It should be pointed out that the choice thing is really a red herring. If homosexuality were a choice, that would still be no reason to persecute gay people.
No, you're wrong, unfortunately. Those who are anti-gay would seize on the "choice" as simply being an immoral one.
The basis of ethics is choice: if someone has no choice in how they act, you can't call it either ethical or unethical. No one says a cat is immoral for chasing little birdies.
From the conservative religious viewpoint, you want to see gay people as making a wrong choice, not just following their natural instincts.
Any heterosexual man has the same basic physical capabilites as a homosexual man, so he could easily engage in homosexual acts... if he simply decides to reject his moral beliefs.
What happens if you throw a repressed Christian in an Egyptian river?
The problem with your thought experiment is that many people engage in behavior that is socially disapproved of, may have serious negative consequences, and may involve disquieting physical aspects. Just look at the people involved with drugs, especially some of the more horrific ones. The outcome of meth addiction is well know, and rather ugly, but people do it anyway. Then there are the even more dangerous drugs that rot your body like Krokodil . And what about prostitution? People engaged in that are continually doing things that have a significant "ick" factor, but do it anyway.
No, the point is that if homosexuality were purely a matter of choosing between A or B, then it's irrelevant what social, aesthetic, moral or other factors are concerned.
And people who are addicted to drugs or forced into prostitution aren't making neutral lifestyle choices.
Any idiot can see the moral difference between stealing secrets and causing an explosion or an oil leak, so stop trying to group two completely unrelated acts under "breaking the law". You may as well say anyone who smokes weed is capable of triple murder/rape.
Stealing secrets could conceivably be a lot worse than causing an explosion.
Say the Nazis had stolen the plans for D-Day, this would have been much more of a disaster than the loss of a power station.
That's just like the term "progressive". I know people that consider "progressive" to be the ultimate compliment.
Actual conversation: "Oh, I can't believe those neighbors turned out to be such jerks. They seemed so progressive!"
Progressive taxes, progressive politics, etc. Never real thought about to *where* are we progressing.
The political term "progressive" includes in its meaning the idea that humanity is (overall) on an upward, improving path.
For example, we have outlawed slavery, given women the vote and stopped sending (Western) children out to work for 12 hours a day.
If you are deeply conservative, then I suppose you think life was better a few hundred years ago when people grew rich from slavery, treated their wives as chattels, and liked the ability of eight year olds to climb up narrow chimneys.
Reminds me of the gratuitous bong-rip philosophy you see on Ashton Kutcher's news site A+, which is bizarrely one of the most-viewed websites in the US.
I might be wrong, but I'm fairly sure I watched a porno set on that roof yesterday, sort of a mini gang bang. I just wonder whether the hip young things were the ones involved?
Climate discussion instantly transforms the staunchest conservatives into Occupiers. Suddenly they're worried that the big bad CEOs of renewable energy companies are going to be getting rich from the rest of us and leave us impoverished.
The CEOs for renewable energy companies are often "not our sort of people".
I don't know what field you work in, but it must be great to know you have the tools to 100% accurately predict the future of a vastly complex system like the Earth.
Would printing the 1,5 meter stack of most influential papers be a reasonable alternative to printing the 109.91 GB Survival Library http://tech.slashdot.org/story... ?
What this effectively does is create a legal loophole through which the US intelligence agencies can request data from the GCHQ, on US citizens thereby bypassing surveiling citizens directly.
If only they'd had such systems in place before 9/11, the world's most spectacular terrorist outrage might have been prevented.
Can someone remind me why it is that we, the people who elect and pay the wages of the politicians and public servants who seek to destroy our right to privacy in this way, continue to allow such outrageous behavior to continue?
Because unlike the colonists, we have never overthrown the British state and insisted on a written constitution to which the State is subject.
Yes, because the US doesn't have the exact equivalent to GCHQ called the NSA or anything..
GCHQ on the other hand are tasked with the job of securing British communications from foreign spying, and for some reason, someone in there has risen to a position of power, where he thinks his job is to spy on Britain for a foreign power. It doesn't take a genius to see what's happened there. I'm sure a considerable amount of effort was expended to ensure he got into that position.
Individuals' goals have nothing to do with it.
In organisations like the Civil Service or the Armed Forces, you get to the top by embracing the culture of that organisation.
GCHQ is not a bunch of radical libertarians tragically perverted by one evil genius mole working for A Foreign Power.
The first thing you should do is to look into how you can pay nothing or as little as you can in taxes.
You missed out the stage where you become an independently wealthy Criminal Mastermind with a secret lair hidden inside a Carribean volcano first. Twat.
a whole lot of people (almost all people above 50) love automatism and fascism
Fuck you, you ignorant piece of shit. If anything it's the younger generation who are quite happy to share everything on facebook and the rest of the "social media".
+5 ignorant. What do you think would happen if a black hole were to form on the moon? Pls, use some common sense here. And trust us science folks to know what we're doing. We go to university for 10 years for a reason.
It takes that long to achieve the polished level of inter-personal communication skills you are demonstrating?
As a physicist, I could now either get angry and rant about how your inferiority complex due to sucking at math impedes your thinking or I could just chuckle and say: tough luck, buddy. Sorry my job pays better than yours.
I could be effectively innumerate and still be earning more than you (e.g. as a lawyer or CEO). It's a meaningless metric. And anyway, I doubt that most academic physicists are exactly on millions a year.
When I go to a reasonably legitimate porn page and type in "sexy girl playing with a dildo" I do NOT expect an underage GIRL; I expect such videos have been expunged and anyone that looks to be 16 or so is at very least 18, but more likely about 22.
Now let's say the fuckers wanted to 'get me' for some reason? Perhaps they put up a bullshit page where they have uploaded child porn, and now i'm going to jail because of what? Because I couldn't trust the page I was going to to be the page I intended to go to.
Entrapment is bullshit, no matter how you cut it.
If the fuckers really wanted to 'get you' they could just plant some drugs/kiddie porn/terrorist bomb making equipment on you anyway. If that's how the world worked.
This is just an easy way to install software without much popping up on the screen to alert the users. I wonder how long it'll be before reports of infections using this installation method. What we really want is someone typing Install-Package Chrom and getting infected because of a typo.
What conflict? I never saw any, except for strict literalists (blasphemers) who believe that G-d's "Days" necessarily are the same as ours with 1440 minutes. What if They average 3 billion of our years? Not necessarily linearly constant either. Space is not, why should time be?
In that case, the people who wrote the bible (and/or any subsequent translators) should have been a bit more careful in their use of language.
Slashdot Mirror
It should be pointed out that the choice thing is really a red herring. If homosexuality were a choice, that would still be no reason to persecute gay people.
No, you're wrong, unfortunately. Those who are anti-gay would seize on the "choice" as simply being an immoral one.
The basis of ethics is choice: if someone has no choice in how they act, you can't call it either ethical or unethical. No one says a cat is immoral for chasing little birdies.
From the conservative religious viewpoint, you want to see gay people as making a wrong choice, not just following their natural instincts.
Any heterosexual man has the same basic physical capabilites as a homosexual man, so he could easily engage in homosexual acts... if he simply decides to reject his moral beliefs.
What happens if you throw a repressed Christian in an Egyptian river?
The problem with your thought experiment is that many people engage in behavior that is socially disapproved of, may have serious negative consequences, and may involve disquieting physical aspects. Just look at the people involved with drugs, especially some of the more horrific ones. The outcome of meth addiction is well know, and rather ugly, but people do it anyway. Then there are the even more dangerous drugs that rot your body like Krokodil . And what about prostitution? People engaged in that are continually doing things that have a significant "ick" factor, but do it anyway.
No, the point is that if homosexuality were purely a matter of choosing between A or B, then it's irrelevant what social, aesthetic, moral or other factors are concerned.
And people who are addicted to drugs or forced into prostitution aren't making neutral lifestyle choices.
"Traditional family values" my arse.
90% of the free rape porn on xvideos features Russians.
But is good, healthy heterosexual rape!
Any idiot can see the moral difference between stealing secrets and causing an explosion or an oil leak, so stop trying to group two completely unrelated acts under "breaking the law". You may as well say anyone who smokes weed is capable of triple murder/rape.
Stealing secrets could conceivably be a lot worse than causing an explosion.
Say the Nazis had stolen the plans for D-Day, this would have been much more of a disaster than the loss of a power station.
"Security has no ROI" has been a mantra I have heard quite often.
If anyone really believed that, then they wouldn't bother spending any money at all on security, would they?
That's just like the term "progressive". I know people that consider "progressive" to be the ultimate compliment.
Actual conversation: "Oh, I can't believe those neighbors turned out to be such jerks. They seemed so progressive!"
Progressive taxes, progressive politics, etc. Never real thought about to *where* are we progressing.
The political term "progressive" includes in its meaning the idea that humanity is (overall) on an upward, improving path.
For example, we have outlawed slavery, given women the vote and stopped sending (Western) children out to work for 12 hours a day.
If you are deeply conservative, then I suppose you think life was better a few hundred years ago when people grew rich from slavery, treated their wives as chattels, and liked the ability of eight year olds to climb up narrow chimneys.
For the rest of us, the progress made is obvious.
Reminds me of the gratuitous bong-rip philosophy you see on Ashton Kutcher's news site A+, which is bizarrely one of the most-viewed websites in the US.
Never heard of it before.
And who or what is Ashton Kutcher?
I might be wrong, but I'm fairly sure I watched a porno set on that roof yesterday, sort of a mini gang bang. I just wonder whether the hip young things were the ones involved?
Climate discussion instantly transforms the staunchest conservatives into Occupiers. Suddenly they're worried that the big bad CEOs of renewable energy companies are going to be getting rich from the rest of us and leave us impoverished.
The CEOs for renewable energy companies are often "not our sort of people".
I don't know what field you work in, but it must be great to know you have the tools to 100% accurately predict the future of a vastly complex system like the Earth.
Would printing the 1,5 meter stack of most influential papers be a reasonable alternative to printing the 109.91 GB Survival Library http://tech.slashdot.org/story... ?
Yes.
What this effectively does is create a legal loophole through which the US intelligence agencies can request data from the GCHQ, on US citizens thereby bypassing surveiling citizens directly.
If only they'd had such systems in place before 9/11, the world's most spectacular terrorist outrage might have been prevented.
If only...
Because unlike the colonists, we have never overthrown the British state and insisted on a written constitution to which the State is subject.
Yes, because the US doesn't have the exact equivalent to GCHQ called the NSA or anything..
GCHQ on the other hand are tasked with the job of securing British communications from foreign spying, and for some reason, someone in there has risen to a position of power, where he thinks his job is to spy on Britain for a foreign power. It doesn't take a genius to see what's happened there. I'm sure a considerable amount of effort was expended to ensure he got into that position.
Individuals' goals have nothing to do with it.
In organisations like the Civil Service or the Armed Forces, you get to the top by embracing the culture of that organisation.
GCHQ is not a bunch of radical libertarians tragically perverted by one evil genius mole working for A Foreign Power.
Faith should be reserved for deities.
You should also be teaching your children that "deities" don't exist.
The first thing you should do is to look into how you can pay nothing or as little as you can in taxes.
You missed out the stage where you become an independently wealthy Criminal Mastermind with a secret lair hidden inside a Carribean volcano first. Twat.
a whole lot of people (almost all people above 50) love automatism and fascism
Fuck you, you ignorant piece of shit. If anything it's the younger generation who are quite happy to share everything on facebook and the rest of the "social media".
+5 ignorant. What do you think would happen if a black hole were to form on the moon? Pls, use some common sense here. And trust us science folks to know what we're doing. We go to university for 10 years for a reason.
It takes that long to achieve the polished level of inter-personal communication skills you are demonstrating?
As a physicist, I could now either get angry and rant about how your inferiority complex due to sucking at math impedes your thinking or I could just chuckle and say: tough luck, buddy. Sorry my job pays better than yours.
I could be effectively innumerate and still be earning more than you (e.g. as a lawyer or CEO). It's a meaningless metric. And anyway, I doubt that most academic physicists are exactly on millions a year.
For me this is about porn.
When I go to a reasonably legitimate porn page and type in "sexy girl playing with a dildo" I do NOT expect an underage GIRL; I expect such videos have been expunged and anyone that looks to be 16 or so is at very least 18, but more likely about 22.
Now let's say the fuckers wanted to 'get me' for some reason? Perhaps they put up a bullshit page where they have uploaded child porn, and now i'm going to jail because of what? Because I couldn't trust the page I was going to to be the page I intended to go to.
Entrapment is bullshit, no matter how you cut it.
If the fuckers really wanted to 'get you' they could just plant some drugs/kiddie porn/terrorist bomb making equipment on you anyway. If that's how the world worked.
Not everything in the world can be solved by clever software.
Saying that you're British and that the weather is one of your favourite topics of conversation is an example of pure redundancy.
This is just an easy way to install software without much popping up on the screen to alert the users. I wonder how long it'll be before reports of infections using this installation method. What we really want is someone typing Install-Package Chrom and getting infected because of a typo.
LOL security through pop up tick boxes.
What conflict? I never saw any, except for strict literalists (blasphemers) who believe that G-d's "Days" necessarily are the same as ours with 1440 minutes. What if They average 3 billion of our years? Not necessarily linearly constant either. Space is not, why should time be?
In that case, the people who wrote the bible (and/or any subsequent translators) should have been a bit more careful in their use of language.
Unless stated otherwise, a "day" is 24 hours.