Well, I'm certainly not trying to wilfully misread, but I'm fairly certain I didn't mis-parse, either.
"Birth or other status, whether of himself or of his family" is grammatically ambiguous. It might mean
"(Birth | other status) whether (self | his family)", which is how you take it. It that case, "Birth status" must make sense in terms of his family, in which case it means, presumably, something like a caste system.
However, it also might be parsed
"Birth | (other status, whether (self | his family))" in which case birth status might still mean a caste system or else his status as born or unborn.
Because of two factors, I opted for the latter parsing. (a) The authors have already emphasized "before and after birth" in the previous clause (which is admittedly separated by a distance, but nevertheless gives some idea of their thinking), and (b) birth status in the sense of a caste system is an odd instance of the general term "status" to set off against "other status." Why not say "race or other status", or "economic or other status", considering that hereditary caste systems a la India and feudal Europe are fairly rare, AFAIK? So... and I could be wrong, understand, but I'm not persuaded yet... I think the second parsing is more likely.
However, christianity in itself has a number of characteristics that makes it prone to be a cause or cover for wars. For one, it is universalistic: That is, it claims it is the only path to salvation. Hence it is a good deed to bring another human to the belief.
Three points:
Religions that are not universalistic -- e.g., Hinduism -- also spawn religious wars.
Non-religions that are universalistic -- e.g., Marxism -- also spawn wars.
Christians who are universalistic often do not spawn wars, or even oppose them.
All of which means that Christianity can *in some cases* be a contributing cause to a war, but cannot *in general* be seen as more war-provoking than, say, atheism. A comparison of the English Civil War, which was religious, to the French Revolution, which was anti-religious, makes Christianity look rather civilized!
I chose the Templar deliberately (although I misremembered Phillip "the Fair" as II rather than IV) because the Templar incident illustrates how religion can be used as a cover for secular motives. There is no question that
(a) The destruction of the Templar came from Phillip rather than Clement.
(b) Phillip desired cover for his actions, and
(c) Phillip pressured Clement into signing a decree banning the Templar. The accusations of unorthodoxy were primarily slanders generated for justification.
See, e.g., Tuchman's A Distant Mirror.
The Spanish Armada, OTOH, I was wrong on. I was thinking of it in terms of Spain's colonialism in the Netherlands, not in terms of Phillip II's (the right # this time!) Catholicism.
1) The issue of abortion is the ultimate case study in the right of people not to be ruled by others' moral beliefs, whether religious or otherwise.
(A) On the one hand, you have women who might desire an abortion, but could be prevented by legislation based upon a certain set of moral beliefs. That is certainly an undesirable situation.
(B) On the other, you have unborn children who are as deserving of legal protection as any other "blob of cells" that functions as a human being; yet, they might be denied their legal protection because of legislation -- in my state of Maryland -- based on a certain set of legal beliefs. That is also an undesirable situation.
In either case, the moral beliefs of one person or group will have a significant effect on the future life of another person. It is incorrect to argue that people who believe that (A) is more tolerable than (B) are "religious nutjobs", or are even trying to impose their beliefs on others. Many, like myself, feel that we must support the lesser of two evils, until a third solution appears. Isn't that what real ethical decision-making is all about?
2) The belief that humans are people from conception transcends religious boundaries. It is true that certain religions -- notably, Catholicism -- promote that view. However, it is also true that some atheists and pagans hold that life begins at conception. That was the official position of the AMA prior to 1973 (no position is held now), and it was the official position of most of the US legal system prior to 1972.
Bottom line: you can't divide up the world into "all the idiots that disagree with me" and "the reasonable people that agree with me."
The interpretation you give is certainly possible. However, the paragraph that precedes it,
Whereas the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth...
is unambiguous. I take that paragraph to color the interpretation of paragraph 1.
In addition, historically, the issue of abortion was considered to be at stake in 1948 with the first DRC. The issue was left ambiguous, because on the one hand the rights of the child were affirmed from conception, while on the other the rights of the woman were not to be infringed as well. You might search here for "unborn" to see what I mean.
Study the Inquisition (which still exists), the Crusades (including my favorite, the Children's Crusade), and the Reformation (with particular focus on the 30 years war, and a brief look at Bloody Mary, queen of England).
...and then put them in the context of the demise of feudalism and the emergence of nationalism, which led to many bloody secular wars as well as many religious ones. Think here of the Hundred-Year's War, of Phillip II's assault on the Templars, of the French Revolution, and of the Spanish Armada.
The point is that just because people who (nominally) held religious beliefs committed violence, does not therefore prove that their religious beliefs caused violence. In some cases, no doubt the beliefs led to violence. That is certainly the case in the sorry Kingdom of Muenster incident. But in many cases, the religious beliefs were a convenient cover for a power grab.
1. Every person has the right to have his life respected. This right shall be protected by law and, in general, from the moment of conception. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.
Whereas the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth...
Principle 1: The child shall enjoy all the rights set forth in this Declaration. Every child, without any exception whatsoever, shall be entitled to these rights, without distinction or discrimination on account of race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status, whether of himself or of his family.
For crying out loud, abortion is almost entirely illegal in Ireland. But I suppose South American, Central American, and Ireland aren't Western countries?
A religious doctrine is not an entity that has the power to interfere, although a church is. You cannot bar "religious doctrines" from influencing government, unless you want to ban all people who believe religious doctrines from writing or enforcing laws. Is that what you really want?
Religions claim to derive their authority from god(s) while governments claim to derive their authority from the people.
Yet, oddly enough, certain religious persons and certain heads of state share the trait of ignoring the express will of their source of authority, when convenient. I guess getting rid of religion won't end tyranny after all.
After the Peace of Westphalia, most European countries (or Freistaates in the case of Germany) had a single established church. The same was true in the U.S. for many states. The last disestablishment was supposedly of Massachussetts in 1833, although I've also seen a date in the 20th century for some state I cannot now recall.
In areas with established churches and income taxes, part of the income tax goes to support the established church. In the case of Germany, you may designate which of several churches your tax goes to.
Giving to churches, however, still shows up on the 1040A in the U.S. under "Deductions - charitable contributions.":-)
Stuff that _I_ upload? But _I_ am not doing anything, it's _them_ downloading stuff they know they shouldn't download.
People that _I_ shoot? But _I_ didn't do anything, it's the _bullet_ that hurts them.
Pulling the trigger is actively deciding to kill someone. Making copyrighted content available on P2P is simply letting people know what you have. If no one else wants anything, nothing is ever going to be downloaded. It's the other person's decision....not yours.
I'm happy to lose my opportunity to mod the thread for this one. You're right that the bullet analogy is somewhat unapt. You are wrong to say that
Making copyrighted content available on P2P is simply letting people know what you have. If no one else wants anything, nothing is ever going to be downloaded. It's the other person's decision....not yours.
Making copyrighted material available on P2P is being a willing accomplice in someone else's decision to break copyright law. You are assisting the principal in his decision to break the law.
(In point of fact, you are republishing copyrighted material when your computer sends it over in packets, so you are *also* directly breaking the law yourself.)
If you want an apt analogy, here goes:
Stuff that _I_ sell? But _I'm_ not doing anything; it's _them_ bringing the contraband to the register and _my employee_ that hands it to them! It's their choice to pick the items off of the shelf!! ---
BTW, amusingly, the downloaders make the reverse argument: "Stuff that _I'm_ downloading? _I'm_ not doing anything! I'm just making a copy of what's already being published on the web!" ---
None of this has any bearing on the morality of copyright laws. If you think (as I do) that copyright laws in their current form are a bad thing, then petition to have them changed. But don't pretend that P2P sharing of copyrighted material is somehow "white" or "gray": legally, it's "black."
I think it would be harder to tell than we'd initially think. We have a gut feeling of what appears to be designed, but it's calibrated to a lifetime of 60-70 years, not geologic, much less cosmic, time. You could stumble on a 6-million digit number that was just 0123456789, repeated over and over 600,000 times, and you'd never ever believe in your gut that it was random.
Agreed. Still, intuitions are both misleading *and* the source of powerful ideas in science. Newton's development of the calculus and his subsequent creation of F = ma were mostly intuitive, not evidence-based. So what are we to do with intuitions that some arrangements just don't "happen"? Should we play the skeptic, or play the Sherlock Holmes? The idea of computing design, if it could be accomplished, would allow a non-intuitive basis for making that decision.
As for your "computable difference," I'd like to see what data someone could use to compute that.
Well, I would too. Obviously, no-one has produced such an equation yet, which is why I haven't signed on to ID. Nevertheless, I can't argue from my ignorance to non-existence of such an equation. Heck, I couldn't even think of Green's Theorem on my own.
The ID movement sprang de novo from the creationist movement after a few lost Supreme Court cases.
The ID *name* sprang up after those court cases, but the concept of design as a proof for God's existence goes back at least to William Paley and is implicit in the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas. Just FYI.
I read at 1, Nested, except when modding. You're right that there's a lot of detritus at -1 that I usually ignore.
But, I stand by my comment and refer you to MistShadow2k4's comment above. The majority of Troll points are assigned to posts because the modder disagrees with the opinion expressed. A genuine Troll is a person is trying to hijack the thread by wilfully posting bad info. That's actually reasonably rare, compared to the number of Troll ratings assigned.
I speak as one who metamods about 4x per week or so, and checks context when needed.
I'm not an ID expert or proponent, exactly, but I find the concept fascinating because it contains a core principle broadly applicable to origins, SETI, and cryptography (esp. steganography):
There is, in principle, a computable difference between designed and non-designed phenomena.
If that principle turns out to be true, it will change the way we pursue those fields.
I think your scenario is relatively unlikely. [Aside: is it just me, or is the
tag broken in the new/. style?]
Let's assume that the range 2" is from the end of the handstock. Now, Alice owns a gun, and is struggling with Bob over it. Currently both have ahold of the stock. Bob wins, wrestling the gun away from her. The gun leaves her hand with a velocity of 10ft/sec (try this at home to assess the reasonability of the estimate). Assuming her decoder ring had direct contact with the receiver, that gives him 1/60 of a second to squeeze off a shot before the gun becomes useless...
...unless he chases her around trying to make her tag her own gun.:-)
Point is, content can always be regarded as process if you look at it the right way. Meta-mod's have the same problem.
That's correct, but we're aiming for improvement rather than perfection. AND, focusing attention on the process is actually a backhanded way of appealing to honor: "These are the qualities we're looking for in posts. Do you see them here?"
Here's some irony for ya: I hardly ever use the "Troll" moderation for the reason that I cited above. Recently, I broke the rule for a post that seemed -- to me -- to be an egregious and obvious troll. I got marked "Unfair." LOL.
On a second reading of the post, it seems somewhat possible that the poster wasn't trolling. So was I in fact unfair? No-one knows. Ah well. Back to my no-Troll policy.
Your comments about spite-modding are absolutely in agreement with what I see, too.
In general, the current mod system tends to reward those who think thoughts agreeable to the majority of moderators;
It is impossible to avoid this, it's a democratic process; only by giving some people more votes than others can you avoid it.
Then it's no longer one-person, one-vote. A meritocracy in other words.
Then how do you decide who has the merit? Democracy again.
Sorry, I was unclear. It's not the democracy I'm objecting to. It's the focus of the moderation on content rather than process. It should be the case that you might post something that I disagree with, yet I could still recognize the merit of *because* you follow a helpful process. I saw a post recently about gay marriage that I completely disagreed with, while at the same time admired because the fellow laid out the issues clearly and well.
That kind of thing deserves mod points. By contrast, agreeing with me doesn't necessarily deserve mod points. In other words, mod points should be given for the quality of thought, not the end result.
Of course moderation will end up being democratic. I just would like to focus the masses on moderating for the sake of helping the discussion along, instead of moderating to push a point of view. I think moderation can be structured in such a way that the masses are led in that direction. Make sense?
On the chance that you're taking suggestions, I'll start a thread:
Get rid of "Troll". There are relatively few genuine trolls compared to the number of people of simply express unfounded opinions. Not that we want to reward that habit either, but calling them "trolls" is rude.
Get rid of Underrated/Overrated, or make it subject to metamodding. There is a very good reason to allow people to post Anonymously. By contrast, there is no good reason to allow people to moderate without being subject to metamods. Underrated and Overrated both allow that. As a result, Overrated becomes the scoundrel's refuge: "I don't like [Republicans|Democrats|atheists|Christians|your sig], so I'll ding you a spite point and hide behind the Overrated rule." And anyway, what could "overrated" possibly mean? Rated over what level? Well, obviously, my subjective assessment of the comment's ideal score. That's nonsense. Every mod point assigned should have some objective component to it, else it is meaningless as feedback for readers and posters. "Overrated" and "Underrated" encourage pure subjectivity.
Allow for a "Useful Sources Cited" mod, which would reward those who take the time to provide useful references for the rest of us. Yes, Google can and should be used by all... but effective Googling should be rewarded. This is different from Informative in that it rewards process rather than content.
Provide options to mark something as "Counterfactual" or something like that. Suppose Alice posts something that gets modded as +5 informative, but which Bob challenges. The moderator sees the challenge, checks the info, finds out that Bob is right, and wants to bump Alice down a bit. What are the choices? Troll, Flamebait, or Overrated. Troll and Flamebait do not fit the situation. Overrated is overly broad (leaving aside the issues mentioned above). A "Counterfactual" option could be very useful here to give specific content to the negative moderation. Also, a Counterfactual mod could be easily scored by a metamod.
Ditto for a "Sound Argument" mod.
In general, the current mod system tends to reward those who think thoughts agreeable to the majority of moderators; that is, it rewards content instead of process. As a result, comments often become cheerleading for one side or another. A good moderation system would reward those whose thought process furthers the conversation at hand, not those who spout party line.
Hehe. I guess I ironically proved my own point: "flotsam" is bad English if I don't have a reasonable expectation of being understood.
I encountered the term in Tolkien. It's part of the name of one of the chapters in LOTR, "Flotsam and Jetsam", where Gandalf finds Pippin and Merry amongst the wreckage of Orthanc.
Technically, flotsam is cargo or wreckage floating on the surface of the sea, while jetsam is cargo that has been thrown overboard (jettisoned) or washed up on the beach. However, the two words are linked to refer to homeless people: The government seemed to do little to help the flotsam and jetsam of society. -- the Hutchinson Encyclopaedia.
Presumably, "flotsam" is a corruption of "floating something" while "jetsam" would be "a jettisoned something", but that's linguistic speculation!
OR, imagine that registered sex offenders are required to wear this device as a condition of parole. Imagine that your video memory gets subpoenaed for an assault case, and some sleazy lawyer gets to see everything you were watching. Imagine that Microsoft decides to offer these with wireless transmission to your laptop (so that you can record your entire performance in the Big Game) but leaves an "accidental" backdoor in the encryption protocol, which gets zero-day-exploited by blackmailers.
Some imagine utopias; others imagine dystopias. The reality of technology seems to include some of both.
Unfortunately for liguistic snobs, there are no Holy Guardians of the One True Language.
Well, the linguistic snobs have certainly applied for the job. Truthfully, they have a point: clear, precise language is an aid to clear, precise thought. All of those people you mentioned who can't recognize logical fallacies are unable to do so because no one ever taught them to make distinctions in thought -- and those distinctions are taught via language at an early age.
Saying "Language is as it is used" is fallacious because the speaker assumes that all language use is equally valid and helpful. But that's clearly false: just look at the good and bad posts on/., or compare Blair's speeches to Bush's. Better yet, try teaching chemistry to a bunch of high-schoolers and see which ones have the most trouble. The slow students will be the linguistically challenged, 9 times out of 10.
Good language helps the speaker clarify his thoughts, points the listener unambiguously in the direction of the speaker's thoughts, and is persuasive as a side-effect. New phrases, grammatical constructions, and meanings of old words that accomplish those goals can genuinely be said to be linguistic innovation. All of the rest is just linguistic flotsam.
My vision is 20/40, with an astigmatism, and it causes minor inconveniences on the basketball court and on the rare occasions that I forget my glasses for things that require detailed reading. Other than that, I can function fine with or without glasses. I can even drive without them, although not legally. So there it is. Put another way -- I've never experienced enough inconvenience to be tempted by contacts.
Well, exactly. My aunt was one of the patients in the FDA trials of LASIK. Prior to surgery, she had 20/800 vision, wore "bottle-glass" glasses, and had constant migraines. Now, she still wears glasses, but of the normal lens variety, and the migraines are gone. For her, LASIK was a significant improvement to her quality of life and worth the risk, even at a time when the procedure was really risky.
I, on the other hand, get by reasonably comfortably with glasses. LASIK would be entirely elective for me, and I don't really want to spend the money or undergo the risk for it. The expected value of the improvement to my life is lower than the expected cost of the risks.
Slashdot Mirror
"Birth or other status, whether of himself or of his family" is grammatically ambiguous. It might mean
"(Birth | other status) whether (self | his family)", which is how you take it. It that case, "Birth status" must make sense in terms of his family, in which case it means, presumably, something like a caste system.
However, it also might be parsed
"Birth | (other status, whether (self | his family))" in which case birth status might still mean a caste system or else his status as born or unborn.
Because of two factors, I opted for the latter parsing. (a) The authors have already emphasized "before and after birth" in the previous clause (which is admittedly separated by a distance, but nevertheless gives some idea of their thinking), and (b) birth status in the sense of a caste system is an odd instance of the general term "status" to set off against "other status." Why not say "race or other status", or "economic or other status", considering that hereditary caste systems a la India and feudal Europe are fairly rare, AFAIK? So ... and I could be wrong, understand, but I'm not persuaded yet ... I think the second parsing is more likely.
- Religions that are not universalistic -- e.g., Hinduism -- also spawn religious wars.
- Non-religions that are universalistic -- e.g., Marxism -- also spawn wars.
- Christians who are universalistic often do not spawn wars, or even oppose them.
All of which means that Christianity can *in some cases* be a contributing cause to a war, but cannot *in general* be seen as more war-provoking than, say, atheism. A comparison of the English Civil War, which was religious, to the French Revolution, which was anti-religious, makes Christianity look rather civilized!(a) The destruction of the Templar came from Phillip rather than Clement.
(b) Phillip desired cover for his actions, and
(c) Phillip pressured Clement into signing a decree banning the Templar. The accusations of unorthodoxy were primarily slanders generated for justification.
See, e.g., Tuchman's A Distant Mirror.
The Spanish Armada, OTOH, I was wrong on. I was thinking of it in terms of Spain's colonialism in the Netherlands, not in terms of Phillip II's (the right # this time!) Catholicism.
1) The issue of abortion is the ultimate case study in the right of people not to be ruled by others' moral beliefs, whether religious or otherwise.
(A) On the one hand, you have women who might desire an abortion, but could be prevented by legislation based upon a certain set of moral beliefs. That is certainly an undesirable situation.
(B) On the other, you have unborn children who are as deserving of legal protection as any other "blob of cells" that functions as a human being; yet, they might be denied their legal protection because of legislation -- in my state of Maryland -- based on a certain set of legal beliefs. That is also an undesirable situation.
In either case, the moral beliefs of one person or group will have a significant effect on the future life of another person. It is incorrect to argue that people who believe that (A) is more tolerable than (B) are "religious nutjobs", or are even trying to impose their beliefs on others. Many, like myself, feel that we must support the lesser of two evils, until a third solution appears. Isn't that what real ethical decision-making is all about?
2) The belief that humans are people from conception transcends religious boundaries. It is true that certain religions -- notably, Catholicism -- promote that view. However, it is also true that some atheists and pagans hold that life begins at conception. That was the official position of the AMA prior to 1973 (no position is held now), and it was the official position of most of the US legal system prior to 1972.
Bottom line: you can't divide up the world into "all the idiots that disagree with me" and "the reasonable people that agree with me."
In addition, historically, the issue of abortion was considered to be at stake in 1948 with the first DRC. The issue was left ambiguous, because on the one hand the rights of the child were affirmed from conception, while on the other the rights of the woman were not to be infringed as well. You might search here for "unborn" to see what I mean.
The point is that just because people who (nominally) held religious beliefs committed violence, does not therefore prove that their religious beliefs caused violence. In some cases, no doubt the beliefs led to violence. That is certainly the case in the sorry Kingdom of Muenster incident. But in many cases, the religious beliefs were a convenient cover for a power grab.
Article 4, Section 1 of the American Convention on Human Rights , signed but not ratified by the U.S., and ratified by most central american countries:
The U.N. Declaration of the Rights of the Child
For crying out loud, abortion is almost entirely illegal in Ireland. But I suppose South American, Central American, and Ireland aren't Western countries?A religious doctrine is not an entity that has the power to interfere, although a church is. You cannot bar "religious doctrines" from influencing government, unless you want to ban all people who believe religious doctrines from writing or enforcing laws. Is that what you really want?
In areas with established churches and income taxes, part of the income tax goes to support the established church. In the case of Germany, you may designate which of several churches your tax goes to.
Giving to churches, however, still shows up on the 1040A in the U.S. under "Deductions - charitable contributions." :-)
(In point of fact, you are republishing copyrighted material when your computer sends it over in packets, so you are *also* directly breaking the law yourself.)
If you want an apt analogy, here goes:
Stuff that _I_ sell? But _I'm_ not doing anything; it's _them_ bringing the contraband to the register and _my employee_ that hands it to them! It's their choice to pick the items off of the shelf!!
---
BTW, amusingly, the downloaders make the reverse argument: "Stuff that _I'm_ downloading? _I'm_ not doing anything! I'm just making a copy of what's already being published on the web!"
---
None of this has any bearing on the morality of copyright laws. If you think (as I do) that copyright laws in their current form are a bad thing, then petition to have them changed. But don't pretend that P2P sharing of copyrighted material is somehow "white" or "gray": legally, it's "black."
But, I stand by my comment and refer you to MistShadow2k4's comment above. The majority of Troll points are assigned to posts because the modder disagrees with the opinion expressed. A genuine Troll is a person is trying to hijack the thread by wilfully posting bad info. That's actually reasonably rare, compared to the number of Troll ratings assigned.
I speak as one who metamods about 4x per week or so, and checks context when needed.
There is, in principle, a computable difference between designed and non-designed phenomena.
If that principle turns out to be true, it will change the way we pursue those fields.
tag broken in the new /. style?]
Let's assume that the range 2" is from the end of the handstock. Now, Alice owns a gun, and is struggling with Bob over it. Currently both have ahold of the stock. Bob wins, wrestling the gun away from her. The gun leaves her hand with a velocity of 10ft/sec (try this at home to assess the reasonability of the estimate). Assuming her decoder ring had direct contact with the receiver, that gives him 1/60 of a second to squeeze off a shot before the gun becomes useless...
...unless he chases her around trying to make her tag her own gun. :-)
On a second reading of the post, it seems somewhat possible that the poster wasn't trolling. So was I in fact unfair? No-one knows. Ah well. Back to my no-Troll policy.
Your comments about spite-modding are absolutely in agreement with what I see, too.
That kind of thing deserves mod points. By contrast, agreeing with me doesn't necessarily deserve mod points. In other words, mod points should be given for the quality of thought, not the end result.
Of course moderation will end up being democratic. I just would like to focus the masses on moderating for the sake of helping the discussion along, instead of moderating to push a point of view. I think moderation can be structured in such a way that the masses are led in that direction. Make sense?
- Get rid of "Troll". There are relatively few genuine trolls compared to the number of people of simply express unfounded opinions. Not that we want to reward that habit either, but calling them "trolls" is rude.
- Get rid of Underrated/Overrated, or make it subject to metamodding. There is a very good reason to allow people to post Anonymously. By contrast, there is no good reason to allow people to moderate without being subject to metamods. Underrated and Overrated both allow that. As a result, Overrated becomes the scoundrel's refuge: "I don't like [Republicans|Democrats|atheists|Christians|your sig], so I'll ding you a spite point and hide behind the Overrated rule." And anyway, what could "overrated" possibly mean? Rated over what level? Well, obviously, my subjective assessment of the comment's ideal score. That's nonsense. Every mod point assigned should have some objective component to it, else it is meaningless as feedback for readers and posters. "Overrated" and "Underrated" encourage pure subjectivity.
- Allow for a "Useful Sources Cited" mod, which would reward those who take the time to provide useful references for the rest of us. Yes, Google can and should be used by all
... but effective Googling should be rewarded. This is different from Informative in that it rewards process rather than content. - Provide options to mark something as "Counterfactual" or something like that. Suppose Alice posts something that gets modded as +5 informative, but which Bob challenges. The moderator sees the challenge, checks the info, finds out that Bob is right, and wants to bump Alice down a bit. What are the choices? Troll, Flamebait, or Overrated. Troll and Flamebait do not fit the situation. Overrated is overly broad (leaving aside the issues mentioned above). A "Counterfactual" option could be very useful here to give specific content to the negative moderation. Also, a Counterfactual mod could be easily scored by a metamod.
- Ditto for a "Sound Argument" mod.
In general, the current mod system tends to reward those who think thoughts agreeable to the majority of moderators; that is, it rewards content instead of process. As a result, comments often become cheerleading for one side or another. A good moderation system would reward those whose thought process furthers the conversation at hand, not those who spout party line.
Presumably, "flotsam" is a corruption of "floating something" while "jetsam" would be "a jettisoned something", but that's linguistic speculation!I encountered the term in Tolkien. It's part of the name of one of the chapters in LOTR, "Flotsam and Jetsam", where Gandalf finds Pippin and Merry amongst the wreckage of Orthanc.
Some imagine utopias; others imagine dystopias. The reality of technology seems to include some of both.
Well, the linguistic snobs have certainly applied for the job. Truthfully, they have a point: clear, precise language is an aid to clear, precise thought. All of those people you mentioned who can't recognize logical fallacies are unable to do so because no one ever taught them to make distinctions in thought -- and those distinctions are taught via language at an early age.
Saying "Language is as it is used" is fallacious because the speaker assumes that all language use is equally valid and helpful. But that's clearly false: just look at the good and bad posts on /., or compare Blair's speeches to Bush's. Better yet, try teaching chemistry to a bunch of high-schoolers and see which ones have the most trouble. The slow students will be the linguistically challenged, 9 times out of 10.
Good language helps the speaker clarify his thoughts, points the listener unambiguously in the direction of the speaker's thoughts, and is persuasive as a side-effect. New phrases, grammatical constructions, and meanings of old words that accomplish those goals can genuinely be said to be linguistic innovation. All of the rest is just linguistic flotsam.
So: "Language is as it is used *well*"
My vision is 20/40, with an astigmatism, and it causes minor inconveniences on the basketball court and on the rare occasions that I forget my glasses for things that require detailed reading. Other than that, I can function fine with or without glasses. I can even drive without them, although not legally. So there it is. Put another way -- I've never experienced enough inconvenience to be tempted by contacts.
I, on the other hand, get by reasonably comfortably with glasses. LASIK would be entirely elective for me, and I don't really want to spend the money or undergo the risk for it. The expected value of the improvement to my life is lower than the expected cost of the risks.