No, I recognized the point -- that once you say okay to good, wholesome sex, you start down a slippery slope to more depraved acts, like triple penetration, bestiality, and -- perversion of perversions -- gay sex. If you can't see the bigotry there, frankly something is wrong.
What if that last item were "interracial sex"? As in, good clean white-on-white sex is one thing, but bestiality, orgies, and naked black people are totally over the line! Wouldn't that seem a little racist to you?
But what about sex? I'm not talking love, I'm talking pure, lustful, sex. What about double, or even triple penetration? What about people having sex with animals? We're all just animals anyway, right? And so what if that woman wants a combined three feet of throbbing man love in her? I mean, she's got that Right, to choose to do that, hasn't she? How about gay sex?
Oh yeah, triple-penetration horse sex is bad but god save us from the gay sex!
Of course; just like I have the legal right to laugh in your face the day you are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It doesn't make it moral, but I guess that's the best we can do as a society.
I guess I agree with all of what you said with the possible exception that we have to "wait in line behind women and minorities." I'm not aware of any laws that discriminate against women and minorities. Women and minorities are allowed to join the military in any capacity. They are allowed to get married. And it's illegal for an employer refuses to hire them because of their race or gender. None of these are available to gay people in every state. Women and minorities already have equality before the law. Gay people don't. Also, I'm not sure what you mean when you say that women and minorities were here first. Gay people have always been around, just like women and minorities.
But except for that line, I agree with you. There has been enormous improvement, and you don't have to go back to the 1980's to see it. Fred Thompson recently issued a clarification that while he believes in a constitutional amendment to leave gay marriage up to individual states, he does not believe in a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. In just two years, the idea of an amendment to ban gay marriage has gone from a mainstay of the conservative platform to so reprehensible that a republican front-runner will issue a statement specifically to distance himself from it. Today, nearly two thirds of the country thinks that gay people should at least be able to have civil unions. Incredible progress is happening incredibly quickly. I have little doubt that we will reach legal equality within the next decade, or two at the outside.
However, none of that means that we don't deserve legal and social equality right now. For that reason, it is completely justified to tell off someone who doesn't want the fact that I am gay "shoved in his face" even to the extent that casual discussion about his opposite-sex spouse shoves the fact that he is straight in my face. And until we have at least legal equality, anyone who seriously objects to a non-obscene bumper sticker advocating it is at least to that extent a homophobic bigot.
I don't care if you're gay, but you don't have to go around telling everyone you meet you are and putting stickers on your car, etc.
Fine. No problem. I'll do that just as soon as I have equal rights.
By the way, "equal rights" means among other things that I am allowed to mention my boyfriend/partner/husband as casually as straight men are allowed to mention their girlfriend/fiance/wife.
I would be happy if in games we could talk about homosexuality, but we're not even at the point where we can admit that humans have heterosexual relationships
WHO isn't at that point? I can think of two mainstream, A-list games, off the top of my head, that casually included heterosexual AND homosexual relationships:
>Funny, in my driver's ed. class they always made the point to drive home that it was a privelege, not a right.
Yes; this is a common legal refrain but not at all consonant with reality. You're right that there are a handful of people who can survive in dense urban areas or by public transportation without driving, but the vast, overwhelming majority of us need our car to survive.
>The applicability of this view to technology has its (de)merits, but we're talking about government here: a very different beast.
Not really. We're talking about progress generally, which can be technological or social. After some reasoned contemplation, if we can't think of any concrete harms and we can think of concrete benefits, we should do it.
Regarding the sinfulness or lack thereof of being gay, well that's a tough one. Specifically because I've watched two of my closest friends go through the torture of coming out in particularly intolerant environments. It's not something I'd want anyone to have to go through.
This doesn't even make sense. You think being gay might be sinful because bigots make coming out of the closet is difficult? Is it also sinful to be black because bigots don't like them either? Maybe if you're using "sinful" in place of "undesirable," I'd agree with you. It is undesirable to be gay in a community full of bigots. But that's the fault of the bigots, not of the gay person.
But that said, there's many stories of people who apparently "turned" straight.
There are stories, but no evidence. All of the evidence strongly suggests that sexuality is absolutely immutable. The best so-called reparative therapy can offer is a very high suicide rate and asexuality -- which isn't even that, really, it's constantly refusing to act on your impulses. If you decided never to look at a girl again, and you managed to follow through, that wouldn't mean that you were no longer straight.
I have watched one person in particular seesaw in their.. how do you say.. 'level of gayness', from being a manwhore, to madly in love with a girl and questioning whether he was even gay anymore.
Give it a few years. I guarantee you that the guy's still gay. I went through something similar back when I was still trying to be straight. I even dated a girl for a year and a half. People thought we were the cutest couple, completely in love, and so on. I was the only one who even had a hunch that girls weren't for me. You hear stories all the time about marriages failing after 20 years because the guy is gay. It's not something that you can will away with enough time, or suck out with enough vaginas.
For whatever it's worth, I've dated a wonderful guy for a long time now. We're completely monogamous and disease-free, and we don't do any drugs or engage in any risky practices. We're both highly, highly educated and on very high-income and stable career paths. We're still completely in love, we're perfect for one another, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if we spent the rest of our lives together. How could that possibly be a sin?
Um. Okay. I guess they aren't mandatory. Unless, you know, you want to drive. Which nearly everyone in this country needs to do to survive. Why is entering a public park any more of a right than driving on the public highway?
>In fact, your fucking SSI card is explicitly not an ID. And goodluck identifying someone by a footrpint taken 20+ years ago.
Both are on the list of acceptable forms of identification that the government requires all employers to check for immigration purposes when they hire a new employee.
>See recent FBI troubles....wherein the government got in trouble for patronizing commercially-available databases? I'm not saying you're definitely wrong, but I've never heard of such a story, and I'd be impressed if you can link me to one.
>You can't foresee all of the ramifications of such a thing, and by the time you do it shall likely be too late.
Good thing this attitude has never been widespread, or we'd never have any sort of technological progress.
Did you miss the part of the bible where Jesus said we're supposed to love our neighbours and our enemies? The guy spent a lot of time hanging out with the people the 'church' of the day wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole - hookers, lepers, etc. Doing the right thing, helping them, looking after them. You know, the things we should be doing for everyone around us, even the ones society looks down on.
I think you probably didn't mean it this way, but your post is Exhibit A in much of what is wrong with mainstream christianity's attitude toward gay people. We're not lepers, and we're not hookers. We don't need anyone to "hate the sin, love the sinner"; we need for people to accept that being gay is not a sin.
I think it was Jesus who said to judge the tree by the fruit it bears. We can say all we want about the theoretical virtues of Christianity, but its fruit these days is pretty poor.
(1) There's a floaty dude in a cloud who says that X is good and Y is bad. (2) If the floaty dude says X is good and Y is bad, then X really is good and Y really is bad.
So why not cut the crap and recognize that the god part of the system is totally superfluous? Your system has MORE axioms than mine but is no more effective at deriving a morality.
Now you're probably getting excited at this point. "If your system has axioms too, then that's its own kind of faith, right? I knew it! Atheism is a religion!"
No. Whether X is good and Y is bad is a matter of OPINION, not empirical truth. My system is better than yours because it decides ONLY matters of opinion by axiom, whereas yours decides empirical conjectures by axiom because actual evidence is annoyingly nonexistent.
I know this is probably a contrarian point of view here on Slashdot, but I guess I don't see the practical difference between mandatory, ubiquitous state-issued ID (driver's licenses) and mandatory, ubiquitous federal ID (passports, birth certificates, social security cards, and... dun dun DUN... Real ID). Already, you can't get on an airplane without a government-issued identification card, or open a bank account, or take out a loan, or begin employment, or enter the country, or buy a car. If you are like the overwhelming majority of Americans, you buy everything by credit card. Private companies track every purchase, collate them all, match them with your supermarket loyalty cards, and mine the data for all sorts of personal information. There is already nothing to stop the government from buying access to those databases. In fact, they probably already do.
I will continue to oppose government invasion into the personal sphere -- for example, wiretapping, secret search warrants, and gag orders -- but I think it's time we accept that our public actions -- purchases, travel, employment -- are already public. They are meticulously documented and combed by all sorts of actors, and by and large the world has not collapsed into an Orwellian nightmare. Certainly, there are Orwellian aspects to our society, particularly with the current group in the White House, but that seems like a phenomenon independent from the stuff this Real ID would be used for.
The proposition that the moon is made of green cheese is, actually, analogous to the proposition that god exists, in that they are both ultimately empirical questions, and there is absolutely no affirmative evidence for either. I also don't know a single otherwise intelligent and reasonable person who believes that the moon is made of green cheese, but surely you're not suggesting that reality is decided by a vote. If it were, it would have been bad news for Galileo, Copernicus, and all the rest.
"the minute you start acting like it's impossible for reasonable people to disagree with you, you're being a fundamentalist."
So you agree that 2+2 can equal 5? That the moon might be made of green cheese? And that underwear gnomes might raid our underwear drawer every other night? Or are you also a fundamentalist?
You know, I bet you take a position on whether there's a flying spaghetti monster, santa claus, leprechauns, gremlins, easter bunny, and invisible pink unicorn. I bet your position is not one of even-handed indecision but active disbelief. I bet if your child asked you with wide-eyed curiosity if gremlins exist, you would say no. I bet you would NOT launch into a lengthy diatribe about how we don't have evidence either way.
Therefore you treat god with more deference than the concept is logically due. You're the one who is inconsistent, "logically bankrupt," etc.
And what practical benefit does your "knowledge" that there is no God provide you? Would your behavior be any different if you did believe in God? If so, then you are nothing but a slave to your desires. And by that, I mean that you choose to behave in such a way that you think God--if he in fact existed--would disapprove of. However, because you believe there is nobody to "keep you honest", you behave that way with impunity.
Whoa whoa whoa. If I believed in God -- that is, the same God that so much of America believes in -- I might do things like go to church every Sunday, smear ash on my face on a particular Wednesday each year, turn to ancient fables instead of science to explain phenomena that I observe, oppose stem cell research, fight against the teaching of evolution in classrooms, and persecute gay people to whatever extent possible.
The Judeo-Christian god apparently wants us to do a lot of things that are not affirmatively moral, and a lot of things that are abjectly immoral. I don't do these things. That is at least some of the practical benefit of my knowledge that there is no god.
secular, humanist people are turning the tide everywhere in the world (even in e.g. muslim countries -- see turkey) and relegating religion to the place it belongs, the private life of individual people
Any actual empirical evidence that this is the dominant trend? Because I suspect Iraq, Iran, UAE, Pakistan, etc. are becoming more religiously radical every year, far outweighing any trend you see in Turkey.
That proves that the company received it. Whether the company chooses to route it to the CEO or make a mailroom paper-airplane out of it is unimportant to the question of whether the company was on notice.
(Also, as someone else pointed out, the notice stage is long past, so really none of this matters.)
Slashdot Mirror
No, I recognized the point -- that once you say okay to good, wholesome sex, you start down a slippery slope to more depraved acts, like triple penetration, bestiality, and -- perversion of perversions -- gay sex. If you can't see the bigotry there, frankly something is wrong.
What if that last item were "interracial sex"? As in, good clean white-on-white sex is one thing, but bestiality, orgies, and naked black people are totally over the line! Wouldn't that seem a little racist to you?
Oh yeah, triple-penetration horse sex is bad but god save us from the gay sex!
Fuck you, bigot.
Of course; just like I have the legal right to laugh in your face the day you are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It doesn't make it moral, but I guess that's the best we can do as a society.
I guess I agree with all of what you said with the possible exception that we have to "wait in line behind women and minorities." I'm not aware of any laws that discriminate against women and minorities. Women and minorities are allowed to join the military in any capacity. They are allowed to get married. And it's illegal for an employer refuses to hire them because of their race or gender. None of these are available to gay people in every state. Women and minorities already have equality before the law. Gay people don't. Also, I'm not sure what you mean when you say that women and minorities were here first. Gay people have always been around, just like women and minorities.
But except for that line, I agree with you. There has been enormous improvement, and you don't have to go back to the 1980's to see it. Fred Thompson recently issued a clarification that while he believes in a constitutional amendment to leave gay marriage up to individual states, he does not believe in a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. In just two years, the idea of an amendment to ban gay marriage has gone from a mainstay of the conservative platform to so reprehensible that a republican front-runner will issue a statement specifically to distance himself from it. Today, nearly two thirds of the country thinks that gay people should at least be able to have civil unions. Incredible progress is happening incredibly quickly. I have little doubt that we will reach legal equality within the next decade, or two at the outside.
However, none of that means that we don't deserve legal and social equality right now. For that reason, it is completely justified to tell off someone who doesn't want the fact that I am gay "shoved in his face" even to the extent that casual discussion about his opposite-sex spouse shoves the fact that he is straight in my face. And until we have at least legal equality, anyone who seriously objects to a non-obscene bumper sticker advocating it is at least to that extent a homophobic bigot.
I guess I don't understand what your point is.
Fine. No problem. I'll do that just as soon as I have equal rights.
By the way, "equal rights" means among other things that I am allowed to mention my boyfriend/partner/husband as casually as straight men are allowed to mention their girlfriend/fiance/wife.
WHO isn't at that point? I can think of two mainstream, A-list games, off the top of my head, that casually included heterosexual AND homosexual relationships:
I've never played the Sims, but I imagine it lets you create gay characters too.
Perhaps the problem is with Mr. Egglebert and Factor 5, not with the industry at large...?
>Funny, in my driver's ed. class they always made the point to drive home that it was a privelege, not a right.
Yes; this is a common legal refrain but not at all consonant with reality. You're right that there are a handful of people who can survive in dense urban areas or by public transportation without driving, but the vast, overwhelming majority of us need our car to survive.
>The applicability of this view to technology has its (de)merits, but we're talking about government here: a very different beast.
Not really. We're talking about progress generally, which can be technological or social. After some reasoned contemplation, if we can't think of any concrete harms and we can think of concrete benefits, we should do it.
There are stories, but no evidence. All of the evidence strongly suggests that sexuality is absolutely immutable. The best so-called reparative therapy can offer is a very high suicide rate and asexuality -- which isn't even that, really, it's constantly refusing to act on your impulses. If you decided never to look at a girl again, and you managed to follow through, that wouldn't mean that you were no longer straight.
Give it a few years. I guarantee you that the guy's still gay. I went through something similar back when I was still trying to be straight. I even dated a girl for a year and a half. People thought we were the cutest couple, completely in love, and so on. I was the only one who even had a hunch that girls weren't for me. You hear stories all the time about marriages failing after 20 years because the guy is gay. It's not something that you can will away with enough time, or suck out with enough vaginas.
For whatever it's worth, I've dated a wonderful guy for a long time now. We're completely monogamous and disease-free, and we don't do any drugs or engage in any risky practices. We're both highly, highly educated and on very high-income and stable career paths. We're still completely in love, we're perfect for one another, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if we spent the rest of our lives together. How could that possibly be a sin?
I already answered this critique: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=273071&cid=202 82771
I'm pursuing it because I'm right! We're nerds; it's what we do! :)
>They aren't mandatory.
...wherein the government got in trouble for patronizing commercially-available databases? I'm not saying you're definitely wrong, but I've never heard of such a story, and I'd be impressed if you can link me to one.
Um. Okay. I guess they aren't mandatory. Unless, you know, you want to drive. Which nearly everyone in this country needs to do to survive. Why is entering a public park any more of a right than driving on the public highway?
>In fact, your fucking SSI card is explicitly not an ID. And goodluck identifying someone by a footrpint taken 20+ years ago.
Both are on the list of acceptable forms of identification that the government requires all employers to check for immigration purposes when they hire a new employee.
>See recent FBI troubles.
>You can't foresee all of the ramifications of such a thing, and by the time you do it shall likely be too late.
Good thing this attitude has never been widespread, or we'd never have any sort of technological progress.
I think you probably didn't mean it this way, but your post is Exhibit A in much of what is wrong with mainstream christianity's attitude toward gay people. We're not lepers, and we're not hookers. We don't need anyone to "hate the sin, love the sinner"; we need for people to accept that being gay is not a sin.
I think it was Jesus who said to judge the tree by the fruit it bears. We can say all we want about the theoretical virtues of Christianity, but its fruit these days is pretty poor.
Giving them your state-issued license number, correlated with your driver's license and address, so that you can park?
Here's my moral system:
(1) X is good, Y is bad. The end.
Here's your moral system:
(1) There's a floaty dude in a cloud who says that X is good and Y is bad.
(2) If the floaty dude says X is good and Y is bad, then X really is good and Y really is bad.
So why not cut the crap and recognize that the god part of the system is totally superfluous? Your system has MORE axioms than mine but is no more effective at deriving a morality.
Now you're probably getting excited at this point. "If your system has axioms too, then that's its own kind of faith, right? I knew it! Atheism is a religion!"
No. Whether X is good and Y is bad is a matter of OPINION, not empirical truth. My system is better than yours because it decides ONLY matters of opinion by axiom, whereas yours decides empirical conjectures by axiom because actual evidence is annoyingly nonexistent.
Okay, forget the cheese moon and go with the underwear gnomes, or flying spaghetti monster, or santa clause.
I know this is probably a contrarian point of view here on Slashdot, but I guess I don't see the practical difference between mandatory, ubiquitous state-issued ID (driver's licenses) and mandatory, ubiquitous federal ID (passports, birth certificates, social security cards, and... dun dun DUN... Real ID). Already, you can't get on an airplane without a government-issued identification card, or open a bank account, or take out a loan, or begin employment, or enter the country, or buy a car. If you are like the overwhelming majority of Americans, you buy everything by credit card. Private companies track every purchase, collate them all, match them with your supermarket loyalty cards, and mine the data for all sorts of personal information. There is already nothing to stop the government from buying access to those databases. In fact, they probably already do.
I will continue to oppose government invasion into the personal sphere -- for example, wiretapping, secret search warrants, and gag orders -- but I think it's time we accept that our public actions -- purchases, travel, employment -- are already public. They are meticulously documented and combed by all sorts of actors, and by and large the world has not collapsed into an Orwellian nightmare. Certainly, there are Orwellian aspects to our society, particularly with the current group in the White House, but that seems like a phenomenon independent from the stuff this Real ID would be used for.
The proposition that the moon is made of green cheese is, actually, analogous to the proposition that god exists, in that they are both ultimately empirical questions, and there is absolutely no affirmative evidence for either. I also don't know a single otherwise intelligent and reasonable person who believes that the moon is made of green cheese, but surely you're not suggesting that reality is decided by a vote. If it were, it would have been bad news for Galileo, Copernicus, and all the rest.
"the minute you start acting like it's impossible for reasonable people to disagree with you, you're being a fundamentalist."
So you agree that 2+2 can equal 5? That the moon might be made of green cheese? And that underwear gnomes might raid our underwear drawer every other night? Or are you also a fundamentalist?
You know, I bet you take a position on whether there's a flying spaghetti monster, santa claus, leprechauns, gremlins, easter bunny, and invisible pink unicorn. I bet your position is not one of even-handed indecision but active disbelief. I bet if your child asked you with wide-eyed curiosity if gremlins exist, you would say no. I bet you would NOT launch into a lengthy diatribe about how we don't have evidence either way.
Therefore you treat god with more deference than the concept is logically due. You're the one who is inconsistent, "logically bankrupt," etc.
Whoa whoa whoa. If I believed in God -- that is, the same God that so much of America believes in -- I might do things like go to church every Sunday, smear ash on my face on a particular Wednesday each year, turn to ancient fables instead of science to explain phenomena that I observe, oppose stem cell research, fight against the teaching of evolution in classrooms, and persecute gay people to whatever extent possible.
The Judeo-Christian god apparently wants us to do a lot of things that are not affirmatively moral, and a lot of things that are abjectly immoral. I don't do these things. That is at least some of the practical benefit of my knowledge that there is no god.
One minor quibble: absence of evidence is evidence of absence -- it's just not proof of absence.
How about this: the proposition that God exists has exactly as much empirical support as the proposition that the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists.
That proves that the company received it. Whether the company chooses to route it to the CEO or make a mailroom paper-airplane out of it is unimportant to the question of whether the company was on notice.
(Also, as someone else pointed out, the notice stage is long past, so really none of this matters.)