1. Hmm, I dunno, I would think it depends more on whether the owner agreed to that kind of modification to their property. If the owners (or the city hall in the case of city property) actually agreed to have their walls repaired with Lego, or maybe in a sort of "doesn't matter with what" kinda contract, then it's ok. If not, it's still defacing someone else's property.
I mean, think of it this way: let's say your house showed some signs of water damage, or maybe (minor) cracks after an earthquake. And I come and glue a brightly coloured poster on top of it. Maybe even a waterproof poster to prevent more water getting there. Fine. But I'm guessing most people would still have a fit about suddenly discovering a bright poster on their property's wall.
2. Additionally, I have to wonder exactly how much _are_ they supporting the wall there. I.e., if it even has that excuse.
That looks like a thick wall of rock and brick. Especially the rock part is actually pretty damn heavy. And usually pretty tough too. Plastic toy bricks, not so much.
If the rest of the wall wasn't holding them in place already, i.e., if the weight of that wall was actually resting on those toy bricks, I'm guessing they'd get crushed instantly.
TFA says they're not even fixed there. Oh, and get this, he tried to fix them there with some _glue_, but it didn't stick to the dusty rock. Maybe someone should tell him about cement. You'd think the rest of the wall would be a clue.
So basically it doesn't look to me like it's even actually "repairing" the wall. It's just a bunch of toy bricks that occupy some available space there, but not much more.
I.e., on the whole it helps the wall just about as much as gluing a poster over the hole would.
3. Hmm, dunno, I have to agree with another poster there. I found the original wall much better, in that photo.
You have to remember that those walls are likely there for historical and cultural value. You know, so people can go and look at an example of roman or medieval architecture.
If they just wanted something brightly coloured instead, they could have demolished those old walls and built a McDonald's there.
Even if I might appreciate a Duplo brick construction on its own, and the wall on its own, it's the combination that bothers me.
It's like going to a museum and putting a clown nose, clown shoes and a pink tutu on a suit of beautiful Maximilian armour. The combination actually defaces and diminishes the original.
I don't know, there's something about it that, well, seems to serve no other purpose than to visually scream "look! there's a hole here! they didn't repair it!" Much like writing "WASH ME" with the finger on a dusty car.
Yes, I know most countries practice conscription, I was one myself once. Believe it or not, it wasn't hell in any way, shape or form, so it doesn't *have* to be that way, even if that concept might be hard to grasp for some. But the poster I replied to, who compared with the military, is most probably living in a country with a voluntary army.
So from the start, your argument is based on _assuming_ where I live, and how conscription works in a particular place. A false assumption too. May I point you to the False Premise fallacy? Not even a particularly skilled one, I might add.
In other words, please address what was actually said, not your own convenient assumptions.
Here you are making two mistakes in the same section.
First of all, yes most crimes are committed by people acting on impulse. In fact research shows that highly impulsive persons are more prone to commit crimes, which explains why harsher punishments generally doesn't keep crime down, just more people behind bars.
This particular spammer, because the talk was about him and his punishment all the time, didn't spam on an impulse.
Second, the judicial system does try to determine the degree of Mens Rea (evil intent) that went into a crime. We already distinguish between crimes done on an impulse, and what this guy did over several years. So, no, we don't lump everyone equally behind bars.
Third, you're setting up a falsehood as premise _again_: we already have ample evidence that laws like the three-strike systems for the repeat offenders, i.e., sharply increasing punishments past a point, did have a rather massive effect on crime rate. So the whole thing just isn't as simple as you try to mis-represent it.
But, anyway, the point is irrelevant to the main discussion, which was whether sleeping in the barracks and occasionally working in the kitchen in that white-collar prison counts as inhuman or not.
Secondly, I am *neither* talking about the specific criminal in this case, but rather criminals in general - since that's how the parent was looked at it - *nor* did I say he should be exempt from responsibility from his actions. I'm just saying that comparing prison to army does not wash. But thanks for the nice demonstration of a prime straw-man.
Since I'm that parent and know pretty well what I was saying, it seems to me like you're the one trying to set up a convenient straw-man by pretending it was something else. Lame.
And here, I present you strawman #2. In the future it would be nice if you even bothered with reading the stuff you're replying to, *before* you resort to "ad-hominems", (you might want to look that up) because it really makes you look like a jackass with your trousers down around your feet. *IF* you had read properly, you would have realized that I was referring to life in the army, since the argument from the parent was that it was "ok if life in prison sucked since it sucks in the army" - which I have already demonstrated is not true. At least not if you mind people going crazy.
1. I quote from your own message: "Second reason it's crap thinking is that just because something else is in a comparable way, doesn't mean it's a *good* way" Note the emphasis there, because it's yours. That's what I'm answering to: and I didn't say it has to be good.
But nah, you have to do the number one forum-troll trick: pretend you said something different. Nice try, no banana. It wasn't a straw man, if was an answer to what you wrote.
2. No matter how I read that message, I don't see you referring explicitly or even reasonably implied to army life. If it's not trying to change topic in mid-flight, well, then you should learn to write more clearly. If you're referring to army life, then say so.
Dude, nobody said it should be "a great place to be". It would be suitable for you to apologize for repeate
Before I start, note that I'm very reluctant to blame society as a nebulous whole, and definitely not instead of the guy who pulled the trigger. But in this case methinks culture may bave played a role, IMHO.
There was this study some time ago -- IIRC even linked on Slashdot -- and made by a woman at that. It showed that girls who grew up on fairy tales like Beauty And The Beast and Cinderella have a higher chance to end up in an abusive relationship, with them as the abused spouse.
Her hypothesis was that they just don't know when to get out of it, and keep hoping that, just like they got told all their childhood, the beast will turn into a handsome and gentle prince.
But just so I don't pick on women alone, there are plenty of stories and (Japanese) CRPGs for boys too, who teach the same false lesson: that if you run into the biggest jerk, he's probably just a traumatized guy hiding behind a tough facade, and you can change him back into a nice guy by just enough support and being there for him.
At any rate, both illustrate the point, that most people don't fully understand sociopaths. Most people seem to assume that everyone is the same, and that you can simply appeal to a sociopath's humanity to make him realize the error of his ways and renounce it. And again, we have everything from short stories to novels preaching just that and making just that point. Not to mention that, depending on the part of the world, you might even have whole hordes of apologists of the great white predator, presenting him like the modern day hero and benefactor of the community.
Where this long rant is going is: she's not the only one. Most people have trouble recognizing a psychopath, and even more trouble wrapping their mind around the very concept. And again, we teach girls from early childhood that it's OK to mary a "beast", he'll turn human later.
Basically it's a bit like condemning someone for falling for the old Road Runner trick of painti1ng a tunnel on a rock. If she's the only one, sure, blame her. But if it turns out that 9 out of 10 people mistake it for a real tunnel, well, maybe she deserves some compassion after all.
Mind you, I do make just that kind of jokes about the Norse religion too, so please don't take this as a lecture or anything.
But I have to wonder just how many people, if a Valkyrie took them to Odin's hall to become Einherjar, would actually think it's great.
For a start, it's a bit like wishing you were in the Marines, as your idea of fun. The Einherjar would just train all day for Ragnarok. They'd then get a copious meal in the evening, go to bed, wake up tomorrow to train some more with their weapons and armour. All day. Every day. For all eternity.
Basically already taken in that simplified form, it was the underachieving "heaven" of some people who had become mercenaries or pirates (and had a rather short life expectancy at that) just so they don't starve. Only the eldest son would inherit the parents' farm, the others were kicked out with no means of subsistence. There weren't any jobs on another farm for them either, and the small Scandinavian towns only had jobs for so many. So they join some private army or pirate group just so they don't starve. And, of course, they had to believe there's higher meaning to that hellish life, and some god who appreciates that. And the grand reward they aspired for was... well, just the same. That some great warlord in the sky would let them sign up in exchange for food and shelter.
But it gets better than that, when you look at how they were supposed to train in Valhalla: by hacking at each other with real, deadly weapons. By the end of the day, most Einherjar would be dead and/or dismembered, having bled to death on those training grounds. Then they'd get magically resurrected and/or healed, fed, sent to sleep, and next day they'd start again.
It was a promised eternity of _pain_ and stress.
I mean, think telling someone about it, but without mentioning which religion and whether it's supposed to be a reward or punishment. See, there was this old religion where after death you could be cut, bled, dismembered and killed daily, made whole again, and next day chopped up again. Then ask them if they think it's the heaven or hell of that religion. I'm betting on the latter.
Trash logic. First of all, joining the army is voluntary, right? That makes a hell of a difference. Hopefully the people who volunteer know what they are getting into and are motivated enough to stand it. Quite probably a lot of criminals do not make such deliberate considerations, and fuck the clichés a about heat and kitchen and so on.
1. Nope, most of the world does practice conscription.
2. I don't think most criminals ended criminals by mistake and without any consideration. It's not like the guy was just minding his own business, and suddenly realizes, "oops, I spammed tens of millions of people and got paid millions for it, without even knowing I was doing it." I'm sorry, but just because he's too fucking stupid to think about consequences too, doesn't make him exempt from them.
Second reason it's crap thinking is that just because something else is in a comparable way, doesn't mean it's a *good* way. So *even* if life in the army is living in a hell hole and you *didn't* make an informed choice to join, (conscript or whatever) that's does NOT per se mean it *has* to be like that.
3. It's not supposed to be a "good" thing, lemming. The fact may have escaped your attention that he's a convicted criminal. We're not giving him a _reward_ for it.
Yes, society could have sent him on a luxury vacation in Malorca or Hawaii, instead, with an army of servants to catter to his every whim and keep him comfortable and entertained. But that would have been a bit of a reward, wouldn't it?
It's supposed to be a _punishment_. It's supposed to be a _deterrent_. I.e., it's supposed to make the next idiot think twice about breaking the law.
So, yes, it'll be a bit inconvenient and will have some downsides. It won't be the ideal, happy place to be. That's the whole point.
So my point isn't that it's a "good" place to be. It's that it's actually a rather mild punishment. As punishment goes. In fact, so mild that millions of people go through that or worse without it being called a punishment. (Heck, for about a billion people on this Earth, that would actually be one step up from their life as hard-working, law-abiding citizens of some third-world nation.) It won't kill him. It's not hell, it's an inconvenience. That's what I'm saying.
Or in other words, there are shades of grey between "it's good" and "it's hell." Roll that concept around a bit in your head.
And considering that he _is_ a convicted criminal, and that the law _is_ supposed to include a _punishment_, I'm not moved to tears by his being a little inconvenienced there.
(I wonder why I cared about this, it's not like I'm going to get any kind of intelligent reply anyway.:/ )
Well, maybe if you started by posting something intelligent. If you start with something as stupid as, basically, "OMG they're slightly inconveniencing a criminal", well, you're not much in a position to be picky about the answers;)
Don't get me wrong, if someone were to tell me that they were doing some genuine evil or degrading stuff to him there, I might show some sympathy. But, basically, "OMG, we're so evil as to make a convicted criminal sleep in a barracks and occasionally work in the kitchen," because that's the general impression I'm left with... heh. Just heh.
Nah, Darwin is no good for a damning. SRSLY. Evolution takes something like 10,000 generations to do anything at all. So, you know, hoping that evolution damns something or someone, is somewhat _lacking_ in short-time motivation and satisfaction. How's evolution going to damn someone? Make sure that his/her descendants devolve into Orcs? Some people aren't even deterred by what smoking will do to them in 20 years, what makes you think they'd take a damnation seriously that might have an effect in 200,000 years?
Plus it's a bit like damning the wrong person. I can't say I feel any kind of satisfaction at the fact that his kids got shot. Au contraire? So why would it be any satisfaction to contemplate evolution damning his grand-grand-grand-[...]-grand-grandson?
So, nah, Darwin is no good for damning.
You might be able to squeeze, say, Schroedinger into a very nerdy curse, or maybe Descartes, but not Darwin;)
But more seriously (ok, ok, not really;) yes, so we atheists somethimes have to reach for expressions that just happen to carry a certain meaning. Even it ends up using non-existent people for certain jobs. Like my imaginary cat, here. But I digress. Otherwise there would be a bunch of things and meanings we can't say as effectively and/or conveying the same meaning.
Plus, we'd have noone to talk to during sex. I mean, "Oh, Dawkins, I'm coming!" might get the missus _seriously_ worried. By the time you finished explaining who Dawkins is and why you shout his name during sex, the mood is all gone, lemme tell ya;)
Well, there may be more than you wrote there, I wouldn't know, never been to jail. But what you do write, is no worse than army life anywhere in the world. And some even use conscription to inflict it on almost every male. Not that I defend conscription or anything, but it's not living hell either.
Dorm living with fully grown men. These "dorms" are sometimes the size of a gymnasium. A gymnasium full of grown men. Fully grown, under enormous stress, living in close quarters. Honestly, you'd have much less stress living in a car.
A lot of barracks out there pack a lot of grown men in a large confined space. Maybe not gym sized, but nevertheless. And they're under stress. Tough shit, learn to cope.
Frankly, I'm not exactly an extrovert myself, but I really don't get the "OMG, it's a big place with lots of men" mentality. So was the army, so is the office, etc. Most of human history happened that way. Whether you'd be packed with a lot of agricultural workers in little more than a big barn, or packed in a small house together with your extended family, or as a soldier in a longship/tent/barrack with at _least_ 8 or 10 members of your squad/decuria/watchamacallit. Go back to prehistory, and you'd be sleep with a lot of men, women and children in the confined space of a cave. It may seem like the end of the world if you spend your life in a basement trying to avoid contact with other humans, but it's not. Most humans are actually made to be social people. Being in a crowd won't kill you.
2 minute showers, enforced.
Well, the navy manages to live on even more inconvenient showers, to conserve water. It's giving up a bit of comfort, no doubt, but it's not the end of the world.
Scheduled bathroom times. Gotta shit? Hold it until shit time, which is usually at the start of the day and the end.
Ever pulled guard duty in the army? You're supposed to stand there and not desert your post until your time is up. This also means you can't go to the bathroom whenever you wish.
Forced labor. They don't even bother matching you up with work from your skillset. Too fat? Go work in the yard. Too stupid to know how to kill someone with a knife? Kitchen work.
Well, tough shit, sherlock. Noone asked me if my aspirations or skill set were perfectly matched to running with an assault rifle up hill, or operating a big loud AA gun. Nor if, say, cleaning the floor is against my religion.
Plus, that's the story of most people's lives even outside prison. You're rarely in a position to get your ideal dream job, or most people's work day would consist of getting blowjobs and surfing for porn. Instead most people get what's available. The guy behind the counter at the gas station or the one frying your burgers at McDonalds also aren't really paired to the best match for their aspirations and skills.
And again, if you look at human history, it used to be even worse.
Basically, I don't know. If you'd be telling me that there's something inherently humiliating or inhuman about the work they're asked to do, ok, I might even show some sympathy. But, basically, OMG, they're like Army Lite, with actually less stress and effort than the real Army... heh... dunno, fails to move me much.
Well, "Flying Spaghetti Monster damn it!" doesn't really roll off the tongue that well, plus he's not as much into fire and damnation. So, you know, it would end up a bit on par with, "Dear Enemy, I curse you and hope something slightly unpleasant happens to you. Like an onion falling on your head."
And the Invisible Pink Unicorn is too cute to be taken seriously when it comes to damning, so that one's out of the question too.
Tooth fairy? I suppose she could get scary if you speak with your head under your pillow, but a damnation that depends on that is kinda unreliable.
Santa Claus? What's he going to do if he damns you? Bring you a lump of coal? With the prices of energy lately, being damned by Santa might actually be a blessing these days, if you know what I mean.
So, you know, as non-existent personifications go, the Christian god wins hands down. Now _that_ guy can damn properly. It still doesn't mean we _believe_ in him, but he's the right non-existent guy for the job.
Actually, while generally frustrating, it _is_ possible to utterly wipe the floor with that kind of "rhetoricians."
First of all, I think "rhetorician" is too mild and misleading a term. And I'll disagree with your assessment of their motives. _Some_ are indeed the prom-queen you describe, but most IMHO are a different beast. It's usually some insecure nerd, whose whole self-image and self-respect is built upon an idea like "smart people don't make mistakes, I'm smart, ergo I don't make mistakes. Ever." The inordinate amount of effort they put into defending a dumb statement is really just defending the integrity of that mental model. The fall from that kind of temple to oneself can be _hard_. But at any rate, I think that's what motivates them. Even winning over the masses is just yet another tool, not an end. It's building the stage for an appeal to popularity fallacy, but that's just yet another fallacy in their arsenal. Again, it's means, not end.
Also, I don't think most as much thrive on the debate, as hurt and lash back. They may savour the victory, but not the fact that you're (in their view) attacking their god-like genius. Cognitive dissonance is a bitch, when it depends on an untenable position. And that's what they're doing: defending an edifice of cognitive dissonance. And the more untenable it is, the harder they'll fight back.Anyway, here's what you can do:
Step 1: Assume that he probably isn't, if it's the first post or second. People just make mistakes, and there's no need to be a bully by jumping directly to the "OMG, you used a fallacy" counter-attack. Point out the mistake politely.
Step 2: Once they have proven amply that they're not giving up on using fallacies, dismantle those. Study that list well. Then dismantle all of them. Every single appeal to false authority, every single non sequitur, every single straw man, etc. Show their argument to be the empty bullshit-bingo round that it is. They'll come with a new one. Repeat. Remember that it's actually less fun for them than it is for you, if it makes you feel any better.
Their argument _only_ works because people either genuinely can't spot those fallacies, or have a strong impression that they're bullshitted but can't prove what's wrong with it. Once you _can_ you're already orders of magnitude more prepared to deal with it.
The caveats here are many. In no particular order:
A. Don't deviate from the plan. Like a Roman Legion or Greek Phalanx, it only works at all if all parts work together. Don't let yourself be baited out of it. E.g., if he does an ad-hominem, don't get lost in proving you're not what he claimed, and much less answer with one. Just point out that it's an ad hominem and thus wholly irrelevant, and move on.
B. Don't use fallacies of your own. Don't turn it into a sophistry contest, because then you're playing on his turf and, as you pointed out, you _will_ lose. Plus, you lose the moral/intellectual high ground if you sink to the same level anyway.
C. Triple check your claim and proofs. Few things lose an argument faster than when your own accusations of fallacies are logically invalid, or it's not the fallacy you claimed.
Basically, yes, it's not easy and it's not necessarily fun. But you _can_ win. Yes, you're not trained in rhetoric, but that's why you don't want to turn it in an empty rhetoric contest. Don't try to demolish it with equally empty rhetoric, dismantle it with logic, and you _can_ win.
Whether you're willing to make that effort just for a random troll, well, that's probably the better question.
Actually, I don't think it's as simple as "male rape = teh funny, female rape = teh unfunny". I think it's more the prison part that makes the big difference.
Some people did evil things and hurt people and, well, some people want to see them hurt in return. Badly. Some 2000 years ago, we would have been shouting in the Forum (the physical Roman plazza kind, not the web kind) that he deserves to be scourged and nailed to a cross. Some 1000 years ago, well, maybe we'd be gathered with pitchforks and torches in front of the town watch, demanding that he swings from the gallows.
Well, nowadays we live in more civilized times (ok, not really;) so we shoot the wind about how funny it would be if he landed in a cell with two muscular guys called Bubba and Billy Joe Bob, who had their inbox full of "h3rb@l v1@gr@" and "enlarge your p3n1s!" spam. It's not a nice thing to wish upon someone, in fact I'll take your word that it's a _horrible_ thing to wish upon someone. But, you know, that's kind of the whole point.
Not because he's a man, but just because he's a scumbag.
Primus pilus: The "first spear" (literal translation) or "first centurion" was the commanding centurion of the first cohort and the senior centurion of the entire legion. This was the highest rank that a career officer could achieve in the 25 years he served. When the primus pilus retired he would most likely gain entry into the equestrian class. He was paid 60 times the base wage.
The Primus Pilus was so called because his own century was in the first file (pilus) of the first cohort (primus). Only eight officers in a fully officered legion outranked the Primus Pilus: The legate (lgtus leginis), commanding the legion; the senior tribune (tribunus laticlavus); the Camp Prefect (praefectus castrorum); and the five junior tribunes (tribn angusticlvi).
Due to similarity between Latin words pilus (file) and pilum, this rank is often incorrectly translated as "first spear centurion".[1]
I'm not even going to get into a debate over which _I_ think is the correct translation. That's not my point. The point is that they contradict each other and can't both be true. One page say X and links to a page which says !X. It's not even the only such pair of pages contradicting each other, _by_ _far_. It's actually quite common.
It's not something funny like San Serife. It's just someone talking out of the butt, and posting incorrect information.
They say rape isn't funny. I say fuck you! I think it's hillarious, how do you like that? I can _prove_ to you that rape is funny! Picture Porky Pig raping Elmer Fudd! Yeah, why do you think they call him Porky?
Basically, lighten up. It may be tasteful or insensitive, but it's still a joke.
And if you're going to go into "OMG someone might be offended" mode at everything that might offend someone, hey, you're not going to have much laughter in your life.
- Out go all ethnic jokes for a start, and some might even say good riddance.
- Men/women stereotypes should go too, because, hey, that't 50% of the globe's population you're insulting with that joke.
- Religious jokes will just have to go too. There's still a commandment against taking the Lord's name in vain, and some people down south take that kind of things very seriously. They might be offended by your silly jokes about Jesus playing golf with Moses and God, ok?
- To be safe, let's cut it out with the jokes about priests of various religions, some communities take them very seriously.
- In fact, let's drop all professions, from hookers to lawyers to doctors. Out they go too. I mean, someone of that profession might be offended.
- Jokes about schoolkids ranging from outright retarded to just maladjusted? Nah, that's mightily insensitive and elitist of you to laugh at someone just because he's stupid and lazy and mis-behaved. Society should support and encourage him, not laugh at him. Plus, don't you think his parents are unhappy already? Why torment them more with jokes about a kid just like theirs?
- Jokes about spouse problems, from alcohol to infidelity (of both genders) should probably go too. There are some unhappy people out there putting up with a drunk abusive husband (or sometimes wife too), or a nymphomaniac wife, or just their own obsessive suspicions on the topic. It's _mean_ to make fun of their daily ordeal. Broken families and/or domestic abuse are a more widespread problem than rape of all kinds combined. Show some sensitivity, will ya?
Etc, etc, etc.
Or you could just lighten up and go with what George Carlin said. It can be funny. Even if it's about rape.
Does it? You mean, the way an article about cloning didgeridoos, complete with pictures of little didgeridoos in test tubes, stayed on de.wikipedia.org for more than a year?
Generally that's my "problem" with Wikipedia. It seems that when I don't know anything about a topic, whoa, look at all the new things I find out there. When I do have even the minimum clue on the topic, I start noticing such things as iron being extracted from monkeys or that one of the bridges of ancient Rome was built in 1999 in Japan. (Hell of a time machine, that, not to mention valuable insight into offshoring;) Which kinda makes me wonder about the former category too.
Yes, I could follow the links to blogs and other such reputable first sources, study the edit history, etc. I'm a lazy guy, you know? Of Knoll offers me a tenth of that, but it's from a reputable source (as opposed to some random kid who claim to have a doctorate, like on Wikipedia) and peer reviewed, I'll prefer it every time.
Well, I still have a problem with that. In fact, a bigger one if it's that. If it's _my_ character, then let _me_ play it. Don't role-play my part. I'm not an NPC.
I think I even have a better example of the situation you describe: Grandia 2. There my character all the time just suddenly goes into "I'm an insensitive jerk" mode at times, and does stuff like being an unfunny jerk to of the girl who... well, is possessed by something which will kill her. Sorta like a demonic sort of cancer, if you will. She's walking with a death sentence. So, you know, it's the last person I'd want to be a jerk to.
Apparently just because they have to tell the fundamentally _Japanese_ CRPG story of the traumatized boy who hides behind a facade of being a self-sufficient jerk, but love and support from his friends turn him into a valuable member of society again. I don't know what it is about Japan that 2 out of 3 CRPGs have to be a "see, you wouldn't have done it without all these people supporting you" _lecture_. But that's not the real problem. The problem is when they essentially end up role-playing that character for me.
I understand _why_ they're doing it, but it's not fun anyway. It can be done better and it _has_ been done better by other games. You _can_ tell a story without essentially taking control of my character and forcing him back into the mold that your story needs.
Because that character is, essentially, _me_. My avatar or representation in the game world. Those moments where someone takes it upon himself to control or redefine _me_ to suit his needs, are _extremely_ annoying. Control the environment, if you must. Control what the other characters or the landscape let me, do or where they let me go. But keep your filthy hands off my character itself.
Well, you illustrate another point, namely: games who try too hard to judge my actions into good or evil, and guilt trip me about them.
Almost any choice you get in The Witcher will sooner or later come back to "haunt" you. Or rather, it will be twisted into pretending to reveal something about you (or your character, same deal) that you didn't actually mean. The witch situation does have at least a right(er) choice, but a lot of other choices just have two "wrong" options.
Warning: minor spoiler alert. It's from the tutorial, though, so nothing major.
You remember how you had to choose whether you want to go inside and prevent the theft, or stay outside and help fight that beast? It doesn't actually matter which you chose. In both cases your character will have an "OMG, it's all my fault. If I had gone the other way, this wouldn't have happened!" moment. Essentially, it'll try to blame you either way.
At other points I even got blamed for deaths that weren't my fault in any form or shape, and couldn't have possibly prevented, no matter what. And stuff like that.
I realize they were trying to make a game where there is no good-vs-evil in the D&D way, but at times methinks they tried _too_ hard. They don't need to twist everything I say or do into sounding like a wrong, immoral, selfish or heartless choice.
Just so it's not completely OT: B&W at times suffered from the same problem. There was more than one situation where being merely being incompetent (e.g., failing to save your villagers from an attack) got judged as being more evil than Satan.
Every console will be required to have the functionality to lock-out content at the consumer's cost.
Heh. Dude, you do realize that it costs bugger all to implement, right? I mean, it's essentially a
if (getGamesMinimumAge() > getAgeSetInTheConsoleOptions()) {
showWarningScreen();
return;
}
Where getGamesMinimumAge() would involve simply reading a value from the boot sector, or whatever other sector, or even an ini file on the disk. They already have the libraries to do that.
And getting a value from the flash memory, they already have the functions for that too, or you couldn't actually have any such settings.
What remains as teh uber-challenge is printing a warning screen, which can be as easy as clearing the screen and displaying a string. Again, they have the functions to display stuff.
Basically the whole thing is going to cost the poor consumers, what? If you ended up paying a whole 1000$ for someone to code that, by the time you sold your first million consoles (which is actually very very few for a console), it comes down to 0.001 dollars, or 0.1 cents per console sold.
Mind you, I'm not opposed to your picking at other details of this law, but, let's get serious with the "Oh noes, it's at the consumer's cost!" arguments.
1. You don't seem to understand the Romans very well.
For a start, they actually deliberately erased the records about some people, who they thought he _shouldn't_ be remembered. Traitors, for example, could get a "Damnatio Memoriae", meaning that the Romans literally tried to erase the person from all recorded history. Census data, chronicles, monuments, etc, they'd erase any mention they could find.
They weren't the only ones, btw. In Egypt, Hatshepsut was almost erased from history as a Pharaoh by her son (though he did leave everything alone that didn't mention her as a Pharaoh), and Akhenaten. The Greek states also occasionally practiced that kind of thing.
Basically you seem to assume that, like today, if someone got famous for the wrong reasons (at least from the point of the view of existing law and government), you'd want to know and record every single detail about him. E.g., the way everyone knows all the details about the Unabomber. In the ancient world essentially they'd try to prevent other people like Herostratus from being tempted to achieve fame by nefarious means. Precisely _because_ those bombings were made to achieve a certain exposure for him and his manifesto, someone like the Unabomber would have vanished from the records altogether in the ancient world.
2. Well, you have to understand that he achieved that notoriety a (relatively) long time after his death. It would be many decades before Rome even figured out the difference between Christians and Jews. The Jews were quite rebellious and had a major religious problem with the Romans too, so yet another group of them preaching fire and damnation against the romans, was, well, business as usual.
Basically by the time that Jesus got really famous, there was no way to go back in time and tell the governor, "psst, make sure you record everything about this guy."
3. I don't know what you mean by, "The Romans put an inordinate amount of effort into killing the guy". It doesn't seem like any signifficant kind of effort to me. Just about everything about it, that I remember, was bog-standard (in fact, regulation standard) for a Crucifixion. Even posting guards there, or breaking those two other guys' legs when they weren't dead yet, and everything, was a standard crucifixion. They already knew in advance exactly what to do when they can't leave someone on the cross for several days. The Romans were organized like that:P
Christianity only became more or less mainstream about 1700 years ago, when it was selected among dozens of other religions by a Roman emperor to be a useful tool. At that point it didn't matter whether any of it was true at all, it became a political tool, just the way it is today. I don't know if this particular Jesus existed, but I wouldn't be surprised if 'he' was a completely fictional character created by combining information about many different events and people and assigning them to one person.
Well, it's true that it hit mainstream because of Constantine, and obviously got mangled by Constantine and his successory.
But it didn't appear suddenly, out of nowhere, at that point. We have plenty of records of Christians before that, if nothing else, of the "persecutions" against them. Nero (37 AD to 68 AD) blamed the great fire of 64 AD on the Christians for example, and, to be fair, the only ones who blamed Nero for the fire were the Christians. That's a good 250 years before Constantine's conversion.
(And I say persecutions rather loosely, because the Romans didn't actually have anything against Christianity as such. They only had a law that you're not allowed to deny the official Gods. You weren't even supposed to worship the official Gods, just don't be an arsehole to those who do. You know, play nice and don't go telling other people that their gods are lies and demons. It annoys people. Especially not to the Gods of the ruling class, because then they can do nasty things when annoyed. Nowadays we consider this to be just good manners, but early Christians took it as some duty and act of faith to troll those of a different religion. And let's just say that the Romans did feed the trolls... to the lions;)
So, you know, those _before_ Constantine had to believe in _something_, if they risked life and limb for it.
I'll further risk a guess that a great factor in it was the anti-Roman symbolism of it all. The crucifix, for example, was a symbol of Roman oppression. It was a cruel execution that was reserved by law for non-citizens only.
So basically I'd say that the whole rest is, basically, irrelevant in that context. Even whether the guy was called Jesus or not or were several Jesuses. What mattered was, basically, "OMG, they even nailed God's son." There were literally millions who were very dissatisfied with Roman rule, and the promise of a God who's against the Roman imperial power too 'cause of what they did to his kid, would find a lot of willing ears.
I'm also guessing that Constantine basically had very little choice there. Christianity was spreading steadily, both in the colonies and at home, and it was rabidly anti-Imperial. The only way to "declaw" it was to adopt it as the Imperial religion. Which he did.
There was no Jesus. No history books cover any of the biblical crap other than the bible, which is hardly trusted reference material. You'd think many scholars would have documents all the magic your mythical Jesus was performing on a regular basis. You would expect some of those documents to have survived, seeing as we have masses of older material. No, nothing exists. It never happened, stop pretending your sill wishful thinking was real. Believe in whatever crap you like, just stop pretending it was real.
First of all, I'm an agnostic leaning towards atheism. I don't think Jesus was anything special, but I do think that _a_ man called Jesus might have existed. If nothing else because it was such a common name, that it's akin to saying that a Russian called Ivan must have existed. At any rate, you know, keep your canned speeches about "wishful thinking" for when they actually apply. Or was it too hard to come up with some original thought?
Second, this is such a monumental stupidity that it still cracks me up.
Get this: we don't have all documents and records from back then. In fact, we have only a small fraction. We don't even know half the commanders of the legions, or half the consuls of, say, the Gaul Empire (which was actually a bunch of provinces which rebelled and split up their own piece of the Roman Empire), or half the governors (e.g., who the heck _was_ governor of Britannia after Agricola?) You know, important people. But it was lost anyway.
A lot of records were destroyed in the warfare. A lot simply rotted away in some ruins. A lot were destroyed by the christian monks who erased old scrolls and wrote new stuff over them. Some even took it as an act of purification to destroy the heathen writings and write some copy of the Bible on that parchment instead.
So, pray tell, what kind of madness or idiocy makes you think that we'd absolutely have the records about every single unimportant John Doe? Because that's what's required to claim that lack of records proves non-existence.
No, seriously. We don't know anything about most of the _citizens_ of the Empire. What makes you think you can take lack of records about a John Doe as confirmation that it didn't exist?
For the Romans, Jesus was a John Doe. Just another non-citizen nutter who spoke against the Emperor and was nailed for it. Business as usual. According to Roman law, they didn't even have to grant a proper trial to a non-citizen, he could be executed on any whim of the governor or a military commander. Pilat wasn't even required to note anywhere that he had him executed. But again, even if you want to believe he did, we lost more important stuff in those 2000 years.
So basically, to cut it short, what you're doing there is just a pretentious kind of the Argument From Ignorance fallacy. Not knowing something doesn't automatically make it false.
You do realise that the Jews have the Old Testament too? How do you think changes to the Christian version of the old testament would somehow go un-noticed?
You do realize that the two aren't exactly identical, and the interpretations and recognized additional sources even less so, right?
E.g., the Jews were big on circumcision, the early Christians did away with that, because it didn't sound too tempting to the barbarians they were trying to convert. E.g., the Jews shouldn't eat pork, that was another thing they gave up at Paul's insistence, because for whole other provinces that was most of the agriculture they had. E.g., Judaism is fundamentally iconoclast and that's one of the most fundamental commands, Christianity threw that right into the garbage bin right there. Etc.
So while the general outline of the text may be the same, whole sections of it are, basically, declared as superseeded and no longer valid.
The Ebionites didn't consider those to be superseeded, and frankly, Jesus didn't say anywhere that they are. That was the work of the apostles, at Paul's insistence to proselytize at all cost.
E.g., right after Christ's death, we already know that there was a sect called the Ebionites, which actually contained relatives of Jesus and people who knew him personally. (They actually insisted that the leadership of the church should go to a relative of Jesus, not to Peter.) They also made no claim of resurrection, nor that Mary was a virgin (much less the later idiocy that she stayed a virgin even after giving birth), etc. Generally they thought of him as a _human_. Prophet and divinely inspired, yes, but not the divine incarnation that the later church turned him into.
What we inherited as Christianity is actually mostly due to Paul, who went fanboy and convinced the others that they must (A) proselitise at all cost, and (B) that it's ok to change stuff, e.g., about half the Old Testament, if it makes it easier to swallow by potential new followers. I wouldn't be too surprised if it involved some embellishing about Jesus too, especially given the following fact:
The Ebionites actually considered Paul an apostate. Not a misunderstanding, or mis-representation, or whatever, but outright apostate. That's how much it deviated.
2. That wouldn't even be the end of massaging it into a different shape.
The new religion wasn't even too clear about who Jesus was, or wth did it all mean. A lot of the early "heresies", like Arianism or Pellagianism are, strictly speaking, compatible with what was actually written. They just filled the blanks in differently.
It took several generations of Byzantine philosophers to define exactly wth _do_ they believe in, down to the smallest details. (The schism between Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism came much later, so yes, you did inherit the byzantine construct even if you're Catholic or Protestant.) A lot of things that resulted don't even reflect the original context or meaning, but the effort of fitting Christianity into the Greek way of seeing the world, which at times was like fitting a square peg in a triangular hole. E.g., they had to make Mary and the birth even more perfect and wondrous, because they thought that something perfect (e.g., Jesus) can't possibly come out of something imperfect (e.g., a normal human mother.)
And even then it created even more schisms and heresies, because some things made no sense to cultures who thought differently. At least one schism was because stuff that made sense in Greek, made no sense when translated into Syriac, because the words didn't have the same nuances.
They also defined very strictly what is included in the Bible, what you can write or say about it, and in which terms.
3. Which brings me to the point, they had no problem dealing with the Ebionites or with the Syriac churches which were a lot closer to where it all happened. They just proclaimed them heretics.
I'm guessing it will be the same today. People will just proclaim this manuscript as some gnostic heresy, and continue as if nothing happened.
"Same group"? What same group? Slashdot is a mass of unrelated people with opinions ranging from "pirates should walk the plank" to presenting sharing other people's property as some great fight for freedom. I'm in the former camp, for example. In regards to guns, again, you have the full spectrum, from people who are rabidly against guns, to people whose gun is their penis size symbol, whith some more sane shades in between. When it comes to Taser, you have again a whole range from people who think they're the greatest thing ever, to people who think they're a sign of the apocalypse. Again, with a lot of shades in between, it's not a dichotomy.
There is no "Slashdot crowd".
Besides, here's a fun, if more advanced concept: people can also
1. have wildly different opinions on different issues. Or
2. judge them differently, by how they fit a bigger concept.
E.g., if you judge both by how the powerful guys (government, corporations, etc) use them to bully the small guys, you have entirely different worries about the two issues. I haven't yet heard of anyone using a P2P program to torture, but the Taser for example has occasionally been used for torture or intimidation. Honestly, I can't imagine an oppressive regime's police going to a demonstration and shouting "disperse or we whip out the laptops with BitTorrent!" So from the point of view of, basically, how it affects your liberties, the concerns about the two are wildly different.
Really, the language they learn isn't that important, if it lets them achieve results. I started sphagetti-coding BASIC on a Tandy CoCo. In High school we used a language called Turing. I made a hangman game and a Connect 4 game in my grade 12 year. Last I heard, people still play that connect 4 game at my high school - almost 10 years later. I spent hours on it, and the more people that tried it out, and enjoyed it, the more I worked on it.
Well, IMHO you seem to illustrate just my point: start with a bloody game, not with PHP and databases. (It was years until _I_ had any interest more serious than games, and that was because Prolog seemed like a fascinating insight into logic and thought at the time.) And more importantly: you had instant bragging rights there. Even more importantly: bragging rights for _programming_, not for something entirely orthogonal like having some cute text on a blog. That's what motivates people to keep programming.
Blogs are the entirely wrong approach IMHO:
1. Most normal people get tired of blogging fast. It's a minority who thinks that blogging is the alpha and omega, and OMG it makes them more important than all kinds of press combined. Normal people post a few posts, get bored, and give up. So chances are that that teenager will get bored and unmotivated there long before you get to guide him into PHP.
2. There's no rational reason to go that route. Blogs have been done before and done better. If I want a more customizable blog, I don't edit HTML and CSS myself, much less get into PHP and databases just for it. I just pick one of the sites which already offer what I need. And that's from someone who's already into programming. If I were just starting? Why on Earth would I want to learn programming just for _that_?
3. There are no bragging rights to be had for the _programming_ part of it. As I was saying, it's been done before and done better. You'd have to work really hard to end up with a site that's even up to par, and a hell of a lot more where someone would even notice that yours is better in any way. The short and easy way to fame and glory there is just to post something interesting, not the programming part. It channels the motivation in an entirely orthogonal direction.
Well, I can sorta see your point, but I seriously have a problem with it being marketed as "a way to avoid actually communicating with all those difficult, boring people in your life." If I wanted to essentially tell mom that she's boring and I don't want to talk to her, well, I could do that by more old fashioned ways. Or just not call in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, think of it this way: let's say your house showed some signs of water damage, or maybe (minor) cracks after an earthquake. And I come and glue a brightly coloured poster on top of it. Maybe even a waterproof poster to prevent more water getting there. Fine. But I'm guessing most people would still have a fit about suddenly discovering a bright poster on their property's wall.
2. Additionally, I have to wonder exactly how much _are_ they supporting the wall there. I.e., if it even has that excuse.
That looks like a thick wall of rock and brick. Especially the rock part is actually pretty damn heavy. And usually pretty tough too. Plastic toy bricks, not so much.
If the rest of the wall wasn't holding them in place already, i.e., if the weight of that wall was actually resting on those toy bricks, I'm guessing they'd get crushed instantly.
TFA says they're not even fixed there. Oh, and get this, he tried to fix them there with some _glue_, but it didn't stick to the dusty rock. Maybe someone should tell him about cement. You'd think the rest of the wall would be a clue.
So basically it doesn't look to me like it's even actually "repairing" the wall. It's just a bunch of toy bricks that occupy some available space there, but not much more.
I.e., on the whole it helps the wall just about as much as gluing a poster over the hole would.
3. Hmm, dunno, I have to agree with another poster there. I found the original wall much better, in that photo.
You have to remember that those walls are likely there for historical and cultural value. You know, so people can go and look at an example of roman or medieval architecture.
If they just wanted something brightly coloured instead, they could have demolished those old walls and built a McDonald's there.
Even if I might appreciate a Duplo brick construction on its own, and the wall on its own, it's the combination that bothers me.
It's like going to a museum and putting a clown nose, clown shoes and a pink tutu on a suit of beautiful Maximilian armour. The combination actually defaces and diminishes the original.
I don't know, there's something about it that, well, seems to serve no other purpose than to visually scream "look! there's a hole here! they didn't repair it!" Much like writing "WASH ME" with the finger on a dusty car.
So from the start, your argument is based on _assuming_ where I live, and how conscription works in a particular place. A false assumption too. May I point you to the False Premise fallacy? Not even a particularly skilled one, I might add.
In other words, please address what was actually said, not your own convenient assumptions.
This particular spammer, because the talk was about him and his punishment all the time, didn't spam on an impulse.
Second, the judicial system does try to determine the degree of Mens Rea (evil intent) that went into a crime. We already distinguish between crimes done on an impulse, and what this guy did over several years. So, no, we don't lump everyone equally behind bars.
Third, you're setting up a falsehood as premise _again_: we already have ample evidence that laws like the three-strike systems for the repeat offenders, i.e., sharply increasing punishments past a point, did have a rather massive effect on crime rate. So the whole thing just isn't as simple as you try to mis-represent it.
But, anyway, the point is irrelevant to the main discussion, which was whether sleeping in the barracks and occasionally working in the kitchen in that white-collar prison counts as inhuman or not.
Since I'm that parent and know pretty well what I was saying, it seems to me like you're the one trying to set up a convenient straw-man by pretending it was something else. Lame.
1. I quote from your own message: "Second reason it's crap thinking is that just because something else is in a comparable way, doesn't mean it's a *good* way" Note the emphasis there, because it's yours. That's what I'm answering to: and I didn't say it has to be good.
But nah, you have to do the number one forum-troll trick: pretend you said something different. Nice try, no banana. It wasn't a straw man, if was an answer to what you wrote.
2. No matter how I read that message, I don't see you referring explicitly or even reasonably implied to army life. If it's not trying to change topic in mid-flight, well, then you should learn to write more clearly. If you're referring to army life, then say so.
Before I start, note that I'm very reluctant to blame society as a nebulous whole, and definitely not instead of the guy who pulled the trigger. But in this case methinks culture may bave played a role, IMHO.
There was this study some time ago -- IIRC even linked on Slashdot -- and made by a woman at that. It showed that girls who grew up on fairy tales like Beauty And The Beast and Cinderella have a higher chance to end up in an abusive relationship, with them as the abused spouse.
Her hypothesis was that they just don't know when to get out of it, and keep hoping that, just like they got told all their childhood, the beast will turn into a handsome and gentle prince.
But just so I don't pick on women alone, there are plenty of stories and (Japanese) CRPGs for boys too, who teach the same false lesson: that if you run into the biggest jerk, he's probably just a traumatized guy hiding behind a tough facade, and you can change him back into a nice guy by just enough support and being there for him.
At any rate, both illustrate the point, that most people don't fully understand sociopaths. Most people seem to assume that everyone is the same, and that you can simply appeal to a sociopath's humanity to make him realize the error of his ways and renounce it. And again, we have everything from short stories to novels preaching just that and making just that point. Not to mention that, depending on the part of the world, you might even have whole hordes of apologists of the great white predator, presenting him like the modern day hero and benefactor of the community.
Where this long rant is going is: she's not the only one. Most people have trouble recognizing a psychopath, and even more trouble wrapping their mind around the very concept. And again, we teach girls from early childhood that it's OK to mary a "beast", he'll turn human later.
Basically it's a bit like condemning someone for falling for the old Road Runner trick of painti1ng a tunnel on a rock. If she's the only one, sure, blame her. But if it turns out that 9 out of 10 people mistake it for a real tunnel, well, maybe she deserves some compassion after all.
More of a hack-and-slash action-rpg, actually ;)
Mind you, I do make just that kind of jokes about the Norse religion too, so please don't take this as a lecture or anything.
But I have to wonder just how many people, if a Valkyrie took them to Odin's hall to become Einherjar, would actually think it's great.
For a start, it's a bit like wishing you were in the Marines, as your idea of fun. The Einherjar would just train all day for Ragnarok. They'd then get a copious meal in the evening, go to bed, wake up tomorrow to train some more with their weapons and armour. All day. Every day. For all eternity.
Basically already taken in that simplified form, it was the underachieving "heaven" of some people who had become mercenaries or pirates (and had a rather short life expectancy at that) just so they don't starve. Only the eldest son would inherit the parents' farm, the others were kicked out with no means of subsistence. There weren't any jobs on another farm for them either, and the small Scandinavian towns only had jobs for so many. So they join some private army or pirate group just so they don't starve. And, of course, they had to believe there's higher meaning to that hellish life, and some god who appreciates that. And the grand reward they aspired for was... well, just the same. That some great warlord in the sky would let them sign up in exchange for food and shelter.
But it gets better than that, when you look at how they were supposed to train in Valhalla: by hacking at each other with real, deadly weapons. By the end of the day, most Einherjar would be dead and/or dismembered, having bled to death on those training grounds. Then they'd get magically resurrected and/or healed, fed, sent to sleep, and next day they'd start again.
It was a promised eternity of _pain_ and stress.
I mean, think telling someone about it, but without mentioning which religion and whether it's supposed to be a reward or punishment. See, there was this old religion where after death you could be cut, bled, dismembered and killed daily, made whole again, and next day chopped up again. Then ask them if they think it's the heaven or hell of that religion. I'm betting on the latter.
1. Nope, most of the world does practice conscription.
2. I don't think most criminals ended criminals by mistake and without any consideration. It's not like the guy was just minding his own business, and suddenly realizes, "oops, I spammed tens of millions of people and got paid millions for it, without even knowing I was doing it." I'm sorry, but just because he's too fucking stupid to think about consequences too, doesn't make him exempt from them.
3. It's not supposed to be a "good" thing, lemming. The fact may have escaped your attention that he's a convicted criminal. We're not giving him a _reward_ for it.
Yes, society could have sent him on a luxury vacation in Malorca or Hawaii, instead, with an army of servants to catter to his every whim and keep him comfortable and entertained. But that would have been a bit of a reward, wouldn't it?
It's supposed to be a _punishment_. It's supposed to be a _deterrent_. I.e., it's supposed to make the next idiot think twice about breaking the law.
So, yes, it'll be a bit inconvenient and will have some downsides. It won't be the ideal, happy place to be. That's the whole point.
So my point isn't that it's a "good" place to be. It's that it's actually a rather mild punishment. As punishment goes. In fact, so mild that millions of people go through that or worse without it being called a punishment. (Heck, for about a billion people on this Earth, that would actually be one step up from their life as hard-working, law-abiding citizens of some third-world nation.) It won't kill him. It's not hell, it's an inconvenience. That's what I'm saying.
Or in other words, there are shades of grey between "it's good" and "it's hell." Roll that concept around a bit in your head.
And considering that he _is_ a convicted criminal, and that the law _is_ supposed to include a _punishment_, I'm not moved to tears by his being a little inconvenienced there.
Well, maybe if you started by posting something intelligent. If you start with something as stupid as, basically, "OMG they're slightly inconveniencing a criminal", well, you're not much in a position to be picky about the answers ;)
Don't get me wrong, if someone were to tell me that they were doing some genuine evil or degrading stuff to him there, I might show some sympathy. But, basically, "OMG, we're so evil as to make a convicted criminal sleep in a barracks and occasionally work in the kitchen," because that's the general impression I'm left with... heh. Just heh.
Nah, Darwin is no good for a damning. SRSLY. Evolution takes something like 10,000 generations to do anything at all. So, you know, hoping that evolution damns something or someone, is somewhat _lacking_ in short-time motivation and satisfaction. How's evolution going to damn someone? Make sure that his/her descendants devolve into Orcs? Some people aren't even deterred by what smoking will do to them in 20 years, what makes you think they'd take a damnation seriously that might have an effect in 200,000 years?
Plus it's a bit like damning the wrong person. I can't say I feel any kind of satisfaction at the fact that his kids got shot. Au contraire? So why would it be any satisfaction to contemplate evolution damning his grand-grand-grand-[...]-grand-grandson?
So, nah, Darwin is no good for damning.
You might be able to squeeze, say, Schroedinger into a very nerdy curse, or maybe Descartes, but not Darwin ;)
But more seriously (ok, ok, not really;) yes, so we atheists somethimes have to reach for expressions that just happen to carry a certain meaning. Even it ends up using non-existent people for certain jobs. Like my imaginary cat, here. But I digress. Otherwise there would be a bunch of things and meanings we can't say as effectively and/or conveying the same meaning.
Plus, we'd have noone to talk to during sex. I mean, "Oh, Dawkins, I'm coming!" might get the missus _seriously_ worried. By the time you finished explaining who Dawkins is and why you shout his name during sex, the mood is all gone, lemme tell ya ;)
Well, there may be more than you wrote there, I wouldn't know, never been to jail. But what you do write, is no worse than army life anywhere in the world. And some even use conscription to inflict it on almost every male. Not that I defend conscription or anything, but it's not living hell either.
A lot of barracks out there pack a lot of grown men in a large confined space. Maybe not gym sized, but nevertheless. And they're under stress. Tough shit, learn to cope.
Frankly, I'm not exactly an extrovert myself, but I really don't get the "OMG, it's a big place with lots of men" mentality. So was the army, so is the office, etc. Most of human history happened that way. Whether you'd be packed with a lot of agricultural workers in little more than a big barn, or packed in a small house together with your extended family, or as a soldier in a longship/tent/barrack with at _least_ 8 or 10 members of your squad/decuria/watchamacallit. Go back to prehistory, and you'd be sleep with a lot of men, women and children in the confined space of a cave. It may seem like the end of the world if you spend your life in a basement trying to avoid contact with other humans, but it's not. Most humans are actually made to be social people. Being in a crowd won't kill you.
Well, the navy manages to live on even more inconvenient showers, to conserve water. It's giving up a bit of comfort, no doubt, but it's not the end of the world.
Ever pulled guard duty in the army? You're supposed to stand there and not desert your post until your time is up. This also means you can't go to the bathroom whenever you wish.
Well, tough shit, sherlock. Noone asked me if my aspirations or skill set were perfectly matched to running with an assault rifle up hill, or operating a big loud AA gun. Nor if, say, cleaning the floor is against my religion.
Plus, that's the story of most people's lives even outside prison. You're rarely in a position to get your ideal dream job, or most people's work day would consist of getting blowjobs and surfing for porn. Instead most people get what's available. The guy behind the counter at the gas station or the one frying your burgers at McDonalds also aren't really paired to the best match for their aspirations and skills.
And again, if you look at human history, it used to be even worse.
Basically, I don't know. If you'd be telling me that there's something inherently humiliating or inhuman about the work they're asked to do, ok, I might even show some sympathy. But, basically, OMG, they're like Army Lite, with actually less stress and effort than the real Army... heh... dunno, fails to move me much.
Well, "Flying Spaghetti Monster damn it!" doesn't really roll off the tongue that well, plus he's not as much into fire and damnation. So, you know, it would end up a bit on par with, "Dear Enemy, I curse you and hope something slightly unpleasant happens to you. Like an onion falling on your head."
And the Invisible Pink Unicorn is too cute to be taken seriously when it comes to damning, so that one's out of the question too.
Tooth fairy? I suppose she could get scary if you speak with your head under your pillow, but a damnation that depends on that is kinda unreliable.
Santa Claus? What's he going to do if he damns you? Bring you a lump of coal? With the prices of energy lately, being damned by Santa might actually be a blessing these days, if you know what I mean.
So, you know, as non-existent personifications go, the Christian god wins hands down. Now _that_ guy can damn properly. It still doesn't mean we _believe_ in him, but he's the right non-existent guy for the job.
Actually, while generally frustrating, it _is_ possible to utterly wipe the floor with that kind of "rhetoricians."
First of all, I think "rhetorician" is too mild and misleading a term. And I'll disagree with your assessment of their motives. _Some_ are indeed the prom-queen you describe, but most IMHO are a different beast. It's usually some insecure nerd, whose whole self-image and self-respect is built upon an idea like "smart people don't make mistakes, I'm smart, ergo I don't make mistakes. Ever." The inordinate amount of effort they put into defending a dumb statement is really just defending the integrity of that mental model. The fall from that kind of temple to oneself can be _hard_. But at any rate, I think that's what motivates them. Even winning over the masses is just yet another tool, not an end. It's building the stage for an appeal to popularity fallacy, but that's just yet another fallacy in their arsenal. Again, it's means, not end.
Also, I don't think most as much thrive on the debate, as hurt and lash back. They may savour the victory, but not the fact that you're (in their view) attacking their god-like genius. Cognitive dissonance is a bitch, when it depends on an untenable position. And that's what they're doing: defending an edifice of cognitive dissonance. And the more untenable it is, the harder they'll fight back.Anyway, here's what you can do:
Step 1: Assume that he probably isn't, if it's the first post or second. People just make mistakes, and there's no need to be a bully by jumping directly to the "OMG, you used a fallacy" counter-attack. Point out the mistake politely.
Step 2: Once they have proven amply that they're not giving up on using fallacies, dismantle those. Study that list well. Then dismantle all of them. Every single appeal to false authority, every single non sequitur, every single straw man, etc. Show their argument to be the empty bullshit-bingo round that it is. They'll come with a new one. Repeat. Remember that it's actually less fun for them than it is for you, if it makes you feel any better.
Their argument _only_ works because people either genuinely can't spot those fallacies, or have a strong impression that they're bullshitted but can't prove what's wrong with it. Once you _can_ you're already orders of magnitude more prepared to deal with it.
The caveats here are many. In no particular order:
A. Don't deviate from the plan. Like a Roman Legion or Greek Phalanx, it only works at all if all parts work together. Don't let yourself be baited out of it. E.g., if he does an ad-hominem, don't get lost in proving you're not what he claimed, and much less answer with one. Just point out that it's an ad hominem and thus wholly irrelevant, and move on.
B. Don't use fallacies of your own. Don't turn it into a sophistry contest, because then you're playing on his turf and, as you pointed out, you _will_ lose. Plus, you lose the moral/intellectual high ground if you sink to the same level anyway.
C. Triple check your claim and proofs. Few things lose an argument faster than when your own accusations of fallacies are logically invalid, or it's not the fallacy you claimed.
Basically, yes, it's not easy and it's not necessarily fun. But you _can_ win. Yes, you're not trained in rhetoric, but that's why you don't want to turn it in an empty rhetoric contest. Don't try to demolish it with equally empty rhetoric, dismantle it with logic, and you _can_ win.
Whether you're willing to make that effort just for a random troll, well, that's probably the better question.
Actually, I don't think it's as simple as "male rape = teh funny, female rape = teh unfunny". I think it's more the prison part that makes the big difference.
Some people did evil things and hurt people and, well, some people want to see them hurt in return. Badly. Some 2000 years ago, we would have been shouting in the Forum (the physical Roman plazza kind, not the web kind) that he deserves to be scourged and nailed to a cross. Some 1000 years ago, well, maybe we'd be gathered with pitchforks and torches in front of the town watch, demanding that he swings from the gallows.
Well, nowadays we live in more civilized times (ok, not really;) so we shoot the wind about how funny it would be if he landed in a cell with two muscular guys called Bubba and Billy Joe Bob, who had their inbox full of "h3rb@l v1@gr@" and "enlarge your p3n1s!" spam. It's not a nice thing to wish upon someone, in fact I'll take your word that it's a _horrible_ thing to wish upon someone. But, you know, that's kind of the whole point.
Not because he's a man, but just because he's a scumbag.
No, most of it isn't even a funny hoax, it's just false and one page contradicts the next one. Let me give you just one random example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_legion currently states (scroll down a bit):
But if you actually follow the link fo "Primus pilus" you get to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primus_pilus which says:
I'm not even going to get into a debate over which _I_ think is the correct translation. That's not my point. The point is that they contradict each other and can't both be true. One page say X and links to a page which says !X. It's not even the only such pair of pages contradicting each other, _by_ _far_. It's actually quite common.
It's not something funny like San Serife. It's just someone talking out of the butt, and posting incorrect information.
_That_ is my problem with Wikipedia.
To quote George Carlin:
Basically, lighten up. It may be tasteful or insensitive, but it's still a joke.
And if you're going to go into "OMG someone might be offended" mode at everything that might offend someone, hey, you're not going to have much laughter in your life.
- Out go all ethnic jokes for a start, and some might even say good riddance.
- Men/women stereotypes should go too, because, hey, that't 50% of the globe's population you're insulting with that joke.
- Religious jokes will just have to go too. There's still a commandment against taking the Lord's name in vain, and some people down south take that kind of things very seriously. They might be offended by your silly jokes about Jesus playing golf with Moses and God, ok?
- To be safe, let's cut it out with the jokes about priests of various religions, some communities take them very seriously.
- In fact, let's drop all professions, from hookers to lawyers to doctors. Out they go too. I mean, someone of that profession might be offended.
- Jokes about schoolkids ranging from outright retarded to just maladjusted? Nah, that's mightily insensitive and elitist of you to laugh at someone just because he's stupid and lazy and mis-behaved. Society should support and encourage him, not laugh at him. Plus, don't you think his parents are unhappy already? Why torment them more with jokes about a kid just like theirs?
- Jokes about spouse problems, from alcohol to infidelity (of both genders) should probably go too. There are some unhappy people out there putting up with a drunk abusive husband (or sometimes wife too), or a nymphomaniac wife, or just their own obsessive suspicions on the topic. It's _mean_ to make fun of their daily ordeal. Broken families and/or domestic abuse are a more widespread problem than rape of all kinds combined. Show some sensitivity, will ya?
Etc, etc, etc.
Or you could just lighten up and go with what George Carlin said. It can be funny. Even if it's about rape.
Does it? You mean, the way an article about cloning didgeridoos, complete with pictures of little didgeridoos in test tubes, stayed on de.wikipedia.org for more than a year?
Generally that's my "problem" with Wikipedia. It seems that when I don't know anything about a topic, whoa, look at all the new things I find out there. When I do have even the minimum clue on the topic, I start noticing such things as iron being extracted from monkeys or that one of the bridges of ancient Rome was built in 1999 in Japan. (Hell of a time machine, that, not to mention valuable insight into offshoring;) Which kinda makes me wonder about the former category too.
Yes, I could follow the links to blogs and other such reputable first sources, study the edit history, etc. I'm a lazy guy, you know? Of Knoll offers me a tenth of that, but it's from a reputable source (as opposed to some random kid who claim to have a doctorate, like on Wikipedia) and peer reviewed, I'll prefer it every time.
Well, I still have a problem with that. In fact, a bigger one if it's that. If it's _my_ character, then let _me_ play it. Don't role-play my part. I'm not an NPC.
I think I even have a better example of the situation you describe: Grandia 2. There my character all the time just suddenly goes into "I'm an insensitive jerk" mode at times, and does stuff like being an unfunny jerk to of the girl who... well, is possessed by something which will kill her. Sorta like a demonic sort of cancer, if you will. She's walking with a death sentence. So, you know, it's the last person I'd want to be a jerk to.
Apparently just because they have to tell the fundamentally _Japanese_ CRPG story of the traumatized boy who hides behind a facade of being a self-sufficient jerk, but love and support from his friends turn him into a valuable member of society again. I don't know what it is about Japan that 2 out of 3 CRPGs have to be a "see, you wouldn't have done it without all these people supporting you" _lecture_. But that's not the real problem. The problem is when they essentially end up role-playing that character for me.
I understand _why_ they're doing it, but it's not fun anyway. It can be done better and it _has_ been done better by other games. You _can_ tell a story without essentially taking control of my character and forcing him back into the mold that your story needs.
Because that character is, essentially, _me_. My avatar or representation in the game world. Those moments where someone takes it upon himself to control or redefine _me_ to suit his needs, are _extremely_ annoying. Control the environment, if you must. Control what the other characters or the landscape let me, do or where they let me go. But keep your filthy hands off my character itself.
Well, you illustrate another point, namely: games who try too hard to judge my actions into good or evil, and guilt trip me about them.
Almost any choice you get in The Witcher will sooner or later come back to "haunt" you. Or rather, it will be twisted into pretending to reveal something about you (or your character, same deal) that you didn't actually mean. The witch situation does have at least a right(er) choice, but a lot of other choices just have two "wrong" options.
Warning: minor spoiler alert. It's from the tutorial, though, so nothing major.
You remember how you had to choose whether you want to go inside and prevent the theft, or stay outside and help fight that beast? It doesn't actually matter which you chose. In both cases your character will have an "OMG, it's all my fault. If I had gone the other way, this wouldn't have happened!" moment. Essentially, it'll try to blame you either way.
At other points I even got blamed for deaths that weren't my fault in any form or shape, and couldn't have possibly prevented, no matter what. And stuff like that.
I realize they were trying to make a game where there is no good-vs-evil in the D&D way, but at times methinks they tried _too_ hard. They don't need to twist everything I say or do into sounding like a wrong, immoral, selfish or heartless choice.
Just so it's not completely OT: B&W at times suffered from the same problem. There was more than one situation where being merely being incompetent (e.g., failing to save your villagers from an attack) got judged as being more evil than Satan.
Heh. Dude, you do realize that it costs bugger all to implement, right? I mean, it's essentially a
Where getGamesMinimumAge() would involve simply reading a value from the boot sector, or whatever other sector, or even an ini file on the disk. They already have the libraries to do that.
And getting a value from the flash memory, they already have the functions for that too, or you couldn't actually have any such settings.
What remains as teh uber-challenge is printing a warning screen, which can be as easy as clearing the screen and displaying a string. Again, they have the functions to display stuff.
Basically the whole thing is going to cost the poor consumers, what? If you ended up paying a whole 1000$ for someone to code that, by the time you sold your first million consoles (which is actually very very few for a console), it comes down to 0.001 dollars, or 0.1 cents per console sold.
Mind you, I'm not opposed to your picking at other details of this law, but, let's get serious with the "Oh noes, it's at the consumer's cost!" arguments.
1. You don't seem to understand the Romans very well.
For a start, they actually deliberately erased the records about some people, who they thought he _shouldn't_ be remembered. Traitors, for example, could get a "Damnatio Memoriae", meaning that the Romans literally tried to erase the person from all recorded history. Census data, chronicles, monuments, etc, they'd erase any mention they could find.
They weren't the only ones, btw. In Egypt, Hatshepsut was almost erased from history as a Pharaoh by her son (though he did leave everything alone that didn't mention her as a Pharaoh), and Akhenaten. The Greek states also occasionally practiced that kind of thing.
Basically you seem to assume that, like today, if someone got famous for the wrong reasons (at least from the point of the view of existing law and government), you'd want to know and record every single detail about him. E.g., the way everyone knows all the details about the Unabomber. In the ancient world essentially they'd try to prevent other people like Herostratus from being tempted to achieve fame by nefarious means. Precisely _because_ those bombings were made to achieve a certain exposure for him and his manifesto, someone like the Unabomber would have vanished from the records altogether in the ancient world.
2. Well, you have to understand that he achieved that notoriety a (relatively) long time after his death. It would be many decades before Rome even figured out the difference between Christians and Jews. The Jews were quite rebellious and had a major religious problem with the Romans too, so yet another group of them preaching fire and damnation against the romans, was, well, business as usual.
Basically by the time that Jesus got really famous, there was no way to go back in time and tell the governor, "psst, make sure you record everything about this guy."
3. I don't know what you mean by, "The Romans put an inordinate amount of effort into killing the guy". It doesn't seem like any signifficant kind of effort to me. Just about everything about it, that I remember, was bog-standard (in fact, regulation standard) for a Crucifixion. Even posting guards there, or breaking those two other guys' legs when they weren't dead yet, and everything, was a standard crucifixion. They already knew in advance exactly what to do when they can't leave someone on the cross for several days. The Romans were organized like that :P
Or what did you mean?
Well, it's true that it hit mainstream because of Constantine, and obviously got mangled by Constantine and his successory.
But it didn't appear suddenly, out of nowhere, at that point. We have plenty of records of Christians before that, if nothing else, of the "persecutions" against them. Nero (37 AD to 68 AD) blamed the great fire of 64 AD on the Christians for example, and, to be fair, the only ones who blamed Nero for the fire were the Christians. That's a good 250 years before Constantine's conversion.
(And I say persecutions rather loosely, because the Romans didn't actually have anything against Christianity as such. They only had a law that you're not allowed to deny the official Gods. You weren't even supposed to worship the official Gods, just don't be an arsehole to those who do. You know, play nice and don't go telling other people that their gods are lies and demons. It annoys people. Especially not to the Gods of the ruling class, because then they can do nasty things when annoyed. Nowadays we consider this to be just good manners, but early Christians took it as some duty and act of faith to troll those of a different religion. And let's just say that the Romans did feed the trolls... to the lions;)
So, you know, those _before_ Constantine had to believe in _something_, if they risked life and limb for it.
I'll further risk a guess that a great factor in it was the anti-Roman symbolism of it all. The crucifix, for example, was a symbol of Roman oppression. It was a cruel execution that was reserved by law for non-citizens only.
So basically I'd say that the whole rest is, basically, irrelevant in that context. Even whether the guy was called Jesus or not or were several Jesuses. What mattered was, basically, "OMG, they even nailed God's son." There were literally millions who were very dissatisfied with Roman rule, and the promise of a God who's against the Roman imperial power too 'cause of what they did to his kid, would find a lot of willing ears.
I'm also guessing that Constantine basically had very little choice there. Christianity was spreading steadily, both in the colonies and at home, and it was rabidly anti-Imperial. The only way to "declaw" it was to adopt it as the Imperial religion. Which he did.
First of all, I'm an agnostic leaning towards atheism. I don't think Jesus was anything special, but I do think that _a_ man called Jesus might have existed. If nothing else because it was such a common name, that it's akin to saying that a Russian called Ivan must have existed. At any rate, you know, keep your canned speeches about "wishful thinking" for when they actually apply. Or was it too hard to come up with some original thought?
Second, this is such a monumental stupidity that it still cracks me up.
Get this: we don't have all documents and records from back then. In fact, we have only a small fraction. We don't even know half the commanders of the legions, or half the consuls of, say, the Gaul Empire (which was actually a bunch of provinces which rebelled and split up their own piece of the Roman Empire), or half the governors (e.g., who the heck _was_ governor of Britannia after Agricola?) You know, important people. But it was lost anyway.
A lot of records were destroyed in the warfare. A lot simply rotted away in some ruins. A lot were destroyed by the christian monks who erased old scrolls and wrote new stuff over them. Some even took it as an act of purification to destroy the heathen writings and write some copy of the Bible on that parchment instead.
So, pray tell, what kind of madness or idiocy makes you think that we'd absolutely have the records about every single unimportant John Doe? Because that's what's required to claim that lack of records proves non-existence.
No, seriously. We don't know anything about most of the _citizens_ of the Empire. What makes you think you can take lack of records about a John Doe as confirmation that it didn't exist?
For the Romans, Jesus was a John Doe. Just another non-citizen nutter who spoke against the Emperor and was nailed for it. Business as usual. According to Roman law, they didn't even have to grant a proper trial to a non-citizen, he could be executed on any whim of the governor or a military commander. Pilat wasn't even required to note anywhere that he had him executed. But again, even if you want to believe he did, we lost more important stuff in those 2000 years.
So basically, to cut it short, what you're doing there is just a pretentious kind of the Argument From Ignorance fallacy. Not knowing something doesn't automatically make it false.
You do realize that the two aren't exactly identical, and the interpretations and recognized additional sources even less so, right?
E.g., the Jews were big on circumcision, the early Christians did away with that, because it didn't sound too tempting to the barbarians they were trying to convert. E.g., the Jews shouldn't eat pork, that was another thing they gave up at Paul's insistence, because for whole other provinces that was most of the agriculture they had. E.g., Judaism is fundamentally iconoclast and that's one of the most fundamental commands, Christianity threw that right into the garbage bin right there. Etc.
So while the general outline of the text may be the same, whole sections of it are, basically, declared as superseeded and no longer valid.
The Ebionites didn't consider those to be superseeded, and frankly, Jesus didn't say anywhere that they are. That was the work of the apostles, at Paul's insistence to proselytize at all cost.
Well,
1. It was perverted from the start.
E.g., right after Christ's death, we already know that there was a sect called the Ebionites, which actually contained relatives of Jesus and people who knew him personally. (They actually insisted that the leadership of the church should go to a relative of Jesus, not to Peter.) They also made no claim of resurrection, nor that Mary was a virgin (much less the later idiocy that she stayed a virgin even after giving birth), etc. Generally they thought of him as a _human_. Prophet and divinely inspired, yes, but not the divine incarnation that the later church turned him into.
What we inherited as Christianity is actually mostly due to Paul, who went fanboy and convinced the others that they must (A) proselitise at all cost, and (B) that it's ok to change stuff, e.g., about half the Old Testament, if it makes it easier to swallow by potential new followers. I wouldn't be too surprised if it involved some embellishing about Jesus too, especially given the following fact:
The Ebionites actually considered Paul an apostate. Not a misunderstanding, or mis-representation, or whatever, but outright apostate. That's how much it deviated.
2. That wouldn't even be the end of massaging it into a different shape.
The new religion wasn't even too clear about who Jesus was, or wth did it all mean. A lot of the early "heresies", like Arianism or Pellagianism are, strictly speaking, compatible with what was actually written. They just filled the blanks in differently.
It took several generations of Byzantine philosophers to define exactly wth _do_ they believe in, down to the smallest details. (The schism between Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism came much later, so yes, you did inherit the byzantine construct even if you're Catholic or Protestant.) A lot of things that resulted don't even reflect the original context or meaning, but the effort of fitting Christianity into the Greek way of seeing the world, which at times was like fitting a square peg in a triangular hole. E.g., they had to make Mary and the birth even more perfect and wondrous, because they thought that something perfect (e.g., Jesus) can't possibly come out of something imperfect (e.g., a normal human mother.)
And even then it created even more schisms and heresies, because some things made no sense to cultures who thought differently. At least one schism was because stuff that made sense in Greek, made no sense when translated into Syriac, because the words didn't have the same nuances.
They also defined very strictly what is included in the Bible, what you can write or say about it, and in which terms.
3. Which brings me to the point, they had no problem dealing with the Ebionites or with the Syriac churches which were a lot closer to where it all happened. They just proclaimed them heretics.
I'm guessing it will be the same today. People will just proclaim this manuscript as some gnostic heresy, and continue as if nothing happened.
Oh, spare me the blanket generalizations.
"Same group"? What same group? Slashdot is a mass of unrelated people with opinions ranging from "pirates should walk the plank" to presenting sharing other people's property as some great fight for freedom. I'm in the former camp, for example. In regards to guns, again, you have the full spectrum, from people who are rabidly against guns, to people whose gun is their penis size symbol, whith some more sane shades in between. When it comes to Taser, you have again a whole range from people who think they're the greatest thing ever, to people who think they're a sign of the apocalypse. Again, with a lot of shades in between, it's not a dichotomy.
There is no "Slashdot crowd".
Besides, here's a fun, if more advanced concept: people can also
1. have wildly different opinions on different issues. Or
2. judge them differently, by how they fit a bigger concept.
E.g., if you judge both by how the powerful guys (government, corporations, etc) use them to bully the small guys, you have entirely different worries about the two issues. I haven't yet heard of anyone using a P2P program to torture, but the Taser for example has occasionally been used for torture or intimidation. Honestly, I can't imagine an oppressive regime's police going to a demonstration and shouting "disperse or we whip out the laptops with BitTorrent!" So from the point of view of, basically, how it affects your liberties, the concerns about the two are wildly different.
Well, IMHO you seem to illustrate just my point: start with a bloody game, not with PHP and databases. (It was years until _I_ had any interest more serious than games, and that was because Prolog seemed like a fascinating insight into logic and thought at the time.) And more importantly: you had instant bragging rights there. Even more importantly: bragging rights for _programming_, not for something entirely orthogonal like having some cute text on a blog. That's what motivates people to keep programming.
Blogs are the entirely wrong approach IMHO:
1. Most normal people get tired of blogging fast. It's a minority who thinks that blogging is the alpha and omega, and OMG it makes them more important than all kinds of press combined. Normal people post a few posts, get bored, and give up. So chances are that that teenager will get bored and unmotivated there long before you get to guide him into PHP.
2. There's no rational reason to go that route. Blogs have been done before and done better. If I want a more customizable blog, I don't edit HTML and CSS myself, much less get into PHP and databases just for it. I just pick one of the sites which already offer what I need. And that's from someone who's already into programming. If I were just starting? Why on Earth would I want to learn programming just for _that_?
3. There are no bragging rights to be had for the _programming_ part of it. As I was saying, it's been done before and done better. You'd have to work really hard to end up with a site that's even up to par, and a hell of a lot more where someone would even notice that yours is better in any way. The short and easy way to fame and glory there is just to post something interesting, not the programming part. It channels the motivation in an entirely orthogonal direction.
Well, I can sorta see your point, but I seriously have a problem with it being marketed as "a way to avoid actually communicating with all those difficult, boring people in your life." If I wanted to essentially tell mom that she's boring and I don't want to talk to her, well, I could do that by more old fashioned ways. Or just not call in the first place.