe in miracles that happened 170 years ago -- when we understood much of nature, the scientific method, modern archeology, and kept accurate records of everything -- than 2000-4000 years ago, when humanity was ignorant of all of those things and essentially had no written language.
If you found someone who had no modern education or understanding of natural phenomena but was nevertheless intelligent and rational, and you told him that thunder is the raging of an angry god, he might well believe you. But even very stupid people with a modern education would laugh at you. This is the fundamental difference between believing in supernatural occurrences 2000 years ago and believing in them 170 years ago.
Your religion teaches that there was an advanced civilization of white people in America before the Native Americans. Archeology shows us that that claim is false. This is not a matter of opinion or even honest belief; the science is quite clear that there was no such civilization. Your religion is premised on taking the word of a convicted con man that he could read ancient inscriptions off of gold plates, even though (1) no one ever saw the gold plates, (2) he could not reproduce the readings even when challenged, and (3) he enjoyed enormous personal gain when people believed him.
This critique covers only the positive claims of the religion. It does not address what I think are the many enormously unethical positions the Church holds, from its persecution of gays to the many ways it subjugates women to its relentless torment of people who leave the religion.
Again, this is not a troll. There has to be room in our discourse for legitimate condemnation of a farcical set of claims, and having its adherents insist that it is a religion does not immunize it from criticism.
The downside is in the jet lag, waste of time, and inconvenience to both attorney and client. A criminal defense lawyer prominent enough to represent a wealthy Saudi defendant accused of terrorism likely doesn't have any trouble billing as many hours as he is willing to work. I assure you that this guy would much rather be working on an interesting legal problem than snoozing on an airport seat. I think your cynicism is going too far.
PORTLAND, Ore. Thomas Nelson, an Oregon lawyer, has lived in a state of perpetual jet lag for the last two years. Every few weeks, he boards a plane in Portland and flies to the Middle East to meet with a high-profile Saudi client who cannot enter the United States because he faces charges here of financing terrorism.
Mr. Nelson says he does not dare to phone this client or send him e-mail messages because of what many prominent criminal defense lawyers say is a well-founded fear that all of their contacts are being monitored by the United States government.
Yes, I know that. I'm a few steps ahead of you. You sue the corporation; the settlement (and it always settles) comes out of the corporation's treasury, which means the corporation owns fewer assets, which means the stock is less valuable, which means the share price drops, which means people who own the shares just cumulatively lost an amount of money exactly equal to the price of the settlement. In other words, as I said, the shareholders bear the loss.
The only time shareholders' limited liability makes a difference would be if the company were sued (and lost) for more than its entire market capitalization -- in other words, for a number larger than the value of all the outstanding stock combined. Then it goes into bankruptcy and it's true that shareholders are not personally liable for the negative value of the corporation. But I would be shocked if that happened here. Telecoms are enormous creatures.
In this case? Shareholders, ultimately. Telecoms' prices are already set at the profit-maximizing point. If they could make more money by raising prices, they would already have done so.
The benefit of liability would be that next time a shareholder chose which telecom company to invest in, he'd pick one that made the most credible promises not to spy on its customers, and crime would be deterred.
Any political benefits politicians could get from the oil business would absolutely pale in comparison to the benefit they could get from promising the electorate $1/gal gasoline. Campaign contributions work at the margins, but not against a headline issue like this.
I guess that works if you want to eat cow fetuses.
That would be voidable on public policy grounds. For some reason, Americans find even the voluntary sale of organs distasteful. Unfortunately, that squeamishness means a lot of innocent people have to die for lack of an available transplant.
All the more reason to legalize the sale of organs. Then there can be a universal tracing system, nearly impossible to evade since every organ carries with it the indelible ID tag of its DNA, and it would be that much easier to track down the source of the hot organs and thus the criminals behind them.
Sure, but there have to be limits. If I proclaimed that my faith exempted me from paying taxes, the IRS would gently suggest that perhaps this isn't the right country for me to live in.
Giving organs saves lives. Every person who leaves behind healthy organs that cannot be harvested because of their faith lets other people die who could otherwise be saved. Why do you have any more of a right to be assured that your organs will rot with your corpse after you die than not to pay taxes, especially when it means that innocent people will die?
It's an appealing thought, in part because we humans get very prickly when it comes to deciding who lives and who dies. But isn't this idea -- the idea of allocating scarce resources based on who can and will pay the most -- basically the definition of capitalism? If you really think drugs, organs, or other medical treatments should not fit this model, why should ferraris, fine cuisine, and iPods?
Here's the problem, reduced to its essence: Suppose I can take some action that will save your life. But imagine that the action is really costly to me; it entails giving up a kidney, or expending resources in pharmaceutical research, or something of the like. Suppose the precise cost to me of saving your life is $1 million.
Under a free market system, if you offer me more than $1 million, I will do it and we will both be better off.
Under a system that encumbers the free market -- say, by nationalizing my patent, banning the sale of organs, or setting price ceilings for drugs -- I won't. Not only will I not receive the surplus value of someone willing to pay more than the cost to me, but the people who would have been willing to pay must die instead.
In that case, perhaps filet mignon was a bad example because it is not expensive enough. At some point, people die. Usually, that death can be delayed with medical care. But the further you delay it, the more money it costs, and the cost progression is exponential or perhaps hyperbolic to infinity. So no matter what, eventually you have to pull the plug because you can't afford the next stage of treatment. It's sad, and hopefully someday when our consciousness has been transplanted into circuitry that will not be the case, but until then, we're going to have to continue to put prices on human's lives.
Of course. But would also pretty much immediately mean the ballistic nuking of both superpowers and possibly all their allies.
These days, disputes between superpowers are resolved with diplomacy and economic sanctions. If things ever progress to another total war, it will probably be the end of the world.
His enormous brain bends space-time.
Not to mention writing a blog post explicitly endorsing Obama and uploading a twenty-minute video to the same effect. But, uh, good sleuthing I guess.
In his book, too. He acknowledges that his copyright struggle was really a subset of the scope of his new Lessig 2.0 corruption struggle.