The swiss are trained in a national guard and allowed to keep their semi-automatic weapon. In America there is no prerequisite to gun ownership. Here are the Swedish requirements via Wikipedia:
I don't think you appreciate one very simple thing. What you mention there means that if a Swede went nuts and decided one day to go on a shooting spree, his weapon training would make him a more effective and more dangerous murderer. So not only is he armed, he's also trained in how to kill since it's pretty hard to have a military without having such training. Yet there is very little gun crime in Switzerland, especially when compared to places with stricter gun control.
I submit to you that this cannot possibly be reconciled with the gun-control advocates' notion that disarming people is the best way to reduce crime. We can split hairs and quibble about the fine nuances of Swedish law, but it won't change that. Not when anyone in Switzerland who wants to grab a gun knows where to find one.
If this system is deployed, I predict that silencers and/or ballistic knives will become popular on Chicago's black market. If there weren't already such well-known, low-tech devices that can defeat this system, I might consider its merits. I wish we'd embrace good old-fashioned police work instead of trying to find technological shortcuts around it. These arms-race scenarios are only one reason I feel that way.
Silencers don't work in real life the way they do in the movies. There is still a pretty loud bang. So what makes you think this technology won't work with silencers?
If we really wanted to reduce crime, we'd legalize the personal use of drugs by adults, release all of the non-violent drug offenders, and use the (tremendous amount of) extra jail space for violent criminals. We'd have more honor that way too, if we only used police to go after criminals who hurt others and stopped using them to tell adults what they may ingest. Unlike the ShotSpotter system, this would both reduce crime and save money.
Seems to me, this system is designed "to go after criminals who hurt others". You are contradicting yourself.
I'm aware that silencers aren't perfect. The point was not whether there is a loud bang. The point is whether the designers of this system were expecting such a countermeasure, and whether their system can pick up muffled gunshots as easily as any other. If it can, are there false positives every time an engine backfires, or someone lights a firecracker, or any number of things that can make sudden loud noises? Even if they can perfectly account for all of those things with 100.0000% accuracy, why wouldn't criminals switch to using other weapons? Right now they use guns because they are a convenient way to present deadly force. If they became a lot less convenient, it's logical they would use something else. These questions need serious, evidence-backed answers before it's reasonable to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in them.
My point is that if two gangs fight over turf, or if someone wants to murder, a system like this might determine the choice of weaponry. It would not determine whether the deed is done. Please explain how I contradict myself by wanting an effective way to stop violent criminals instead of wanting a less effective way (I get the funny feeling you won't try to explain that one). "You contradict yourself" isn't the fatal objection you imagine it to be when you can't back it up with something substantial. Comments on argumentation aside, when we need to go after criminals who hurt others, we have police officers for that. Those officers would have a lot more available manpower and jailspace if we stopped prosecuting personal drug use. I think that's a much better long-term solution than relying on a single technical measure that invites the creation of countermeasures.
"Meanwhile, France and the UK and most of continental Europe do enforce gun control laws"
And meanwhile you *still* get situations like biker gangs in Denmark going at each other with shoulder fired AT4-HEAT antitank grenades.
Contrast and compare to Switzerland - an entire country that is armed to the teeth in every house across the land, and there isn't mayhem.
Gun control laws do absolutely nothing to stem violence, a fact that anti-gun people tend to ignore.
--
BMO
That's why I often refer to this as a religious issue. For gun-control advocates, the comparison between Denmark and Switzerland requires an explanation. It seems they would rather ignore it. In my way of looking at things, if I were an advocate of gun control and encountered such a comparison, I must either give a truly satisfying explanation for it that is consistent with gun-control, or I must abandon gun-control.
There is no shame in abandoning gun-control if I notice that there are fatal flaws in its reasoning. At that point, abandoning it and never advocating that view again would be the only blameless thing to do. I don't see gun-control advocates trying to seriously address such patterns. The best they seem able to do is to discredit the statistics, even when they're quite sound. All they seem to do with data contradictory to their expectations is to dismiss it or ignore it. They never seem to respond to it or feel a need to do so. This is a religion that refers to data only when it is convenient.
That makes it obvious to me that they have an inferior worldview, and it frankly makes me suspicious of their motives. Their inability to respond to objections is so obvious that I believe one or both of two things are happening. Either these people are so thoroughly ignorant about how to advocate a position that they don't see these things as problems, or they know they are problems and don't care because gun-control is about disarming law-abiding citizens and was never about reducing crime. I suspect that a combination of the two is occurring. The gun-control advocates who have real media presence and real political clout know that it's bullshit, and regard their well-meaning-but-ignorant supporters as "useful idiots."
Crime in the US is mainly the result of wide social disparities, much like in South America.
Do you really believe that's a satisfying explanation? That it's normal and natural to assume humans will deal with social disparities by becoming criminals?
There are some people who grow up dirt-poor, with none of the luxuries many take for granted. Yet they don't steal, they don't murder, they don't deal with their situation that way. Others in the same situation become career criminals. I find the difference between those two to be much more interesting and worthy than the difference between rich and poor.
Indeed. Unless it's a union ploy and it really does work.
In which case, $250k per square mile doesn't really seem that bad to me, though, assuming it's the one-time installation fee and not a yearly operational cost. That's 640 acres, and at Chicago's population density of 12k per square mile means the system only costs $20 per "covered" resident.
If this system is deployed, I predict that silencers and/or ballistic knives will become popular on Chicago's black market. If there weren't already such well-known, low-tech devices that can defeat this system, I might consider its merits. I wish we'd embrace good old-fashioned police work instead of trying to find technological shortcuts around it. These arms-race scenarios are only one reason I feel that way.
If we really wanted to reduce crime, we'd legalize the personal use of drugs by adults, release all of the non-violent drug offenders, and use the (tremendous amount of) extra jail space for violent criminals. We'd have more honor that way too, if we only used police to go after criminals who hurt others and stopped using them to tell adults what they may ingest. Unlike the ShotSpotter system, this would both reduce crime and save money.
We're on a site that bills itself as a leading open-source meeting of minds, and the headline is that this publisher is "infecting" Amazon. I think that handles the pettiness qualification.
I can't be responsible for what headline the Slashdot editor chose to write. It was not my decision. What I can do is provide a counter-example if I think it's petty. What I can do is to decide not to allow a thing like that to prevent me from joining this discussion. Besides, it's not hard for me to understand why that description was chosen. The willingness to understand where something comes from independently of whether you like it is vastly underrated.
Arguing that there's an undue emphasis on personal opinion in conversations about freedom is, itself, a personal opinion, though.
The moment I see anyone try to censor otherwise harmless speech because they disagree with it, at that time their disagreement becomes more than an opinion because they are trying to back it with force. Something similar happens here when it's assumed I would want French-style copyright laws that can be used to prevent VDM from reselling Wiki's data.
Even just on the topic of moral rights to a work, is it an abridgment of my freedom to put me in the position of being coerced to sell the final say over what will be my last remnant on earth, or is it an abridgment of my freedom to deny me the opportunity?
That's a fool's question. The answer is "both", and that's why these conversations always turn to weight of opinion.
I don't think that renders a discussion about freedom into a meaningless exchange of opinions. I think it just illustrates the disadvantages of trying to frame important concerns into either-or questions. This is the fallacy of the excluded middle because there's a third option you are neglecting. If you are concerned with how others will use your copyrighted work, release it under a license that forbids those uses. Just understand that if you contribute to Wikipedia, you are agreeing with their license.
Incidentally, this is not a "fair use" or "moral rights" issue. If you thought it was, then we can easily resolve our disagreement. Wikipedia uses a Creative Commons license. By contributing to Wikipedia, you are releasing your work under that license. That license explicitly allows what VDM is doing. That's part of its design. It's right there in black-and-white in the Creative Commons license, and is not an implied thing like a moral right or an instance of fair use.
VDM is trying to charge money for a static copy of frequently-updated information that is trivial to obtain for free.
But let's be clear: you're not saying that the basis for whether you pay for something is whether it's trivial to obtain free or not, correct? That's just might makes right.
I hope this is trolling.
"Might makes right" is about using force of some kind. Wikipedia's contributers are writing and editing articles voluntarily. Wikipedia has chosen to use a Creative Commons license voluntarily. They have chosen to publish their articles on wikipedia.org where anyone can read them for free, voluntarily. If I go to that site and enjoy the free articles, which are something they have worked hard to allow anyone to do, I also am doing that voluntarily. None of these activities involve the use of force, so there is no "might" being used.
Like I said, this is so trivial to deconstruct that I hope you are trolling. If not, please find a good book on argumentation and read it.
They have an excellent chance of being seen as invalid when even their proponents add the caveat "...but this free access only counts if we like you". Either you believe works being free for use is a good thing, or you don't, and the abject rage whenever someone puts a price tag on GPLed/copylefted works smacks of the movement considering the concept a weapon against entrenched publishers rather than a goal. If you're terming something that the lawyers that wrote the license considered a positive feature "abuse" and an opportunity for "selfish gain", perhaps you should reconsider your position on copyright and support French-style stricter rather than looser copyright laws with a moral right clause.
Ironically, these people are almost definitely outsourcing their printing, and probably not even generating a layout until after an order. If it's so bothersome, why not run the same wget->latex->gs chain they do, undercut by half a dollar, and donate all proceeds to Wikipedia?
For an analogy, my views on this are similar to my views on free speech. I may strongly dislike an opinion that you express, but that does not give me the right to attempt to censor you. Instead, the way to handle that is to use persuasion, or to challenge you with an example of what I believe is better speech. Likewise, I think this is a rather selfish use of Wikipedia's information, but I don't believe it should be prevented. It is clearly the intention of Wikipedia that such uses be allowed, and their freedom to make that decision is more important to me than my personal opinion of this particular use. If the "proponents" you mention don't understand this and are as petty as you suggest then they merely hinder themselves.
This discussion is actually an iteration of a general worldview. It's a shame that in many conversations about freedom, there is an such an undue emphasis on personal opinions. The unstated assumption is that they are more important than the concern for freedom. I can see that the root of this is a desire to control others, to have them do only the things of which you would approve. It's contagious and so prevalent that everyone has to interact with it in some way, either to acknowledge and reject it or to be conditioned to accept it as normal. Apparently the latter choice is more popular, as there are not many who would seriously defend (otherwise harmless) speech with which they strongly disagree. Most would either do nothing or try to silence the speaker.
I see that this is the norm. The environment created by such a norm makes it all too easy to overlook the significance of claims I never made. So I can't count it against you that it seems logical to you that I'd advocate stronger copyright controls, since that would amount to using the force of law to prevent something not because it's wrong, but because I dislike it. I'm hoping you can see that my position is not what you may have expected. Interpreted in that light, some of my statements should make more sense. If VDM stops doing this, I want it to be because they change their minds and agree with me that they can do better, not because someone made a law to stop them.
Incidentally, I don't like what VDM is doing because I believe they are charging a high price for a shoddy, low-quality product when the high-quality version is available for free. I would not use words like "exploitative" if I believed they were doing anything to actually earn that money. I consider this to ultimately be a matter that is between VDM and its customers. I am merely explaining why I won't be one of them.
This kind of article is exactly why the open source/copyleft movement doesn't get taken seriously. Free use is only respected when it's someone the neckbeard hivemind loves, cue stories like this or the once-a-year like clockwork furor about Windows containing fragments of BSD. It's especially laughable that somewhere like Slashdot, which prides itself on devotion to the movement, joins in the rage and betrays both readers' and editors' complete incomprehension of the licenses they're constantly on about as ideals.
So the ideals of freedom and openness, and the efforts to have it in the realm of information are invalid because a very small minority of people will abuse it and try to exploit it for their own selfish gain? That's such a disheartening viewpoint that I hope I am grossly misinterpreting you. If you really do feel that way, please reconsider. The whole concept of freedom is that it's so precious that it's worth the occasional asshat, many times over, even if people fail to take it seriously.
This is simply book spam, a new form we're not used to seeing. The conditions are all there: it's randomly generated nonsense blasted to as many people as possible with the intent of getting money from them. Ergo, it's spam.
Although they're certainly free to use Wikipedia content, the problem people have with them is that they're spammers. Nobody likes spammers. We're not against them because of how they generate their messages from a mish-mash of other texts, we're against them because they're spamming us and making it hard for real people to communicate.
This is part of what I meant when I said I believe it deserves to fail because it's without merit. I don't view it as morally wrong but I don't believe it should be rewarded either. The best way to discourage this behavior is for VDM to waste their time and money on it. If that happens, others who might be inclined to do the same thing will take notice that it has been tried and has failed.
I agree that it's a nuisance but I'm not certain it's spam. I am not receiving unsolicited e-mails or cold-calls to my phone about this. Unlike my personal inbox or my personal telephone, Amazon is a place of business. I am not going to see any of VDM's products unless I go to such a place of business and search for books. If I go to say, Wal-mart and see advertisements for products Wal-mart carries, those ads might or might not be annoying and might or might not worsen my shopping experience, but I would not call them spam. If all spam worked this way, we would not have a situation where over 90% of SMTP traffic is due to spammers.
Though I believe they are shoddy, these are legitimate products that are being sold at a legitimate store. Amazon and other booksellers offer these books because they have voluntarily made agreements with VDM, not because they need to use more sophisticated captchas. I think your real issue is with Amazon and other online businesses that are providing VDM a forum. If it annoys enough of their customers, they will probably cease.
For what it's worth, I don't like this company or its practices any more than you do. I just think "spam" is a strong word, and should be, but becomes weakened by using it where it doesn't really apply. It's sort of like what has happened to words like "lady" or "gentleman".
You know, I hit "Submit" too soon. I wanted to comment on your final paragraph as well:
Sadly instead of empowering books and their content, the advent of print-on-demand will cause people to doubt the once rigid standards books held. And rightfully so with entrepreneurs like VDM waltzing around. Don't think this won't spread or VDM won't set up fronts to publish under to avoid their known muckraked name.
I would love for this to happen. It's about damned time the average person became more savvy and learned that skepticism and the ability to distinguish good information from bad are extremely healthy traits. These things are not burdens that one should resent having to perform; they are privileges. For that matter, it's about time it was widely understood and appreciated that no one has your best interests at heart quite like you do. Over-reliance on someone else to be your "gatekeeper" is for people who need to be spoon-fed and have their information interpreted for them. All of the damage VDM could possibly do to anyone would be a very small price to pay for this. I do not exaggerate in the slightest when I say that if critical thinking became a common skill, it would radically change our society for the better.
The complaints are coming from the people buying this tripe--and rightfully so. You used to be able to acquire a book and know that since it was a book the author(s) had done their homework. It was hard for idiots to get publishing deals because the publishers would actually read their work. Sure, you'd have small publishing houses printing "work" on things like free energy or whatever might sell to a niche market. But you'd never have a publisher capable of VDM's feat because of the print-on-demand requirement.
So now we're in this transition period where a few folks know everything about Multigrid GPUs and notice a new book has come on sale [amazon.com] and they must have it to complete their library. Well, it's pure unadulterated shit. But VDM Verlag gets that $60 on a couple sales for college libraries or well paid GPU engineers. And it takes a while for word to get out that VDM is what it is. VDM is capitalizing off of this transition period of consumer trust in books to consumer awareness about print-on-demand. VDM is making a boatload of money but I can't think of a good way to fix the system and, like you said, there's nothing technically illegal about their strategy.
This is really simple, at least to me. You guard against this by actually knowing a little about the company and/or product before you make the purchase. Legitimate companies that believe in the merits of their products will make this easy. If you cannot be bothered to do the few minutes of Googling this requires, or if you are the very first person to ever patronize this company and no one has ever written a review, then you accept that you're taking a risk. I don't view this as a system that needs fixing.
Incidentally, that risk should be easy enough to mitigate with a physical object like this (as opposed to something like boxed software). If you're going to buy it, buy it with a credit card. If you don't like it, return it. If they want to hassle you on returning it, perform a chargeback. I am amazed that there's been no mention of whether VDM has received a lot of chargebacks from this series of books.
It's more about the questionable nature of their publishing than their use of Wikipedia content.
It made me smile to see someone appreciate a very simple matter without feeling a need to delve into copyright law or otherwise complicate it. I hope this is modded up.
VDM is trying to charge money for a static copy of frequently-updated information that is trivial to obtain for free. They seem to be counting on Thomas Tusser's observation that "a fool and his money are soon parted." As far as I know, no one is accusing them of using force or fraud so anyone who does business with them is acting voluntarily. For that reason, I have no moral objection to what they are doing, though I believe it deserves to fail because it lacks merit.
...based on your view of what's important or provides utility. The place where you're falling on your face is in not acknowledging that other people have entirely different utility functions than you do.
I never claimed my list was exhaustive. The features I would personally shop for was not the point of my post, nor do I see how you would think that it was. Either Apple's customers are looking at objective criteria to at least some degree, or those customers are just paying for the brand name. One of those must be true and they cannot both be true.
I agree that the objective criteria I would shop for can be (and probably is) different from the objective criteria another person would shop for. Apparently you think this is something that I would dispute, that I am "falling on my face" due to this. But the specific criteria a particular person would want has nothing to do with anything I was saying. That's because my post was about whether Apple's customers are generally using objective criteria of any sort or whether they patronize Apple solely because of savvy marketing.
When you want to quibble like this over a minor point that doesn't affect my argument one way or another, and act like you just made a slam-dunk counter-argument by doing so, what am I supposed to think? It's obvious to me that you dislike what I said and are incapable of separating your personal feelings from any notion of whether my argument is sound. Unfortunately it transforms your post into an emotional reaction that's trying to disguise itself as reason. It's a good example of rationalization, all the more so because I don't believe you intended it.
Human beings are fascinating this way: they can use such tactics and perform elaborate mental gymnastics like this without even being aware that they have done so. Indeed, most forms of manipulation rely on it. It's usually reinforced by a sincere yet misguided belief that they could not have possibly done such a thing because they weren't planning it. It's always a worthy goal to cultivate the kind of awareness that lets you catch yourself doing this. It's a key component of the ancient urgings to "know thyself."
Most people have never opened the case of their equipment, have no clue about the difference between memory and storage, and couldn't identify the CPU if you put a gun to their head and told them their life depended on it. They've never replaced a component, applied a patch, or compiled a program. Why would openness/ability to mod have any presence in their decision making process? They want something that works reliably and is easy to use.
It sounds like you have independently discovered the reason why I mentioned purchasing decisions and not technical procedures. I suppose you could also assume I am careless enough for this to have been the product of random chance, though I assure you it wasn't. The objection you believe you are making was readily foreseeable.
You also seem to have a narrow conception of openness. If the only way to obtain an application is from a specific company's App Store, and the company for whatever reason does not approve the application, then you aren't going to have it without jailbreaking the device. Do you remember the controversy recently about Apple's initial refusal to approve the Google Voice app? That would not have happened on an open platform. Unlike the narrow concept of openness you have mentioned, users do have reasons to care about this.
As for the other categories of "objective" assessment you listed, most people are aware of tradeoffs in several categories of usability. You don't have to be best in any single category to be best overall. People want a music device which is affordable, rugged, reliable, easy to use, holds "enough" music, and has "enough" battery life. Folks who obsess about any one of those criteria won't want an iPod, but a huge number of people
Apple has you in some sort of hypnosis that is causing you to go gaga over closed up commercial productions that you think you need to own.
Would you like to explain the technical process by which they managed to cause everyone to go gaga? I think a more likely explanation is that some people like it. The fact that you don't has no bearing on that.
Obviously some people like it. They demonstrate that by giving up some of their money in order to obtain it. If some people didn't like it, it would have been a failed, discontinued product and we wouldn't be having this discussion. So, this statement may help you attempt to belittle the GP but it contributes nothing.
A more meaningful consideration is why people like it. Do they like Apple's products because of inherent, demonstrable superiority, like more functionality, better battery life, higher quality, or openness/ability to mod? Things that you can objectively examine such that any neutral, disinterested person can see for himself that it's superior to the competition? Many of us are taking a look at Apple's products and deciding that this cannot be the case. If so, then the phenomenon requires another explanation. When the man running the company personally inspired the term "reality distortion field" because of his salesmanship, it's easy to come up with an alternative explanation.
I think Apple understands one thing well: most people are incredibly lazy, not in the sense that they won't work for something but in the sense that they are passive and completely lack initiative. When it comes to purchasing decisions, they are spectators of the marketers and are not self-directed decision-makers. The results of this are mediocre at best, but they like it because it doesn't require them to take initiative. It's a difficult thing for me to understand because not taking the backseat of your own life is a joy.
I would feel like little more than livestock if I lived the way they do, and indeed they are often described as "bovine" or "sheeple". Yet apparently it suits them. I suspect that's because they are unable to consider this and view it as a choice, making it a self-reinforcing condition. Examples of this mentality are everywhere. If you pay attention, it is not difficult whatsoever to observe people and confirm this for yourself.
It's the same reason why literate adults cry for help with simple computer questions requiring no expertise to understand that could be answered in seconds with Google. I refer to the difference between instantly demanding assistance versus making even a token effort to find their own answers and asking for help only when this fails. Most people will do the latter and not the former. Many of them are intelligent and otherwise more than capable of not only solving the problem, but understanding how it happened so that it doesn't have to occur again. They will take the passive route even when they must wait significantly longer for assistance than their own problem-solving would possibly take. It's not the same thing as stupidity but it is a type of dullness.
This mentality demands gratification and convenience above all else. It usually doesn't mind paying a premium for those things, if only because it's generally unwilling to look for better deals. That's the appeal of the vendor lock-in and the one-stop-shop. I think Apple's marketers understand this very well and are smart enough not to directly say so. They're not alone in this, of course. If this mentality completely disappeared, I believe that much of marketing and advertising would disappear along with it. At any rate, an awareness and appreciation of this otherwise pathological tendency is why Apple's products went from the occasional (pre-OSX) Macintosh that you might find in an office somewhere to everyday devices that you frequently notice people using. With that statement I describe not just Apple, but all successful marketing.
Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)
I laughed at that. Don't these "conservatives" realize that the separation of church and state is better for the state AND the church? The best way to destroy the religion they so cling to would be to intermingle it with petty politics.
The difference is that, as a culture, America has a long history of racially motivated violence and (this is the important bit) we want to do everything in our power to remove that impulse from society.
The best way to do that is through education. This has another benefit. Unlike hate crime laws, we don't have to wait until a person has become a victim of a racially motivated crime before we can use education.
It's the exact same kind of reasoning behind luxury taxes or gas guzzler taxes on cars.
There are certain behaviors we want to discourage in society and so we put into place extra penalties to discourage them.
It's a shame we take such an authoritarian route instead of teaching people that it's a virtue not to be so prone to excess. But then, we're generally not really interested in getting at the roots of our problems and concerns. We greatly prefer to use such carrot-and-stick methods to control behavior, don't we? So how has this superficial approach been working out for us? Do any of our problems ever really go away?
I'm not merely "for" or "against" a particular category of laws, because they did not come from a vacuum. I also examine the worldview that created them. I see plainly that this one is rather unenlightened. It does not seek to reason, convince, and persuade. It only threatens with punishment, which tells me it assumes the people will only respond to force. That is merely "do as I say or else", not true reform. That is not how you bring about meaningful, lasting change.
No.
If you really care to educate yourself, go find a book. Endless pages have been written about hate crime laws.
If that doesn't suit you, find the specific law that you object to and dig through the congressional record &/or C-SPAN's archive.
I think you fail to appreciate that I object to the concept, not any particular implementation. If you understood that, you would not mention specific laws. You'd probably be a bit less patronizing and lose the "if you were educated, you'd agree with me" tone as well.
I think the problem is not so much that your questions haven't been answered, but that you don't/wouldn't like the answers anyway.
You're correct on this one. I don't care for answers like yours because they fail to recognize the nature of my objection. I have tried in this post to clarify that for you. Here's my objection. Hate crimes are thought crimes, because they are based on what the perpetrator was thinking when the crime was committed. That's just a fact, and an integral part of the definition of a hate crime.
I don't want the government to create thought crimes for any reason. Such reasons as "for the children" or "to fight terrorism" are dangerous because they have been used to justify some seriously questionable laws and are nearly impossible to politically oppose. "To stop racism" is like this. Things like racism and terrorism are not just evil. They are so poisonous that if we aren't careful, our efforts to oppose them will corrupt our institutions, our justice system. Thought crimes in the "land of the free" are an example of such corruption.
Motive matters in some cases because we can hold more than a single, direct perpetrator guilty of the same crime. We can, for example, charge the get-away driver with bank robbery, even though he never entered the bank.
But driving a get-away vehicle, or otherwise taking part in a robbery, is already a crime. The person either drove the get-away car or they didn't. If they did, they are guilty of a crime. If they didn't, they aren't. What they were thinking, or why they drove the car, or why they want to take what doesn't belong to them is immaterial.
Right now in the US, there's a young girl accused of conspiracy to commit attempted murder, because she allegedly pointed out the victim to the assailant. Her motive certainly matters. Did she want at least a fight to happen? The principal assailant's motive probably doesn't matter as much in this case, maybe not at all.
Like my above commentary on a hypothetical bank robber, I don't care why she did it. If she helped someone commit murder, then she's guilty of a crime. What difference does it make why she did it? I believe you're confusing this issue with motive. Motive might help a prosecutor build his/her case, but we are not talking about that because a hate crime is a matter of how to punish the perpetrator once guilt is established.
As long as more than one person can be guilty for contributing the same single act, motive must be considered, or tremendous injustices would become not just possible but the norm. I'd suspect that's also the general case even where there is only one criminal, but I can see some counter arguments there.
Why do multiple perpetrators give significance to what they were thinking when the crime was committed? The point is not why the perpetrator feels justified. The point is that other people have been tempted to punch someone out, or to steal something valuable, etc., and they chose not to do it.
Some people find out their spouse is cheating on them and they deal with it by getting a divorce or maybe some marriage counseling. Other people find out the same thing and they deal with it by committing murder. We hear about those on the news every day. The difference between those two groups is why we have a justice system. The latter group has demonstrated that they are not fit to be in our society and must be separated from it to protect everyone else. I really don't care what the murderer was thinking once they have established that they are a member of the latter group.
The time to worry about what tempts people to do harm to others is when your goal is crime prevention. We can and sometimes do recognize pathological behaviors and inclinations before they are acted upon. Those individuals may have psychological problems that can be treated and managed. Some of them may get such help and change their lives before they go too far down the wrong path. But after the crime has been committed and guilt has been established, it's too late to do anything meaningful with this concern.
Your error is in assuming that the fact that BadAnalogyGuy used the phrase wrongly means that the phrase itself has no useful meaning. I noticed that both you and he used professions in your discussion, but that's not where "hate speech" is a useful term. It's when speech is used to generate hate about something that isn't reasonably changeable, like a person's skin color or religion, that it takes on meaning.
Virg
I wonder if you've thought that through. So it's wrong to hate a thing that is not easily changed, but okay to hate a thing that the person can change. If this is your guiding principle, what you end up with is a uniform society of conformists. They'll superficially look different (skin color, attire, etc) but any meaningful diversity will end there, because any real diversity of ideas, worldviews and philosophies is now on the "acceptable hatred" list. That's the problem with this notion, and more generally the problem with all of this focus on group identities instead of individuality.
I don't intend to convince you of the rightness of their opinions, just explain to you where they're coming from, since you seem to be coming from the "dead is dead, what does it matter the reason" school of thought.
I generally agree with the GP. When you read his post, I believe there is an implicit meaning that you have missed.
It's not "dead is dead, what does the reason matter". It's "intentionally dead is intentionally dead, except for legitimate self-defense, what does the reason matter". If someone intentionally murders another human being who was no physical threat to them, the purpose of arresting and incarcerating (or executing) that individual is to remove them from society, thereby protecting society from a known murderer and potentially deterring others who would murder.
I don't understand the concern and fascination with what a murderer was thinking. To punish one more severely than another, which would mean one might get out of jail sooner than another, makes no sense to me. To choose whether I want a guy who would murder for money back on the streets, or whether I want a guy who would murder over someone's skin tone back on the streets is like choosing from which bucket of puke to drink. Both are equally unappealing. I don't really want either person to ever walk the streets again.
I'll clarify. You are saying that the motive for the crime matters to "Democrats". So to them, a guy who comes home to find his wife screwing another man and murders his wife is "more understandable" or "less punishable" than a guy who murders a member of a racial minority because he was a member of that minority. But guess what? Other people get cheated on by someone who claimed to love them, and they don't kill over it. Other people have totally inappropriate racism and sexism and other "isms" and manage not to murder anyone. Other people see a rich man walk down the street and envy his wealth and manage not to kill that man.
To worry about the murderer's excuses and justifications is madness. I don't care what the reason is. The point is, other people also have reasons not to like someone, valid and invalid, and they manage to deal with them peacefully. If someone cannot do that, there's something seriously wrong with them and society needs to be protected from them.
Like far too many laws, these "hate crime" concepts were written, voted upon, and made law without first addressing the above. That's a weak form of "might makes right" reasoning. The message is, we have the votes, we have the means, we have the political clout, so we're going to make this law whether we can justify it or not, whether we can answer the objections to it or not. Anytime you're asked to have faith in a concept by a person who cannot address your objections to it, because it sounds good to them but they can't give you a truly good reason for it, what you are dealing with is religion. Even if it doesn't call itself that.
To give a hypothetical, let's say that, heaven forbid, a guy is driving down the road, visibility is very low, conditions are bad, and he hits a pedestrian that he honestly did not see. This person had no intention of hitting anyone, and is quite horrified that this happened. That's an honest accident. I would not call this person a murderer.
It seems that if you're going to bad mouth an entire profession, there should be some kind of evidence to back it up. It sounds like he's just got it in for chiropractors.
It seems to me that if you're going to bad-mouth a profession, it should be understood that this is your personal opinion, it may or may not represent reality, and you're entitled to it. Anyone who is undecided about the efficacy of chiropractors and is looking for information about them -- and for that matter, anyone else participating in serious inquiry -- needs something a lot more substantial than one man's opinion. To put that another way, anyone who makes (or alters) medical decisions based on some random dude's personal opinions had no reasonable expectation of good results in the first place.
And I'm not so sure we can consider it anything but hate speech.
Well let's see. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. If you want to officially settle that, then we have two options here:
Option A: monitor the speech of everyone in order to track down occurrences of "hate speech", spend tax dollars prosecuting them or waste time defaming them, place a chilling effect on free speech, and tell adult people when they are or are not allowed to hate something. Side effects include the use of the police power of government in situations where no one is using force or fraud to infringe anyone's civil rights, as well as a population that is incapable of understanding that you get to choose whether or not the words of another are going to injure you or affect how you feel. This is otherwise known as having a spine, having some self-determination, and other things that are falling out of fashion these days. The popular practice now is to let your emotions and your general well-being depend on what other people do, and the next logical step (since everything is always evolving or progressing along its path) is to want more control over other people. Thus, we have concepts like "hate speech". The strange thing is that many people seem incredibly determined to never question any of this or to look very deeply at what motivates it.
Option B: teach people how to actually perform research. This would naturally equip them to differentiate between factual data and personal opinion. That would mean this person can say whatever he wants about chiropractors or any other profession, because anyone seriously considering hiring a chiropractor or any other professional of any sort would rightly ignore him in favor of better sources of information. Side effects include a population that can easily distinguish good information from bad, more free speech with fewer negative effects, and people who can explain what is wrong with even actual hatred and use it as an example of what one shouldn't do without feeling a need to use force (i.e. police) in order to censor it.
Having carefully examined both of the available options, I must say that I have a strong preference for the latter. If you still support the "hate speech" concept, and especially if you believe that legal sanctions (including arrest, a criminal record, possible fines, possible incarceration) are the very best way to deal with this person, then I'd like to know why you disagree with me.
I'm behind the times. Isn't the PDF format a document format, that contains only document markup and layout info? When did it start being able to have embedded code?
Ever since Adobe perfected the basic PDF functionality and needed to keep adding features. Whether they are frills or not, whether they depart from the purpose of PDF or not, Adobe has to do this to justify its marketing. They want their customers to have reasons to keep wanting the latest version. Feature creep, in other words.
I disagree with the slant of the article that this is a scandal. Have the Chicago Bulls been just as good without Jordan? Of course not. Special people are special. You are lucky when you get them, but most of the time you have to work around not having them.
I think this gentleman and John Taylor Gatto have a lot in common. The "special" thing about Gatto is his ability to see a spade and call it a spade instead of getting lost in all of the justifications and excuses. This one-line summary in no way does justice to either of the above-linked works, but Gatto went to some of the poorest inner-city schools in some of the worst neighborhoods and found that the children there were eager and very able learners once you stopped treating them like idiots. You'd think the school systems would appreciate anyone who can demonstrate that, but they didn't.
So I think your analogy to the Chicago Bulls doesn't really work. The Bulls experienced a particularly outstanding individual but presumably, all the other players would have wanted to attain that level of talent. The school systems are experiencing problems that are institutional and profoundly anti-educational. I don't believe the problem with schools is funding or ability. I think the problem is that they are not really interested in improving their methods or looking too closely at their results.
It must suck to have to start disliking stuff just because some plebs found out about it.
I appreciate your accusation of allowing the crowd to determine my tastes, and I'm not surprised the mods rewarded you for taking the low-hanging fruit of going that route. But in truth I can like a thing and not like constant irrelevant (or barely-relevant) references to it. The map is not the territory; if I think the map is shoddy, it is not the same thing as refusing to set foot on the territory.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you appreciate one very simple thing. What you mention there means that if a Swede went nuts and decided one day to go on a shooting spree, his weapon training would make him a more effective and more dangerous murderer. So not only is he armed, he's also trained in how to kill since it's pretty hard to have a military without having such training. Yet there is very little gun crime in Switzerland, especially when compared to places with stricter gun control.
I submit to you that this cannot possibly be reconciled with the gun-control advocates' notion that disarming people is the best way to reduce crime. We can split hairs and quibble about the fine nuances of Swedish law, but it won't change that. Not when anyone in Switzerland who wants to grab a gun knows where to find one.
If this system is deployed, I predict that silencers and/or ballistic knives will become popular on Chicago's black market. If there weren't already such well-known, low-tech devices that can defeat this system, I might consider its merits. I wish we'd embrace good old-fashioned police work instead of trying to find technological shortcuts around it. These arms-race scenarios are only one reason I feel that way.
Silencers don't work in real life the way they do in the movies. There is still a pretty loud bang. So what makes you think this technology won't work with silencers?
If we really wanted to reduce crime, we'd legalize the personal use of drugs by adults, release all of the non-violent drug offenders, and use the (tremendous amount of) extra jail space for violent criminals. We'd have more honor that way too, if we only used police to go after criminals who hurt others and stopped using them to tell adults what they may ingest. Unlike the ShotSpotter system, this would both reduce crime and save money.
Seems to me, this system is designed "to go after criminals who hurt others". You are contradicting yourself.
I'm aware that silencers aren't perfect. The point was not whether there is a loud bang. The point is whether the designers of this system were expecting such a countermeasure, and whether their system can pick up muffled gunshots as easily as any other. If it can, are there false positives every time an engine backfires, or someone lights a firecracker, or any number of things that can make sudden loud noises? Even if they can perfectly account for all of those things with 100.0000% accuracy, why wouldn't criminals switch to using other weapons? Right now they use guns because they are a convenient way to present deadly force. If they became a lot less convenient, it's logical they would use something else. These questions need serious, evidence-backed answers before it's reasonable to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in them.
My point is that if two gangs fight over turf, or if someone wants to murder, a system like this might determine the choice of weaponry. It would not determine whether the deed is done. Please explain how I contradict myself by wanting an effective way to stop violent criminals instead of wanting a less effective way (I get the funny feeling you won't try to explain that one). "You contradict yourself" isn't the fatal objection you imagine it to be when you can't back it up with something substantial. Comments on argumentation aside, when we need to go after criminals who hurt others, we have police officers for that. Those officers would have a lot more available manpower and jailspace if we stopped prosecuting personal drug use. I think that's a much better long-term solution than relying on a single technical measure that invites the creation of countermeasures.
"Meanwhile, France and the UK and most of continental Europe do enforce gun control laws"
And meanwhile you *still* get situations like biker gangs in Denmark going at each other with shoulder fired AT4-HEAT antitank grenades.
Contrast and compare to Switzerland - an entire country that is armed to the teeth in every house across the land, and there isn't mayhem.
Gun control laws do absolutely nothing to stem violence, a fact that anti-gun people tend to ignore.
-- BMO
That's why I often refer to this as a religious issue. For gun-control advocates, the comparison between Denmark and Switzerland requires an explanation. It seems they would rather ignore it. In my way of looking at things, if I were an advocate of gun control and encountered such a comparison, I must either give a truly satisfying explanation for it that is consistent with gun-control, or I must abandon gun-control.
There is no shame in abandoning gun-control if I notice that there are fatal flaws in its reasoning. At that point, abandoning it and never advocating that view again would be the only blameless thing to do. I don't see gun-control advocates trying to seriously address such patterns. The best they seem able to do is to discredit the statistics, even when they're quite sound. All they seem to do with data contradictory to their expectations is to dismiss it or ignore it. They never seem to respond to it or feel a need to do so. This is a religion that refers to data only when it is convenient.
That makes it obvious to me that they have an inferior worldview, and it frankly makes me suspicious of their motives. Their inability to respond to objections is so obvious that I believe one or both of two things are happening. Either these people are so thoroughly ignorant about how to advocate a position that they don't see these things as problems, or they know they are problems and don't care because gun-control is about disarming law-abiding citizens and was never about reducing crime. I suspect that a combination of the two is occurring. The gun-control advocates who have real media presence and real political clout know that it's bullshit, and regard their well-meaning-but-ignorant supporters as "useful idiots."
Do you really believe that's a satisfying explanation? That it's normal and natural to assume humans will deal with social disparities by becoming criminals?
There are some people who grow up dirt-poor, with none of the luxuries many take for granted. Yet they don't steal, they don't murder, they don't deal with their situation that way. Others in the same situation become career criminals. I find the difference between those two to be much more interesting and worthy than the difference between rich and poor.
Indeed. Unless it's a union ploy and it really does work.
In which case, $250k per square mile doesn't really seem that bad to me, though, assuming it's the one-time installation fee and not a yearly operational cost. That's 640 acres, and at Chicago's population density of 12k per square mile means the system only costs $20 per "covered" resident.
If this system is deployed, I predict that silencers and/or ballistic knives will become popular on Chicago's black market. If there weren't already such well-known, low-tech devices that can defeat this system, I might consider its merits. I wish we'd embrace good old-fashioned police work instead of trying to find technological shortcuts around it. These arms-race scenarios are only one reason I feel that way.
If we really wanted to reduce crime, we'd legalize the personal use of drugs by adults, release all of the non-violent drug offenders, and use the (tremendous amount of) extra jail space for violent criminals. We'd have more honor that way too, if we only used police to go after criminals who hurt others and stopped using them to tell adults what they may ingest. Unlike the ShotSpotter system, this would both reduce crime and save money.
I can't be responsible for what headline the Slashdot editor chose to write. It was not my decision. What I can do is provide a counter-example if I think it's petty. What I can do is to decide not to allow a thing like that to prevent me from joining this discussion. Besides, it's not hard for me to understand why that description was chosen. The willingness to understand where something comes from independently of whether you like it is vastly underrated.
The moment I see anyone try to censor otherwise harmless speech because they disagree with it, at that time their disagreement becomes more than an opinion because they are trying to back it with force. Something similar happens here when it's assumed I would want French-style copyright laws that can be used to prevent VDM from reselling Wiki's data.
I don't think that renders a discussion about freedom into a meaningless exchange of opinions. I think it just illustrates the disadvantages of trying to frame important concerns into either-or questions. This is the fallacy of the excluded middle because there's a third option you are neglecting. If you are concerned with how others will use your copyrighted work, release it under a license that forbids those uses. Just understand that if you contribute to Wikipedia, you are agreeing with their license.
Incidentally, this is not a "fair use" or "moral rights" issue. If you thought it was, then we can easily resolve our disagreement. Wikipedia uses a Creative Commons license. By contributing to Wikipedia, you are releasing your work under that license. That license explicitly allows what VDM is doing. That's part of its design. It's right there in black-and-white in the Creative Commons license, and is not an implied thing like a moral right or an instance of fair use.
VDM is trying to charge money for a static copy of frequently-updated information that is trivial to obtain for free.
But let's be clear: you're not saying that the basis for whether you pay for something is whether it's trivial to obtain free or not, correct? That's just might makes right.
I hope this is trolling.
"Might makes right" is about using force of some kind. Wikipedia's contributers are writing and editing articles voluntarily. Wikipedia has chosen to use a Creative Commons license voluntarily. They have chosen to publish their articles on wikipedia.org where anyone can read them for free, voluntarily. If I go to that site and enjoy the free articles, which are something they have worked hard to allow anyone to do, I also am doing that voluntarily. None of these activities involve the use of force, so there is no "might" being used.
Like I said, this is so trivial to deconstruct that I hope you are trolling. If not, please find a good book on argumentation and read it.
For an analogy, my views on this are similar to my views on free speech. I may strongly dislike an opinion that you express, but that does not give me the right to attempt to censor you. Instead, the way to handle that is to use persuasion, or to challenge you with an example of what I believe is better speech. Likewise, I think this is a rather selfish use of Wikipedia's information, but I don't believe it should be prevented. It is clearly the intention of Wikipedia that such uses be allowed, and their freedom to make that decision is more important to me than my personal opinion of this particular use. If the "proponents" you mention don't understand this and are as petty as you suggest then they merely hinder themselves.
This discussion is actually an iteration of a general worldview. It's a shame that in many conversations about freedom, there is an such an undue emphasis on personal opinions. The unstated assumption is that they are more important than the concern for freedom. I can see that the root of this is a desire to control others, to have them do only the things of which you would approve. It's contagious and so prevalent that everyone has to interact with it in some way, either to acknowledge and reject it or to be conditioned to accept it as normal. Apparently the latter choice is more popular, as there are not many who would seriously defend (otherwise harmless) speech with which they strongly disagree. Most would either do nothing or try to silence the speaker.
I see that this is the norm. The environment created by such a norm makes it all too easy to overlook the significance of claims I never made. So I can't count it against you that it seems logical to you that I'd advocate stronger copyright controls, since that would amount to using the force of law to prevent something not because it's wrong, but because I dislike it. I'm hoping you can see that my position is not what you may have expected. Interpreted in that light, some of my statements should make more sense. If VDM stops doing this, I want it to be because they change their minds and agree with me that they can do better, not because someone made a law to stop them.
Incidentally, I don't like what VDM is doing because I believe they are charging a high price for a shoddy, low-quality product when the high-quality version is available for free. I would not use words like "exploitative" if I believed they were doing anything to actually earn that money. I consider this to ultimately be a matter that is between VDM and its customers. I am merely explaining why I won't be one of them.
So the ideals of freedom and openness, and the efforts to have it in the realm of information are invalid because a very small minority of people will abuse it and try to exploit it for their own selfish gain? That's such a disheartening viewpoint that I hope I am grossly misinterpreting you. If you really do feel that way, please reconsider. The whole concept of freedom is that it's so precious that it's worth the occasional asshat, many times over, even if people fail to take it seriously.
This is simply book spam, a new form we're not used to seeing. The conditions are all there: it's randomly generated nonsense blasted to as many people as possible with the intent of getting money from them. Ergo, it's spam.
Although they're certainly free to use Wikipedia content, the problem people have with them is that they're spammers. Nobody likes spammers. We're not against them because of how they generate their messages from a mish-mash of other texts, we're against them because they're spamming us and making it hard for real people to communicate.
This is part of what I meant when I said I believe it deserves to fail because it's without merit. I don't view it as morally wrong but I don't believe it should be rewarded either. The best way to discourage this behavior is for VDM to waste their time and money on it. If that happens, others who might be inclined to do the same thing will take notice that it has been tried and has failed.
I agree that it's a nuisance but I'm not certain it's spam. I am not receiving unsolicited e-mails or cold-calls to my phone about this. Unlike my personal inbox or my personal telephone, Amazon is a place of business. I am not going to see any of VDM's products unless I go to such a place of business and search for books. If I go to say, Wal-mart and see advertisements for products Wal-mart carries, those ads might or might not be annoying and might or might not worsen my shopping experience, but I would not call them spam. If all spam worked this way, we would not have a situation where over 90% of SMTP traffic is due to spammers.
Though I believe they are shoddy, these are legitimate products that are being sold at a legitimate store. Amazon and other booksellers offer these books because they have voluntarily made agreements with VDM, not because they need to use more sophisticated captchas. I think your real issue is with Amazon and other online businesses that are providing VDM a forum. If it annoys enough of their customers, they will probably cease.
For what it's worth, I don't like this company or its practices any more than you do. I just think "spam" is a strong word, and should be, but becomes weakened by using it where it doesn't really apply. It's sort of like what has happened to words like "lady" or "gentleman".
I would love for this to happen. It's about damned time the average person became more savvy and learned that skepticism and the ability to distinguish good information from bad are extremely healthy traits. These things are not burdens that one should resent having to perform; they are privileges. For that matter, it's about time it was widely understood and appreciated that no one has your best interests at heart quite like you do. Over-reliance on someone else to be your "gatekeeper" is for people who need to be spoon-fed and have their information interpreted for them. All of the damage VDM could possibly do to anyone would be a very small price to pay for this. I do not exaggerate in the slightest when I say that if critical thinking became a common skill, it would radically change our society for the better.
This is really simple, at least to me. You guard against this by actually knowing a little about the company and/or product before you make the purchase. Legitimate companies that believe in the merits of their products will make this easy. If you cannot be bothered to do the few minutes of Googling this requires, or if you are the very first person to ever patronize this company and no one has ever written a review, then you accept that you're taking a risk. I don't view this as a system that needs fixing.
Incidentally, that risk should be easy enough to mitigate with a physical object like this (as opposed to something like boxed software). If you're going to buy it, buy it with a credit card. If you don't like it, return it. If they want to hassle you on returning it, perform a chargeback. I am amazed that there's been no mention of whether VDM has received a lot of chargebacks from this series of books.
It's more about the questionable nature of their publishing than their use of Wikipedia content.
It made me smile to see someone appreciate a very simple matter without feeling a need to delve into copyright law or otherwise complicate it. I hope this is modded up.
VDM is trying to charge money for a static copy of frequently-updated information that is trivial to obtain for free. They seem to be counting on Thomas Tusser's observation that "a fool and his money are soon parted." As far as I know, no one is accusing them of using force or fraud so anyone who does business with them is acting voluntarily. For that reason, I have no moral objection to what they are doing, though I believe it deserves to fail because it lacks merit.
I never claimed my list was exhaustive. The features I would personally shop for was not the point of my post, nor do I see how you would think that it was. Either Apple's customers are looking at objective criteria to at least some degree, or those customers are just paying for the brand name. One of those must be true and they cannot both be true.
I agree that the objective criteria I would shop for can be (and probably is) different from the objective criteria another person would shop for. Apparently you think this is something that I would dispute, that I am "falling on my face" due to this. But the specific criteria a particular person would want has nothing to do with anything I was saying. That's because my post was about whether Apple's customers are generally using objective criteria of any sort or whether they patronize Apple solely because of savvy marketing.
When you want to quibble like this over a minor point that doesn't affect my argument one way or another, and act like you just made a slam-dunk counter-argument by doing so, what am I supposed to think? It's obvious to me that you dislike what I said and are incapable of separating your personal feelings from any notion of whether my argument is sound. Unfortunately it transforms your post into an emotional reaction that's trying to disguise itself as reason. It's a good example of rationalization, all the more so because I don't believe you intended it.
Human beings are fascinating this way: they can use such tactics and perform elaborate mental gymnastics like this without even being aware that they have done so. Indeed, most forms of manipulation rely on it. It's usually reinforced by a sincere yet misguided belief that they could not have possibly done such a thing because they weren't planning it. It's always a worthy goal to cultivate the kind of awareness that lets you catch yourself doing this. It's a key component of the ancient urgings to "know thyself."
It sounds like you have independently discovered the reason why I mentioned purchasing decisions and not technical procedures. I suppose you could also assume I am careless enough for this to have been the product of random chance, though I assure you it wasn't. The objection you believe you are making was readily foreseeable.
You also seem to have a narrow conception of openness. If the only way to obtain an application is from a specific company's App Store, and the company for whatever reason does not approve the application, then you aren't going to have it without jailbreaking the device. Do you remember the controversy recently about Apple's initial refusal to approve the Google Voice app? That would not have happened on an open platform. Unlike the narrow concept of openness you have mentioned, users do have reasons to care about this.
Apple has you in some sort of hypnosis that is causing you to go gaga over closed up commercial productions that you think you need to own.
Would you like to explain the technical process by which they managed to cause everyone to go gaga? I think a more likely explanation is that some people like it. The fact that you don't has no bearing on that.
Obviously some people like it. They demonstrate that by giving up some of their money in order to obtain it. If some people didn't like it, it would have been a failed, discontinued product and we wouldn't be having this discussion. So, this statement may help you attempt to belittle the GP but it contributes nothing.
A more meaningful consideration is why people like it. Do they like Apple's products because of inherent, demonstrable superiority, like more functionality, better battery life, higher quality, or openness/ability to mod? Things that you can objectively examine such that any neutral, disinterested person can see for himself that it's superior to the competition? Many of us are taking a look at Apple's products and deciding that this cannot be the case. If so, then the phenomenon requires another explanation. When the man running the company personally inspired the term "reality distortion field" because of his salesmanship, it's easy to come up with an alternative explanation.
I think Apple understands one thing well: most people are incredibly lazy, not in the sense that they won't work for something but in the sense that they are passive and completely lack initiative. When it comes to purchasing decisions, they are spectators of the marketers and are not self-directed decision-makers. The results of this are mediocre at best, but they like it because it doesn't require them to take initiative. It's a difficult thing for me to understand because not taking the backseat of your own life is a joy.
I would feel like little more than livestock if I lived the way they do, and indeed they are often described as "bovine" or "sheeple". Yet apparently it suits them. I suspect that's because they are unable to consider this and view it as a choice, making it a self-reinforcing condition. Examples of this mentality are everywhere. If you pay attention, it is not difficult whatsoever to observe people and confirm this for yourself.
It's the same reason why literate adults cry for help with simple computer questions requiring no expertise to understand that could be answered in seconds with Google. I refer to the difference between instantly demanding assistance versus making even a token effort to find their own answers and asking for help only when this fails. Most people will do the latter and not the former. Many of them are intelligent and otherwise more than capable of not only solving the problem, but understanding how it happened so that it doesn't have to occur again. They will take the passive route even when they must wait significantly longer for assistance than their own problem-solving would possibly take. It's not the same thing as stupidity but it is a type of dullness.
This mentality demands gratification and convenience above all else. It usually doesn't mind paying a premium for those things, if only because it's generally unwilling to look for better deals. That's the appeal of the vendor lock-in and the one-stop-shop. I think Apple's marketers understand this very well and are smart enough not to directly say so. They're not alone in this, of course. If this mentality completely disappeared, I believe that much of marketing and advertising would disappear along with it. At any rate, an awareness and appreciation of this otherwise pathological tendency is why Apple's products went from the occasional (pre-OSX) Macintosh that you might find in an office somewhere to everyday devices that you frequently notice people using. With that statement I describe not just Apple, but all successful marketing.
Maybe you missed it, but he's not officially inspirational anymore. (Last paragraph.)
That paragraph was amusing, in a way. It reads:
Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)
I laughed at that. Don't these "conservatives" realize that the separation of church and state is better for the state AND the church? The best way to destroy the religion they so cling to would be to intermingle it with petty politics.
The best way to do that is through education. This has another benefit. Unlike hate crime laws, we don't have to wait until a person has become a victim of a racially motivated crime before we can use education.
It's a shame we take such an authoritarian route instead of teaching people that it's a virtue not to be so prone to excess. But then, we're generally not really interested in getting at the roots of our problems and concerns. We greatly prefer to use such carrot-and-stick methods to control behavior, don't we? So how has this superficial approach been working out for us? Do any of our problems ever really go away?
I'm not merely "for" or "against" a particular category of laws, because they did not come from a vacuum. I also examine the worldview that created them. I see plainly that this one is rather unenlightened. It does not seek to reason, convince, and persuade. It only threatens with punishment, which tells me it assumes the people will only respond to force. That is merely "do as I say or else", not true reform. That is not how you bring about meaningful, lasting change.
I think you fail to appreciate that I object to the concept, not any particular implementation. If you understood that, you would not mention specific laws. You'd probably be a bit less patronizing and lose the "if you were educated, you'd agree with me" tone as well.
You're correct on this one. I don't care for answers like yours because they fail to recognize the nature of my objection. I have tried in this post to clarify that for you. Here's my objection. Hate crimes are thought crimes, because they are based on what the perpetrator was thinking when the crime was committed. That's just a fact, and an integral part of the definition of a hate crime.
I don't want the government to create thought crimes for any reason. Such reasons as "for the children" or "to fight terrorism" are dangerous because they have been used to justify some seriously questionable laws and are nearly impossible to politically oppose. "To stop racism" is like this. Things like racism and terrorism are not just evil. They are so poisonous that if we aren't careful, our efforts to oppose them will corrupt our institutions, our justice system. Thought crimes in the "land of the free" are an example of such corruption.
But driving a get-away vehicle, or otherwise taking part in a robbery, is already a crime. The person either drove the get-away car or they didn't. If they did, they are guilty of a crime. If they didn't, they aren't. What they were thinking, or why they drove the car, or why they want to take what doesn't belong to them is immaterial.
Like my above commentary on a hypothetical bank robber, I don't care why she did it. If she helped someone commit murder, then she's guilty of a crime. What difference does it make why she did it? I believe you're confusing this issue with motive. Motive might help a prosecutor build his/her case, but we are not talking about that because a hate crime is a matter of how to punish the perpetrator once guilt is established.
Why do multiple perpetrators give significance to what they were thinking when the crime was committed? The point is not why the perpetrator feels justified. The point is that other people have been tempted to punch someone out, or to steal something valuable, etc., and they chose not to do it.
Some people find out their spouse is cheating on them and they deal with it by getting a divorce or maybe some marriage counseling. Other people find out the same thing and they deal with it by committing murder. We hear about those on the news every day. The difference between those two groups is why we have a justice system. The latter group has demonstrated that they are not fit to be in our society and must be separated from it to protect everyone else. I really don't care what the murderer was thinking once they have established that they are a member of the latter group.
The time to worry about what tempts people to do harm to others is when your goal is crime prevention. We can and sometimes do recognize pathological behaviors and inclinations before they are acted upon. Those individuals may have psychological problems that can be treated and managed. Some of them may get such help and change their lives before they go too far down the wrong path. But after the crime has been committed and guilt has been established, it's too late to do anything meaningful with this concern.
Your error is in assuming that the fact that BadAnalogyGuy used the phrase wrongly means that the phrase itself has no useful meaning. I noticed that both you and he used professions in your discussion, but that's not where "hate speech" is a useful term. It's when speech is used to generate hate about something that isn't reasonably changeable, like a person's skin color or religion, that it takes on meaning. Virg
I wonder if you've thought that through. So it's wrong to hate a thing that is not easily changed, but okay to hate a thing that the person can change. If this is your guiding principle, what you end up with is a uniform society of conformists. They'll superficially look different (skin color, attire, etc) but any meaningful diversity will end there, because any real diversity of ideas, worldviews and philosophies is now on the "acceptable hatred" list. That's the problem with this notion, and more generally the problem with all of this focus on group identities instead of individuality.
Bah, replying to myself. I meant to end that comment with "Even if it doesn't call itself that."
Note to self: don't brainstorm a paragraph at the end of your text and then leave it in the finished post.
I generally agree with the GP. When you read his post, I believe there is an implicit meaning that you have missed.
It's not "dead is dead, what does the reason matter". It's "intentionally dead is intentionally dead, except for legitimate self-defense, what does the reason matter". If someone intentionally murders another human being who was no physical threat to them, the purpose of arresting and incarcerating (or executing) that individual is to remove them from society, thereby protecting society from a known murderer and potentially deterring others who would murder.
I don't understand the concern and fascination with what a murderer was thinking. To punish one more severely than another, which would mean one might get out of jail sooner than another, makes no sense to me. To choose whether I want a guy who would murder for money back on the streets, or whether I want a guy who would murder over someone's skin tone back on the streets is like choosing from which bucket of puke to drink. Both are equally unappealing. I don't really want either person to ever walk the streets again.
I'll clarify. You are saying that the motive for the crime matters to "Democrats". So to them, a guy who comes home to find his wife screwing another man and murders his wife is "more understandable" or "less punishable" than a guy who murders a member of a racial minority because he was a member of that minority. But guess what? Other people get cheated on by someone who claimed to love them, and they don't kill over it. Other people have totally inappropriate racism and sexism and other "isms" and manage not to murder anyone. Other people see a rich man walk down the street and envy his wealth and manage not to kill that man.
To worry about the murderer's excuses and justifications is madness. I don't care what the reason is. The point is, other people also have reasons not to like someone, valid and invalid, and they manage to deal with them peacefully. If someone cannot do that, there's something seriously wrong with them and society needs to be protected from them.
Like far too many laws, these "hate crime" concepts were written, voted upon, and made law without first addressing the above. That's a weak form of "might makes right" reasoning. The message is, we have the votes, we have the means, we have the political clout, so we're going to make this law whether we can justify it or not, whether we can answer the objections to it or not. Anytime you're asked to have faith in a concept by a person who cannot address your objections to it, because it sounds good to them but they can't give you a truly good reason for it, what you are dealing with is religion. Even if it doesn't call itself that. To give a hypothetical, let's say that, heaven forbid, a guy is driving down the road, visibility is very low, conditions are bad, and he hits a pedestrian that he honestly did not see. This person had no intention of hitting anyone, and is quite horrified that this happened. That's an honest accident. I would not call this person a murderer.
It seems to me that if you're going to bad-mouth a profession, it should be understood that this is your personal opinion, it may or may not represent reality, and you're entitled to it. Anyone who is undecided about the efficacy of chiropractors and is looking for information about them -- and for that matter, anyone else participating in serious inquiry -- needs something a lot more substantial than one man's opinion. To put that another way, anyone who makes (or alters) medical decisions based on some random dude's personal opinions had no reasonable expectation of good results in the first place.
Well let's see. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. If you want to officially settle that, then we have two options here:
Option A: monitor the speech of everyone in order to track down occurrences of "hate speech", spend tax dollars prosecuting them or waste time defaming them, place a chilling effect on free speech, and tell adult people when they are or are not allowed to hate something. Side effects include the use of the police power of government in situations where no one is using force or fraud to infringe anyone's civil rights, as well as a population that is incapable of understanding that you get to choose whether or not the words of another are going to injure you or affect how you feel. This is otherwise known as having a spine, having some self-determination, and other things that are falling out of fashion these days. The popular practice now is to let your emotions and your general well-being depend on what other people do, and the next logical step (since everything is always evolving or progressing along its path) is to want more control over other people. Thus, we have concepts like "hate speech". The strange thing is that many people seem incredibly determined to never question any of this or to look very deeply at what motivates it.
Option B: teach people how to actually perform research. This would naturally equip them to differentiate between factual data and personal opinion. That would mean this person can say whatever he wants about chiropractors or any other profession, because anyone seriously considering hiring a chiropractor or any other professional of any sort would rightly ignore him in favor of better sources of information. Side effects include a population that can easily distinguish good information from bad, more free speech with fewer negative effects, and people who can explain what is wrong with even actual hatred and use it as an example of what one shouldn't do without feeling a need to use force (i.e. police) in order to censor it.
Having carefully examined both of the available options, I must say that I have a strong preference for the latter. If you still support the "hate speech" concept, and especially if you believe that legal sanctions (including arrest, a criminal record, possible fines, possible incarceration) are the very best way to deal with this person, then I'd like to know why you disagree with me.
Ever since Adobe perfected the basic PDF functionality and needed to keep adding features. Whether they are frills or not, whether they depart from the purpose of PDF or not, Adobe has to do this to justify its marketing. They want their customers to have reasons to keep wanting the latest version. Feature creep, in other words.
I disagree with the slant of the article that this is a scandal. Have the Chicago Bulls been just as good without Jordan? Of course not. Special people are special. You are lucky when you get them, but most of the time you have to work around not having them.
I think this gentleman and John Taylor Gatto have a lot in common. The "special" thing about Gatto is his ability to see a spade and call it a spade instead of getting lost in all of the justifications and excuses. This one-line summary in no way does justice to either of the above-linked works, but Gatto went to some of the poorest inner-city schools in some of the worst neighborhoods and found that the children there were eager and very able learners once you stopped treating them like idiots. You'd think the school systems would appreciate anyone who can demonstrate that, but they didn't.
So I think your analogy to the Chicago Bulls doesn't really work. The Bulls experienced a particularly outstanding individual but presumably, all the other players would have wanted to attain that level of talent. The school systems are experiencing problems that are institutional and profoundly anti-educational. I don't believe the problem with schools is funding or ability. I think the problem is that they are not really interested in improving their methods or looking too closely at their results.
It must suck to have to start disliking stuff just because some plebs found out about it.
I appreciate your accusation of allowing the crowd to determine my tastes, and I'm not surprised the mods rewarded you for taking the low-hanging fruit of going that route. But in truth I can like a thing and not like constant irrelevant (or barely-relevant) references to it. The map is not the territory; if I think the map is shoddy, it is not the same thing as refusing to set foot on the territory.