I went a-googling and found the source; some work by Isaiah Berlin. I can't say I'm impressed with his choice of terminology, but I get it now. Positive liberty is supposed to be understood as self-mastery, particularly in choosing who runs one's society, and is degraded when elites force behaviors upon the citizenry (which would include all of the examples I gave above, btw.) Berlin's own explanations of what positive liberty is: He says "when positive liberty is misconstrued as goals imposed from the third-person that the individual is told they "should" rationally desire, and the justifications for political totalitarianism" -- precisely what suppression of historical artifacts and speech embodies. He goes on to warn that when misconstrued positive freedom impinges upon negative freedom, there's a problem; and that appears to be exactly what's happening with controls on your speech and ownership of historical artifacts. It's very interesting that you got the definitions so tangled up -- because he warns against precisely that, and suggests the likely cause is entitled third parties conflating the two types of freedom inaccurately. Berlin was clearly not advocating what you are advocating; he described such things as anathema to liberty.
To address your specific points, the restrictions on Nazi memorabilia are to protect the majority [...] as history demonstrates the rise of Nazism can have equally devastating consequences
They do not "protect the majority." From a practical viewpoint, Nazi memorabilia are perfectly legal in the US, this has been uniformly the case for the last 75 years, and the majority has suffered not one whit from this. Furthermore, the concepts behind these laws are no better than witch hunting (and likely descended from it): the idea that should you hold an object that was associated with an evil idea, that you would become evil. The entire idea is superstitious claptrap, and furthermore, does nothing to stop people from thinking about Nazi concepts free of their history, while chilling speech about the artifacts and the history of the artifacts, the very thing that would paint our experience with Nazism accurately as the nightmare it actually was. These laws are, bluntly, anti-liberty of all kinds, and dangerous as well. The precedent is horrific.
As to the second point, history does not show that ideas arise from artifacts. Ideas gain traction when they gain acceptance; and one does not acquire acceptance of such ideas by handling, observing, buying, or selling an artifact. Were it so, then my ownership of a Luger from WWII would have me citing Mein Kampf at you. Even Erwin Rommel, a high general in the Nazi war machine, completely surrounded by. and even clothed in Nazi paraphernalia, recipient of many additional benefits if he did accept Nazism (and recipient of threats against his family because he did not), rejected the whole thing, lock, stock and barrel -- and lost his life as a direct result. It's clearly not about artifacts, and it never was. It's about ideas, how they apply to the current situation, who is pushing them, and how charismatic they are. Frankly, without Hitler or similar, and a society of the mindset of 1930's Germany, you will almost certainly never see a Nazi nation again. You absolutely won't see it because dealers can sell objects to collectors.
It's the same as the restrictions on WMD in the US
No. What are the consequences if someone drops a Nazi flag on London, or Reginald sells a Nazi uniform to Smythe over there? Nothing whatsoever of note. Smythe might be moved so far as to say "Mm, yes, Hitler's minions. Nasty bugger, he was." Now what are the consequences if someone drops a 10kT nuke on old Smythe? They don't bear much thinking about, do they? Compari
TFA accurately describes using multiple 2D scene acquisitions in order to build a 3D model by trading time and resolution for position.
TFA does not in any way describe "3D cameras."
3D cameras would acquire a 3D representation of subject matter directly. Such cameras do exist; but they are not about to "go mainstream" in any meaningful or accurate sense of the term.
Imagine a 12" cube with numbers on every face. Place a stereo (likely dual sensor / dual lens) camera in front of it, collinear with any one of the six axis. Acquire image. Now, tell me what number is on the face of the cube furthest from the camera.
You can't? Of course you can't. Because you didn't acquire anything even close to 3D data on the object.
Now place the same cube in front of a system that looks at it from, say, 32 directions on a plane parallel to the floor and acquire. Now you can tell me what is on the far side of the cube, because in this case, something somewhat closer to 3D data acquisition was actually performed (and can be used to immediately give you views at angles and distances of much finer granularity than 32.) It's still not actually 3D (what's on the bottom of the cube? The top? For that matter, what's inside it?) but even with the fairly reasonable limits of opacity, at least a system of this kind would be able to present you with the appropriate representation if it was informed that you had moved your viewpoint horizontally or circularly relative to the data's representation on the display device and on essentially the same viewing plane as the camera set.
In the EU we have more positive freedom [...] The US has extreme negative freedom
I find your characterization to be inaccurate. Freedom means the ability to do something, as opposed to the ability to not do something. Every time people are restricted from some action, their freedom diminishes, which would be going in a negative direction.
I would not argue with the contention that in many ways, freedom in the US is diminishing; but I would insist that this is not a condition that is justified by our constitution. We never really were able to meet the standards of our own constitution, and today, we are presently being subjected to unauthorized government action that is eroding our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms quite severely in a number of areas. Ideally, something would arrest this process, but it doesn't look like there's much hope for it. So I'll be primarily discussing our constitution and our ideals here; please understand that I am well aware that the reality is often "other."
In the EU and within member countries of the EU, restrictions on what you may do as an individual, harming no one, extend beyond matters of speech. Nazi memorabilia -- sale, purchase, collection -- serves to demonstrate how individual freedoms are repressed by state actors to the detriment of the citizens (and which also provides a rather sobering mechanism to suppress history.) Collecting people's passports at their hotel demonstrates another way individual freedom is restricted, in this case, the freedom to travel and the freedom to control one's own data. Being forbidden to keep arms limits the ability to defend home, family, business and employees from criminal elements, and that's a very significant negative.
I honestly do not see how these kinds of things can be described as "positive freedoms"; they directly reduce freedom without providing a gain in freedom elsewhere, and so seem to me to be inherently negative with regard to freedom overall. You would have to present an excellent defense of your contention in these contexts to change my outlook on this.
Most rights generate limits when colliding with other rights, whether they be the same right, or another. A classic go-to is "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins." The key to making this idea work as best it can is a very careful determination of where the nose is; in the case of speech, if the "nose" consists of simply hearing something as it does in some places outside the USA, I would assert that the limit is set incorrectly. When government uses coercion backed by force to limit one's ability to express an opinion in a public venue, characterizing that as a positive seems more than wrong; it seems ridiculous.
When speech does more than communicate words -- for instance, should it fall into liable or slander -- then limits arise, because we're no longer dealing only with communication. We're dealing with harmful aggression in a very real and concrete sense. In the USA, as elsewhere, reputation is something of value, and attempts to damage it unjustly are viewed quite dimly by most of our body of law. Other examples include coercive speech, other threats, harmful volume levels, and various types of concrete incitement to action. So there's no perfect freedom of speech here, nor do I think there should be, but in the matter of expressing one's opinion and the communication of ideas, we're definitely quite free, and a good deal more so than those in the EU are in some of the member states.
The US has extreme negative freedom, that is freedom to do what you like without interference.
Although I think your characterization of "negative" is inaccurate, I'd be very interested to see what you have to say in regard to the bad things you think we are free to do without interference. Again I am speaking of our constitution and our ideals, not the current state of unauthorized law, which restrict us as much, and in some
The way I see it, an unqualified threat is a promise of action.
If the action promised is violence, and the threat is credible, then the recipient of the threat has been adequately notified that conflict is actually under way.
As the recipient has been assured that violence is immanent in some measure, preempting the other party's violence is reasonable, sensible and should be socially acceptable on every level.
Qualified threats are something else entirely, the question of coercion arises as does the authority of the individual making the threat with regard to the qualification. For instance you could say to me "if you raise your hand to my wife, I will beat you senseless." This is a qualified threat covering an issue where you have adequate authority to assert both the rule and the consequence. No violent response of mine could be justified.
I would be remiss if I didn't point out that US law tends not to agree with me on these matters. The way I see things is pretty much laid out here.
You have failed to understand that no matter what your intent is when you make a remark to another person, it is up to them to evaluate the level of offense actually delivered by the remark.
You have also failed to take into account proportionality. Lightly scratching one's skin on rough tree bark causes pain. A gunshot to the knee causes pain. The former can be trivially ignored and dismissed without consequence or any particular reaction despite the fact that it was, technically speaking, "painful." The latter, not so much.
Then we have the whole issue of "consider the source." Let's take your post for example. I read it, immediately realized you had no idea of the limits to which you had been informed by the talk you went to, and consequently recognized your entire line of reasoning as facile and wrongheaded -- which in turn resulted in the classification of your "arrogant and deluded" remark as baseless nonsense. Which, as it turns out, does not offend me.
You have failed to demonstrate circularity. If you can, by all means, do.
That's fine as an operational definition of what a society *treats* as privacy
Er.... yes, that's what the article is primarily about. I gave you the pointer to the blogpost because as an operational definition, "privacy is autotomy -- the right to conduct your affairs without unreasonable and uninvited interference" doesn't describe the problem space. If you look up a woman's skirt without her permission, how is the interception of those particular photons "interfering" with her "affairs" in any meaningful way? It isn't. It can even be done entirely without her knowledge. But it is a clear invasion of privacy nonetheless. It's not interference that is at issue. It is the sundering of the expectation that an established (very well established in this case) boundary not be violated.
it does no good in telling us what those boundaries should be.
In defining what privacy is, I don't need to describe every set of boundaries, any more than in defining what law is, I must describe every law, or in defining what food is, I must describe every meal.
Even so, I provided several specific examples that were (and remain) topical, and worked through one in detail. I also pointed out that these boundaries can be highly individual and/or specific to a particular society, as well as codified in law, and I broke down why hardening isn't generally relevant to privacy.
It would be somewhat absurd for me to define your own boundaries for you -- how would I know what these are without you knowing first and then telling me? I could tell you mine, but that wouldn't be very likely to illuminate yours in any significant degree.
As far as legal and society-wide boundaries go, I pointed to several and I laid out exactly why they are what they are, how they obviously apply, and where errors arise in procedure that violates those boundaries. Can you not look at the cases of interest to you and do the same? Must I do your thinking for you?
Say your brother was a soldier who was killed in the line of duty. At the funeral some people turn up to scream abuse at you and call him a murderer.
Here in the US, soldiers fight to defend the constitution -- they swear an oath to do so -- and the constitution in turn forbids the federal and state governments from restricting speech:
1st amendment: Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech (and the 14th amendment applies this to state legislatures as well.)
I take that to mean that a fallen soldier's sacrifice for those principles would be devalued if my reaction to speech I disagreed with was to incite the government to use force to muzzle people of different opinions in any public venue.
If one wants to hold a ceremony where no one can speak unless the host permits it, they need to do so on the host's own private property. Hosting a ceremony or speech in public, by its very nature, exposes it to everyone, not just people who are like-minded. Holding a public ceremony and then complaining when someone shows up who disagrees... I see that as attempting to claim an entitlement that should never exist in the first place.
Or how about if he was gay and they stated chanting "faggot" over the words if[sic] the priest. Would you be okay with that?
Again, if the funeral is public, they can say whatever they want. If it is on private property -- which is where my gay sister's funeral was held, by the way, in a very conservative small eastern Pennsylvania town -- then exercising control of the event is up to the owner of the property.
Is there really no limit to what someone can say to you, in any possible context, that doesn't bother you?
No, of course there are things people could say short of injury, financial and/or reputation damage that would bother me. Some of them don't even have anything to do with me.
I just don't think that there's any principle important enough to justify government force and coercion in order to protect my sensibilities from someone who wants to say something that only reaches the level of bothersome or offensive to me.
So the upshot is that should someone's speech bother or offend me, I need to deal with it myself. In such cases, I have options. I can silently manage the stress; I can undertake countering speech of my own; I can remove myself from the venue; and in the case where I own the venue (home, property, website, etc.), I can control the offensive speech directly.
In fact, if one day we took a man's brain and transplanted it into a woman's body, they would still insist that they are male
Again, it isn't about what you insist upon. It is about what you are. If you want to go whole-hog reductionist as in your first paragraph, I'll go right along with you -- and I maintain that if they transplanted your own personal brain into a purely female body otherwise, you'd still be a man. You didn't form as a female, your brain did not canalize under the conditions of being female, your brain isn't hooked to, nor does it have the networks required to manage, the various female glands and other system controls; you didn't go through female adolescence, during the development of your brain you were in the wrong bathrooms and locker rooms and so forth; and your thought patterns and ability to multitask didn't receive the development guidance that would give you the many-challenges-at-once competence females exhibit casually and constantly, because it is inherent to their makeup. You're still a fellow in a lady suit.
It would have to be much more than a transplant. Your brain would have to be physically reconfigured into a female model, in no way different from any other female. That would require not only change in configuration, but implantation of new knowledge, skills, reflexes, glandular controls and so on. We may be able to do that someday, but we're not even close now.
What counts is what's between the ears,
This -- when we're talking about perception of ourselves -- represents a basic misunderstanding and misrepresentation of reality. Born human, if you think you're a pony -- with every fiber and pathway of your mind -- you're still not a pony. If you think you are a rock, and I mean utterly convinced in every possible way... you still aren't a rock. If you think you are a magician, or a god, or an elf it doesn't matter even one little bit. You aren't; you never will be; you never were. You're still you, and what that is, is whatever you were born as. You're still exactly that. Just older and considerably more interesting consequent to education and experience.
This is why giving estrogen to Alan Turing to "treat his being gay" didn't work - he was male in both mind and body. It's also why attempts to treat m2f transsexuals with testosterone mostly ended up in suicide or jail. The brain is the fundamental organ of our existence. It defines who and what we are.
The reason treating Turing with hormones didn't work is because the idea is monumentally stupid. They thought estrogen would "neutralize libido", and the reason they thought that is because they were unscientific, bumbling fools in the grip of religiously inspired application of tyranny, inculcation of insecurity, and an inexcusable ignorance of sexuality in general. There was never any compelling evidence for such an assertion, nor, for that matter, was there ever a sane reason or excuse to treat Turing as he was treated that rises above the standard of "redneck fucktard", albeit rednecks with lovely English accents. Just more destructive, evil behavior directly attributable to religious fanaticism. I can imagine no punishment adequate to address their contemptible and malicious actions.
The brain is the fundamental organ of our existence. It defines who and what we are.
I agree. But it does so by means nowhere near as simplistic as today's decision to put on a dress. The physical configuration, chromosomal configuration, topological organization, network distribution and tasking, skill sets and experiences that move the brain along the developmental path from comparatively blank slate at birth to formed human being all have their part in creating a female brain. If the biology is originally male, at least at this point in our scientific development, it's game over and that's your only prize: You're a male.
Doesn't mean you can't spend all your time, bar none, at trying to wrap yourself around an attempt to be female; or that doing so is in any way "wrong"; it just means you can't get there. Yet, anyway.
Say, for whatever reason, valid or not, you perceive me as annoying and contrary and generally pin-headed, and you undertake to call me truly despicable names in the most contemptuous and filthy manner imaginable. Every day. Until you expire. Are you harassing me? No. You aren't. It wouldn't even rise to the standard of mild annoyance. Why? Because I am immune to such rhetoric under all but the most trying circumstances, and even were you somehow to reach such a malodorous level of offense, you're still 100% within the bounds of acceptable speech in my book; I just have to cope with it (which would require just about zero effort, I assure you.)
But the next person in line? They might break down into tears, wander off into the nearest bathtub, and slit their wrists if you simply called them a douchebag or implied they had too many pimples.
Whose fault is this? What is our responsibility in the matter of such weak, unprepared, or broken personalities? Should we pad the very walls and take out all the tubs and razors and knives and muzzle each and every one of us to prevent poor Cluetard McDimwit from wrist slitting lest something rises to the level of offense in the dim, dysfunctional reaches of what passes for his mind?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again:
No one has the "right to not be offended." Being offended is subjective. It has everything to do with you as an individual, or as part of a collective, or a group, or a society, or a community; it varies due to your moral conditioning, your religious beliefs, your upbringing, your education; what offends one person or group (collective, society, community) may not offend another; and in the final analysis, it requires one person to attempt to read the mind of other persons they do not know in order to anticipate whether a specific action will cause offense in the mind of another. And no, codifying an action in law is not in any way sufficient... it is well established that not even lawyers can know the law well enough to anticipate what is legal, and what is not. Sane law relies on the basic idea that we try not to risk or cause harm to the bodies, finances and reputations of others without them consenting and being aware of the risks. Law that bans something based upon the idea that some individual or group simply finds the behavior objectionable is the very worst kind of law, utterly devoid of consideration or others, while absolutely permeated in self-indulgence.
Prepare your kids, and yourself, for exposure to the opinions of others, and gird yourself appropriately lest there is (gasp) an encounter with differing opinion, surprising and/or not-to-your-taste behavior, or OMFG, someone intentionally being nasty, crude or stupid. Or all or the foregoing. It is not anyone else's job to do this for you or your children; and it is not anyone else's responsibility if your failure to do so causes unrest, or worse, in minds you failed to prepare. Including yours.
In order to have freedoms, we must be educated well enough, and prepared well enough, to deal with them. If the fact that some cannot deal with them is sufficient to the cause to limit those freedoms, then eventually, they will erode away to nothing. Likely there will always be some personality on the borderline of collapsing at some provocation, imaginary or otherwise. Should we really attempt to tune our whole society to the lowest possible standard of discourse as a result?
Think very carefully before you endorse force of any kind as a remedy for "offense." To borrow somewhat from Jefferson, if it does not pick my pocket, break my leg, or falsely portray my reputation in some measure likely to cause material or financial consequence... then no remedy is called for; no coercion of law appropriate; and no sympathy required.
Having said that, the owner of any private venue has every right to set arbitrary limits on speech and behavior within the venue. You don't like it, leave. End of story. Such r
Non-functional? 85% of male-to-female transsexuals are fully orgasmic.
I wasn't talking about the presence of orgasms. One certainly hopes that isn't lost. Sorry to hear about the other 15%. I was talking about the nature of the orgasms, the female organs, cycles, musculature, nervous system, skeletal geometry and so forth. You know, the uterus, the ovaries, the vagina (no, a carved out hole is not the same as the actual topology and musculature and reflexive nature of a vagina and associated internal bits), the clitoris (no, a stub of a penis is not the same as a clitoris, not even close) particular flexibilities, etc.
As for the clitoris, both the female clitoris and the male penis start out as the same organ in the fetus.
Yes, and we start out with tails, too. But as we develop, things go quite differently for the two sexes. Again, the penis does not equate to a clitoris. No matter what you do with, or to it. Delusions otherwise notwithstanding. Even you were to magically skip my that, the male orgasm is different in nature from the female orgasm in several obvious ways (duration, intensity, repeatability, muscular response [men don't even have some of those muscles], and frankly, I suspect the two are different in many non-obvious ways as well, based on my own personal observations and explorations.
There are plenty of genetic women who no longer have periods, and cannot bear children. Are you going to claim they're not women based on that criteria?
No. If a person's body was genetically built as a woman, they still think as women do, they still are structured biologically as women, and they are still functional as women. Just as changes to your body can't change you from being a man, changes to their bodies can't change them from being a woman. It doesn't come down to one or two issues. Not even close.
As for lubrication, there's a surgical technique that uses a portion of donor tissue from another site in the patient to allow them to lubricate, but most don't opt for it. And there are plenty of women who don't lubricate, no matter how much they're stimulated.
You're confusing the natural lubrication the nervous system drives with an artificial source hooked to entirely different plumbing; consider that surgically relocating a tooth in your anus doesn't make it a mouth. As for women who don't lubricate, that's irrelevant. The biology -- nerves, glands, musculature, spinal and brain nervous system components -- is either there, or they're (unfortunately) damaged or have been altered. Now, OTOH, if they simply don't lubricate, but can, that's more a matter of not being fired up, and is no reflection upon their femininity -- it's just an expression of lack of arousal (and the partner takes the heat for that one.) The idea of a fully functional woman as contrasted with one that isn't fully functional still covers a spectrum of woman-to-woman. There's no point in that spectrum where she would change into a man because "just one more thing" had ceased functioning. Same thing the other way. There's no point in a spectrum of losing external male characteristics or artificially altered hormone balance that somehow changes everything else from nervous system to skeleton to muscular arrangement that can make one actually become a woman.
Estrogen provides the same protection from diseases in both transsexuals and genetic women.
Prostate cancer. Uterine cancer. Ovarian cancer. Penile cancer. Breast cancer. And related. You can't suffer from vaginal cancer because you don't have a vagina. A woman can't suffer from penile cancer because she doesn't have a penis. And so on. So no, the disease vulnerabilities of the sexes are not equal, and do not shift magically from one to the other with the surgeons knife or
Transgendered women are not "men trying to impersonate women,"
An absolutely fact-free claim. Back it up or be ignored.
your comments about aliens and hobbits are insulting and you know it.
Your inability or unwillingness to deal with the comparison speaks not at all to any worthwhile counterpoint. It is not an insult to draw accurate comparisons or invoke appropriate metaphor. It is, however, of no service whatsoever to your POV to go whining about it instead of addressing it head-on; you have not established in any way or form that those comparisons were inaccurate or inappropriate. Much less "insulting." Someone interested in masquerading as the Predator would consider your remarks both insensitive and thoughtless -- and they'd be right. There's nothing about gender masquerade that makes it superior to any other type of masquerade.
This is a hugely privileged and willfully ignorant gender-essentialist rant.
I brought numerous facts and contentions to the discussion. You have brought nothing other than a monumentally pathetic attempt to disrespect me through labeling. If you want to actually discuss the issues at hand, I'll engage. If all you have to offer is "nuh-uh, meanie!" then you will simply be ignored.
Exactly. You can also do anything you want as far as installing keyloggers and other future-action compromises.
If you require security for your data, then you need two things:
o Sufficient physical security (what that actually means depends on who you're defending against) o Complete WAN network isolation combined with zero-executable transfer protocols. No scripts, macros, apps, nothing.
Without these things, it is simply not possible to assure security.
If we can't make the mind match the body, let's make the body match the mind. And once it's treated (one or more of hormones, surgery, therapy) then they're no longer dysphoric.
Here's the problem. We can't make the body match the mind. We literally cannot do it. We don't have the technology. The very best we can do is a skin-deep, non-functional mask.
For instance, if you're male, we can lop off the genitals that grew naturally; we can probably dig a pit into your groin; we can plastic up some lippy-looking things to go around it; we might even be able to leave enough of your penis to kinda-sorta give you a little stimulation where the clitoris raises its cute little head. We can't give you an actual clitoris, though. We can insert stuff in your chest to give you breast-like bumps -- which will not, of course, actually be breasts -- and you can cover all this with makeup, dresses, and so on until you may even be able to fool some of the onlooker's eyes.
At the end of this process, though, even with the most successful results, you're not a woman, not female in any way. You're a man with surgical modifications. You're not going to have periods. You cannot bear children. You will not lubricate correctly. You won't share the same disease risks, and you won't share the same disease immunities. Your chromosome configuration will be wrong. Your pheromone emissions will be off. Your sweat will smell wrong. Your skeletal structure will be wrong. Your walk will be wrong, because your pelvic geometry is different. Even your mind, identity crisis and all, probably won't work even remotely like a woman's actually does -- likely you will continue short on multitasking and long on aggression, among many other things.
Don't get me wrong -- if you want to do all this to yourself, I'm all for it. It's your body, by all means, hack away and have fun. If you want to change yourself so you appear as alien or predator or Hillary Clinton or a hobbit or a pony, it's all good, have at it and I truly hope you can get as close as possible to the appearance of the thing you're trying to impersonate so you can enjoy the pretense as fully as possible. Acting is often its own reward, as many actors will tell you right up front.
For the case of a man trying to impersonate a woman, I wouldn't be offended in the least if you managed to carry off that impersonation well enough to coax me, a rather profoundly heterosexual individual, into a sexual interest -- but once I discovered you were actually a guy, I would disengage, simply because I'm not interested in men. And you're still a man. Wearing a mask doesn't make you the thing the mask represents, and that's all body mods and hormone shots accomplish -- they create a mask. It'd be exactly the same if the identity you desire to present is that of a pony; even with the most radical surgeries and prosthetic devices, no matter how accurate the resulting look is, you will never, ever, be a pony. You're a male human with body mods. No more; no less.
Gender is not something we can change at this time, and the not-very-close series of surgical modifications that create a gender mask is not a path that's even in the same direction of desiring to be the other gender. You can cut, chop, filet and drug yourself until you run out of money, and at the end of the day, you're still just the same guy -- you just look different. The problem is that no matter how much you like to wear a mask, and no matter how good the mask is, you are not the mask.
What the present amalgam of surgical and pharmaceutical procedures accomplishes is not a sex change. The best description of it I've heard thus far is these procedures result in the provision of a full body mask, within which you can act like you are the being that the mask presents to the viewer. And while that may be very enjoyable for you, it's still an act; you are still 100% male. A cat in a dog suit is still a cat. A human male modified to look exactly lik
Here are some more definitions of the term, which has been in general use for years, and is often defined as useless actions such as signing online petitions or buying a bracelet.
The length of time a term of disrespect exists is no endorsement for its verity or worth. As you ought to know very well, as a 't' in LGBTt.
These petitions aren't useless; the bottom line is every time you attempt to characterize them that way, regardless of if you're using some half-witted slang term, you're making a fool of yourself.
The vast majority of these petitions are not presented or relevant in a global context. Pretty sure the denizens of Beijing really don't give a crap about Pizza Hut's US hiring policies. Etc.
Nice try, though. When you don't have facts, just play air guitar, eh? Ooooo, nice "chord"!
Maybe you should read George Takei's writings on his experience in an internment camp.
The reason the internment camps were wrong -- and they were -- is because they were based upon race, not ideology. The reason political correctness is wrong in this matter is because it allows toxic and dangerous ideology to fester and continue to harm us without any meaningful attempt to hold the ideology and its followers responsible -- and in many cases, goes as far as making excuses for it.
The parts of WWII facing Japan that were entirely correct include the extreme levels of violence we pursued in response to the violent incursion and further evil-doings based on the Japanese Empire's ideologies. The most correct actions taken were at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is only a shame that it was so difficult to develop the technology that finally proved sufficient to stop that ideology in its filthy, toxic tracks.
Takei's experience has no comparable bearing here (in fact, it demonstrates the opposite of what you were trying to say... American camps were far more humane and reasonable than the Japanese, and even then we fought about them internally.) If you want to compare fairly, then read the experiences of those Americans at Pearl Harbor; Guam; in the Changi camps; and so on, and relate those experiences to the beliefs the various ideologies inculcated in the citizens of the Japanese empire, along with the entirely doctrine-compliant actions the Empire's subjects took as a direct result. Go hang out at the Arizona memorial for a while. Let's compare Apples with Apples; ideology with ideology. And then consider what is too severe an injury to society for society to allow the abuse to continue.
Just ask yourself three questions: First, were conditions at Changi, Outram Road and so on like the conditions at US internment camps? Second, did our ideology -- our constitution, the bill of rights, American ideals -- actually support the idea of the interment camps? Three, did the Japanese ideology -- the ingrained ideas of the Empire that brought us the kamikaze, drove the Japanese citizens off the cliffs at Saipan, the death march at Bataan, and declared the Japanese superior to any other race -- actually support the idea of Changi and its brethren?
The fact is that ideology can be extremely toxic. When it is, tolerating it is an extremely bad idea. What society has to do, and I readily admit this is difficult, is figure out when something is so against the grain that it is unacceptably dangerous. At that point, it is time to excise the tumor. Islam is one of these toxic ideologies. We're going to have to face it eventually. And until we do, every life lost and family destroyed should add to the load on the consciences of those who advocate separating responsibility from ideology in the face of the obvious facts.
I've heard the same rhetoric about blacks. And Hispanics. It's easy to hate someone you've never met.
Have you? When, pray tell, did "blacks" fly into skyscrapers full of innocent people? When, pray tell, did "Hispanics" march into a humor magazine and shoot down the cartoonist and anyone nearby? When's the last time "blacks" blew up a night club? When's the last time Hispanics murdered everyone at a resort?
Your problem is that the political correctness butt plug has been shoved so far up your ass by the idiots who think everyone is a special butterfly that you can no longer shit, so you've simply gone blind.
With that said, the last thing we should do is to lay responsibility for these events at the doorstep of every muslim in our country. That is what the terrorists want.
No, they don't. Because with that appropriately allocated blame would come elimination. Out you go, here's a nice bit of desert, enjoy, bye, PS we confiscated all your money and possessions and redistributed it to our sane citizens. Thanks for all the rugs and books of superstition suitable for providing kindling in the colder months.
At which point they can bomb sand dunes, set each other on fire, hack each others heads off, and mutilate each others genitals until the the sun goes dead and no one would give a hoot. Quite rightly, too. What justifies this? The abject and continuous failure of the Muslim community to stop this poison at its source -- or even try: Their toxic, world-domination-oriented religion and its book of terrorist advisories.
So, no. What these "terrorists" (Islamists) actually want is just what they say they want, and just what their religion tells them to want: Sharia law, Islam everywhere, bowing in a certain direction at certain times of the day for everyone, end of story.
If you let rattlesnakes run around in your living room, someone's going to get bit. I really don't care how much sympathy you have for rattlesnakes -- and neither do the rattlesnakes. Islam is toxic. You can't fix that. Get it out of the figurative living room.
if you can't publish a political cartoon without fear of retaliation, then that's not a country any civilized person should desire to live in.
I will assume you're not suggesting that every reasonable person in said country should pack up and leave the country to those who work to instill such fear. Because, you know, that would be stupid.
The problem here is, as has been true for some time, religion. Specifically Islam in this case, but of course they're just the latest enthusiastic practitioners of murdering, torturing and so on in the cause of superstitious balderdash.
As long as we allow our civilized sensibilities to continue to prevent us from cutting off the head of this particular beast, it will continue to savage us.
You can "desire" to live in a civilized country all you want; but if you are unwilling or unable to weed out the uncivilized for any reason, your desire will be no more than a dream. And that is going to require some action of an extremely severe nature. Such action would not be... civilized. But the eventual result could be.
Physical access to your machine (and/or you) can result in any number of compromises. This has been true since day one; it'll remain true well into the indefinite future (in fact, I see nothing at all coming down the pike that would ameliorate this in any way. I'm just allowing for the possibility.)
Slashdot Mirror
I went a-googling and found the source; some work by Isaiah Berlin. I can't say I'm impressed with his choice of terminology, but I get it now. Positive liberty is supposed to be understood as self-mastery, particularly in choosing who runs one's society, and is degraded when elites force behaviors upon the citizenry (which would include all of the examples I gave above, btw.) Berlin's own explanations of what positive liberty is: He says "when positive liberty is misconstrued as goals imposed from the third-person that the individual is told they "should" rationally desire, and the justifications for political totalitarianism" -- precisely what suppression of historical artifacts and speech embodies. He goes on to warn that when misconstrued positive freedom impinges upon negative freedom, there's a problem; and that appears to be exactly what's happening with controls on your speech and ownership of historical artifacts. It's very interesting that you got the definitions so tangled up -- because he warns against precisely that, and suggests the likely cause is entitled third parties conflating the two types of freedom inaccurately. Berlin was clearly not advocating what you are advocating; he described such things as anathema to liberty.
They do not "protect the majority." From a practical viewpoint, Nazi memorabilia are perfectly legal in the US, this has been uniformly the case for the last 75 years, and the majority has suffered not one whit from this. Furthermore, the concepts behind these laws are no better than witch hunting (and likely descended from it): the idea that should you hold an object that was associated with an evil idea, that you would become evil. The entire idea is superstitious claptrap, and furthermore, does nothing to stop people from thinking about Nazi concepts free of their history, while chilling speech about the artifacts and the history of the artifacts, the very thing that would paint our experience with Nazism accurately as the nightmare it actually was. These laws are, bluntly, anti-liberty of all kinds, and dangerous as well. The precedent is horrific.
As to the second point, history does not show that ideas arise from artifacts. Ideas gain traction when they gain acceptance; and one does not acquire acceptance of such ideas by handling, observing, buying, or selling an artifact. Were it so, then my ownership of a Luger from WWII would have me citing Mein Kampf at you. Even Erwin Rommel, a high general in the Nazi war machine, completely surrounded by. and even clothed in Nazi paraphernalia, recipient of many additional benefits if he did accept Nazism (and recipient of threats against his family because he did not), rejected the whole thing, lock, stock and barrel -- and lost his life as a direct result. It's clearly not about artifacts, and it never was. It's about ideas, how they apply to the current situation, who is pushing them, and how charismatic they are. Frankly, without Hitler or similar, and a society of the mindset of 1930's Germany, you will almost certainly never see a Nazi nation again. You absolutely won't see it because dealers can sell objects to collectors.
No. What are the consequences if someone drops a Nazi flag on London, or Reginald sells a Nazi uniform to Smythe over there? Nothing whatsoever of note. Smythe might be moved so far as to say "Mm, yes, Hitler's minions. Nasty bugger, he was." Now what are the consequences if someone drops a 10kT nuke on old Smythe? They don't bear much thinking about, do they? Compari
TFA accurately describes using multiple 2D scene acquisitions in order to build a 3D model by trading time and resolution for position.
TFA does not in any way describe "3D cameras."
3D cameras would acquire a 3D representation of subject matter directly. Such cameras do exist; but they are not about to "go mainstream" in any meaningful or accurate sense of the term.
Imagine a 12" cube with numbers on every face. Place a stereo (likely dual sensor / dual lens) camera in front of it, collinear with any one of the six axis. Acquire image. Now, tell me what number is on the face of the cube furthest from the camera.
You can't? Of course you can't. Because you didn't acquire anything even close to 3D data on the object.
Now place the same cube in front of a system that looks at it from, say, 32 directions on a plane parallel to the floor and acquire. Now you can tell me what is on the far side of the cube, because in this case, something somewhat closer to 3D data acquisition was actually performed (and can be used to immediately give you views at angles and distances of much finer granularity than 32.) It's still not actually 3D (what's on the bottom of the cube? The top? For that matter, what's inside it?) but even with the fairly reasonable limits of opacity, at least a system of this kind would be able to present you with the appropriate representation if it was informed that you had moved your viewpoint horizontally or circularly relative to the data's representation on the display device and on essentially the same viewing plane as the camera set.
I find your characterization to be inaccurate. Freedom means the ability to do something, as opposed to the ability to not do something. Every time people are restricted from some action, their freedom diminishes, which would be going in a negative direction.
I would not argue with the contention that in many ways, freedom in the US is diminishing; but I would insist that this is not a condition that is justified by our constitution. We never really were able to meet the standards of our own constitution, and today, we are presently being subjected to unauthorized government action that is eroding our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms quite severely in a number of areas. Ideally, something would arrest this process, but it doesn't look like there's much hope for it. So I'll be primarily discussing our constitution and our ideals here; please understand that I am well aware that the reality is often "other."
In the EU and within member countries of the EU, restrictions on what you may do as an individual, harming no one, extend beyond matters of speech. Nazi memorabilia -- sale, purchase, collection -- serves to demonstrate how individual freedoms are repressed by state actors to the detriment of the citizens (and which also provides a rather sobering mechanism to suppress history.) Collecting people's passports at their hotel demonstrates another way individual freedom is restricted, in this case, the freedom to travel and the freedom to control one's own data. Being forbidden to keep arms limits the ability to defend home, family, business and employees from criminal elements, and that's a very significant negative.
I honestly do not see how these kinds of things can be described as "positive freedoms"; they directly reduce freedom without providing a gain in freedom elsewhere, and so seem to me to be inherently negative with regard to freedom overall. You would have to present an excellent defense of your contention in these contexts to change my outlook on this.
Most rights generate limits when colliding with other rights, whether they be the same right, or another. A classic go-to is "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins." The key to making this idea work as best it can is a very careful determination of where the nose is; in the case of speech, if the "nose" consists of simply hearing something as it does in some places outside the USA, I would assert that the limit is set incorrectly. When government uses coercion backed by force to limit one's ability to express an opinion in a public venue, characterizing that as a positive seems more than wrong; it seems ridiculous.
When speech does more than communicate words -- for instance, should it fall into liable or slander -- then limits arise, because we're no longer dealing only with communication. We're dealing with harmful aggression in a very real and concrete sense. In the USA, as elsewhere, reputation is something of value, and attempts to damage it unjustly are viewed quite dimly by most of our body of law. Other examples include coercive speech, other threats, harmful volume levels, and various types of concrete incitement to action. So there's no perfect freedom of speech here, nor do I think there should be, but in the matter of expressing one's opinion and the communication of ideas, we're definitely quite free, and a good deal more so than those in the EU are in some of the member states.
Although I think your characterization of "negative" is inaccurate, I'd be very interested to see what you have to say in regard to the bad things you think we are free to do without interference. Again I am speaking of our constitution and our ideals, not the current state of unauthorized law, which restrict us as much, and in some
The way I see it, an unqualified threat is a promise of action.
If the action promised is violence, and the threat is credible, then the recipient of the threat has been adequately notified that conflict is actually under way.
As the recipient has been assured that violence is immanent in some measure, preempting the other party's violence is reasonable, sensible and should be socially acceptable on every level.
Qualified threats are something else entirely, the question of coercion arises as does the authority of the individual making the threat with regard to the qualification. For instance you could say to me "if you raise your hand to my wife, I will beat you senseless." This is a qualified threat covering an issue where you have adequate authority to assert both the rule and the consequence. No violent response of mine could be justified.
I would be remiss if I didn't point out that US law tends not to agree with me on these matters. The way I see things is pretty much laid out here.
You have failed to understand that no matter what your intent is when you make a remark to another person, it is up to them to evaluate the level of offense actually delivered by the remark.
You have also failed to take into account proportionality. Lightly scratching one's skin on rough tree bark causes pain. A gunshot to the knee causes pain. The former can be trivially ignored and dismissed without consequence or any particular reaction despite the fact that it was, technically speaking, "painful." The latter, not so much.
Then we have the whole issue of "consider the source." Let's take your post for example. I read it, immediately realized you had no idea of the limits to which you had been informed by the talk you went to, and consequently recognized your entire line of reasoning as facile and wrongheaded -- which in turn resulted in the classification of your "arrogant and deluded" remark as baseless nonsense. Which, as it turns out, does not offend me.
Cheers. :)
You have failed to demonstrate circularity. If you can, by all means, do.
Er.... yes, that's what the article is primarily about. I gave you the pointer to the blogpost because as an operational definition, "privacy is autotomy -- the right to conduct your affairs without unreasonable and uninvited interference" doesn't describe the problem space. If you look up a woman's skirt without her permission, how is the interception of those particular photons "interfering" with her "affairs" in any meaningful way? It isn't. It can even be done entirely without her knowledge. But it is a clear invasion of privacy nonetheless. It's not interference that is at issue. It is the sundering of the expectation that an established (very well established in this case) boundary not be violated.
In defining what privacy is, I don't need to describe every set of boundaries, any more than in defining what law is, I must describe every law, or in defining what food is, I must describe every meal.
Even so, I provided several specific examples that were (and remain) topical, and worked through one in detail. I also pointed out that these boundaries can be highly individual and/or specific to a particular society, as well as codified in law, and I broke down why hardening isn't generally relevant to privacy.
It would be somewhat absurd for me to define your own boundaries for you -- how would I know what these are without you knowing first and then telling me? I could tell you mine, but that wouldn't be very likely to illuminate yours in any significant degree.
As far as legal and society-wide boundaries go, I pointed to several and I laid out exactly why they are what they are, how they obviously apply, and where errors arise in procedure that violates those boundaries. Can you not look at the cases of interest to you and do the same? Must I do your thinking for you?
Here in the US, soldiers fight to defend the constitution -- they swear an oath to do so -- and the constitution in turn forbids the federal and state governments from restricting speech:
I take that to mean that a fallen soldier's sacrifice for those principles would be devalued if my reaction to speech I disagreed with was to incite the government to use force to muzzle people of different opinions in any public venue.
If one wants to hold a ceremony where no one can speak unless the host permits it, they need to do so on the host's own private property. Hosting a ceremony or speech in public, by its very nature, exposes it to everyone, not just people who are like-minded. Holding a public ceremony and then complaining when someone shows up who disagrees... I see that as attempting to claim an entitlement that should never exist in the first place.
Again, if the funeral is public, they can say whatever they want. If it is on private property -- which is where my gay sister's funeral was held, by the way, in a very conservative small eastern Pennsylvania town -- then exercising control of the event is up to the owner of the property.
No, of course there are things people could say short of injury, financial and/or reputation damage that would bother me. Some of them don't even have anything to do with me.
I just don't think that there's any principle important enough to justify government force and coercion in order to protect my sensibilities from someone who wants to say something that only reaches the level of bothersome or offensive to me.
So the upshot is that should someone's speech bother or offend me, I need to deal with it myself. In such cases, I have options. I can silently manage the stress; I can undertake countering speech of my own; I can remove myself from the venue; and in the case where I own the venue (home, property, website, etc.), I can control the offensive speech directly.
Is that clearer?
Yawn.
Again, it isn't about what you insist upon. It is about what you are. If you want to go whole-hog reductionist as in your first paragraph, I'll go right along with you -- and I maintain that if they transplanted your own personal brain into a purely female body otherwise, you'd still be a man. You didn't form as a female, your brain did not canalize under the conditions of being female, your brain isn't hooked to, nor does it have the networks required to manage, the various female glands and other system controls; you didn't go through female adolescence, during the development of your brain you were in the wrong bathrooms and locker rooms and so forth; and your thought patterns and ability to multitask didn't receive the development guidance that would give you the many-challenges-at-once competence females exhibit casually and constantly, because it is inherent to their makeup. You're still a fellow in a lady suit.
It would have to be much more than a transplant. Your brain would have to be physically reconfigured into a female model, in no way different from any other female. That would require not only change in configuration, but implantation of new knowledge, skills, reflexes, glandular controls and so on. We may be able to do that someday, but we're not even close now.
This -- when we're talking about perception of ourselves -- represents a basic misunderstanding and misrepresentation of reality. Born human, if you think you're a pony -- with every fiber and pathway of your mind -- you're still not a pony. If you think you are a rock, and I mean utterly convinced in every possible way... you still aren't a rock. If you think you are a magician, or a god, or an elf it doesn't matter even one little bit. You aren't; you never will be; you never were. You're still you, and what that is, is whatever you were born as. You're still exactly that. Just older and considerably more interesting consequent to education and experience.
The reason treating Turing with hormones didn't work is because the idea is monumentally stupid. They thought estrogen would "neutralize libido", and the reason they thought that is because they were unscientific, bumbling fools in the grip of religiously inspired application of tyranny, inculcation of insecurity, and an inexcusable ignorance of sexuality in general. There was never any compelling evidence for such an assertion, nor, for that matter, was there ever a sane reason or excuse to treat Turing as he was treated that rises above the standard of "redneck fucktard", albeit rednecks with lovely English accents. Just more destructive, evil behavior directly attributable to religious fanaticism. I can imagine no punishment adequate to address their contemptible and malicious actions.
I agree. But it does so by means nowhere near as simplistic as today's decision to put on a dress. The physical configuration, chromosomal configuration, topological organization, network distribution and tasking, skill sets and experiences that move the brain along the developmental path from comparatively blank slate at birth to formed human being all have their part in creating a female brain. If the biology is originally male, at least at this point in our scientific development, it's game over and that's your only prize: You're a male.
Doesn't mean you can't spend all your time, bar none, at trying to wrap yourself around an attempt to be female; or that doing so is in any way "wrong"; it just means you can't get there. Yet, anyway.
Ouch. Please read this.
Say, for whatever reason, valid or not, you perceive me as annoying and contrary and generally pin-headed, and you undertake to call me truly despicable names in the most contemptuous and filthy manner imaginable. Every day. Until you expire. Are you harassing me? No. You aren't. It wouldn't even rise to the standard of mild annoyance. Why? Because I am immune to such rhetoric under all but the most trying circumstances, and even were you somehow to reach such a malodorous level of offense, you're still 100% within the bounds of acceptable speech in my book; I just have to cope with it (which would require just about zero effort, I assure you.)
But the next person in line? They might break down into tears, wander off into the nearest bathtub, and slit their wrists if you simply called them a douchebag or implied they had too many pimples.
Whose fault is this? What is our responsibility in the matter of such weak, unprepared, or broken personalities? Should we pad the very walls and take out all the tubs and razors and knives and muzzle each and every one of us to prevent poor Cluetard McDimwit from wrist slitting lest something rises to the level of offense in the dim, dysfunctional reaches of what passes for his mind?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again:
Prepare your kids, and yourself, for exposure to the opinions of others, and gird yourself appropriately lest there is (gasp) an encounter with differing opinion, surprising and/or not-to-your-taste behavior, or OMFG, someone intentionally being nasty, crude or stupid. Or all or the foregoing. It is not anyone else's job to do this for you or your children; and it is not anyone else's responsibility if your failure to do so causes unrest, or worse, in minds you failed to prepare. Including yours.
In order to have freedoms, we must be educated well enough, and prepared well enough, to deal with them. If the fact that some cannot deal with them is sufficient to the cause to limit those freedoms, then eventually, they will erode away to nothing. Likely there will always be some personality on the borderline of collapsing at some provocation, imaginary or otherwise. Should we really attempt to tune our whole society to the lowest possible standard of discourse as a result?
Think very carefully before you endorse force of any kind as a remedy for "offense." To borrow somewhat from Jefferson, if it does not pick my pocket, break my leg, or falsely portray my reputation in some measure likely to cause material or financial consequence... then no remedy is called for; no coercion of law appropriate; and no sympathy required.
Having said that, the owner of any private venue has every right to set arbitrary limits on speech and behavior within the venue. You don't like it, leave. End of story. Such r
I wasn't talking about the presence of orgasms. One certainly hopes that isn't lost. Sorry to hear about the other 15%. I was talking about the nature of the orgasms, the female organs, cycles, musculature, nervous system, skeletal geometry and so forth. You know, the uterus, the ovaries, the vagina (no, a carved out hole is not the same as the actual topology and musculature and reflexive nature of a vagina and associated internal bits), the clitoris (no, a stub of a penis is not the same as a clitoris, not even close) particular flexibilities, etc.
Yes, and we start out with tails, too. But as we develop, things go quite differently for the two sexes. Again, the penis does not equate to a clitoris. No matter what you do with, or to it. Delusions otherwise notwithstanding. Even you were to magically skip my that, the male orgasm is different in nature from the female orgasm in several obvious ways (duration, intensity, repeatability, muscular response [men don't even have some of those muscles], and frankly, I suspect the two are different in many non-obvious ways as well, based on my own personal observations and explorations.
No. If a person's body was genetically built as a woman, they still think as women do, they still are structured biologically as women, and they are still functional as women. Just as changes to your body can't change you from being a man, changes to their bodies can't change them from being a woman. It doesn't come down to one or two issues. Not even close.
You're confusing the natural lubrication the nervous system drives with an artificial source hooked to entirely different plumbing; consider that surgically relocating a tooth in your anus doesn't make it a mouth. As for women who don't lubricate, that's irrelevant. The biology -- nerves, glands, musculature, spinal and brain nervous system components -- is either there, or they're (unfortunately) damaged or have been altered. Now, OTOH, if they simply don't lubricate, but can, that's more a matter of not being fired up, and is no reflection upon their femininity -- it's just an expression of lack of arousal (and the partner takes the heat for that one.) The idea of a fully functional woman as contrasted with one that isn't fully functional still covers a spectrum of woman-to-woman. There's no point in that spectrum where she would change into a man because "just one more thing" had ceased functioning. Same thing the other way. There's no point in a spectrum of losing external male characteristics or artificially altered hormone balance that somehow changes everything else from nervous system to skeleton to muscular arrangement that can make one actually become a woman.
Prostate cancer. Uterine cancer. Ovarian cancer. Penile cancer. Breast cancer. And related. You can't suffer from vaginal cancer because you don't have a vagina. A woman can't suffer from penile cancer because she doesn't have a penis. And so on. So no, the disease vulnerabilities of the sexes are not equal, and do not shift magically from one to the other with the surgeons knife or
An absolutely fact-free claim. Back it up or be ignored.
Your inability or unwillingness to deal with the comparison speaks not at all to any worthwhile counterpoint. It is not an insult to draw accurate comparisons or invoke appropriate metaphor. It is, however, of no service whatsoever to your POV to go whining about it instead of addressing it head-on; you have not established in any way or form that those comparisons were inaccurate or inappropriate. Much less "insulting." Someone interested in masquerading as the Predator would consider your remarks both insensitive and thoughtless -- and they'd be right. There's nothing about gender masquerade that makes it superior to any other type of masquerade.
I brought numerous facts and contentions to the discussion. You have brought nothing other than a monumentally pathetic attempt to disrespect me through labeling. If you want to actually discuss the issues at hand, I'll engage. If all you have to offer is "nuh-uh, meanie!" then you will simply be ignored.
Exactly. You can also do anything you want as far as installing keyloggers and other future-action compromises.
If you require security for your data, then you need two things:
o Sufficient physical security (what that actually means depends on who you're defending against)
o Complete WAN network isolation combined with zero-executable transfer protocols. No scripts, macros, apps, nothing.
Without these things, it is simply not possible to assure security.
And in turn, you should remember that these reasons are not always sound.
Defy Invalid Social Norms
Here's the problem. We can't make the body match the mind. We literally cannot do it. We don't have the technology. The very best we can do is a skin-deep, non-functional mask.
For instance, if you're male, we can lop off the genitals that grew naturally; we can probably dig a pit into your groin; we can plastic up some lippy-looking things to go around it; we might even be able to leave enough of your penis to kinda-sorta give you a little stimulation where the clitoris raises its cute little head. We can't give you an actual clitoris, though. We can insert stuff in your chest to give you breast-like bumps -- which will not, of course, actually be breasts -- and you can cover all this with makeup, dresses, and so on until you may even be able to fool some of the onlooker's eyes.
At the end of this process, though, even with the most successful results, you're not a woman, not female in any way. You're a man with surgical modifications. You're not going to have periods. You cannot bear children. You will not lubricate correctly. You won't share the same disease risks, and you won't share the same disease immunities. Your chromosome configuration will be wrong. Your pheromone emissions will be off. Your sweat will smell wrong. Your skeletal structure will be wrong. Your walk will be wrong, because your pelvic geometry is different. Even your mind, identity crisis and all, probably won't work even remotely like a woman's actually does -- likely you will continue short on multitasking and long on aggression, among many other things.
Don't get me wrong -- if you want to do all this to yourself, I'm all for it. It's your body, by all means, hack away and have fun. If you want to change yourself so you appear as alien or predator or Hillary Clinton or a hobbit or a pony, it's all good, have at it and I truly hope you can get as close as possible to the appearance of the thing you're trying to impersonate so you can enjoy the pretense as fully as possible. Acting is often its own reward, as many actors will tell you right up front.
For the case of a man trying to impersonate a woman, I wouldn't be offended in the least if you managed to carry off that impersonation well enough to coax me, a rather profoundly heterosexual individual, into a sexual interest -- but once I discovered you were actually a guy, I would disengage, simply because I'm not interested in men. And you're still a man. Wearing a mask doesn't make you the thing the mask represents, and that's all body mods and hormone shots accomplish -- they create a mask. It'd be exactly the same if the identity you desire to present is that of a pony; even with the most radical surgeries and prosthetic devices, no matter how accurate the resulting look is, you will never, ever, be a pony. You're a male human with body mods. No more; no less.
Gender is not something we can change at this time, and the not-very-close series of surgical modifications that create a gender mask is not a path that's even in the same direction of desiring to be the other gender. You can cut, chop, filet and drug yourself until you run out of money, and at the end of the day, you're still just the same guy -- you just look different. The problem is that no matter how much you like to wear a mask, and no matter how good the mask is, you are not the mask.
What the present amalgam of surgical and pharmaceutical procedures accomplishes is not a sex change. The best description of it I've heard thus far is these procedures result in the provision of a full body mask, within which you can act like you are the being that the mask presents to the viewer. And while that may be very enjoyable for you, it's still an act; you are still 100% male. A cat in a dog suit is still a cat. A human male modified to look exactly lik
The length of time a term of disrespect exists is no endorsement for its verity or worth. As you ought to know very well, as a 't' in LGBTt.
These petitions aren't useless; the bottom line is every time you attempt to characterize them that way, regardless of if you're using some half-witted slang term, you're making a fool of yourself.
Brought to you by the r in reason. :)
The vast majority of these petitions are not presented or relevant in a global context. Pretty sure the denizens of Beijing really don't give a crap about Pizza Hut's US hiring policies. Etc.
Nice try, though. When you don't have facts, just play air guitar, eh? Ooooo, nice "chord"!
The reason the internment camps were wrong -- and they were -- is because they were based upon race, not ideology. The reason political correctness is wrong in this matter is because it allows toxic and dangerous ideology to fester and continue to harm us without any meaningful attempt to hold the ideology and its followers responsible -- and in many cases, goes as far as making excuses for it.
The parts of WWII facing Japan that were entirely correct include the extreme levels of violence we pursued in response to the violent incursion and further evil-doings based on the Japanese Empire's ideologies. The most correct actions taken were at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is only a shame that it was so difficult to develop the technology that finally proved sufficient to stop that ideology in its filthy, toxic tracks.
Takei's experience has no comparable bearing here (in fact, it demonstrates the opposite of what you were trying to say... American camps were far more humane and reasonable than the Japanese, and even then we fought about them internally.) If you want to compare fairly, then read the experiences of those Americans at Pearl Harbor; Guam; in the Changi camps; and so on, and relate those experiences to the beliefs the various ideologies inculcated in the citizens of the Japanese empire, along with the entirely doctrine-compliant actions the Empire's subjects took as a direct result. Go hang out at the Arizona memorial for a while. Let's compare Apples with Apples; ideology with ideology. And then consider what is too severe an injury to society for society to allow the abuse to continue.
Just ask yourself three questions: First, were conditions at Changi, Outram Road and so on like the conditions at US internment camps? Second, did our ideology -- our constitution, the bill of rights, American ideals -- actually support the idea of the interment camps? Three, did the Japanese ideology -- the ingrained ideas of the Empire that brought us the kamikaze, drove the Japanese citizens off the cliffs at Saipan, the death march at Bataan, and declared the Japanese superior to any other race -- actually support the idea of Changi and its brethren?
The fact is that ideology can be extremely toxic. When it is, tolerating it is an extremely bad idea. What society has to do, and I readily admit this is difficult, is figure out when something is so against the grain that it is unacceptably dangerous. At that point, it is time to excise the tumor. Islam is one of these toxic ideologies. We're going to have to face it eventually. And until we do, every life lost and family destroyed should add to the load on the consciences of those who advocate separating responsibility from ideology in the face of the obvious facts.
Have you? When, pray tell, did "blacks" fly into skyscrapers full of innocent people? When, pray tell, did "Hispanics" march into a humor magazine and shoot down the cartoonist and anyone nearby? When's the last time "blacks" blew up a night club? When's the last time Hispanics murdered everyone at a resort?
Your problem is that the political correctness butt plug has been shoved so far up your ass by the idiots who think everyone is a special butterfly that you can no longer shit, so you've simply gone blind.
No, they don't. Because with that appropriately allocated blame would come elimination. Out you go, here's a nice bit of desert, enjoy, bye, PS we confiscated all your money and possessions and redistributed it to our sane citizens. Thanks for all the rugs and books of superstition suitable for providing kindling in the colder months.
At which point they can bomb sand dunes, set each other on fire, hack each others heads off, and mutilate each others genitals until the the sun goes dead and no one would give a hoot. Quite rightly, too. What justifies this? The abject and continuous failure of the Muslim community to stop this poison at its source -- or even try: Their toxic, world-domination-oriented religion and its book of terrorist advisories.
So, no. What these "terrorists" (Islamists) actually want is just what they say they want, and just what their religion tells them to want: Sharia law, Islam everywhere, bowing in a certain direction at certain times of the day for everyone, end of story.
If you let rattlesnakes run around in your living room, someone's going to get bit. I really don't care how much sympathy you have for rattlesnakes -- and neither do the rattlesnakes. Islam is toxic. You can't fix that. Get it out of the figurative living room.
I will assume you're not suggesting that every reasonable person in said country should pack up and leave the country to those who work to instill such fear. Because, you know, that would be stupid.
The problem here is, as has been true for some time, religion. Specifically Islam in this case, but of course they're just the latest enthusiastic practitioners of murdering, torturing and so on in the cause of superstitious balderdash.
As long as we allow our civilized sensibilities to continue to prevent us from cutting off the head of this particular beast, it will continue to savage us.
You can "desire" to live in a civilized country all you want; but if you are unwilling or unable to weed out the uncivilized for any reason, your desire will be no more than a dream. And that is going to require some action of an extremely severe nature. Such action would not be... civilized. But the eventual result could be.
Physical access to your machine (and/or you) can result in any number of compromises. This has been true since day one; it'll remain true well into the indefinite future (in fact, I see nothing at all coming down the pike that would ameliorate this in any way. I'm just allowing for the possibility.)
and I wonder how long before wearing Google glasses to a poker table gets you booted out of the building.