"Wrong. This just proves that "truth" is subjective. The "fact" remains."
This is funny, I'm having the same debate with two different people using the opposite terms as each other.
OK. Prove it. Prove Christopher Columbus even came here. (and yes, I'm just being difficult and no, I don't really believe he didn't) Just because a bunch of people wrote books about it doesn't make it so. You didn't see him here and neither did I. We're all just taking somebody's word who we trust. Fact , and truth, are subjective. Truth is of the individual, fact is of the plebescite.
"There has to be something that is right, that's what I call "fact"."
Well, in your own words, that's what *you* call fact. And what you didn't say was that there has to be something that is right - for *you*. You are not in charge of what other people think is right.
I mean, if I choose not to believe in the scientific method (and yes, I do believe in it), you can't prove a damn thing to me, ever. Period. Face it, fact is subjective, predicated on a previously existing system of belief and trust. Just ask the Amish aboyut facts. They'll have a bunch for you (electicity is the work of the Devil, etc). They will not listen to "scientific" proof because they don't believe in science. And until we die, we won't really know for sure whether they might actually be right about a thing or two. The only sources of knowledge in the world are that which you discover *for yourself* to be true, and that which you accept as true from others. If fact is so immutable, why are there so many debates about it?
"Doesn't make it right, and I may be able to prove you wrong with the facts,"
Not if I challenge everything you are basing your "facts" on. (ie, those figures are wrong, that research is flawed, etc). Everyting you believe is based on something else that you believed first. Fact is just what the majority happen to consider to be truth.
"The fact is that we don't know all the answers"
Indeed, this may be the only real fact there is, by your definition.
OK, so what you're saying is that even though the commonly accepted story of Columbus' voyage is factually wrong by your subjective account, it still gets taught in public and private schools the world over.
Thank you for proving my point. Fact is subjective.
And hey, as long as we're being nitpicky, the Earth isn't "really spherical", the southern hemispehere is slightly squatter than the northern, IIRC. that and I doubt it was a smear campaign against the Spanish, since it was Spain that financed his voyage.
So then I guess you can explain all those maps from *after* 1492 that still showed the world as having an edge you could fall off of. Not to mention dragons.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not the biggest fan of Columbus, he pulled a lot of shit over here, but you appear to be far from unbiased on the subject yourself.
Gee, it's almost like what one considers to be fact is, like, subjective, or something.
Well, I like to think that what I consider to be fact is indeed synonymous with truth, but then that's me doing the thinking...
And come on, "truth" is even more subjective than "facts". At least people who throw "facts" around like to pretend that there's a preponderance of evidence to support their position. "Truth" is something religions talk about, for crying out loud. I mean, ask the Heaven's Gate folks about the "truth". Ask the Branch Davidians. Ask the Jim Jones-ers.
If anything, "truth" is even more subjective than "facts" are. (Unless it's *my* truth, of course...)
dude, PBS just gave Tucker Carlson, the man who called John Edwards a "Jacuzzi lawyer" for having the infernal gall to sue the manufacturer of a product that sucked a child's intestines out for making an unsafe product, his own show. Then, just to make sure they're "fair and balanced", they gave the Wall Street Journal *editorial board* it's own show. Not the news organization, which deserves its own show, but their knee-jerk fascist editorial board.
"So are you arguing that 100s of years ago the world really was flat? That "The World is Flat" was true then but not now?"
Not at all. I'm saying that if you would have walked down the streets of any European city in the early 1400's saying that the world was round, you would have been unanimously pronounced as factually wrong. And if you said the reverse, you would have been pronouced factually right. I'm saying facts always have been, and always will be, subjective. The only reason we consider the statement "chlorophyll is a photosynthetic checmical" to be a fact is that we consider it to be so, based on statements from scientsts, who also consider it to be so, but at the end of the day that's really just a lot of considering. I mean, I've never proven, on my own, that chlorophyll is photosynthetic. I've never proven that electrons have spin, that black holes bend light waves, or that cancer is caused by the unregulated growth of cells. Have you? For the most part, we are content to trust the scientists.
A fact is only useful as a fact when it's accepted by the majority. For years, the fact was that American blacks were just as capable in every regard as American whites. But you couldn't tell that to many people south of the Mason-Dixon line, and that fact was therefore not useful to the abolition movement as a fact, because it was not accepted as such.
"I say it was never true, but people thought it was correct, but they were wrong."
"Go to any of the three letter network TV news sites and you'll see a lot of similarity. Consensus? Of what kind?"
Or, more to the point, on the one hand the media keep repeating this platitude about the country being more evenly divided then ever. On the other hand, all major media outlets, (yes, including NPR, which a recent study showed to have 60% republican guest speakers vs 40% democrats) are saying very, very slight variations on the same theme. I mean, the collusion is to the point where the news programs, local and cable/national/network, have their freakin weather reports at *exactly* the same time! What heppend to the marketplace of ideas? What happened to the very American idea of competition?
Oh yeah, I remember what happened - Deregulation.
Was I the only one who learned in school that there is no capitalism without competition?
"Blogs: Now your authorities are copy-catting non-professionals!"
And compared to those previous "authorities", the blogs are looking pretty damn good right about now. Blogs are simply the ultimate manifestation of free speech. You can read Matt Drudge *or* Eric Alterman. Or somebody completely different. Anybody can post anything and at least have a chance at it being taken seriously. Call me crazy, but I think free speech is still a good thing, even if a sizable chunk of those speaking freely are raving loons.
Um, yeah, life is subjective. Truth is subjective. Fact is subjective. I mean, hundreds of years ago it was FACT that the Earth was flat and the Sun revolved around us.
The only facts I can find are those that are facts for me, not for anybody else.
" Is creativity creating somthing new or is creativity just reworking something old?"
Speaking strictly in the context of contemporary (that is to say, scalar rather than modal) Western music... Put it this way. There's twelve notes. TWELVE. Period. Given the constraints of a four minute pop song, I think the obvious answer to your question is B. Seriously. There is no chord progression, no melody, no riff that is completely original, that has never been thought of before. They are possible mathematical sequences in a giant matrix, and each one has been discovered. I mean, every blues song has the same chord progression (1-1-4-1-5-4-1-1)! Every jungle song has the same drum loop ("amen brother")! The things that define genres or styles of music is a commonality in technique or purpose. It would be a bad thing for music if that commonality were made illegal.
the problem here will be enforcement. The fact of the matter is, speaking as somebody with an *intimate* knowledge of sampling technology and techniques, that a sample used creatively enough is not recognizable. Most samples that I use are cut to ehll, processed through like 5 different effects, and then used melodically. There's no way that anybody will be able to tell where I got that sample from, what it was, or (most importantly) that I couldn't have re-created that.5 seconds of guitar drone myself. Much less prove it in court. They couldn't even perform a halfway convincing analysis of the sound without a complete master of the song.
"Heck, videos contain enough commericals now that I wouldn't be surprised if MTV actually started showing videos again."
dude, videos *are* commercials. They advertise the band's song/recording/performance, depending on the video. They're four-minute long chunks of TV that MTV is *paid*, usually by the bands themselves, to put on. The bands also pay for the production of the video as well. And you'll notice that they tend to come out right before a album relase or tour - they're just commercials to sell a product. That was the whole beauty of MTV when it started - it was basically a channel of 24-hour commercials that people would beg to watch. Same goes these days for M2 and fuse.
Somewhere along the line, MTV decided to introduce original programming, but keep it as low-budget as possible, hence reality television - no stars, no writers, no directors, no sets. Just producers, assistants, and a dozen or so poor saps ready to humiliate themselves on network television for a chance at a measly half a mil... after signing all the insurance waivers, of course. The budget benefits of reality programming are the reason it'll be around for a long time.
...and somehow, in a giant coincidence, this year saw the return of *good* music to the airwaves. Funny how that happened just as they were losing tons of money at the same time as loudmouth assholes like me were screaming that profit pressure would eventually force the majors to go back to the tried and true business model of releasing product that doesn't suck.
Folks, we already did vote with our wallet. And we've damn near won. The Killers, Black Eyed Peas, Franz Ferdinand, Dashboard Confessional, Jimmy Eat World and Yellowcard are all on the charts. Rest assured, if the RIAA thought that they could continue shoveling Brtny and Jstn down our throats with impunity, they would be.
It's nice to be able to turn on the radio and hear the occasional good song. Reminds me of when I was young, and you could hear good songs on the radio as many as four or five times daily!
This episode, whether anybody wants to admit it, is drawing to a close - the RIAA have been the clear losers of the moral and financial high ground. They're not beaten, but they've had their nose bloodied and, like most bullies, once the victim fought back they decided they'd rather play ball fairly than pick it up and go home. And suddenly, good music is back on the radio. Tell your friends.
I went out and bought four CD's this weekend. All of them good, and all of them from people whose good music I had heard on the radio.
Well, for one thing, I could react and move as much as possible. I could duck, twist and contort, and try to avoid harm, but you're right, able people can also have accidents.
But my point was that able people can at least minimize them. If the pot lands on her she can't even move it off. An able person could keep the coffee from pouring out and soaking them, she couldn't. Quadroplegia is not an insignificant disability.
" You propose to consign handicapped people to a life of dependence"
I do? News to me. Seems to me that the simple fact of their being handicapped has consigned them thereto. It's unfortunate, and I'm not trying to be a dick about it, but look at it this way. There's a guy who's blind. He's gonna be blind for a while, probably. Now, he can get a seeing eye dog and enjoy a much more fulfilling life than he probably would without one. Is the seeing-eye dog a tool to his benefit, or a crutch of dependency?
Take another. A man is born with a predisposition to, and later develops, paranoid schizophrenia. Through the miracle of modern medicine he can take lithium and be A-OK. IS the lithium a tool to his benefit or a crutch of dependency?
And finally, the most relevant. An elderly man is to the point where he is unable to locomote effectively. His family spends money to buy him a wheelchair and to pay for a personal attendant. Is the attendant a tool to his benefit or a crutch of dependency?
"How would another person help if hot coffee fell on the handicapped person? They couldn't do anything flight attendants couldn't already do."
Except that flight attendants are up at the front of the plane, and have the job of attending to 150 people with normal needs instead of 1 person with special ones. If there was some sort, any sort, of emergency, the other person could... i dunno... maybe REACH the CALL BUTTON?!?! This isn't rocket science. There are abilities that disabled people don't have, that's why they're called "disabled".
And you're still missing the point. It's not about whether it's right or wrong to allow quadraplegics unescorted and unattended on commercial airliners. It's about the company's right to refuse service to anyone they like, and in this case they felt like refusing it to somebody who happened to be a walking, seven-figure lawsuit. Nobody said that "people like that can't fly on any planes", they said "this person cannot fly on *our* airplane". And it's their plane, so they can do whatever they want.
Now, if the airline in question were run by the American government, you would have very valid points indeed, because the government isn't allowed (theoretically) to discriminate based on such things.
I will be the first to admit that I don't know the first thing about airplane coffee delivery systems, except that they usually contain really shitty coffee.
"This woman knew the risks of flying alone, and decided that she was capable of doing so independently. Will you tell her otherwise?"
If it's *my* plane she's trying to get on, you better believe I'll tell her otherwise.
"Her brain works just fine, and she's able to make choices for herself."
That's very true, and if her brain could move her out of the way of a beverage cart speeding towards her after the plane hit some heavy turbulance by sheer telekinetic ability, then her brain would have a substantial degree of relevance to the topic at hand. Which it doesn't.
Because the topic at hand is insurance, and insurance companies. First let me say that I still have deep philosophical misgivings about insurance as a concept, let alone an industry. But Western society has seen fit to make it normative, so TBFTGOGGI... Look at it this way. Do you think that the reason McDonald's lets seeing eye dogs into their restaurants is just because of some law? It's because their premiums will be lower if they can tell their insurer that the blind people on the premesis are under some sort of supervision, even canine. That's just how insurance companies work.
And insurance is the invisible hand that manipulates all Western business, and can snap one like a twig. IMHO it's the single biggest force stifling Americans' inborn dynamo of capitalistic creativity. There are *zillions* of excellent businesses that will never see the light of day in Western society for the simple fact that nobody would insure them.
The current anti-French shit has gone beyond the old stereotypes when you can't read a single damn thread around here without some anti-French shit. It's bullshit, 6th grade behavior and I'm sick of it. France is not a threat to the US and we have a lot to be thankful to the French for. And bigotry sucks ass and is not acceptable to me.
And how on Earth is "what do you expect from a French snob" not flamebaitish? If it was supposed to be a joke it wasn't funny.
And also, not only have I not yet begun to blow my stack (ax somebody AC), even if I had, racism would be an entirely appropriate thing to blow it over.
And if you really think words are only words, then you must also think that the Constitution (and every other law on the books) is "just words", and the Magna Carta was "just words", and that "Common Sense" and "Civil Disobediance" were "just words". Words, backed by blood, created the freedom whose tatters we cling to today. Those words mean a lot to me, call me crazy.
Mr Anonymous-I-Make-No-Sense-Coward.
But that's OK cuz I'm now officially waaaaay off-topic...
Read the fucking article, you knee-jerk, numbnuts bigot. It's pretty clear to me that this is all, like everything else in Western Civilation lately, about the fucking lawyers, God bless 'em.
Think about it. If you owned and operated an airline, and a quadraplegic showed up unescorted to fly on your airline, somebody without enough limbs to turn herself over if, say, something hot fell on top of her, or something was moving towards her very fast and she needed to move, or a rat started knawing on her... This is a no-brainer. You're not going to let somebody who's physically impaired to the point of not being able to remove themselves from harm's way to the extent that it applies to normal, everyday caution fly on your airline. They're a gigantic, huuuge lawuit just waiting to happen. You would be slaughtered, and rightly so, by the courts, the shareholders and the media. Can you think of a more sympathatic witness than a fucking quadraplegic? Do you want to be the one to answer the question: "And when you saw that this woman had no ability to remove herself from harm's way whatsoever, to the point that, were she buckled into her seatbelt and a pot of scalding hot coffee to fall into her lap, she would be unable to prevent herself from serious injury, *you deemed her fit to be her own escort on a commercial airline flight, with all the risks that entails?*"
And hey, if you hate the French so much (and before it gets mentioned I was born of poor British, Irish and Scottish stock in NC and reside in WI now), right after you get done giving them the statue of liberty back and thanking them for helping out against the Brits and being the only other democracy back when we were and producing some of the best minds (and best food) of most of the second millennium AD, not to mention the french kiss, after you're done with all that, why don't you be a *real* bigot and go start killing them? Just hang them from trees like you guys used to do, back in the good old days. Bigots back then were *real* bigots, they lynched their victims and were proud of it. Stood around for pictures of it. Put those pictures on postcards, in photo albums, in frames. But now have you, the ubiquitous Anonymous Coward.
Back in the good old days evil wasn't nearly as afraid to brag.
Mod me down as offtopic or flamebait if you want, since I adressed the topic, I personally don't think this is either - I'm a normal American who's fucking fed up with the anti-French shit. It's fucking ridiculous. There's a lot of countries out there more dangerous and subversive to the US than France. And at the end of the day racism is fucking racism, whether it's popular or not.
Re:perhaps my evil genius hat isn't working
on
Microsoft Patents sudo
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· Score: 2, Funny
"rumors of affairs with black women"...ever heard of Sally Hemmings? Not only were the rumors true, Jefferson had at least one child with Hemmings, one of his slaves.
"The concept of "journalism", and its ethics of unbiased reporting, wasn't invented until the late 1800s."
Slashdot Mirror
yeah, what part of "comments are owned by the poster" is hard to understand?
But I've been plenty pedantic in this thread, so I'll rephrase if it'll make you happy: Truth is subjective - IMHO. I shouldn't have to
"Wrong. This just proves that "truth" is subjective. The "fact" remains."
This is funny, I'm having the same debate with two different people using the opposite terms as each other.
OK. Prove it. Prove Christopher Columbus even came here. (and yes, I'm just being difficult and no, I don't really believe he didn't) Just because a bunch of people wrote books about it doesn't make it so. You didn't see him here and neither did I. We're all just taking somebody's word who we trust. Fact , and truth, are subjective. Truth is of the individual, fact is of the plebescite.
"There has to be something that is right, that's what I call "fact"."
Well, in your own words, that's what *you* call fact. And what you didn't say was that there has to be something that is right - for *you*. You are not in charge of what other people think is right.
I mean, if I choose not to believe in the scientific method (and yes, I do believe in it), you can't prove a damn thing to me, ever. Period. Face it, fact is subjective, predicated on a previously existing system of belief and trust. Just ask the Amish aboyut facts. They'll have a bunch for you (electicity is the work of the Devil, etc). They will not listen to "scientific" proof because they don't believe in science. And until we die, we won't really know for sure whether they might actually be right about a thing or two. The only sources of knowledge in the world are that which you discover *for yourself* to be true, and that which you accept as true from others. If fact is so immutable, why are there so many debates about it?
"Doesn't make it right, and I may be able to prove you wrong with the facts,"
Not if I challenge everything you are basing your "facts" on. (ie, those figures are wrong, that research is flawed, etc). Everyting you believe is based on something else that you believed first. Fact is just what the majority happen to consider to be truth.
"The fact is that we don't know all the answers"
Indeed, this may be the only real fact there is, by your definition.
"Fact is."
Sure. Just as soon as you prove it.
OK, so what you're saying is that even though the commonly accepted story of Columbus' voyage is factually wrong by your subjective account, it still gets taught in public and private schools the world over.
Thank you for proving my point. Fact is subjective.
And hey, as long as we're being nitpicky, the Earth isn't "really spherical", the southern hemispehere is slightly squatter than the northern, IIRC. that and I doubt it was a smear campaign against the Spanish, since it was Spain that financed his voyage.
So then I guess you can explain all those maps from *after* 1492 that still showed the world as having an edge you could fall off of. Not to mention dragons.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not the biggest fan of Columbus, he pulled a lot of shit over here, but you appear to be far from unbiased on the subject yourself.
Gee, it's almost like what one considers to be fact is, like, subjective, or something.
Well, I like to think that what I consider to be fact is indeed synonymous with truth, but then that's me doing the thinking...
And come on, "truth" is even more subjective than "facts". At least people who throw "facts" around like to pretend that there's a preponderance of evidence to support their position. "Truth" is something religions talk about, for crying out loud. I mean, ask the Heaven's Gate folks about the "truth". Ask the Branch Davidians. Ask the Jim Jones-ers.
If anything, "truth" is even more subjective than "facts" are. (Unless it's *my* truth, of course...)
Hence Democracy.
dude, PBS just gave Tucker Carlson, the man who called John Edwards a "Jacuzzi lawyer" for having the infernal gall to sue the manufacturer of a product that sucked a child's intestines out for making an unsafe product, his own show. Then, just to make sure they're "fair and balanced", they gave the Wall Street Journal *editorial board* it's own show. Not the news organization, which deserves its own show, but their knee-jerk fascist editorial board.
There goes my pledge.
"So are you arguing that 100s of years ago the world really was flat? That "The World is Flat" was true then but not now?"
Not at all. I'm saying that if you would have walked down the streets of any European city in the early 1400's saying that the world was round, you would have been unanimously pronounced as factually wrong. And if you said the reverse, you would have been pronouced factually right. I'm saying facts always have been, and always will be, subjective. The only reason we consider the statement "chlorophyll is a photosynthetic checmical" to be a fact is that we consider it to be so, based on statements from scientsts, who also consider it to be so, but at the end of the day that's really just a lot of considering. I mean, I've never proven, on my own, that chlorophyll is photosynthetic. I've never proven that electrons have spin, that black holes bend light waves, or that cancer is caused by the unregulated growth of cells. Have you? For the most part, we are content to trust the scientists.
A fact is only useful as a fact when it's accepted by the majority. For years, the fact was that American blacks were just as capable in every regard as American whites. But you couldn't tell that to many people south of the Mason-Dixon line, and that fact was therefore not useful to the abolition movement as a fact, because it was not accepted as such.
"I say it was never true, but people thought it was correct, but they were wrong."
Then we agree.
"Go to any of the three letter network TV news sites and you'll see a lot of similarity. Consensus? Of what kind?"
Or, more to the point, on the one hand the media keep repeating this platitude about the country being more evenly divided then ever. On the other hand, all major media outlets, (yes, including NPR, which a recent study showed to have 60% republican guest speakers vs 40% democrats) are saying very, very slight variations on the same theme. I mean, the collusion is to the point where the news programs, local and cable/national/network, have their freakin weather reports at *exactly* the same time! What heppend to the marketplace of ideas? What happened to the very American idea of competition?
Oh yeah, I remember what happened - Deregulation.
Was I the only one who learned in school that there is no capitalism without competition?
"Blogs: Now your authorities are copy-catting non-professionals!"
And compared to those previous "authorities", the blogs are looking pretty damn good right about now. Blogs are simply the ultimate manifestation of free speech. You can read Matt Drudge *or* Eric Alterman. Or somebody completely different. Anybody can post anything and at least have a chance at it being taken seriously. Call me crazy, but I think free speech is still a good thing, even if a sizable chunk of those speaking freely are raving loons.
Um, yeah, life is subjective. Truth is subjective. Fact is subjective. I mean, hundreds of years ago it was FACT that the Earth was flat and the Sun revolved around us.
The only facts I can find are those that are facts for me, not for anybody else.
Hence Democracy.
"After all, The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" is just a C chord played over and over again."
Dude, you are so wrong. There's definately a B flat in there as well.
" Is creativity creating somthing new or is creativity just reworking something old?"
Speaking strictly in the context of contemporary (that is to say, scalar rather than modal) Western music... Put it this way. There's twelve notes. TWELVE. Period. Given the constraints of a four minute pop song, I think the obvious answer to your question is B. Seriously. There is no chord progression, no melody, no riff that is completely original, that has never been thought of before. They are possible mathematical sequences in a giant matrix, and each one has been discovered. I mean, every blues song has the same chord progression (1-1-4-1-5-4-1-1)! Every jungle song has the same drum loop ("amen brother")! The things that define genres or styles of music is a commonality in technique or purpose. It would be a bad thing for music if that commonality were made illegal.
the problem here will be enforcement. The fact of the matter is, speaking as somebody with an *intimate* knowledge of sampling technology and techniques, that a sample used creatively enough is not recognizable. Most samples that I use are cut to ehll, processed through like 5 different effects, and then used melodically. There's no way that anybody will be able to tell where I got that sample from, what it was, or (most importantly) that I couldn't have re-created that .5 seconds of guitar drone myself. Much less prove it in court. They couldn't even perform a halfway convincing analysis of the sound without a complete master of the song.
that's actually a great point... I'm sure somebody owns the publishing rights to Cage's compositions... maybe even Cage...
"Heck, videos contain enough commericals now that I wouldn't be surprised if MTV actually started showing videos again."
dude, videos *are* commercials. They advertise the band's song/recording/performance, depending on the video. They're four-minute long chunks of TV that MTV is *paid*, usually by the bands themselves, to put on. The bands also pay for the production of the video as well. And you'll notice that they tend to come out right before a album relase or tour - they're just commercials to sell a product. That was the whole beauty of MTV when it started - it was basically a channel of 24-hour commercials that people would beg to watch. Same goes these days for M2 and fuse.
Somewhere along the line, MTV decided to introduce original programming, but keep it as low-budget as possible, hence reality television - no stars, no writers, no directors, no sets. Just producers, assistants, and a dozen or so poor saps ready to humiliate themselves on network television for a chance at a measly half a mil... after signing all the insurance waivers, of course. The budget benefits of reality programming are the reason it'll be around for a long time.
Prove it.
...and somehow, in a giant coincidence, this year saw the return of *good* music to the airwaves. Funny how that happened just as they were losing tons of money at the same time as loudmouth assholes like me were screaming that profit pressure would eventually force the majors to go back to the tried and true business model of releasing product that doesn't suck.
Folks, we already did vote with our wallet. And we've damn near won. The Killers, Black Eyed Peas, Franz Ferdinand, Dashboard Confessional, Jimmy Eat World and Yellowcard are all on the charts. Rest assured, if the RIAA thought that they could continue shoveling Brtny and Jstn down our throats with impunity, they would be.
It's nice to be able to turn on the radio and hear the occasional good song. Reminds me of when I was young, and you could hear good songs on the radio as many as four or five times daily!
This episode, whether anybody wants to admit it, is drawing to a close - the RIAA have been the clear losers of the moral and financial high ground. They're not beaten, but they've had their nose bloodied and, like most bullies, once the victim fought back they decided they'd rather play ball fairly than pick it up and go home. And suddenly, good music is back on the radio. Tell your friends.
I went out and bought four CD's this weekend. All of them good, and all of them from people whose good music I had heard on the radio.
Yeah, a democracy with a king and a state church. Not that that makes England any less cool.
Well, for one thing, I could react and move as much as possible. I could duck, twist and contort, and try to avoid harm, but you're right, able people can also have accidents.
But my point was that able people can at least minimize them. If the pot lands on her she can't even move it off. An able person could keep the coffee from pouring out and soaking them, she couldn't. Quadroplegia is not an insignificant disability.
" You propose to consign handicapped people to a life of dependence"
I do? News to me. Seems to me that the simple fact of their being handicapped has consigned them thereto. It's unfortunate, and I'm not trying to be a dick about it, but look at it this way. There's a guy who's blind. He's gonna be blind for a while, probably. Now, he can get a seeing eye dog and enjoy a much more fulfilling life than he probably would without one. Is the seeing-eye dog a tool to his benefit, or a crutch of dependency?
Take another. A man is born with a predisposition to, and later develops, paranoid schizophrenia. Through the miracle of modern medicine he can take lithium and be A-OK. IS the lithium a tool to his benefit or a crutch of dependency?
And finally, the most relevant. An elderly man is to the point where he is unable to locomote effectively. His family spends money to buy him a wheelchair and to pay for a personal attendant. Is the attendant a tool to his benefit or a crutch of dependency?
"How would another person help if hot coffee fell on the handicapped person? They couldn't do anything flight attendants couldn't already do."
Except that flight attendants are up at the front of the plane, and have the job of attending to 150 people with normal needs instead of 1 person with special ones. If there was some sort, any sort, of emergency, the other person could... i dunno... maybe REACH the CALL BUTTON?!?! This isn't rocket science. There are abilities that disabled people don't have, that's why they're called "disabled".
And you're still missing the point. It's not about whether it's right or wrong to allow quadraplegics unescorted and unattended on commercial airliners. It's about the company's right to refuse service to anyone they like, and in this case they felt like refusing it to somebody who happened to be a walking, seven-figure lawsuit. Nobody said that "people like that can't fly on any planes", they said "this person cannot fly on *our* airplane". And it's their plane, so they can do whatever they want.
Now, if the airline in question were run by the American government, you would have very valid points indeed, because the government isn't allowed (theoretically) to discriminate based on such things.
I will be the first to admit that I don't know the first thing about airplane coffee delivery systems, except that they usually contain really shitty coffee.
"This woman knew the risks of flying alone, and decided that she was capable of doing so independently. Will you tell her otherwise?"
If it's *my* plane she's trying to get on, you better believe I'll tell her otherwise.
"Her brain works just fine, and she's able to make choices for herself."
That's very true, and if her brain could move her out of the way of a beverage cart speeding towards her after the plane hit some heavy turbulance by sheer telekinetic ability, then her brain would have a substantial degree of relevance to the topic at hand. Which it doesn't.
Because the topic at hand is insurance, and insurance companies. First let me say that I still have deep philosophical misgivings about insurance as a concept, let alone an industry. But Western society has seen fit to make it normative, so TBFTGOGGI... Look at it this way. Do you think that the reason McDonald's lets seeing eye dogs into their restaurants is just because of some law? It's because their premiums will be lower if they can tell their insurer that the blind people on the premesis are under some sort of supervision, even canine. That's just how insurance companies work.
And insurance is the invisible hand that manipulates all Western business, and can snap one like a twig. IMHO it's the single biggest force stifling Americans' inborn dynamo of capitalistic creativity. There are *zillions* of excellent businesses that will never see the light of day in Western society for the simple fact that nobody would insure them.
And insurance is the reas
The current anti-French shit has gone beyond the old stereotypes when you can't read a single damn thread around here without some anti-French shit. It's bullshit, 6th grade behavior and I'm sick of it. France is not a threat to the US and we have a lot to be thankful to the French for. And bigotry sucks ass and is not acceptable to me.
And how on Earth is "what do you expect from a French snob" not flamebaitish? If it was supposed to be a joke it wasn't funny.
And also, not only have I not yet begun to blow my stack (ax somebody AC), even if I had, racism would be an entirely appropriate thing to blow it over.
And if you really think words are only words, then you must also think that the Constitution (and every other law on the books) is "just words", and the Magna Carta was "just words", and that "Common Sense" and "Civil Disobediance" were "just words". Words, backed by blood, created the freedom whose tatters we cling to today. Those words mean a lot to me, call me crazy.
Mr Anonymous-I-Make-No-Sense-Coward.
But that's OK cuz I'm now officially waaaaay off-topic...
Read the fucking article, you knee-jerk, numbnuts bigot. It's pretty clear to me that this is all, like everything else in Western Civilation lately, about the fucking lawyers, God bless 'em.
Think about it. If you owned and operated an airline, and a quadraplegic showed up unescorted to fly on your airline, somebody without enough limbs to turn herself over if, say, something hot fell on top of her, or something was moving towards her very fast and she needed to move, or a rat started knawing on her... This is a no-brainer. You're not going to let somebody who's physically impaired to the point of not being able to remove themselves from harm's way to the extent that it applies to normal, everyday caution fly on your airline. They're a gigantic, huuuge lawuit just waiting to happen. You would be slaughtered, and rightly so, by the courts, the shareholders and the media. Can you think of a more sympathatic witness than a fucking quadraplegic? Do you want to be the one to answer the question: "And when you saw that this woman had no ability to remove herself from harm's way whatsoever, to the point that, were she buckled into her seatbelt and a pot of scalding hot coffee to fall into her lap, she would be unable to prevent herself from serious injury, *you deemed her fit to be her own escort on a commercial airline flight, with all the risks that entails?*"
And hey, if you hate the French so much (and before it gets mentioned I was born of poor British, Irish and Scottish stock in NC and reside in WI now), right after you get done giving them the statue of liberty back and thanking them for helping out against the Brits and being the only other democracy back when we were and producing some of the best minds (and best food) of most of the second millennium AD, not to mention the french kiss, after you're done with all that, why don't you be a *real* bigot and go start killing them? Just hang them from trees like you guys used to do, back in the good old days. Bigots back then were *real* bigots, they lynched their victims and were proud of it. Stood around for pictures of it. Put those pictures on postcards, in photo albums, in frames. But now have you, the ubiquitous Anonymous Coward.
Back in the good old days evil wasn't nearly as afraid to brag.
Mod me down as offtopic or flamebait if you want, since I adressed the topic, I personally don't think this is either - I'm a normal American who's fucking fed up with the anti-French shit. It's fucking ridiculous. There's a lot of countries out there more dangerous and subversive to the US than France. And at the end of the day racism is fucking racism, whether it's popular or not.
please don't give them any ideas...
color me trolled, but...
...ever heard of Sally Hemmings? Not only were the rumors true, Jefferson had at least one child with Hemmings, one of his slaves.
"rumors of affairs with black women"
"The concept of "journalism", and its ethics of unbiased reporting, wasn't invented until the late 1800s."
Just in time for Hearst! Yay!
no, jack ryan deserved just what he got for the simple reason that he got to fuck seven of nine.
that bastard.
users with illicit requirements?
I knew they'd been smoking *something*...