Grandfathered into what? Not SI, because, as they say right there, they are "non-SI". They're still customary units and not metric and you use them instead of their metric equivalents because they are useful for your purposes, even while saying that other people should not use the customary units they use because they are useful for their purposes.
So when you get a prescription for pills it says something like "Take two every 82 kiloseconds for one megasecond", using only SI units and no customary units like days or weeks, right?
And you're telling me that sailors in your country don't use nautical miles? Maybe they don't even use degrees latitude...
That's possible, but I would doubt it. Greek words and names were usually transliterated by the Latins with "c" for Greek kappa (and "us" for cases with Greek second-declension masculine[omicron-sigma/"os"]). And this was done even after Etruscan had gone extinct. Maybe the tradition of transliterating as such came from the Etruscans, I don't know.
So, do you think it can be wrong to advise someone to commit suicide if the commitment itself is not wrong? I'm sorry, that was my question. It has nothing to do with the particulars of the case reported here.
"If I talk someone into killing another person, whether for pay or other incentive, I am just as guilty of the murder."
I can think of cases where this is not true. Say I am the person in charge of a justified execution (say the person has to be executed or some divine punishment will come down from on high). The person who is supposed to administer the injection does not want to do it. So I tell him that it is job and that due to his poor performance recently, if he did not do his job this time, he would be fired. So I talk him into killing the person. I don't think I would be guilty of murder, because the killing was justified, despite having talked someone into killing another person.
This is really the same thought that prompted my original question: If such a killing is morally permissible, then how can advising such a killing be wrong? That seems to be a general contradiction that people have: On the one hand they say that some suicide is morally permissible, but on the other hand they say that convincing someone to commit some such suicide is nonetheless wrong. Just take any other thing which is sometimes morally permissible -- eating bread, for example. If committing suicide is morally permissible, and eating bread is morally permissible, then the two actions have the same moral status as such. So, then, is advising a mentally ill person to eat bread wrong? It would seem to have to be if advising such a person to commit suicide is wrong, because the moral statuses of the actions advised are the same and so there would be relevant difference between the two which could account for a moral difference in advising either. If advising a mentally ill person to eat bread is morally permissible, and yet advising a mentally ill person to commit suicide is wrong, then whence the wrongness? It couldn't be from merely advising a mentally ill person to do something, because, as in the bread case, advising a mentally ill person to do something is not wrong in itself. So the wrongness would have to be because of something about the action advised. But the assumption was that committing suicide is not wrong. It just doesn't work.
If it's not wrong to commit suicide, how could it be wrong to advise someone to commit suicide? You're advising them to do something which isn't wrong.
"It is basically a battle between the Puritan ideal that all pleasures of the flesh are bad, wrong, and evil, and the not so crazy idea that harm is bad while pleasure is good."
Where did this belief come from that the Puritans thought that all pleasures of the flesh are "bad, wrong and evil"? I would think that that is much more a Catholic doctrine, a religious group whom Puritans thought were more or less satanic.
As a side note -- did you know that the poet you quote in your signature was a fervent Puritan?
Well, they did have pro-athletes, music stars (weak list), and drama and so had famous playwrights and actors (where do you think we get the word thespian? Actually, we also get our words "athlete" and "musician" from the Greeks).
Okay, sure, you're right, they have to be pre-approved (I'm Canadian so I feel alright being ignorant of the subtleties of the US electoral college). But, what barriers are there for someone being pre-approved? Has anyone who has filled out that form (or its equivalent in other contexts) with the correct information ever been denied pre-approval? It doesn't seem like a requirement to fill-out a form with basic contact information places much of a limit on whom you can vote for.
I thought you could write whomever you wanted onto your ballot?
Or is your objection that voting for third-party candidates is useless because only Republican or Democratic candidates get enough votes to win and so your vote is only useful in helping one of those two to win?
I've seen this objection before. I'm pretty sure what makes it that Republican or Democratic candidates are the ones that get enough votes is because so many people choose to vote for them. So it seems your objection amounts to something like: "The majority chooses who wins, and I'm not part of the majority!"
I don't know about Genghis Khan, but Alexander was apparently hailed with all the hyperbolic praise and exaltation that could be mustered while he was alive. By the time of his death he had already entered into regional folklores. This is a guy that, when he was seventeen, conquered a nation and founded a new city there which was named after him. He had a city in Iran named after his horse -- I guess because he was sick of naming cities after himself. But no one exists in a vacuum. A lot of what Alexander accomplished was already laid for him by his father Philipp. His invasion force for Persia was quite literally already drawn-up for him, and was being managed by Parmenio, his father's right-hand man. He took advantage of Parmenio's skills until the general stopped being useful and then had him executed on the flimsiest of justifications.
Alexander is more great as a general than anything. I don't think that he would compare to many 20th-century personalities. Say Stalin, who oversaw Russia change into arguably the most powerful empire the world had ever seen up to that point. Even Hitler, who took Germany from being essentially a tributary, to the brink of European domination. Except, then he lost and the German states were reduced to an even more subservient position, one they really hadn't seen since the times of Napoleon. So you can't really say he achieved anything overall, just temporarily. I'm sure other people could describe other examples, maybe Mao? I don't know.
I took the parent to be saying that if all humans formed one population that then there would be no group differences amongst humans.
So I take it that you are suggesting that because we descended from one population which resided in Africa and yet there are still group differences, this disproves the notion that different populations are needed to maintain group differences. But that is a poor empirical argument, because after migrations occurred from the one population, then further populations were made.
I don't see how the differences could be maintained with a single population. What would maintain the groups as genetically different? If the groups are differentiated by genetic traits then they would have to breed amongst that group and members of other groups could not breed amongst that group, or else the traits would not be distributed just as well amongst other groups. But if the group only breeds amongst itself, then they form a separate population by definition! And in the long haul it seems that genetic drift amongst the single population would remove incidental differences entirely, so that there could be no differences whatsoever by which a different group could be defined.
That's not basically how it works in Canada. Read about Sec. 13 of the Human Rights Act, which reads:
" 13. (1) It is a discriminatory practice for a person or a group of persons acting in concert to communicate telephonically or to cause to be so communicated, repeatedly, in whole or in part by means of the facilities of a telecommunication undertaking within the legislative authority of Parliament, any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.
Interpretation
(2) For greater certainty, subsection (1) applies in respect of a matter that is communicated by means of a computer or a group of interconnected or related computers, including the Internet, or any similar means of communication, but does not apply in respect of a matter that is communicated in whole or in part by means of the facilities of a broadcasting undertaking."
If you look at the convictions under this section, what is "likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt" is understood broadly.
I don't know the details of the Halifax case reported here (don't really care right now to read them), but I would bet that Sec. 13 is being invoked as they are talking about postings on internet boards.
I'll probably just be mainly repeating myself, and you, for example:
I could say that there are no such things as threatening letters, that is, letters that are inherently threating. There are letters that, when read by someone, trigger fear, dread or terror. Since fears are wide and varied, there's unlikely to be any letter that wouldn't do that for someone. This, in turn, means that whether something should be considered a threat...etc.
How do you know that the author of the letter was joking or was writing fiction? It may be hard, but you use the facts nonetheless. You can question him about his intent, you can look for inconsistencies in that account. You can do the same thing for child pornography.
Text need not be generated by the author. He could generate text randomly and then select the text he wants to send as a letter. But mainly he will configure words (words which he does not make up himself) to express what he wants. Similarly a photographer can go around selecting the images he wants. But he can also get models and have them pose by his intentions and set the lighting by his intentions and set focal lengths and exposure times and angles to his intentions.
And understood by whom? By anyone with a reasonable interpretation. If I walk to a gas bar with a jerrycan and say to the attendant to "Fill it up, please", a reasonable interpretation on the part of the attendant is that I'm asking him to fill the jerrycan with gasoline. An unreasonable interpretation is to think that I'm asking him to fill my mouth with gasoline. Someone who has never seen a gas bar, a jerrycan nor gasoline would have probably no idea what I meant, and think: "He could mean anything!" Just because someone might think that does not mean that my words weren't an actual request for the jerrycan to be filled up.
Similarly for child pornography. If someone gets a young girl to pose nude with her legs spread open while men ejaculate on her and then takes a picture of this and then sells the image over the internet, a reasonable interpretation is that he intends the image to be sexually arousing. Someone who does not know what ejaculation is, does not know what sex is, does know the difference between adulthood and adolescence, etc., would have no idea what the image was intended for and think "It could have been intended for anything!" Again, that does not make it so.
"Sexuality is in the eye of the beholder... Just imagine it's an adult woman instead, and ask yourself: would no one get turned on by the hypothethical image?"
I could write a letter and someone may take it as threatening and another may think that it is not threatening. So then are threats in the eye of the beholder? I wouldn't think so: It just has to be established that I intended to threat and that the letter does express a threat on a reasonable interpretation of the text.
Similarly for child pornography then: You just have to establish that the creator of the work intended it to be sexual and that on a reasonable interpretation of the work it could be understood as sexual.
Music is good for more than just entertainment. It can be used to engender in people a feeling of beauty or the sublime. It can be used to train and teach people, make them better people. It can be used for relaxation, a sleeping aid, meditation, or even an aphrodisiac. Heck, it can even be used for subliminal messaging.
How does that describe slavery any more than most jobs?
"Someone else provides the workers money (which buys the food and home). Those providers have expectations of the workers. No further motivations should be expected let alone required."
I've never met a kid who said he'd rather never have been born altogether. But I suppose a number do commit suicide, but that in itself is not evidence that they've rather never have lived, just that they'd rather live no more.
Maybe the solution then is to open up access to suicide so that it can be pleasant. If a child does not like the deal of giving the toil demanded by parents for the gift of life, then they are free to not accept it.
I have trouble believing in the evolution of species, because I'm not even sure what a species is. I might read an article once and a while to try to figure it out, but I never really get anywhere significant, and I other things to do as well. My conception of a species is as muddied as my conception of a breed, yet I'm told that a breed has no scientific basis. I'm not sure what the scientific basis for a species is. I've heard that it has something to do with groups of organisms which can breed together. A group which can breed together is a species, an organism that can't breed with members of this group is of a different species. I don't see how this applies to organisms which don't breed at all, however. And I've also heard that it is not if an organism _can't_ breed with some group which defines that organism as a different species, but that it _won't_ breed. So someone might be able to mechanically force the organism to breed with members of the group, but this would never happen naturally. This is just plain a different definition from the first. Which is the right one I have no idea, and so I have no idea what a species is, and so I have no idea what the evolution of species is.
With the big bang I have other problems. I don't know what primordial nucleosynthesis is really. But I'm told, if I remember correctly, that the relative abundances of certain elements in our universe is evidence that once our universe was so small and dense that this primordial nucleosynthesis occurred. This then is supposed to prove that the big bang occurred. But that primordial nucleosynthesis occurred is seems to me to only show that there was a certain density of the universe, but I don't why then the universe is supposed to have been even denser than that, as at the very start of the universe on the big bang model. Why couldn't the matter and energy have been moving in an overall inwards fashion before the time when primordial nucleosynthesis began? The universe was then less dense before primordial nucleosynthesis, became denser as the mass and energy generally moved in towards each other (because that was the path it all was travelling at before reaching this maximally dense point), and then it began to become less dense as the mass and energy continued on their trajectories. I would wager I'm just talking nonsense because all the astrophysicists seem to believe in the big bang, but I don't understand the issues and so this account I give here seems to match up with the evidence just as well as the big bang model does. Basically what I'm saying is that I lack resources to even conceive of what the big bang is and how our observations give evidence for it; so how can I believe in it?
Before the game begins, all players should agree upon the dictionary that they will use, in case of a challenge. All words labeled as a part of speech (including those listed of foreign origin, and as archaic, obsolete, colloquial, slang, etc.) are permitted with the exception of the following: words always capitalized, abbreviations, prefixes and suffixes standing alone, words requiring a hyphen or an apostrophe.
That throws out his rules 1, 2, 5, and some of his 4, depending on the dictionary used.
Slashdot Mirror
Grandfathered into what? Not SI, because, as they say right there, they are "non-SI". They're still customary units and not metric and you use them instead of their metric equivalents because they are useful for your purposes, even while saying that other people should not use the customary units they use because they are useful for their purposes.
So when you get a prescription for pills it says something like "Take two every 82 kiloseconds for one megasecond", using only SI units and no customary units like days or weeks, right?
And you're telling me that sailors in your country don't use nautical miles? Maybe they don't even use degrees latitude...
That's possible, but I would doubt it. Greek words and names were usually transliterated by the Latins with "c" for Greek kappa (and "us" for cases with Greek second-declension masculine[omicron-sigma/"os"]). And this was done even after Etruscan had gone extinct. Maybe the tradition of transliterating as such came from the Etruscans, I don't know.
I highly doubt the Latins used "Ikaros" very often. Maybe when they were referring to the Greek. Ovid certainly used "Icarus": http://users.telenet.be/daedalus/Ovid/DaedIcar.htm.
Shouldn't your name be "SputnikPanik" then?
So, do you think it can be wrong to advise someone to commit suicide if the commitment itself is not wrong? I'm sorry, that was my question. It has nothing to do with the particulars of the case reported here.
"If I talk someone into killing another person, whether for pay or other incentive, I am just as guilty of the murder."
I can think of cases where this is not true. Say I am the person in charge of a justified execution (say the person has to be executed or some divine punishment will come down from on high). The person who is supposed to administer the injection does not want to do it. So I tell him that it is job and that due to his poor performance recently, if he did not do his job this time, he would be fired. So I talk him into killing the person. I don't think I would be guilty of murder, because the killing was justified, despite having talked someone into killing another person.
This is really the same thought that prompted my original question: If such a killing is morally permissible, then how can advising such a killing be wrong? That seems to be a general contradiction that people have: On the one hand they say that some suicide is morally permissible, but on the other hand they say that convincing someone to commit some such suicide is nonetheless wrong. Just take any other thing which is sometimes morally permissible -- eating bread, for example. If committing suicide is morally permissible, and eating bread is morally permissible, then the two actions have the same moral status as such. So, then, is advising a mentally ill person to eat bread wrong? It would seem to have to be if advising such a person to commit suicide is wrong, because the moral statuses of the actions advised are the same and so there would be relevant difference between the two which could account for a moral difference in advising either. If advising a mentally ill person to eat bread is morally permissible, and yet advising a mentally ill person to commit suicide is wrong, then whence the wrongness? It couldn't be from merely advising a mentally ill person to do something, because, as in the bread case, advising a mentally ill person to do something is not wrong in itself. So the wrongness would have to be because of something about the action advised. But the assumption was that committing suicide is not wrong. It just doesn't work.
If it's not wrong to commit suicide, how could it be wrong to advise someone to commit suicide? You're advising them to do something which isn't wrong.
"It is basically a battle between the Puritan ideal that all pleasures of the flesh are bad, wrong, and evil, and the not so crazy idea that harm is bad while pleasure is good."
Where did this belief come from that the Puritans thought that all pleasures of the flesh are "bad, wrong and evil"? I would think that that is much more a Catholic doctrine, a religious group whom Puritans thought were more or less satanic.
As a side note -- did you know that the poet you quote in your signature was a fervent Puritan?
But that is talking about ColberT running as a Democratic party candidate, not running altogether.
Well, they did have pro-athletes, music stars (weak list), and drama and so had famous playwrights and actors (where do you think we get the word thespian? Actually, we also get our words "athlete" and "musician" from the Greeks).
Okay, sure, you're right, they have to be pre-approved (I'm Canadian so I feel alright being ignorant of the subtleties of the US electoral college). But, what barriers are there for someone being pre-approved? Has anyone who has filled out that form (or its equivalent in other contexts) with the correct information ever been denied pre-approval? It doesn't seem like a requirement to fill-out a form with basic contact information places much of a limit on whom you can vote for.
I thought you could write whomever you wanted onto your ballot?
Or is your objection that voting for third-party candidates is useless because only Republican or Democratic candidates get enough votes to win and so your vote is only useful in helping one of those two to win?
I've seen this objection before. I'm pretty sure what makes it that Republican or Democratic candidates are the ones that get enough votes is because so many people choose to vote for them. So it seems your objection amounts to something like: "The majority chooses who wins, and I'm not part of the majority!"
I don't know about Genghis Khan, but Alexander was apparently hailed with all the hyperbolic praise and exaltation that could be mustered while he was alive. By the time of his death he had already entered into regional folklores. This is a guy that, when he was seventeen, conquered a nation and founded a new city there which was named after him. He had a city in Iran named after his horse -- I guess because he was sick of naming cities after himself. But no one exists in a vacuum. A lot of what Alexander accomplished was already laid for him by his father Philipp. His invasion force for Persia was quite literally already drawn-up for him, and was being managed by Parmenio, his father's right-hand man. He took advantage of Parmenio's skills until the general stopped being useful and then had him executed on the flimsiest of justifications.
Alexander is more great as a general than anything. I don't think that he would compare to many 20th-century personalities. Say Stalin, who oversaw Russia change into arguably the most powerful empire the world had ever seen up to that point. Even Hitler, who took Germany from being essentially a tributary, to the brink of European domination. Except, then he lost and the German states were reduced to an even more subservient position, one they really hadn't seen since the times of Napoleon. So you can't really say he achieved anything overall, just temporarily. I'm sure other people could describe other examples, maybe Mao? I don't know.
"else the traits would not be distributed" should not have that "not".
I took the parent to be saying that if all humans formed one population that then there would be no group differences amongst humans.
So I take it that you are suggesting that because we descended from one population which resided in Africa and yet there are still group differences, this disproves the notion that different populations are needed to maintain group differences. But that is a poor empirical argument, because after migrations occurred from the one population, then further populations were made.
I don't see how the differences could be maintained with a single population. What would maintain the groups as genetically different? If the groups are differentiated by genetic traits then they would have to breed amongst that group and members of other groups could not breed amongst that group, or else the traits would not be distributed just as well amongst other groups. But if the group only breeds amongst itself, then they form a separate population by definition! And in the long haul it seems that genetic drift amongst the single population would remove incidental differences entirely, so that there could be no differences whatsoever by which a different group could be defined.
That's not basically how it works in Canada. Read about Sec. 13 of the Human Rights Act, which reads:
" 13. (1) It is a discriminatory practice for a person or a group of persons acting in concert to communicate telephonically or to cause to be so communicated, repeatedly, in whole or in part by means of the facilities of a telecommunication undertaking within the legislative authority of Parliament, any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.
Interpretation
(2) For greater certainty, subsection (1) applies in respect of a matter that is communicated by means of a computer or a group of interconnected or related computers, including the Internet, or any similar means of communication, but does not apply in respect of a matter that is communicated in whole or in part by means of the facilities of a broadcasting undertaking."
If you look at the convictions under this section, what is "likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt" is understood broadly.
I don't know the details of the Halifax case reported here (don't really care right now to read them), but I would bet that Sec. 13 is being invoked as they are talking about postings on internet boards.
Does interracial breeding even fit the categorical imperative?
I'll probably just be mainly repeating myself, and you, for example:
I could say that there are no such things as threatening letters, that is, letters that are inherently threating. There are letters that, when read by someone, trigger fear, dread or terror. Since fears are wide and varied, there's unlikely to be any letter that wouldn't do that for someone. This, in turn, means that whether something should be considered a threat...etc.
How do you know that the author of the letter was joking or was writing fiction? It may be hard, but you use the facts nonetheless. You can question him about his intent, you can look for inconsistencies in that account. You can do the same thing for child pornography.
Text need not be generated by the author. He could generate text randomly and then select the text he wants to send as a letter. But mainly he will configure words (words which he does not make up himself) to express what he wants. Similarly a photographer can go around selecting the images he wants. But he can also get models and have them pose by his intentions and set the lighting by his intentions and set focal lengths and exposure times and angles to his intentions.
And understood by whom? By anyone with a reasonable interpretation. If I walk to a gas bar with a jerrycan and say to the attendant to "Fill it up, please", a reasonable interpretation on the part of the attendant is that I'm asking him to fill the jerrycan with gasoline. An unreasonable interpretation is to think that I'm asking him to fill my mouth with gasoline. Someone who has never seen a gas bar, a jerrycan nor gasoline would have probably no idea what I meant, and think: "He could mean anything!" Just because someone might think that does not mean that my words weren't an actual request for the jerrycan to be filled up.
Similarly for child pornography. If someone gets a young girl to pose nude with her legs spread open while men ejaculate on her and then takes a picture of this and then sells the image over the internet, a reasonable interpretation is that he intends the image to be sexually arousing. Someone who does not know what ejaculation is, does not know what sex is, does know the difference between adulthood and adolescence, etc., would have no idea what the image was intended for and think "It could have been intended for anything!" Again, that does not make it so.
"Sexuality is in the eye of the beholder... Just imagine it's an adult woman instead, and ask yourself: would no one get turned on by the hypothethical image?"
I could write a letter and someone may take it as threatening and another may think that it is not threatening. So then are threats in the eye of the beholder? I wouldn't think so: It just has to be established that I intended to threat and that the letter does express a threat on a reasonable interpretation of the text.
Similarly for child pornography then: You just have to establish that the creator of the work intended it to be sexual and that on a reasonable interpretation of the work it could be understood as sexual.
Music is good for more than just entertainment. It can be used to engender in people a feeling of beauty or the sublime. It can be used to train and teach people, make them better people. It can be used for relaxation, a sleeping aid, meditation, or even an aphrodisiac. Heck, it can even be used for subliminal messaging.
How does that describe slavery any more than most jobs?
"Someone else provides the workers money (which buys the food and home). Those providers have expectations of the workers. No further motivations should be expected let alone required."
May I suggest a bottle of scotch and an overdose of heroin, then?
I've never met a kid who said he'd rather never have been born altogether. But I suppose a number do commit suicide, but that in itself is not evidence that they've rather never have lived, just that they'd rather live no more.
Maybe the solution then is to open up access to suicide so that it can be pleasant. If a child does not like the deal of giving the toil demanded by parents for the gift of life, then they are free to not accept it.
I have trouble believing in the evolution of species, because I'm not even sure what a species is. I might read an article once and a while to try to figure it out, but I never really get anywhere significant, and I other things to do as well. My conception of a species is as muddied as my conception of a breed, yet I'm told that a breed has no scientific basis. I'm not sure what the scientific basis for a species is. I've heard that it has something to do with groups of organisms which can breed together. A group which can breed together is a species, an organism that can't breed with members of this group is of a different species. I don't see how this applies to organisms which don't breed at all, however. And I've also heard that it is not if an organism _can't_ breed with some group which defines that organism as a different species, but that it _won't_ breed. So someone might be able to mechanically force the organism to breed with members of the group, but this would never happen naturally. This is just plain a different definition from the first. Which is the right one I have no idea, and so I have no idea what a species is, and so I have no idea what the evolution of species is.
With the big bang I have other problems. I don't know what primordial nucleosynthesis is really. But I'm told, if I remember correctly, that the relative abundances of certain elements in our universe is evidence that once our universe was so small and dense that this primordial nucleosynthesis occurred. This then is supposed to prove that the big bang occurred. But that primordial nucleosynthesis occurred is seems to me to only show that there was a certain density of the universe, but I don't why then the universe is supposed to have been even denser than that, as at the very start of the universe on the big bang model. Why couldn't the matter and energy have been moving in an overall inwards fashion before the time when primordial nucleosynthesis began? The universe was then less dense before primordial nucleosynthesis, became denser as the mass and energy generally moved in towards each other (because that was the path it all was travelling at before reaching this maximally dense point), and then it began to become less dense as the mass and energy continued on their trajectories. I would wager I'm just talking nonsense because all the astrophysicists seem to believe in the big bang, but I don't understand the issues and so this account I give here seems to match up with the evidence just as well as the big bang model does. Basically what I'm saying is that I lack resources to even conceive of what the big bang is and how our observations give evidence for it; so how can I believe in it?
I'm sure there's different versions but here: Rules for the American/Canadian version of scrabble. Note:
That throws out his rules 1, 2, 5, and some of his 4, depending on the dictionary used.