That's kind of interesting -- my instructor for both Math 12 and AP Calculus was a former chemist from Berkeley -- a postdoc, I think. He also taught Physics 12 and Chemistry 12, as well as the AP programs for both. EVERYONE took his courses, because he made them so much fun. I don't just mean all the nerdy kids: quite literally, everyone in grade 12 took his courses if they could get in.
He showed every one of his classes "Stand And Deliver" at the start of the year, and he had even had the chance to meet Jaime Escalante in person. He also told us all about him and his friends playing cage-rules basketball with gangbangers (and usually getting beaten up by them afterwards). Man, did he ever make class fun. Although he didn't make his neighbourhood back in LA sound particularly livable.;)
The point? A genuinely great instructor really can inspire students to great things. They really can pass their passion for science and mathematics to even the most average of students. So if you decide to go for it, good for you. The world, and America in particular, definitely needs teachers that can impart their passion and love of the things that they study.
The flu is caused by a virus, not a bacteria. A big part of the problem is people like yourself who go and ask their doctor for antibiotics when they get viral infections (not to mention the doctors that fork over those antibiotics). It's the ideal setup for antiobiotic-resistance to develop, since you'll stop taking the antiobiotics once the virus goes away... leaving highly-selected colonies of bacteria in your body.
What a bigot, disparaging those of us who are disabled in spirit. Just because I have scoliosis of the soul doesn't mean that I don't deserve to fly on spacecraft that are named after the act of emesis.
I bet the jerk Hawking hates crackpots and anthropocidal maniacs too.
You're right -- APD isn't predictive of anti-social behaviour. It's diagnosed by anti-social behaviour. That kind of kicks the shit out of prediction, in much the same way that if you have heart attacks, doctors will suggest that you have heart disease; or that if you're terminally bummed out, people will start mentioning words like "depression". Saying that it isn't predictive is meaningless.
But it IS diagnostic. Anti-social behaviour doesn't just mean that the person ends up in jail a lot, or does bad things. It's not just saying that someone is a jerk. It refers to very specific types of behaviours that demonstrate an absence of empathy and social values. Those behaviours are precisely how APD is diagnosed.
I'm not sure what you think APD is, or what you think the term "anti-social" means. It's not at all clear, and you seem to confuse "anti-social" behavour with "criminal" behavour, even though they only partially overlap.
Oh please. Half of the time, juries are the ones responsible for miscarriages of justice. Getting eight jackasses -- who vote based on which candidate has the best hair -- to attempt to decipher the law? Getting eight gullible half-wits -- who believe in fairy-tales about talking bushes, talking snakes, and magical spacemen -- to disciminate between fact and fiction? Getting eight illiterate doofuses -- who consider education to be the devil's work and anyone who respects civil liberties to be an evil hippy -- to actually respect someone's constitutional rights?
I don't think so. Anyone who isn't at making least six figures or in possession of world-class charisma, has a better chance of making it to Tijuana on an airplane wearing an "I have a bomb" t-shirt.
Hey, it gets my vote. Any situation where massive numbers of human deaths can be associated with the word "hilariously" twice in the same sentence, is a situation that I want to be a part of.
Given their current level of success, the RIAA would probably only manage to kill a few dozen music traders, plus a few hundred people that DON'T trade music, and finally encourage (indirectly) several million people to go out and have new children that then become music traders.
Right... even though now an estimated 120 million Americans use or have used content-trading tools?
The RIAA can keep suing a few thousand people a year, and it wont mean a thing. This year's round of the flu probably stopped more music-traders by flat-out killing them than the RIAA has by their lawsuits and propaganda.
All these laws mean is that the government is making itself more and more the enemy of the people, that the government is making itself more and more contemptible and despicable.
Incidentally, do you think the guy that posted the article is aware that it was a Democratic-Party government that proposed the DMCA, Democratic-Party congressmen who gleefully passed it, and a Democratic-Party president who signed it into law? The fact that the Republicans adored it too (as if they could dislike anything that strips the people of freedoms) doesn't mean that the Ass party is going to suddenly develop some newfound love of consumer-rights.
If the government makes itself redundant and stupid, the people will ignore its laws and do whatever they want. That's just the way it's always been. And I say this as someone who lives in a city with about a dozen Pot-smoking lounges that operate completely openly because even the cops have stopped giving a shit about laws that don't matter.
What ultimately counts is that most cops, social workers, social workers, child psychologists, and other assorted well-meaners, understand what "reasonable" means (being relatively "reasonable" people). The small number of unbalanced and unreasonable ones get a whole lot of press time, but how is that any different than any other group of people?
Westboro Baptist Church probably makes the papers more than all other churches on Earth COMBINED, but they're hardly representative of what Christians are like. Rush Limbaugh is the biggest blubbering crybaby hypocrite you'll ever see in your whole life, but is he representative of Republicans? Not even close; most Republicans are nowhere near as racist, hateful, and sycophantic to the GOP as that douchey fuck (even the GOP themselves aren't very representative of what real, normal Republicans are like). And you'd better pray that people like the US soldiers that were recently tried for raping and murdering a young Iraqi girl are not representative of what America's armed forces are like; America is pretty fucked if they are.
Don't let a few unbalanced maniacs deceive you about the state of the world. This can be particularly hard in the United States, where the media loves to trot out the maniacs and show them off at every turn. But it's vital if we are to remain grounded in reality, and to remain reasonable people ourselves.
There's actually a rather sophisticated mental leap from the basic "I do X, then Y (which is bad) happens", and the more complex "I do X, Z (which is awesome) happens, then P shows up (who I hate), then P does Y (which is bad)". It takes a sophisticated set of mental systems to perform, which is why you don't see jellyfish and cockroaches doing it much.
Think about it this way: when you see someone perform some act, you normally associate that act with that person, right? When you get mugged, you blame the mugger, right? When the neighbour kid throws a rock through your window, you don't associate it with your own actions right? It's only under special circumstances that you'll associate the actions of another Human being with your own actions.
If you stuff a sociopath in a Skinner-box and try to condition them to behave some way, it will probably work. If you supply the shocks yourself, it wont. This is true of rats too -- if you shock the rat yourself to train it, it will just bite you and run away.
Strictly speaking, sociopaths even have trouble with that kind of conditioning. They do incredibly unsafe things all the time because they have a great deal of difficulty responding even to environmental conditioning. You should read up a bit on the subject; sociopaths really are fascinating, like most people who lack some crucial aspect of Human psychology. In fact, sociopaths may be the most interesting of all the people that have psychological deviatons, because their aberration makes unable to perform the most fundamental of all Human acts: participating in a society.
What an odd little exposition about your life... and rather beside the point.
Still, let's run with it. We'll operate under the assumption that you belong to group #3, that you are living the "good life". If you knew that you were going to die soon and be eaten by some hypothetical overlord race that is farming Humans (I wouldn't be surprised if harvested Human pineal glands is what's keeping some of those bicentegenerian senators alive...), would you prefer to have never been born, and that our species didn't exist because those hypothetical organisms were vegetarian?
That's how stupid and insane the vegetarian philosophy is. If we were all vegetarian, many of our food-animals would wind up extinct. Goats and pigs can make it in the outside world, but chickens and cows are far too inbred and specialized to survive. I'm not sure about domesticated the breeds of ducks and geese. If we were to simply ban cruel farm practices, and encourage free-range farming practices, these animals could have great lives. Plus, they get a quick clean death, rather than dying under the claws of a predator or the ravages of a painful disease, the way their wild counterparts do.
Hey, if someone could genetically engineer a genuinely evil animal, do you think vegetarians would be comfortable eating it? After all, we would have to kill them anyway. It just makes to not waste the flesh, right?
He was disciplined by his step-father (my father). His natural father spoiled him, because he has super pissed-off that he hadn't gotten custody and wanted to bride the kid into ditching his mom. And a fraction of a second's worth of thinking and/or actually reading the post could have cleared that one up for you.
I'm sure there is still a lot of abuse out there. But that has exactly zero to do with the legality of reasonable corporal punishment. There is a big difference between the two, and trying to deliberately confuse people about them doesn't help anyone. All it really accomplishes is to cause decent parents labelled as abusers, and to cause people to stop taking genuinely abused children seriously.
If two deeply stupid people are each carriers for a recessive gene that allows genius-level intelligence, and breed, and have a brilliant child, do you think they'll take credit for their child's impressive mental faculties? If they each have a recessive gene that causes sociopathic tendencies -- which research has shown derive entirely from an aberration of brain physiology that affects the ability to make analogies between one's own experiences and those of others -- do you think they deserve any less credit? Did they deserve credit for the aforementioned brilliant child, or is their pride simply hubris?
If passing on genes for destructive, anti-social behaviour isn't something that you can attribute to people, you can't really attribute ANY heritable qualities to the parents at all. Height, nice high cheek bones, good teeth, eye colour, all of it is just the luck of the draw -- and there's no justification for taking any pride in any of it.
I'm not laying the burden of sin on the parents. I'm just saying that the parents are as responsible for the genetic defects in their children as they are for the genetic gifts -- and since parents do take responsibility for their childrens' genetic gifts, they are by default taking responsibility for their childrens' genetic flaws. Add in their rather substantial degree of responsibility for their childrens' nurturing, and you have parents that are heavily to blame for the things that their children do.
I didn't decide that it was this way -- it was parents that decided to attribute the quality of their children's genetics (and upbringing for that matter) to themselves.
Everyone knows that they "could" be carrying destructive genes (everyone has, on average, 9 to 20 fatal recessive alleles, which is why inbreeding is so destructive). Having children is like forcing the members of the next generation to play Russian Roulette. No one likes to think about it, but every single time you breed, you could be breeding a monster, or a child who'll die young of the tetralogy of Fallot, or who will be born without a brain, or who will suffer from depression for their entire lives and never experience a moment of happiness, or who will vote for the GOP, or whatever. You take that chance DELIBERATELY. Sure, it's vital that we all take those chances; but you ARE taking a chance, and you have to deal with that. It's no different than coal miners: every time they go underground, they know they could die. It's one of the most dangerous legal professions in all of western society. The fact that it's necessary if we are to have coal is irrelevant -- they are still taking a risk, and if they die then they did so because of the risk that they chose to take.
The system may be a bit broken in some places right now, but the law still does permit corporal punishment. My parents had several run-ins with social workers too (thanks to the foster kids they looked after and my spoiled-rotten step-brother) -- those run-ins never lasted for more than a few minutes. Those minutes were generally spent noting the fact that the children in question were in perfect health and that the "abuse" had consisted of an entirely legal smack to the ass.
EXACTLY the same thing happens to people who take family photos of their young children in the pool or bath. This is, of course, completely 100% legal. But occasionally someone overzealous pscho-cop (ie: any cop on Earth, basically) will discover one of these photos and decide to put some gloss on their badge by abusing the law and throwing an innocent person in jail. It doesn't change the legality of what that parent did. It just means that the justice system has been abused. It happens. In the city where I live, medicinal marijuana is legal; that doesn't stop people who smoke it with a prescription from being arrested repeatedly and being subjected to strip-searches, from having their homes ransacked by the police, from having the marijuana that they had to grow themselves legally confiscated and destroyed at great expense to themselves, etc.
Police officers are just stupid, evil, monstrous, and only barely Human. It's unfortunate. Until you have the sense to stop voting for the Conservatives / Republicans / Fascists / Nazis / Communists / Shariah-Alliance or whatever else the local ultra-authoritarian party happens to call itself, you have only yourself to blame. You can't put bullies in charge and then act surprised when you get bullied. Vote for someone that respects liberty and the proper application of justice, and doesn't respond to "think of the children" style fearmongering, and you'll be okay (and if you suggest that voting for the Democrats -- should you happen to American -- will help, you get an automatic smack to the face for being an idiot; they're every bit as stupid, authoritarian, corrupt, and reactionary the Republicans; they're just more likely to smile and act pleasant while they send the cops to rape you to death for being too individualistic).
Believing things that aren't true? That's stupidity and grounds for being selected against by evolution these days.
Check the lawbooks, ask a cop, ask a lawyer, a judge, or even a social worker -- which is how my stepbrother found out that crying "abuse" wouldn't get him off the hook; the information that the social worker provided was very detailed and informative.
I've seen this first hand. My parents looked after foster children a lot, and I had a stepbrother that was spoiled rotten by his real dad. The foster kids got smacked, my stepbrother got smacked, I got smacked. My stepbrother and the foster kids were both as retarded and ignorant as you are -- they thought that the social workers would put a stop to this. They were very wrong.
The media doesn't bring report about the illegality of corporal punishment because that illegality exists solely in the imaginations of hippies (who are too stupid to tell the difference between what they wish was true and what IS true, or to understand basic psychology) and ultra-conservatives (who are too stupid to successfully perceive reality in any way whatsoever).
Trust me -- you can smack your child. You can yell at your child. As long as your child doesn't require medical attention or tremble at the sound of your footsteps, you're almost certainly still within the bounds of the law.
Look, I know you like being an ultra-conservative, but you need to start being a rational-conservative -- the kind that is at least vaguely aware of reality. Right now you are on exactly the same intellectual level right now as the losers that sit around babbling incoherently about how evil corporations are (a corporation, being a thing, is no more evil than a socket-wrench). Seriously, the real world is nice. Try living in it and understanding it.
Q: True or false -- parents generally take credit for the good genes that their children receive from them.
A: True.
Do they get to have it both ways -- their childrens' bad genes came from gremlins, but the good ones from the parents? If stupid parents have stupid children, that's not the parents' fault, but when smart parents have smart children, they get the credit?
Tendencies towards depression, APD, generosity, happiness, intelligence, stupidity, gullibility, risk-taking, even things as abstract as patriotism and religosity (basically synonymous with the aforementioned gullibility) are all very much genetic in origin. But for some reason, we let parents get away with taking credit only for the good genes...
My parents have actually apologized to me for the some of their families' more regretable genetic traits, like hypothyroid disorder and a tendency towards morosity and self-destructive behaviour, in much the same way that they take credit for the intelligence and rationalism that run in the family. I guess an un-hypocritical streak also runs in the family... although apparently not in ALL families.
What exactly is the animal going to lose? Its money? Its car? Losing its life doesn't really mean anything, since it's just going to die soon anyway. Besides, isn't three years of a good life better than NO years of a good life? Frankly, I'd take three years of a good life over the fifty years of drab gray nothing that are ahead of me.
THink of it this way. Our hypothetical animal has three potential lives ahead of it:
Non-existence. Arguably a rather poor option. Only a tiny minority of Humans would ever choose non-existence over at least a chance at life.
Shitty life, then death. Meh.
Good life, then death. You already know that you'd choose this option, given the chance. You're probably striving to accomplish exactly this scenario right now.
So really, which would you choose? I'd be really surprised if you would EVER choose 1 over the arguably superior choices, 2 and 3. So there we have it: vegetarianism is the genocide of the cow race, the denial of their opportunity to have a life or even a species (short of the rise of some kind of race of feral cows, basically an impossibility given that they'd be competing with superior organisms like bison).
They don't understand HUMAN consequences. They get that if they stick their finger in a light-socket, they'll get shocked. They can respond to basic conditioning. What they don't do is take the next step -- associating things that someone else does with their own behaviour.
You really think sociopath won't understand "If you screw with me, I will find you, and I will kill you." especially when it comes from someone who has proven willing and capable of enforcing such threats?
Sociopaths routinely attack police officers. That's how many of them end up dead. They also routinely attack big, tough guys; lots of them get killed that way too. If you threaten to kill a sociopath if they do X, they might do X just to see what happens. Sociopaths have been known to kill people just to see what happens. If YOU punish a sociopath for behaviour X, they just get angry at YOU. They don't stop behaviour X -- they just start thinking of ways to hurt YOU, and (for particularly intelligent ones) ways to stop you from finding out / stop you from punishing them / whatever. But they are completely incapable of making the natural emotional leap from experiencing punishment to saying "I'm not going to do that". No matter how many times you punish them, they don't make the connection. At best, they figure out how to still do whatever the hell they want to do, but without you finding out. Even that tends to not work out, since sociopaths are also ridiculously impatient, and ultimately don't really give a shit about you or what you intend to do.
You're still confusing sociopaths with Humans. Sociopaths really don't respond the way you think they do. You're probably thinking of regular criminals and other social deviants. Sociopaths are an entirely different ballgame. Society can not control sociopaths in any way -- other than to simply let them do whatever they want. The best society can manage is to kill them or at least permanently isolate them. That's the whole fucking point -- anti-social personality disorder. They are fundamentally at odds with society and with society's methods of controlling behaviour. Nothing you can think of will work. That's the whole point. That's why no society in all of human history has ever been able to do better than to kill or imprison these people. No one has ever beaten a sociopath into submission (other than a short fake submission, so that they can jump up at stab you in the back two seconds later). No one has ever punished a sociopathic child so severely that they learned their lesson. No one has ever loved the goodness back into a sociopath. No one has ever convinced a sociopath that they shouldn't simply follow their impulses wherever they happen to lead. That's just how sociopaths roll.
Incidentally, organized crime groups HATE sociopaths. Sociopaths are the bane of organized crime because they bring enormous amounts of police and government attention to the group. They don't take orders. They can't be controlled. Generally, organized crime groups avoid sociopaths or kill them as liabilities. Despotic government just cut straight to the final step, executing sociopaths with a grim determination that freedom-loving and justice-loving societies can only sit back and envy.
To summarize: sociopaths are not just devoid of morality and empathy; they are fundamentally incapable of responding properly to societal influences. Social rules, laws, taboos, threats, intimidation, ultimatums, justice systems, exploding collars, electronic tethers, none of it means a thing to them.
Realistically speaking, we're only marginally more subject to the Queen's authority than Americans are.
And Americans probably dig the British Monarchy quite a bit more than Canadians do. One of the benefits of a couple of a divorce is that you can go back for a quick fling, and it's all good. Time and distance heal all wounds. But when you're still in the separation period, that kind of thing just doesn't fly.
Hey, Canadians are pretty serious about their comedy. We like a good laugh. It helps to keep us from spending our time thinking of news ways to make life miserable for each other, or from sitting around convincing ourselves that terrorists are sure to come and try to blow up our little hick town's beloved Wal-Mart. Farce, ironically enough, keeps people grounded in reality.
Do you think any politician on Earth would even know what those things are, let alone who developed them? James Gosling, by contrast, is a somewhat public figure with money. Politicians dig fame and money, they crave them the way Vampires crave blood. And James Gosling is one of the few public figures (with money) that's actually done something even vaguely positive and is even vagely Canadian.
So: to be noticed by Canadian politicians, a software development figure would need to be a) rich, b) famous, c) at least vaguely Canadian, and d) have done something that wasn't provably detrimental to society (presumably the Canadian government was willing to overlook the plague of crapplets that Gosling's work helped to unleash upon us). That's a pretty harsh set of criteria, given that most development figures are middle class (at best) and labour in obscurity. The few that are rich mostly got there by releasing horrible, horrible software that everyone outside of a corporate purchasing committee despises. And Canada is rather small population-wise (the ratio of Canadians to Americans is a little over 1:10 ).
No, that's what DEFINES a sociopath. They DON'T understand consequences. If someone understands consequences, they're not a sociopath. If a child responds to punishment by discontinuing the undesirable behaviour, they're not a sociopath.
Punishment is fine for normal Humans. A normal kid, if you give him/her a good solid smack on the ass when you catch them misbehaving, will learn REALLY fast. The effect is instantaneous and dramatic.
The sociopathic child doesn't learn. They just don't. That's why most sociopaths end up in juvenile detention centres, jails, and things like that. A handful will understand on a purely intellectual level that they can avoid certain outcomes by behaving in certain ways, but this requires a great deal of intelligence. Children don't even come close to being able to make this leap.
Pain and fear only motivate change in those that can associate that pain and fear with their OWN actions. Sociopaths can not do that. They will associate the pain and fear purely with the person that is causing it. In EXACTLY the same way, they can not associate other people's pain and fear with their own actions, which is why they never develop a sense of empathy (in a normal Human, seeing someone else in pain activates the parts of of our own brain that respond to pain; sociopaths lack this response).
Many people labour under the misconception that sociopaths are these clever, evil people that can get whatever they want and can scam their way out of any trouble they get into. The reality is that only a vanishingly tiny proportion of sociopaths can perform this feat: most just hurt a bunch of people, do a lot of seemingly retarded things, and end up in jail, in a psych hospital, or dead. The overwhelming majority sociopaths behave in exactly the way you would expect a person with no understanding of consequences to act, and they don't last very long.
The only reason people believe otherwise is because of that tiny, tiny fraction who have such a powerful intellect that they can use the rational part of their mind to anticipate and plan. This doesn't sound very significant, but research and real-world evidence have demonstrated that people don't really do much actual conscious thinking. Mostly we rely on our conditioning to let us just kind of blunder through life. We don't ever have to stop and think about why we don't slap our parents (and other authority figures) in the face for no reason, or why we can't take sharp things and throw them at people. Getting caught shoplifting that one time at the age of 13 will prevent us from even considering a repeat attempt. Sociopaths can only avoid doing those things if they do so at a purely intellectual level. Past punishments just don't act as any kind of inhibition whatsoever.
Unlike other kinds of human monsters, sociopaths truly are born, not made. There has to be something missing right from the start to prevent the normal system of moral normalization from working.
Problem is, once you start holding cops accountable for their actions, you end up with no cops. There isn't a single police force on the entire planet that doesn't pull exactly this kind of bullshit every single day.
In my own hometown, there's a guy being prosecuted for murdering 49 prostitutes. 49 -- no exaggeration whatsoever. The police knew that these women were going missing, and did nothing. It wasn't until womens' advocacy groups started making an really big stink that the police were eventually backed into a corner and forced to investigate. The worst known serial killer in Canadian HISTORY, and the police only investigated when they finally ran out of ways to ignore and dismiss the reports of missing women...
Individual police officers may possess some tiny shred of honour and dignity, somewhere deep underneath the corruption and bigotry. But police forces as a whole do not. If you start trying to hold them accountable for the things they do, you'd pretty much end up having to throw every member of every police force on Earth into prison. The complicity and collusion in these acts is total.
Who was that moral philosopher that wrote extensively about "so-called people"? About how we keep lots of things alive just because they LOOK human? You know, people in vegetative states, sociopaths, people born without brains, that kind of thing. I can't remember his name for the life of me...
A psychologist was telling me about his ideas once. There's definitely a lot of merit to them. The same philosopher was also apparently one of the first people to champion the notion that eating free-range meat was ethically superior to vegetarianism, because the animals got to enjoy a rich full life rather than the oblivion of non-existence.
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Hey, if militaries and engineers are happy to use diatoms in their dynamite, who are gamers to question diatoms in their CPUs?
He showed every one of his classes "Stand And Deliver" at the start of the year, and he had even had the chance to meet Jaime Escalante in person. He also told us all about him and his friends playing cage-rules basketball with gangbangers (and usually getting beaten up by them afterwards). Man, did he ever make class fun. Although he didn't make his neighbourhood back in LA sound particularly livable. ;)
The point? A genuinely great instructor really can inspire students to great things. They really can pass their passion for science and mathematics to even the most average of students. So if you decide to go for it, good for you. The world, and America in particular, definitely needs teachers that can impart their passion and love of the things that they study.
The flu is caused by a virus, not a bacteria. A big part of the problem is people like yourself who go and ask their doctor for antibiotics when they get viral infections (not to mention the doctors that fork over those antibiotics). It's the ideal setup for antiobiotic-resistance to develop, since you'll stop taking the antiobiotics once the virus goes away ... leaving highly-selected colonies of bacteria in your body.
I bet the jerk Hawking hates crackpots and anthropocidal maniacs too.
But it IS diagnostic. Anti-social behaviour doesn't just mean that the person ends up in jail a lot, or does bad things. It's not just saying that someone is a jerk. It refers to very specific types of behaviours that demonstrate an absence of empathy and social values. Those behaviours are precisely how APD is diagnosed.
I'm not sure what you think APD is, or what you think the term "anti-social" means. It's not at all clear, and you seem to confuse "anti-social" behavour with "criminal" behavour, even though they only partially overlap.
I don't think so. Anyone who isn't at making least six figures or in possession of world-class charisma, has a better chance of making it to Tijuana on an airplane wearing an "I have a bomb" t-shirt.
Hey, it gets my vote. Any situation where massive numbers of human deaths can be associated with the word "hilariously" twice in the same sentence, is a situation that I want to be a part of.
Given their current level of success, the RIAA would probably only manage to kill a few dozen music traders, plus a few hundred people that DON'T trade music, and finally encourage (indirectly) several million people to go out and have new children that then become music traders.
The RIAA can keep suing a few thousand people a year, and it wont mean a thing. This year's round of the flu probably stopped more music-traders by flat-out killing them than the RIAA has by their lawsuits and propaganda.
All these laws mean is that the government is making itself more and more the enemy of the people, that the government is making itself more and more contemptible and despicable.
Incidentally, do you think the guy that posted the article is aware that it was a Democratic-Party government that proposed the DMCA, Democratic-Party congressmen who gleefully passed it, and a Democratic-Party president who signed it into law? The fact that the Republicans adored it too (as if they could dislike anything that strips the people of freedoms) doesn't mean that the Ass party is going to suddenly develop some newfound love of consumer-rights.
If the government makes itself redundant and stupid, the people will ignore its laws and do whatever they want. That's just the way it's always been. And I say this as someone who lives in a city with about a dozen Pot-smoking lounges that operate completely openly because even the cops have stopped giving a shit about laws that don't matter.
Westboro Baptist Church probably makes the papers more than all other churches on Earth COMBINED, but they're hardly representative of what Christians are like. Rush Limbaugh is the biggest blubbering crybaby hypocrite you'll ever see in your whole life, but is he representative of Republicans? Not even close; most Republicans are nowhere near as racist, hateful, and sycophantic to the GOP as that douchey fuck (even the GOP themselves aren't very representative of what real, normal Republicans are like). And you'd better pray that people like the US soldiers that were recently tried for raping and murdering a young Iraqi girl are not representative of what America's armed forces are like; America is pretty fucked if they are.
Don't let a few unbalanced maniacs deceive you about the state of the world. This can be particularly hard in the United States, where the media loves to trot out the maniacs and show them off at every turn. But it's vital if we are to remain grounded in reality, and to remain reasonable people ourselves.
Think about it this way: when you see someone perform some act, you normally associate that act with that person, right? When you get mugged, you blame the mugger, right? When the neighbour kid throws a rock through your window, you don't associate it with your own actions right? It's only under special circumstances that you'll associate the actions of another Human being with your own actions.
If you stuff a sociopath in a Skinner-box and try to condition them to behave some way, it will probably work. If you supply the shocks yourself, it wont. This is true of rats too -- if you shock the rat yourself to train it, it will just bite you and run away.
Strictly speaking, sociopaths even have trouble with that kind of conditioning. They do incredibly unsafe things all the time because they have a great deal of difficulty responding even to environmental conditioning. You should read up a bit on the subject; sociopaths really are fascinating, like most people who lack some crucial aspect of Human psychology. In fact, sociopaths may be the most interesting of all the people that have psychological deviatons, because their aberration makes unable to perform the most fundamental of all Human acts: participating in a society.
Still, let's run with it. We'll operate under the assumption that you belong to group #3, that you are living the "good life". If you knew that you were going to die soon and be eaten by some hypothetical overlord race that is farming Humans (I wouldn't be surprised if harvested Human pineal glands is what's keeping some of those bicentegenerian senators alive...), would you prefer to have never been born, and that our species didn't exist because those hypothetical organisms were vegetarian?
That's how stupid and insane the vegetarian philosophy is. If we were all vegetarian, many of our food-animals would wind up extinct. Goats and pigs can make it in the outside world, but chickens and cows are far too inbred and specialized to survive. I'm not sure about domesticated the breeds of ducks and geese. If we were to simply ban cruel farm practices, and encourage free-range farming practices, these animals could have great lives. Plus, they get a quick clean death, rather than dying under the claws of a predator or the ravages of a painful disease, the way their wild counterparts do.
Hey, if someone could genetically engineer a genuinely evil animal, do you think vegetarians would be comfortable eating it? After all, we would have to kill them anyway. It just makes to not waste the flesh, right?
I'm sure there is still a lot of abuse out there. But that has exactly zero to do with the legality of reasonable corporal punishment. There is a big difference between the two, and trying to deliberately confuse people about them doesn't help anyone. All it really accomplishes is to cause decent parents labelled as abusers, and to cause people to stop taking genuinely abused children seriously.
If passing on genes for destructive, anti-social behaviour isn't something that you can attribute to people, you can't really attribute ANY heritable qualities to the parents at all. Height, nice high cheek bones, good teeth, eye colour, all of it is just the luck of the draw -- and there's no justification for taking any pride in any of it.
I'm not laying the burden of sin on the parents. I'm just saying that the parents are as responsible for the genetic defects in their children as they are for the genetic gifts -- and since parents do take responsibility for their childrens' genetic gifts, they are by default taking responsibility for their childrens' genetic flaws. Add in their rather substantial degree of responsibility for their childrens' nurturing, and you have parents that are heavily to blame for the things that their children do.
I didn't decide that it was this way -- it was parents that decided to attribute the quality of their children's genetics (and upbringing for that matter) to themselves.
Everyone knows that they "could" be carrying destructive genes (everyone has, on average, 9 to 20 fatal recessive alleles, which is why inbreeding is so destructive). Having children is like forcing the members of the next generation to play Russian Roulette. No one likes to think about it, but every single time you breed, you could be breeding a monster, or a child who'll die young of the tetralogy of Fallot, or who will be born without a brain, or who will suffer from depression for their entire lives and never experience a moment of happiness, or who will vote for the GOP, or whatever. You take that chance DELIBERATELY. Sure, it's vital that we all take those chances; but you ARE taking a chance, and you have to deal with that. It's no different than coal miners: every time they go underground, they know they could die. It's one of the most dangerous legal professions in all of western society. The fact that it's necessary if we are to have coal is irrelevant -- they are still taking a risk, and if they die then they did so because of the risk that they chose to take.
EXACTLY the same thing happens to people who take family photos of their young children in the pool or bath. This is, of course, completely 100% legal. But occasionally someone overzealous pscho-cop (ie: any cop on Earth, basically) will discover one of these photos and decide to put some gloss on their badge by abusing the law and throwing an innocent person in jail. It doesn't change the legality of what that parent did. It just means that the justice system has been abused. It happens. In the city where I live, medicinal marijuana is legal; that doesn't stop people who smoke it with a prescription from being arrested repeatedly and being subjected to strip-searches, from having their homes ransacked by the police, from having the marijuana that they had to grow themselves legally confiscated and destroyed at great expense to themselves, etc.
Police officers are just stupid, evil, monstrous, and only barely Human. It's unfortunate. Until you have the sense to stop voting for the Conservatives / Republicans / Fascists / Nazis / Communists / Shariah-Alliance or whatever else the local ultra-authoritarian party happens to call itself, you have only yourself to blame. You can't put bullies in charge and then act surprised when you get bullied. Vote for someone that respects liberty and the proper application of justice, and doesn't respond to "think of the children" style fearmongering, and you'll be okay (and if you suggest that voting for the Democrats -- should you happen to American -- will help, you get an automatic smack to the face for being an idiot; they're every bit as stupid, authoritarian, corrupt, and reactionary the Republicans; they're just more likely to smile and act pleasant while they send the cops to rape you to death for being too individualistic).
Check the lawbooks, ask a cop, ask a lawyer, a judge, or even a social worker -- which is how my stepbrother found out that crying "abuse" wouldn't get him off the hook; the information that the social worker provided was very detailed and informative.
I've seen this first hand. My parents looked after foster children a lot, and I had a stepbrother that was spoiled rotten by his real dad. The foster kids got smacked, my stepbrother got smacked, I got smacked. My stepbrother and the foster kids were both as retarded and ignorant as you are -- they thought that the social workers would put a stop to this. They were very wrong.
The media doesn't bring report about the illegality of corporal punishment because that illegality exists solely in the imaginations of hippies (who are too stupid to tell the difference between what they wish was true and what IS true, or to understand basic psychology) and ultra-conservatives (who are too stupid to successfully perceive reality in any way whatsoever).
Trust me -- you can smack your child. You can yell at your child. As long as your child doesn't require medical attention or tremble at the sound of your footsteps, you're almost certainly still within the bounds of the law.
Look, I know you like being an ultra-conservative, but you need to start being a rational-conservative -- the kind that is at least vaguely aware of reality. Right now you are on exactly the same intellectual level right now as the losers that sit around babbling incoherently about how evil corporations are (a corporation, being a thing, is no more evil than a socket-wrench). Seriously, the real world is nice. Try living in it and understanding it.
A: True.
Do they get to have it both ways -- their childrens' bad genes came from gremlins, but the good ones from the parents? If stupid parents have stupid children, that's not the parents' fault, but when smart parents have smart children, they get the credit?
Tendencies towards depression, APD, generosity, happiness, intelligence, stupidity, gullibility, risk-taking, even things as abstract as patriotism and religosity (basically synonymous with the aforementioned gullibility) are all very much genetic in origin. But for some reason, we let parents get away with taking credit only for the good genes...
My parents have actually apologized to me for the some of their families' more regretable genetic traits, like hypothyroid disorder and a tendency towards morosity and self-destructive behaviour, in much the same way that they take credit for the intelligence and rationalism that run in the family. I guess an un-hypocritical streak also runs in the family ... although apparently not in ALL families.
THink of it this way. Our hypothetical animal has three potential lives ahead of it:
So really, which would you choose? I'd be really surprised if you would EVER choose 1 over the arguably superior choices, 2 and 3. So there we have it: vegetarianism is the genocide of the cow race, the denial of their opportunity to have a life or even a species (short of the rise of some kind of race of feral cows, basically an impossibility given that they'd be competing with superior organisms like bison).
You're still confusing sociopaths with Humans. Sociopaths really don't respond the way you think they do. You're probably thinking of regular criminals and other social deviants. Sociopaths are an entirely different ballgame. Society can not control sociopaths in any way -- other than to simply let them do whatever they want. The best society can manage is to kill them or at least permanently isolate them. That's the whole fucking point -- anti-social personality disorder. They are fundamentally at odds with society and with society's methods of controlling behaviour. Nothing you can think of will work. That's the whole point. That's why no society in all of human history has ever been able to do better than to kill or imprison these people. No one has ever beaten a sociopath into submission (other than a short fake submission, so that they can jump up at stab you in the back two seconds later). No one has ever punished a sociopathic child so severely that they learned their lesson. No one has ever loved the goodness back into a sociopath. No one has ever convinced a sociopath that they shouldn't simply follow their impulses wherever they happen to lead. That's just how sociopaths roll.
Incidentally, organized crime groups HATE sociopaths. Sociopaths are the bane of organized crime because they bring enormous amounts of police and government attention to the group. They don't take orders. They can't be controlled. Generally, organized crime groups avoid sociopaths or kill them as liabilities. Despotic government just cut straight to the final step, executing sociopaths with a grim determination that freedom-loving and justice-loving societies can only sit back and envy.
To summarize: sociopaths are not just devoid of morality and empathy; they are fundamentally incapable of responding properly to societal influences. Social rules, laws, taboos, threats, intimidation, ultimatums, justice systems, exploding collars, electronic tethers, none of it means a thing to them.
And Americans probably dig the British Monarchy quite a bit more than Canadians do. One of the benefits of a couple of a divorce is that you can go back for a quick fling, and it's all good. Time and distance heal all wounds. But when you're still in the separation period, that kind of thing just doesn't fly.
Hey, Canadians are pretty serious about their comedy. We like a good laugh. It helps to keep us from spending our time thinking of news ways to make life miserable for each other, or from sitting around convincing ourselves that terrorists are sure to come and try to blow up our little hick town's beloved Wal-Mart. Farce, ironically enough, keeps people grounded in reality.
So: to be noticed by Canadian politicians, a software development figure would need to be a) rich, b) famous, c) at least vaguely Canadian, and d) have done something that wasn't provably detrimental to society (presumably the Canadian government was willing to overlook the plague of crapplets that Gosling's work helped to unleash upon us). That's a pretty harsh set of criteria, given that most development figures are middle class (at best) and labour in obscurity. The few that are rich mostly got there by releasing horrible, horrible software that everyone outside of a corporate purchasing committee despises. And Canada is rather small population-wise (the ratio of Canadians to Americans is a little over 1:10 ).
Punishment is fine for normal Humans. A normal kid, if you give him/her a good solid smack on the ass when you catch them misbehaving, will learn REALLY fast. The effect is instantaneous and dramatic.
The sociopathic child doesn't learn. They just don't. That's why most sociopaths end up in juvenile detention centres, jails, and things like that. A handful will understand on a purely intellectual level that they can avoid certain outcomes by behaving in certain ways, but this requires a great deal of intelligence. Children don't even come close to being able to make this leap.
Pain and fear only motivate change in those that can associate that pain and fear with their OWN actions. Sociopaths can not do that. They will associate the pain and fear purely with the person that is causing it. In EXACTLY the same way, they can not associate other people's pain and fear with their own actions, which is why they never develop a sense of empathy (in a normal Human, seeing someone else in pain activates the parts of of our own brain that respond to pain; sociopaths lack this response).
Many people labour under the misconception that sociopaths are these clever, evil people that can get whatever they want and can scam their way out of any trouble they get into. The reality is that only a vanishingly tiny proportion of sociopaths can perform this feat: most just hurt a bunch of people, do a lot of seemingly retarded things, and end up in jail, in a psych hospital, or dead. The overwhelming majority sociopaths behave in exactly the way you would expect a person with no understanding of consequences to act, and they don't last very long.
The only reason people believe otherwise is because of that tiny, tiny fraction who have such a powerful intellect that they can use the rational part of their mind to anticipate and plan. This doesn't sound very significant, but research and real-world evidence have demonstrated that people don't really do much actual conscious thinking. Mostly we rely on our conditioning to let us just kind of blunder through life. We don't ever have to stop and think about why we don't slap our parents (and other authority figures) in the face for no reason, or why we can't take sharp things and throw them at people. Getting caught shoplifting that one time at the age of 13 will prevent us from even considering a repeat attempt. Sociopaths can only avoid doing those things if they do so at a purely intellectual level. Past punishments just don't act as any kind of inhibition whatsoever.
Unlike other kinds of human monsters, sociopaths truly are born, not made. There has to be something missing right from the start to prevent the normal system of moral normalization from working.
In my own hometown, there's a guy being prosecuted for murdering 49 prostitutes. 49 -- no exaggeration whatsoever. The police knew that these women were going missing, and did nothing. It wasn't until womens' advocacy groups started making an really big stink that the police were eventually backed into a corner and forced to investigate. The worst known serial killer in Canadian HISTORY, and the police only investigated when they finally ran out of ways to ignore and dismiss the reports of missing women...
Individual police officers may possess some tiny shred of honour and dignity, somewhere deep underneath the corruption and bigotry. But police forces as a whole do not. If you start trying to hold them accountable for the things they do, you'd pretty much end up having to throw every member of every police force on Earth into prison. The complicity and collusion in these acts is total.
A psychologist was telling me about his ideas once. There's definitely a lot of merit to them. The same philosopher was also apparently one of the first people to champion the notion that eating free-range meat was ethically superior to vegetarianism, because the animals got to enjoy a rich full life rather than the oblivion of non-existence.