On January 17, 2012, Dodd released a statement criticizing "the so-called 'Blackout Day' protesting anti-piracy legislation."[26] Referring to the websites participating in the blackout, Dodd said, "It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and use their services.
Funny, I never thought these sites owed me their services. I don't recall signing any such contract with them. They do so on a voluntary basis and their willingness to do it is appreciated. I also appreciate their willingness to take a stand on this. I would respect it even if I disagreed with it. It's called honor. It's not something the likes of Dodd would understand because it cannot be deposited in a bank.
Those tactics don't work on people who have emotionally matured past the point of having a fevered sense of entitlement.
It is also an abuse of power... when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests."[26]
No, it's free speech. Money, however, is definitely a form of power in sufficient quantities. In other words, "yeah this is just so terrible......"
In further comments, Dodd threatened to cut off campaign contributions to politicians who did not support PIPA and SOPA, legislation supported by the MPAA.[27]
"... except when I do it. Then it's perfectly okay."
Do members of Congress ever entertain thoughts of growing a spine and making it clear that the MPAA needs Congress a lot more than Congress needs the MPAA? How about a ncie "keep your contributions, we don't want them and we will find replacements; meanwhile we will discuss repealing all copyright legislation passed during the last ten years, have a nice day!"
Yeah I know that's a nice fantasy. But it is a nice one.
However Startpage has been yelling at me "you have done a large amount of searches, we are going to block you to prove you're not a bot."
(like 10 a day, mostly going to X sites)
I've never personally had Startpage do that. Could it be actually coming from Google?
I ditched google and am currently using startpage. Is there any alternative that doesn't censor or use googles data set? Information likes to be free, and so do I!
You can use Startpage's sister company ixquick.com. It's just like Startpage except it's their own search engine that is not dependent on what Google does.
It's not quite as high-quality but it's been more than good enough every time I've tried it.
If these guys had their way we'd still have all music on Vinyl LP's and Movies could only be viewed in a theater or on broadcast television.
Ahh! Fond memories! We should be so lucky.
So you'll throw away any sound card (or disable any on-board hardware) and speakers attached to your computer, and give up any video capability for a good old green-on-black terminal then, right? And you'll throw away your television and any cable or satellite subscriptions, and throw away any digital TV antenna right? Then you too can be this lucky!
Looks like I failed to put in the "sarcasm" tag. I do get nostalgic about Saturday matinees, though.
Hehe your sarcasm is what I was questioning. In the sense of "when you actually lived during that time, did you think it was so great?"
While that was graceful of you to say, I think we both could have been more explicit about the intended interpretation.
Careful. You are stepping on many toes here with that type of proclamation. Government being bound by the rule of law, which is the Constitution? That's unpossible.
It's possible. It's possible and it's beautiful and it's so shameful that a small number of greedy, ambitious, power-hungry men and women would destroy it for a few years of their own personal gain.
Make no mistake, those people are not merely ignorant and well-meaning. They know exactly what they are doing.
Governments tend to become tyrannical. That's just a fact and has been a repeating pattern throughout history. Does that mean we just give up and submit to tyranny? No. It means we need constant vigilence.
Government elected by people who believe governments are evil, become evil. It's people like you who are the problem, no, the disease. Of all possible things, this is a discussion about suicide, and it just happens that the best thing you can do for everyone else is to kill yourself.
As the Founding Fathers observed and wrote about more articulately than I am likely to, and as any decent history book will demonstrate, governments tend to start out with some of the noblest of intentions and then, like all other non-permanent things in this Universe, they start to decay and fail. The failure mode of government is to become increasingly tyrannical and authoritarian, until finally they either collapse under their own weight or are overthrown. The best guard against this is to have limited government which recognized as fundamental various human rights, to give people the ability to participate in said government, and to have as much as possible come from local levels.
Your hatred and vitriol is not really against me, for I have done you no harm. I merely speak the truth concerning the reality of human affairs that you seem desperate to deny. You are merely descending into the realm of "shoot the messenger, that will make the facts go away". No, it won't. My personal death isn't going to stop the USA from becoming increasingly authoritarian, for example. Your great faith in the goodness of government isn't going to stop it either. Large numbers of people standing up and demanding that it stick to its founding principles is the only thing that will do that.
I know it's increasingly trendy on Internet forums to tell other people to die, to kill themselves, etc. You probably think that makes you sound intense and edgy and badass. No, it makes you sound like a pathetic, weak little shell of a man who has no real argument, just a lot of anger and a desperately insecure need to blame it on someone else. I don't hope that you come to any harm at all. I hope that you prosper and come to see your current condition as beneath you, or at the very least, that you mature enough to recognize as unhealthy your hatred of those who have done no harm.
If we ever have Star Trek-style replicators, you can expect that to change.
You'd think we already do, with all the hype about 3D printers.
Of course Star Trek replicators (as with most of ST tech) has made the built-in assumption that energy is free. When energy is free many other things become free with the right (entropy modifying) tech...
Well we receive 1000 watts per square meter right now, no charge at all. We just need to find better ways of collecting and storing it. Then there's geothermal, nuclear reactors, maybe even at some future date we'll have fusion or some other not-yet-imagined method that will be even better.
Yeah, but I've found most people who pirate have no bones about dropping serious bank on hardware.
That's probably because hardware isn't subject to a model of artificial scarcity. There are actual manufacturing and distribution costs involved in producing things like CPUs and hard drives.
If we ever have Star Trek-style replicators, you can expect that to change.
But that's punishing the murderer for what he does not for what he is. You can't control what people are.
No, *I* cannot. I can only control what I am. A murderer likewise chose to be what he is.
Societies that try are commonly known as totalitarian [wikipedia.org]. I assume we're both against that?
Yes, we are. Those societies spiral out of control because what they're trying to do is not actually possible.
Anyway, it's a long way from saying, "A murderer deserves to die", to "a suicide is a loser who has done society a favor". Punishing murderers is about society protecting itself from dangerous people. Discounting the lives of suicides is ignorant, stupid, and expressive of a smug sense of superiority.
This is why context must be considered. Someone who murders five people and then turns the gun on himself is indeed doing us all a favor. There is nothing smug about it. The rest of us are better off without him.
This man who off'ed himself merely endangered others. His suicide was just a completely selfish act because he preferred death over facing his crimes. No one forced him to take what he perceived as the easy way out. He willingly chose it. He discounted his own life and nothing you or I may say is going to change that fact.
The real smug sense of superiority is to believe that holding a particular opinion changes one bit the reality of the situation. It's also rather smug to assume that I value my particular opinion about the man's life and what it is worth more than the opinion of the man himself. It was his call to make. I would have told him to face his punishment like someone with a spine and try to turn his life around, but he didn't ask me.
So you speak of people who peacefully post opinions on a Web site as equals to people who steal cars, wave guns around, lead police on dangerous chases, and finally off themselves when they realize arrest is otherwise unavoidable?
Well, yes, actually. Because (and this is the part you're not paying attention to), I'm arguing against people devaluing the lives of other people.
This man devalued his own life. In exactly the opposite way that people who truly respect themselves don't allow themselves to become obese.
But if either of those standards are failed, then there comes the need for excuses.
You make some interesting points, but this "prison rape is part of the punishment" meme is particularly worrisome. First, there is the tacit assumption that prison rape is common, or at least significantly more common than base-rate rape. If true, we are not designing our prisons and guard procedures responsibly.
I think it's fucked up and I think that prison administrators who don't do everything possible to discourage it, prevent it, and severely punish anyone who does it are just plain evil.
However, it certainly does happen. Think about it. An inmate is locked in a confined environment with a bunch of people who have already demonstrated lawless and/or violent tendencies, some of whom may be in prison in the first place for raping someone, with little else to do all day except pump iron and establish what are basically sub-groups or gangs with a hierarchical structure. In a place with no women.
Next, and perhaps more disturbing, is the idea that this is ok, and even expected. After all, everyone in prison is a subhuman criminal and therefore deserves any treatment they get no matter how terrible, right?
I hope this never, ever happens, but if you yourself were facing a long prison sentence, are you telling me the possibility of being someone's bitch would never cross your mind? Prison is a dog-eat-dog environment full of aggressive people. It is not an environment where you can keep to yourself, mind your own business, and be left alone. Hell, that's quite difficult to do in regular society because so many people have no life of their own, are meddlesome and self-important, and must insert themselves into every little trivial situation.
This idea is so ingrained that it's even made light of in comedy movies (Office Space, for one..)
If this stereotype were completely 100% baseless and entirely the product of someone's imagination, it would be one of the few I've ever heard of.
At any rate, if you read my previous post and thought I approved of this, you grossly misunderstood what I said. I deliberately made no comment about it one way or the other, except to mention that someone who has already shown he makes rash decisions might have also considered it. Furthermore, I am not one of the mindless sheeple who repeats a meme with no concept of where it came from. The fact that this is ingrained only reinforces the point I was making.
If these guys had their way we'd still have all music on Vinyl LP's and Movies could only be viewed in a theater or on broadcast television.
Ahh! Fond memories! We should be so lucky.
So you'll throw away any sound card (or disable any on-board hardware) and speakers attached to your computer, and give up any video capability for a good old green-on-black terminal then, right? And you'll throw away your television and any cable or satellite subscriptions, and throw away any digital TV antenna right? Then you too can be this lucky!
Because of the founding legal precept that all that is not explicitly disallowed is allowed. It is a foundational notion of the clComnon Law and indeed of liberty.
Yeah, for you and me. Not for the federal government. They are not supposed to have ANY POWER WHATSOEVER except for those specific powers the Constitution allows.
So who is left to check congress if they decide they have the authority to violate the Constitution?
Your answer is in the mirror. If you keep reelecting them, what incentive is there for them to obey the law?
If you had no parties and all candidates ran on public money, that would work.
If you had a multitude of parties, and a single transferrable vote type of system, that would work.
But two parties with a winner-takes-all system, that does not work. You know what colluding duopolies would do to an industry? They do worse when there is both money AND power involved. If you want a far less powerful central government, expressed in terms of $$ and in terms of number of laws on the books, for whom would you vote? Realistically?
Wrong on the first part; agreed on the second. The fact that the drug war is evil, stupid, in my opinion unconstitutional, and clearly a war against personal freedoms, in no way, shape, or form means that the supreme court has ruled that it is illegal.
You're depending on the court to settle that matter for you? The same court which approved abusing eminent domain to raise tax revenues?
Tell me this. Why was it necessary to ratify a new Constitutional amendment to give the government power to prohibit alcohol, which was then repealed... but it is not necessary to apply the exact same process to different substances?
I have never seen anyone explain that. Sure, I am certain they can expand the Commerce Clause to mean they can rape your wife anytime they want, because they might buy condoms first, and buying condoms affects interstate commerce.. but c'mon. At some point you have to call the absurd absurd.
People who smugly devalue the lives of others are not making a good case for the value of their lives.
So you speak of people who peacefully post opinions on a Web site as equals to people who steal cars, wave guns around, lead police on dangerous chases, and finally off themselves when they realize arrest is otherwise unavoidable?
Is this more of that "oh no, all lifestyles are perfectly 100% equal, just different" garbage? I guess the average mass murderer is really just misunderstood?
What you devalue is the fact that this man had choices to make and he chose poorly. You act like that just "happened", as if he had nothing to do with it. It's a war against individuality and you have apparently chosen the wrong side.
So you see then the hyper-emotional, irrational style of "argumentation" from what are nowadays average people. That one was merely their de facto representative.
The way average people think is entirely at the mercy of what they like and dislike. He didn't personally like what you said, therefore in his mind, you must be objectively wrong. It follows (in twisted, perverted emotional "logic") that anything he says against you must therefore be in accordance with rational thinking.
You might not believe it, but deep down, if you dig deeply enough, it's a roundabout way of declaring oneself a sort of "god", and you definitely don't blaspheme "god" or you suffer "god's wrath" (usually some kind of belittling or degrading tone). It is dressed up in the language of pseudo-rationalism of course. The giveaway is that it's full of personal attacks instead of an explanation for why your position is faulty.
Most of the human race operates this way. It's why nothing ever really changes, even when it does. Oh and the killing of a bunch of brown people who aren't really a threat to us, that's "legitimized" because a "bigger god" in the form of government has approved it. Put the right symbol behind something and lots of emotional thinkers will get behind it. Advertisers exploit this every day. The hilarious thing is that people who do not understand this will whine about "yeah well it works even MORE on YOU since you are daring to criticize it!" yeah well manipulation tends not to work so well when you know that you are being manipulated, you know who is doing it, and you know what they want to gain from doing so. But of course they're "god" and I am not, so what do I know...
The "life" of the guy that shot himself in the video was worth less than most, according to both him and most of the rest of the world. I know it's polite to argue otherwise, but it's the only rational observation.
Time and again it happens that people quickly abandon rationality the moment it doesn't say what they want it to say.
This is especially true for any sort of "what would other people think of me if I were truly honest about this?" type of issues. Because to most, what other people would think and winning their petty approval of who you are is far, FAR more important than rationality, than making sense.
The real irony is that if their opinion were worth a damn, if they were any kind of person worth taking seriously, they would respect your opinion whether or not they agreed with it and approval would be removed from the equation. But such people, which I call actual adults, are quite rare.
The problem that a lot of people have with this attitude is that it sounds like you're making excuses why nothing needs fixing. Most people don't turn to crime because they are inherently evil. Most people turn to crime because life dealt them a bad hand.
I find people will find or create whatever perception is convenient for them, with "convenient" meaning they do not have to change their perspective. Bonus points if they get to tell someone else how wrong they are, perhaps with condemnatory vitriol.
To say "nothing needs fixing" misses the point. Governments tend to become tyrannical. That's just a fact and has been a repeating pattern throughout history. Does that mean we just give up and submit to tyranny? No. It means we need constant vigilence. Crime is the same way. No, what people want is some kind of simple, easy, painless, one-shot Final Ultimate Perfect Solution that brings Heaven to Earth. They will remain disappointed.
If you want to talk of attitudes that are tiresome, this "life dealt them a bad hand" nonsense is a good start. I have both read about and personally known people who grew up under terrible conditions. Poverty, child abuse, neglect, gang violence, you name it. Some of it frankly makes me want to puke.
The people fitting that description whom I have met also happen to be some of the noblest and most kind-hearted individuals I have ever known. They didn't use their rough life as an excuse to menace and victimize others. They seem to understand that victimizing others just creates more people who will have the upbringing that they had, and they don't wish to perpetuate it.
So we are left, then, with what you seem to find inconvenient. There is at some point a difference between the criminals who had a rough life and think it's okay to create more victims, and those who had horrible upbringings and became wonderful people in spite of everything. What is the difference then? I say it's the nature of the person. Some struggle against the evil that was placed inside of them and lose. Others are victorious. It's a mysterious thing. It doesn't lend itself to the easy answers we always want. Why is that so hard to accept? We have become so arrogant as a society that we think we can scientifically explain every last detail of the universe?
I love logic. Logic works for problems within its domain. This isn't one of them. This requires a more organic understanding, spiritual if you like, though that's a rather loaded word these days, since people think that's something you get from a book, a leader, or pretty much anywhere except inside yourself.
Like I said, sometimes a rabid dog needs to be put down. You can speculate about where rabies originally came from, but you won't find any ultimate answers.
The tacit assumption that society is working on here is that anyone who wants to commit suicide by definition has something wrong with them.
You so very conveniently ignored the final stanza of my post.
We do not know for sure, and that includes you, but I doubt seriously that this man was planning from the start to kill himself. It was a rash decision he made when he found out that most criminals who engage in high-speed chases do get caught and he wasn't going to be the exception. At that moment, it could not be undone, he had two choices and only two choice: get pounded in the ass by Bubba and anyone else who thinks he has a pretty mouth, possibly for decades, or take the suicide route. He chose door number two.
Why would he have even bothered with the chase if he just wanted to die? Think about it. Someone who plans from the start to shoot himself has no reason to run from the cops. I believe that if he had gotten away from them, he would have tried his luck as a fugitive.
Smug superiority? He was a criminal that killed himself after putting the lives of many innocent people at risk. Most people ARE better than that piece of human garbage.
A lot of people have this perverted sense of compassion that involves sympathy for the Devil himself, so that they may show everyone what a great and noble person they are. The compassion would rightly be for those he endangered. The criminal himself is not a victim.
And there also seems to be a great deal of denial about the fact that once in a while, a rabid dog needs to be put down. No one wants to put it down, but it cannot be reasoned with and it can only pose a threat. Ideally "put down" means imprisonment and rehabilitation so they can go on to live a decent life, but sometimes it happens the way this story did. It's a harsh reality that seems to drive many into some kind of fluffy-bunny world where nothing is ever truly bad. Those very same people can sleep soundly at night only because the police and military are willing to do their violence or threat of violence for them. But they like to forget that.
I agree with the literal meaning but I don't share your desire to dismiss the idea entirely.
Life choices tend to represent life style. It's more of a cultural matter where upbringing and social environment intersects with the degree to which that person is an individual. People who get themselves killed (deliberately or accidentally) are not affecting the gene pool very much.
What they are doing is providing an example of what one who follows that life style ("path" if you like) can expect. For example, you can look at the kind of life the average crackhead has and that alone will convince a rational person not to become a crackhead.
What they are doing is removing their influence from those who may not be so individualistic, who may copycat because someone else did it, who are impressionable rather than rational when shown a bad example.
Call it mental or social or some kind of non-physical unnatural selection.
That's funny, because the societies that protect the weak tend to be the strongest in the world, while those that persecute the weak tend to end up in the dustbin of history.
Thats true... of the societies that protect the weak from the strong. That is, from being victimized by the strong.
That is not and never will be true concerning protecting adult people from themselves. In that case, there is no victim. Pretending that there is amounts to treating chronological adults like mental and spiritual infants. The only effect it can have is to cripple and retard their ability to deal with reality, make sound decisions, and actually live life. In fact that would be a living death. It would destroy the joy, meaning, and purpose that life has to offer.
It also makes it easier to institute a totalitarian cradle-to-grave state, because adults who cannot deal with reality and make good decisions need some kind of authority to tell them how to live. That's bad for everyone.
Perhaps this is because a compassionate society that cares for its weaker members makes everyone stronger.
Sometimes compassion requires the fortitude to respect the way people want to live (or not live) their lives, and to restrain your urge to appoint yourself the judge and jury concerning how they should deal with life.
Besides which, if there are no sometimes dire consequences and no bad examples, how do you expect someone to mature into a person who is fully human? You can't do that if you cannot make your own decisions and reap the consequences. No matter how hard you try.
And perhaps mental illness doesn't hurt society nearly as much as the traits of indifference and contempt.
I hate to break it to you but there are plenty of criminals who are not mentally ill (i.e. not legally insane). Some people are simply evil and they understand fully what they are doing. Your compassion is wasted on such people -- they interpret it as weakness and exploitability. In fact the more sociopathic types will let you believe you're doing good so long as they can take advantage of you. You have to have the judgment to tell the difference. There is no algorithm for doing so.
To speculate, did you ever think that by the time the chase ended, perhaps this individual preferred death over being pounded in the ass by Bubba for a couple of decades? Maybe you would have chosen Bubba, but you must admit someone else might not.
Slashdot Mirror
On January 17, 2012, Dodd released a statement criticizing "the so-called 'Blackout Day' protesting anti-piracy legislation."[26] Referring to the websites participating in the blackout, Dodd said, "It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and use their services.
Funny, I never thought these sites owed me their services. I don't recall signing any such contract with them. They do so on a voluntary basis and their willingness to do it is appreciated. I also appreciate their willingness to take a stand on this. I would respect it even if I disagreed with it. It's called honor. It's not something the likes of Dodd would understand because it cannot be deposited in a bank.
Those tactics don't work on people who have emotionally matured past the point of having a fevered sense of entitlement.
It is also an abuse of power... when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests."[26]
No, it's free speech. Money, however, is definitely a form of power in sufficient quantities. In other words, "yeah this is just so terrible... ..."
In further comments, Dodd threatened to cut off campaign contributions to politicians who did not support PIPA and SOPA, legislation supported by the MPAA.[27]
" ... except when I do it. Then it's perfectly okay."
Do members of Congress ever entertain thoughts of growing a spine and making it clear that the MPAA needs Congress a lot more than Congress needs the MPAA? How about a ncie "keep your contributions, we don't want them and we will find replacements; meanwhile we will discuss repealing all copyright legislation passed during the last ten years, have a nice day!"
Yeah I know that's a nice fantasy. But it is a nice one.
However Startpage has been yelling at me "you have done a large amount of searches, we are going to block you to prove you're not a bot." (like 10 a day, mostly going to X sites)
I've never personally had Startpage do that. Could it be actually coming from Google?
I ditched google and am currently using startpage. Is there any alternative that doesn't censor or use googles data set? Information likes to be free, and so do I!
You can use Startpage's sister company ixquick.com. It's just like Startpage except it's their own search engine that is not dependent on what Google does.
It's not quite as high-quality but it's been more than good enough every time I've tried it.
If these guys had their way we'd still have all music on Vinyl LP's and Movies could only be viewed in a theater or on broadcast television.
Ahh! Fond memories! We should be so lucky.
So you'll throw away any sound card (or disable any on-board hardware) and speakers attached to your computer, and give up any video capability for a good old green-on-black terminal then, right? And you'll throw away your television and any cable or satellite subscriptions, and throw away any digital TV antenna right? Then you too can be this lucky!
Looks like I failed to put in the "sarcasm" tag. I do get nostalgic about Saturday matinees, though.
Hehe your sarcasm is what I was questioning. In the sense of "when you actually lived during that time, did you think it was so great?"
While that was graceful of you to say, I think we both could have been more explicit about the intended interpretation.
Careful. You are stepping on many toes here with that type of proclamation. Government being bound by the rule of law, which is the Constitution? That's unpossible.
It's possible. It's possible and it's beautiful and it's so shameful that a small number of greedy, ambitious, power-hungry men and women would destroy it for a few years of their own personal gain.
Make no mistake, those people are not merely ignorant and well-meaning. They know exactly what they are doing.
More like they don't have the balls to steal hardware.
More like, it would have to be stolen because you cannot make an infinite number of perfect copies at negligible cost.
This is the reason that even the law recognizes the difference between the civil tort of copyright infringement and the crime of actual larceny.
Governments tend to become tyrannical. That's just a fact and has been a repeating pattern throughout history. Does that mean we just give up and submit to tyranny? No. It means we need constant vigilence.
Government elected by people who believe governments are evil, become evil. It's people like you who are the problem, no, the disease. Of all possible things, this is a discussion about suicide, and it just happens that the best thing you can do for everyone else is to kill yourself.
As the Founding Fathers observed and wrote about more articulately than I am likely to, and as any decent history book will demonstrate, governments tend to start out with some of the noblest of intentions and then, like all other non-permanent things in this Universe, they start to decay and fail. The failure mode of government is to become increasingly tyrannical and authoritarian, until finally they either collapse under their own weight or are overthrown. The best guard against this is to have limited government which recognized as fundamental various human rights, to give people the ability to participate in said government, and to have as much as possible come from local levels.
Your hatred and vitriol is not really against me, for I have done you no harm. I merely speak the truth concerning the reality of human affairs that you seem desperate to deny. You are merely descending into the realm of "shoot the messenger, that will make the facts go away". No, it won't. My personal death isn't going to stop the USA from becoming increasingly authoritarian, for example. Your great faith in the goodness of government isn't going to stop it either. Large numbers of people standing up and demanding that it stick to its founding principles is the only thing that will do that.
I know it's increasingly trendy on Internet forums to tell other people to die, to kill themselves, etc. You probably think that makes you sound intense and edgy and badass. No, it makes you sound like a pathetic, weak little shell of a man who has no real argument, just a lot of anger and a desperately insecure need to blame it on someone else. I don't hope that you come to any harm at all. I hope that you prosper and come to see your current condition as beneath you, or at the very least, that you mature enough to recognize as unhealthy your hatred of those who have done no harm.
That's the difference between you and I.
You'd think we already do, with all the hype about 3D printers.
Of course Star Trek replicators (as with most of ST tech) has made the built-in assumption that energy is free. When energy is free many other things become free with the right (entropy modifying) tech...
Well we receive 1000 watts per square meter right now, no charge at all. We just need to find better ways of collecting and storing it. Then there's geothermal, nuclear reactors, maybe even at some future date we'll have fusion or some other not-yet-imagined method that will be even better.
Yeah, but I've found most people who pirate have no bones about dropping serious bank on hardware.
That's probably because hardware isn't subject to a model of artificial scarcity. There are actual manufacturing and distribution costs involved in producing things like CPUs and hard drives.
If we ever have Star Trek-style replicators, you can expect that to change.
But that's punishing the murderer for what he does not for what he is. You can't control what people are.
No, *I* cannot. I can only control what I am. A murderer likewise chose to be what he is.
Societies that try are commonly known as totalitarian [wikipedia.org]. I assume we're both against that?
Yes, we are. Those societies spiral out of control because what they're trying to do is not actually possible.
Anyway, it's a long way from saying, "A murderer deserves to die", to "a suicide is a loser who has done society a favor". Punishing murderers is about society protecting itself from dangerous people. Discounting the lives of suicides is ignorant, stupid, and expressive of a smug sense of superiority.
This is why context must be considered. Someone who murders five people and then turns the gun on himself is indeed doing us all a favor. There is nothing smug about it. The rest of us are better off without him.
This man who off'ed himself merely endangered others. His suicide was just a completely selfish act because he preferred death over facing his crimes. No one forced him to take what he perceived as the easy way out. He willingly chose it. He discounted his own life and nothing you or I may say is going to change that fact.
The real smug sense of superiority is to believe that holding a particular opinion changes one bit the reality of the situation. It's also rather smug to assume that I value my particular opinion about the man's life and what it is worth more than the opinion of the man himself. It was his call to make. I would have told him to face his punishment like someone with a spine and try to turn his life around, but he didn't ask me.
So you speak of people who peacefully post opinions on a Web site as equals to people who steal cars, wave guns around, lead police on dangerous chases, and finally off themselves when they realize arrest is otherwise unavoidable?
Well, yes, actually. Because (and this is the part you're not paying attention to), I'm arguing against people devaluing the lives of other people.
This man devalued his own life. In exactly the opposite way that people who truly respect themselves don't allow themselves to become obese.
But if either of those standards are failed, then there comes the need for excuses.
You make some interesting points, but this "prison rape is part of the punishment" meme is particularly worrisome. First, there is the tacit assumption that prison rape is common, or at least significantly more common than base-rate rape. If true, we are not designing our prisons and guard procedures responsibly.
I think it's fucked up and I think that prison administrators who don't do everything possible to discourage it, prevent it, and severely punish anyone who does it are just plain evil.
However, it certainly does happen. Think about it. An inmate is locked in a confined environment with a bunch of people who have already demonstrated lawless and/or violent tendencies, some of whom may be in prison in the first place for raping someone, with little else to do all day except pump iron and establish what are basically sub-groups or gangs with a hierarchical structure. In a place with no women.
Next, and perhaps more disturbing, is the idea that this is ok, and even expected. After all, everyone in prison is a subhuman criminal and therefore deserves any treatment they get no matter how terrible, right?
I hope this never, ever happens, but if you yourself were facing a long prison sentence, are you telling me the possibility of being someone's bitch would never cross your mind? Prison is a dog-eat-dog environment full of aggressive people. It is not an environment where you can keep to yourself, mind your own business, and be left alone. Hell, that's quite difficult to do in regular society because so many people have no life of their own, are meddlesome and self-important, and must insert themselves into every little trivial situation.
This idea is so ingrained that it's even made light of in comedy movies (Office Space, for one..)
If this stereotype were completely 100% baseless and entirely the product of someone's imagination, it would be one of the few I've ever heard of.
At any rate, if you read my previous post and thought I approved of this, you grossly misunderstood what I said. I deliberately made no comment about it one way or the other, except to mention that someone who has already shown he makes rash decisions might have also considered it. Furthermore, I am not one of the mindless sheeple who repeats a meme with no concept of where it came from. The fact that this is ingrained only reinforces the point I was making.
If these guys had their way we'd still have all music on Vinyl LP's and Movies could only be viewed in a theater or on broadcast television.
Ahh! Fond memories! We should be so lucky.
So you'll throw away any sound card (or disable any on-board hardware) and speakers attached to your computer, and give up any video capability for a good old green-on-black terminal then, right? And you'll throw away your television and any cable or satellite subscriptions, and throw away any digital TV antenna right? Then you too can be this lucky!
Because of the founding legal precept that all that is not explicitly disallowed is allowed. It is a foundational notion of the clComnon Law and indeed of liberty.
Yeah, for you and me. Not for the federal government. They are not supposed to have ANY POWER WHATSOEVER except for those specific powers the Constitution allows.
So who is left to check congress if they decide they have the authority to violate the Constitution?
Your answer is in the mirror. If you keep reelecting them, what incentive is there for them to obey the law?
If you had no parties and all candidates ran on public money, that would work.
If you had a multitude of parties, and a single transferrable vote type of system, that would work.
But two parties with a winner-takes-all system, that does not work. You know what colluding duopolies would do to an industry? They do worse when there is both money AND power involved. If you want a far less powerful central government, expressed in terms of $$ and in terms of number of laws on the books, for whom would you vote? Realistically?
Wrong on the first part; agreed on the second. The fact that the drug war is evil, stupid, in my opinion unconstitutional, and clearly a war against personal freedoms, in no way, shape, or form means that the supreme court has ruled that it is illegal.
You're depending on the court to settle that matter for you? The same court which approved abusing eminent domain to raise tax revenues?
.. but c'mon. At some point you have to call the absurd absurd.
Tell me this. Why was it necessary to ratify a new Constitutional amendment to give the government power to prohibit alcohol, which was then repealed... but it is not necessary to apply the exact same process to different substances?
I have never seen anyone explain that. Sure, I am certain they can expand the Commerce Clause to mean they can rape your wife anytime they want, because they might buy condoms first, and buying condoms affects interstate commerce
This is true, but they've noticed correlations between different ways that suicide is discussed and the suicide rate following it.
Sometimes I think that the ability to collect detailed statistics about social issues is one of the worst things that ever happened to society.
People who smugly devalue the lives of others are not making a good case for the value of their lives.
So you speak of people who peacefully post opinions on a Web site as equals to people who steal cars, wave guns around, lead police on dangerous chases, and finally off themselves when they realize arrest is otherwise unavoidable?
Is this more of that "oh no, all lifestyles are perfectly 100% equal, just different" garbage? I guess the average mass murderer is really just misunderstood?
What you devalue is the fact that this man had choices to make and he chose poorly. You act like that just "happened", as if he had nothing to do with it. It's a war against individuality and you have apparently chosen the wrong side.
So you see then the hyper-emotional, irrational style of "argumentation" from what are nowadays average people. That one was merely their de facto representative.
The way average people think is entirely at the mercy of what they like and dislike. He didn't personally like what you said, therefore in his mind, you must be objectively wrong. It follows (in twisted, perverted emotional "logic") that anything he says against you must therefore be in accordance with rational thinking.
You might not believe it, but deep down, if you dig deeply enough, it's a roundabout way of declaring oneself a sort of "god", and you definitely don't blaspheme "god" or you suffer "god's wrath" (usually some kind of belittling or degrading tone). It is dressed up in the language of pseudo-rationalism of course. The giveaway is that it's full of personal attacks instead of an explanation for why your position is faulty.
Most of the human race operates this way. It's why nothing ever really changes, even when it does. Oh and the killing of a bunch of brown people who aren't really a threat to us, that's "legitimized" because a "bigger god" in the form of government has approved it. Put the right symbol behind something and lots of emotional thinkers will get behind it. Advertisers exploit this every day. The hilarious thing is that people who do not understand this will whine about "yeah well it works even MORE on YOU since you are daring to criticize it!" yeah well manipulation tends not to work so well when you know that you are being manipulated, you know who is doing it, and you know what they want to gain from doing so. But of course they're "god" and I am not, so what do I know...
The "life" of the guy that shot himself in the video was worth less than most, according to both him and most of the rest of the world. I know it's polite to argue otherwise, but it's the only rational observation.
Time and again it happens that people quickly abandon rationality the moment it doesn't say what they want it to say.
This is especially true for any sort of "what would other people think of me if I were truly honest about this?" type of issues. Because to most, what other people would think and winning their petty approval of who you are is far, FAR more important than rationality, than making sense.
The real irony is that if their opinion were worth a damn, if they were any kind of person worth taking seriously, they would respect your opinion whether or not they agreed with it and approval would be removed from the equation. But such people, which I call actual adults, are quite rare.
The problem that a lot of people have with this attitude is that it sounds like you're making excuses why nothing needs fixing. Most people don't turn to crime because they are inherently evil. Most people turn to crime because life dealt them a bad hand.
I find people will find or create whatever perception is convenient for them, with "convenient" meaning they do not have to change their perspective. Bonus points if they get to tell someone else how wrong they are, perhaps with condemnatory vitriol.
To say "nothing needs fixing" misses the point. Governments tend to become tyrannical. That's just a fact and has been a repeating pattern throughout history. Does that mean we just give up and submit to tyranny? No. It means we need constant vigilence. Crime is the same way. No, what people want is some kind of simple, easy, painless, one-shot Final Ultimate Perfect Solution that brings Heaven to Earth. They will remain disappointed.
If you want to talk of attitudes that are tiresome, this "life dealt them a bad hand" nonsense is a good start. I have both read about and personally known people who grew up under terrible conditions. Poverty, child abuse, neglect, gang violence, you name it. Some of it frankly makes me want to puke.
The people fitting that description whom I have met also happen to be some of the noblest and most kind-hearted individuals I have ever known. They didn't use their rough life as an excuse to menace and victimize others. They seem to understand that victimizing others just creates more people who will have the upbringing that they had, and they don't wish to perpetuate it.
So we are left, then, with what you seem to find inconvenient. There is at some point a difference between the criminals who had a rough life and think it's okay to create more victims, and those who had horrible upbringings and became wonderful people in spite of everything. What is the difference then? I say it's the nature of the person. Some struggle against the evil that was placed inside of them and lose. Others are victorious. It's a mysterious thing. It doesn't lend itself to the easy answers we always want. Why is that so hard to accept? We have become so arrogant as a society that we think we can scientifically explain every last detail of the universe?
I love logic. Logic works for problems within its domain. This isn't one of them. This requires a more organic understanding, spiritual if you like, though that's a rather loaded word these days, since people think that's something you get from a book, a leader, or pretty much anywhere except inside yourself.
Like I said, sometimes a rabid dog needs to be put down. You can speculate about where rabies originally came from, but you won't find any ultimate answers.
The tacit assumption that society is working on here is that anyone who wants to commit suicide by definition has something wrong with them.
You so very conveniently ignored the final stanza of my post.
We do not know for sure, and that includes you, but I doubt seriously that this man was planning from the start to kill himself. It was a rash decision he made when he found out that most criminals who engage in high-speed chases do get caught and he wasn't going to be the exception. At that moment, it could not be undone, he had two choices and only two choice: get pounded in the ass by Bubba and anyone else who thinks he has a pretty mouth, possibly for decades, or take the suicide route. He chose door number two.
Why would he have even bothered with the chase if he just wanted to die? Think about it. Someone who plans from the start to shoot himself has no reason to run from the cops. I believe that if he had gotten away from them, he would have tried his luck as a fugitive.
Smug superiority? He was a criminal that killed himself after putting the lives of many innocent people at risk. Most people ARE better than that piece of human garbage.
A lot of people have this perverted sense of compassion that involves sympathy for the Devil himself, so that they may show everyone what a great and noble person they are. The compassion would rightly be for those he endangered. The criminal himself is not a victim.
And there also seems to be a great deal of denial about the fact that once in a while, a rabid dog needs to be put down. No one wants to put it down, but it cannot be reasoned with and it can only pose a threat. Ideally "put down" means imprisonment and rehabilitation so they can go on to live a decent life, but sometimes it happens the way this story did. It's a harsh reality that seems to drive many into some kind of fluffy-bunny world where nothing is ever truly bad. Those very same people can sleep soundly at night only because the police and military are willing to do their violence or threat of violence for them. But they like to forget that.
Not to mention life choices != the gene pool.
I agree with the literal meaning but I don't share your desire to dismiss the idea entirely.
Life choices tend to represent life style. It's more of a cultural matter where upbringing and social environment intersects with the degree to which that person is an individual. People who get themselves killed (deliberately or accidentally) are not affecting the gene pool very much.
What they are doing is providing an example of what one who follows that life style ("path" if you like) can expect. For example, you can look at the kind of life the average crackhead has and that alone will convince a rational person not to become a crackhead.
What they are doing is removing their influence from those who may not be so individualistic, who may copycat because someone else did it, who are impressionable rather than rational when shown a bad example.
Call it mental or social or some kind of non-physical unnatural selection.
That's funny, because the societies that protect the weak tend to be the strongest in the world, while those that persecute the weak tend to end up in the dustbin of history.
Thats true... of the societies that protect the weak from the strong. That is, from being victimized by the strong.
That is not and never will be true concerning protecting adult people from themselves. In that case, there is no victim. Pretending that there is amounts to treating chronological adults like mental and spiritual infants. The only effect it can have is to cripple and retard their ability to deal with reality, make sound decisions, and actually live life. In fact that would be a living death. It would destroy the joy, meaning, and purpose that life has to offer.
It also makes it easier to institute a totalitarian cradle-to-grave state, because adults who cannot deal with reality and make good decisions need some kind of authority to tell them how to live. That's bad for everyone.
Perhaps this is because a compassionate society that cares for its weaker members makes everyone stronger.
Sometimes compassion requires the fortitude to respect the way people want to live (or not live) their lives, and to restrain your urge to appoint yourself the judge and jury concerning how they should deal with life.
Besides which, if there are no sometimes dire consequences and no bad examples, how do you expect someone to mature into a person who is fully human? You can't do that if you cannot make your own decisions and reap the consequences. No matter how hard you try.
And perhaps mental illness doesn't hurt society nearly as much as the traits of indifference and contempt.
I hate to break it to you but there are plenty of criminals who are not mentally ill (i.e. not legally insane). Some people are simply evil and they understand fully what they are doing. Your compassion is wasted on such people -- they interpret it as weakness and exploitability. In fact the more sociopathic types will let you believe you're doing good so long as they can take advantage of you. You have to have the judgment to tell the difference. There is no algorithm for doing so.
To speculate, did you ever think that by the time the chase ended, perhaps this individual preferred death over being pounded in the ass by Bubba for a couple of decades? Maybe you would have chosen Bubba, but you must admit someone else might not.