The methods in this case aren't as important as the results.
In my opinion they ought to offer a bounty for anyone who can provide information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of the rapist. This will encourage friends and family members of the rapist to turn against the suspect and provide any information they know. It will have a domino effect on the investigation.
They could get the money for these bounties from rape victims and this a portion of this money can be given to bounty hunters who have the legal authority to conduct these sorts of investigations.
And what happens when a DA declines to prosecute you and the guy's family decides his fate was undeserved and comes looking for you for vengeance? Where does it end?
Part of living in a civilized society is giving up your "right" to vengeance and letting the authorities take care of the problem. If they don't, the solution is to get better authorities, not to take the law into your own hands.
This is why you have to follow the law. Now if the rapist confessed to it, and there is physical and material evidence to prove he did rape the individual. Then we should take him down and it wont be hard getting support to do it.
But I don't think two wrongs make a right, and feeding this guy to a woodchipper because the police wouldn't do their job, while maybe emotionally fulfilling, isn't right.
Isn't it though? The laws and justice system evolved originally to stop family feuds turning bloody and escalating, so justice would remain in the hands of the king, as in the code of Hammurabi. If the justice system fails badly, clearly, and obviously, along with the enforcement system, I personally would have no moral qualms about ensuring the punishment is exacted myself, by whatever means neccessary, up to and including a sharpened piece of metal. But only after exhausting all other possible avenues.
And I bet anyone else he had subsequently hurt wouldn't complain much either.
However you should guarantee that no innocent lives are at risk when you take down the rapist. If the rapist has a wife and kids you have to consider their fate before you take him down by sword. If you take him down by word then you'll spare his family the unnecessary anguish.
Also you need evidence this individual is a rapist and it must be irrefutable. If you manage to get him on camera raping someone, then you can move on him. If it's just a bunch of women claiming he raped them with no physical evidence then it's just a witch hunt.
This is what I mean. You should utilize the police as a resource, but you should also utilize powerful private citizens as a resource. The combined might of the public and private sector will take anybody down.
But if they don't, my only lawful recourse is to go to the media (weren't interested), protest (one person with a sign didn't exactly make an impact), write letters (got form letter replies and courteous brush-offs), and try to help the other victims to find him and build a case against him (only found one of the three I knew about, and that person didn't want to rehash an old wound).
Just because it's not lawful doesn't mean it's unethical. When the law itself (or those enforcing it) is unethical, the only ethical action may be to break the law.
If you are raped you have to decide which laws you are willing to break and which laws you aren't willing to break. It starts becoming unethical when the jailtime and risk involved in capturing the rapist outweigh the rewards. If people are dying to catch a rapist it's unethical. If people are being raped to catch a rapist it's unethical. If people go to jail for many years to catch a rapist it's unethical.
On the other hand many people would risk losing their job or some jailtime to catch a rapist. Any many individuals would refuse to hire a rapist which is completely legal. And most importantly many people would physically beat up a rapist and go to jail for a night or even not at all if the police don't mind.
The point is that if somebody is a serial rapist they aren't ever going to stop until somebody puts a stop to them. So the ethical thing to do is to stop them using all of your resources, without breaking the law. This isn't anarchy, as long as you follow the law.
Why? You explained your circumstances, but I don't understand your reasoning. If anything, it's the police who ignore you who are unethical. It's not unethical to do their job when they won't.
If somebody raped you, the first thing you should probably do is track them down. Later on you can determine what to do about them.
I can't (nor should I be allowed to) assume police powers because the person or group that has them doesn't want to excercise them. That's lunacy. If I want to track this guy down privately, using lawful channels, and the police are willing and able to prosecute -- it's a win for everyone. But if they don't, my only lawful recourse is to go to the media (weren't interested), protest (one person with a sign didn't exactly make an impact), write letters (got form letter replies and courteous brush-offs), and try to help the other victims to find him and build a case against him (only found one of the three I knew about, and that person didn't want to rehash an old wound).
Don't kid yourself -- I tried. I did more than this website did, and with less fanfare. But I never crossed the line of going public. The risk of someone being misidentified and harmed by that isn't one I am willing to take, then, now, or ever. I want him as bad as anyone else who's ever been raped. That doesn't give me the right to endanger innocent lives to correct that injustice.
Exactly. As long as no innocent lives are endangered and as long as you get the job done, let the ends justify the means. Just make sure that you don't put yourself or anyone you care about at risk of going to prison. You have an unlimited number of creative options for taking a person down.
Speaking as someone who was sexually assaulted, yes, tracking the person responsible down is unethical. In my case, they filed it under miscellany and never interviewed him, and less than a month later, three more cases turned up and the guy skipped state. The police never followed up, and so he's very likely still out there. I did the responsible thing and contacted the authorities once I got out of the hospital. Granted, I did it while staring at the floor, stuttering, and being held by a friend, but I did do it.
Can I say I'd do it the same way if it happened again? No, not really. It was a traumatic experience and I won't sit here and say if given half a chance I wouldn't have returned the favor at the time. But I don't think two wrongs make a right, and feeding this guy to a woodchipper because the police wouldn't do their job, while maybe emotionally fulfilling, isn't right.
If there is a such thing as right and wrong in a scientific context it must be based on the result of the act and not the emotion or nature of it. If reporting the rape to the police results in the rapist going to jail then that was right. If the police can't catch the rapist then you have a responsibility as a victim to do everything in your power to track the guy if you have the resources to do it. As long as you don't break any laws or hurt any innocent people in the process, it's ethical for the victims of crime to track down the individuals who victimized them. If the guy commits another rape then you got him, if he doesn't then you can blacklist him but the point is he must be stopped one way or the other if it is to be an ethical result.
So I have to stand by what I said -- vigilantism is not a public service. A public service would be my day in court, along with the others who that son of a bitch hurt. So I do understand the motivations behind such behavior on a very personal level. I don't agree with it.
If the rapist does not respect your civil or human rights, why respect his privacy? It all depends on what the law says, what you can get away with, the resources you have, the whether the police are corrupt or not. You cannot always depend on the police is what I'm saying. And no being a vigilante is not the answer but neither is depending entirely on the police. At some point you have to protect yourself.
The argument can be made that vigilantes cannot solve crime. The solution to this argument is to actually decide to stop being a victim and become a private investigator, and make it your personal mission to hunt down rapists and murderers.
So why not let the Vigilantes track the rapists and the rapists track the Vigilantes? Everyone can track anyone because privacy is already non-existent for anyone who has a very strong intellect.
I already can track people by their cellphone, IP address, cache, screen name, email address, Google Earth, employment history, not to mention I can form a posse and just follow them around everywhere they go.
And of course anybody can do that to me. So the fact that it happens to a rapist is not my concern. The concern is that it already happens to people who haven't committed any crime whatsoever and will continue to happen because the private investigation industry is a capitalist industry.
If you are a billionaire you can spend unlimited amounts of money to track anyone you want, or even track entire families of individuals you dislike. If you have billions of dollars you can decide to track all the powerful families in New York and there is nothing they can do about it.
Tracking people in this fashion is unethical, even if it is a rapist. Leave it to the authorities --
If you can prove the rapist actually is a rapist, and if you have physical and material evidence, a trail of victims you personally know, this is reason enough to start investigating on your own. Community policing is not new, and it's really the only method known to catch rapists. Got a better idea?
this is vigilantism, nothing more. And that's not something that we can tolerate in an information-saturated society. Anytime a person is tracked electronically like this by someone with a personal agenda, it's wrong. There should not be exceptions, because the moment we allow that line to be crossed, we damn all of us to the potential to have our privacy invaded under false pretext.
Privacy is dead. This sort of stuff already is happening under false pretexting to millions of people. The only way to stop it is to counter it with investigations into the "victims" to find out if they are lying or not and to examine their mental stability. I'm sure statistics and math can help determine whether the victims match the red flags of an individual with a personal agenda or not. Finally it should not be determined that an individual actually has raped someone unless DNA evidence and actual semen is found at the scene of the crime. He said she said does not a rape make.
You want to help? Volunteer your services to a responsible authority like the local police. Work with them and follow their ethical guidelines.
The police should be involved. But if your mother or sister were raped you know damn well you wouldn't wait for the police to detect the rapist. You would use every resource you had to catch and track the rapist. The simple fact is that people get tracked by vigilantes who aren't rapists. People can get tracked for commercial reasons, political reasons, or because they pissed off a rich person who can hire a private investigator, so the fact that it's happening to a rapist should not concern anybody.
Believe me, they want citizens to come to them and the system functions best when done under professional and ethical oversight by a disinterested party. This kind of behavior, however well-intentioned, harms those efforts and undermines the entire system of justice.
I agree it can go wrong. It does go wrong. And it is going wrong. What you don't understand is that you already do not have any privacy. You already get tracked. Whether the police do it or corporations make no difference. They will invade your privacy and track you and there is nothing you can do about it. There is really no law against tracking people. Anyone can hire a private investigator to track you, in fact they can hire a private investigator to track you just because you made a post on slashdot they disagree with. A corporation can hire a private investigator because you apply for a job, and corporations share what they discover. Your neighbor, your ex, your best friend, could decide to track you via facebook and there is nothing you can do about it.
If you have a problem why choose the one case where the person being tracked is a rapist? Why not use this argument when people are tracked for political purposes or just stalked on facebook? Obviously these individual trackers should be regulated by laws and if you have some ideas for how to do this lets figure it out, but privacy is dead and you cannot put the toothpaste back into the tube. You can either investigate the investigators, or you can regulate the investigators so they go to prison for a very long time if they investigate under false pretext.
Tracking people in this fashion is unethical, even if it is a rapist. Leave it to the authorities -- this is vigilantism, nothing more. And that's not something that we can tolerate in an information-saturated society. Anytime a person is tracked electronically like this by someone with a personal agenda, it's wrong. There should not be exceptions, because the moment we allow that line to be crossed, we damn all of us to the potential to have our privacy invaded under false pretext.
You want to help? Volunteer your services to a responsible authority like the local police. Work with them and follow their ethical guidelines. Believe me, they want citizens to come to them and the system functions best when done under professional and ethical oversight by a disinterested party. This kind of behavior, however well-intentioned, harms those efforts and undermines the entire system of justice.
If this tracking system actually helps to catch the rapist, it will be objectively ethical based on the actual results of the experiment. You can only measure whether something is ethical or not based on the outcome. I hope the rapist is captured and handled appropriately so that it is ethical. And if there is DNA evidence and multiple individuals coming forward thats enough to track the person.
I don't know if I agree with your assessment of religion as the root cause of most conflicts. Making a blanket statement like that isn't much better than Hitler's mantra of blaming Jews for all the world's problems. Religion might be a convenient scapegoat, but probably isn't the root cause. In any case, the kind of instinctive reactions to people/animals that look different would have pre-dated Christianity by quite a bit, I'm talking caveman era stuff, where you unexpectedly encounter another being and have a reaction. War is kind of planned, and even then, the uniforms are different on each side:-)
Organized religion in specific. Religion throughout history has encouraged irrational behavior and irrational wars. Wars against other religions are inherently irrational. Genocide against entire groups based on religious dogma is inherently irrational. Religion caused more genocide and human rights abuses than anything else.
I'm not against individuals being religious, I'm not even against the church. I'm saying the church has a messed up history. The history of the church is a history of genocide against gays, women, atheists and other religions. This isn't just the church because Hitlers religion/nazism is just as bad.
It's not Christianity which caused racism. Race didn't even exist back then. Racism itself is based on another religion based around darwinism. Social darwinism combined with the teaching of pseudo scientists to produce pseudoscientific racism. I would say racism actually began as a tactic of war to justify slavery. Slavery was wrong and most people knew it so they had to invent racial ideas to justify the human rights abuses.
The point is that ignorance and irrationality are bad for the individual and bad for the world.
Actually I was not pushing the racial differentiation, simply the difference in how other tribes/groups/animals looked, since it is not just language, culture, and gene pools (which may have been similar for tribes residing close to one another). The tribes differentiated themselves with head dress, face paint, color of clothing, etc. They looked distinct from one another, how pronounced that distinction was is another matter. It still supports the "does not look like me" argument I mentioned in my original post.
But it's not look alone. I'm sure you have family members who don't look like you but you consider them one of your own. Then you have some people who look like you but their personality traits make them seem alien to you, in my opinion culture played a bigger role than appearance.
Look at the influence of Christianity, you had people who were of the same "race" and "appearance" fighting to the death over which God was the real God and many individuals died in wars which lasted for centuries over these sorts of arguments. When you look at it in that context you see that religion has had more influence on evolution than race because almost all the conflict on the massive scale has been caused by religion, this includes the holocaust in my opinion.
They might have killed the male members of the opposing tribe but our historic and genetic records show they had often a different purpose for the females. A good example is Iceland with it's Viking male and Celtic females settlers: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090116073205.htm
The whole racial thing might be the result of contemporary bias and perhaps future historians will present the PRAM II tool as evidence of how our current society is preoccupied with race.
Very good argument. Concise and it makes sense. Why would our ancestors kill the females? I doubt they would even kill all the males. Most of the time only the males who wont give in are killed and the males who submit or who surrender are spared except in the very worst of wars. These males are made into servants and the females are taken as wives, and over a period of hundreds of years their genes mix.
This has probably happened hundreds or maybe thousands of times in the history of a tribe and this would explain why the genes of one tribe is very different from the genes of another. Race on the whole really isn't a lot of genes, and if we describe race by the common diseases of a group then even here it's still not going to completely align with the social concept of race.
Slavery and war has always existed but racial slavery is new and did not exist until very recently. Genocide always existed but it was very rare and usually only happens when too many males are in the same location in a competition for natural resources.
"Racism is ethical because they were racist against me first?" How do you expect to make any progress in eradicating it if you further it?
Ethics have nothing to do with eradicating the ism's. Ethics are about reward, punishment, and rational solutions to problems. The problem is the predatory behavior being rewarded by society not the ism. What this means is if you stop rewarding bullying this is the first step to decreasing the incentive to be racist.
If somebody is racist and it can be proven that they have committed a hate crime, why shouldn't we black list them? You want to hire someone who committed a hate crime? The simple fact is this person does not care about his/her neighbor, if you give money to this individual it supports their cause so there is a legit logical reason to deprive them of financial support. It's the same logic that goes into depriving terrorists of financial support for their cause, nobody calls the anti terrorism (terrorism) against the terrorists but I suppose you could call it that if you want.
The point is that racism should be punished unless the racism is applied to the racists. Terrorism must be punished unless the terrorism is applied to the terrorists. If a serial killer like Dahmer gets killed there is no rational reason to feel anything for Mr. Dahmer. If the only way to stop Mr. Dahmer is to kill him then that is the ethical solution to the problem because it costs only 1 life.
If destroying the life of a racist is the only way to reduce the effects of racism, then thats the ethical solution. I don't think hate criminals should be treated like normal criminals, just like we don't treat sex offenders like ordinary criminals. If a man beats up a woman and rapes her then hes both a hate and sex criminal, and I would not hire that man unless he wants to be a janitor.
No I'm not saying we shouldn't hire the people we assume are ignorant, I am saying we shouldn't hire the people we KNOW are ignorant. Save these jobs for people who aren't racist, sexist, etc.
And no I don't hate the ignorant, I just don't want to reward an ignorant person when I can reward an enlightened person instead.
{Then you're part of that "race of bullies", just like me and 99% of all other human beings: we all are prewired for racism and violence. }
I'm not a bully. If nobody were racist and nobody wanted to exterminate people I care about I would not take on the attitude of active discrimination against the bully. No animal likes being preyed upon for any reason and the fight or flight instinct will kick in. This really has nothing to do with race, if you'd like I'll label them the predators of the human species and claim we must respond.
It has nothing to do with any prewiring. IF someone wants to commit genocide on you or someone you care about then they become the enemy. They become the threat or the problem. Whether it's socially acceptable or not, if an individual does not respect the human rights of others they should not expect others to respond to them as if they have rights.
Racists believe in discrimination by race. So the economic solution is to actively discriminate against the racists. It becomes do it to them or they'll do it to you. It's no longer a choice and it's got nothing to do with pre-wired instincts, genes, or anything like that beyond a will to survive. Just as if you were a jewish individual during the holocaust I'm sure you'd discriminate and be mean to the nazi's whereever you find them.
I'm skeptical mainly because anybody can have genes from anywhere, especially if they are multi-racial. If this idea would work on an individual of mixed race then I would take it more seriously.
What I'm saying is none of these social constructs are based on science and just like the racist or the jock or whomever can try to use stereotypes to hurt one group of people, the group of people they use stereotypes on can just as easily create and use stereotypes as a weapon against them. And I'd go so far as to say this would be the ethical thing to do because the only way to show a bully why something is wrong is to do it to them so they can experience how it feels.
When the jock gets passed up on a job for being too blonde, too fit, too good looking, he will know how it feels and will learn "THATS WRONG!" and when this happens eventually he will learn "THAT IS BULLSHIT! RACE IS BULLSHIT!". But until he learns that I'm fine with discriminating against him because if someone believes stereotypes should apply to others, it should apply to them as well.
So why should I hire a racist? If they believe in races over believing in genetics then they are no better than individuals who don't believe in evolution. As far as I'm concerned they behave as a race, and they think and act alike so the stereotype applies until they decide to grow up.
The worst thing you can do is simply sit back and let the dumbest most retarded ignorant among us take control of and hijack all the stereotypes, do all the discrimination, and create countless numbers of victims without consequence. So would I hire someone who I suspect to be a racist? Sure I'd hire this person, but they shouldn't expect to get a high salary or get promoted, they can be the janitor.
And this is completely ethical because only the enlightened should be rewarded. Ignorance should never be rewarded and this is the problem with concepts like race, it primarily rewards the ignorant at the expense of the intelligent.
I'm saying relying on race in a medical context is as stupid as just looking at a persons weight or size and determining their health. Yes most of the time an obese individual is unhealthy, but this isn't always the case and we should not diagnose individuals merely by looking at them.
There is no link between physical appearance and race. You can look one race and have the genes of another which means race as a concept is unscientific and bogus. You do have genes but the genes you have aren't going to be known merely by looking at someone.
Sure you can see their race but their race isn't their genes.
You could apply this to members of the same kinship group. Do children treat fat people in their own family the same as they treat skinny people?
A person who is fatter than me or who has a different body type is very likely not related. This would mean if I'm a big buff jock then that skinny wimp probably isn't related to me so I can go ahead and bully him right?
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The methods in this case aren't as important as the results.
In my opinion they ought to offer a bounty for anyone who can provide information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of the rapist. This will encourage friends and family members of the rapist to turn against the suspect and provide any information they know. It will have a domino effect on the investigation.
They could get the money for these bounties from rape victims and this a portion of this money can be given to bounty hunters who have the legal authority to conduct these sorts of investigations.
The wiki would allow groups of investigators to work together on cases such as this.
And what happens when a DA declines to prosecute you and the guy's family decides his fate was undeserved and comes looking for you for vengeance? Where does it end?
Part of living in a civilized society is giving up your "right" to vengeance and letting the authorities take care of the problem. If they don't, the solution is to get better authorities, not to take the law into your own hands.
This is why you have to follow the law. Now if the rapist confessed to it, and there is physical and material evidence to prove he did rape the individual. Then we should take him down and it wont be hard getting support to do it.
But I don't think two wrongs make a right, and feeding this guy to a woodchipper because the police wouldn't do their job, while maybe emotionally fulfilling, isn't right.
Isn't it though? The laws and justice system evolved originally to stop family feuds turning bloody and escalating, so justice would remain in the hands of the king, as in the code of Hammurabi. If the justice system fails badly, clearly, and obviously, along with the enforcement system, I personally would have no moral qualms about ensuring the punishment is exacted myself, by whatever means neccessary, up to and including a sharpened piece of metal. But only after exhausting all other possible avenues.
And I bet anyone else he had subsequently hurt wouldn't complain much either.
However you should guarantee that no innocent lives are at risk when you take down the rapist. If the rapist has a wife and kids you have to consider their fate before you take him down by sword. If you take him down by word then you'll spare his family the unnecessary anguish.
Also you need evidence this individual is a rapist and it must be irrefutable. If you manage to get him on camera raping someone, then you can move on him. If it's just a bunch of women claiming he raped them with no physical evidence then it's just a witch hunt.
This is what I mean. You should utilize the police as a resource, but you should also utilize powerful private citizens as a resource. The combined might of the public and private sector will take anybody down.
But if they don't, my only lawful recourse is to go to the media (weren't interested), protest (one person with a sign didn't exactly make an impact), write letters (got form letter replies and courteous brush-offs), and try to help the other victims to find him and build a case against him (only found one of the three I knew about, and that person didn't want to rehash an old wound).
Just because it's not lawful doesn't mean it's unethical. When the law itself (or those enforcing it) is unethical, the only ethical action may be to break the law.
If you are raped you have to decide which laws you are willing to break and which laws you aren't willing to break. It starts becoming unethical when the jailtime and risk involved in capturing the rapist outweigh the rewards. If people are dying to catch a rapist it's unethical. If people are being raped to catch a rapist it's unethical. If people go to jail for many years to catch a rapist it's unethical.
On the other hand many people would risk losing their job or some jailtime to catch a rapist. Any many individuals would refuse to hire a rapist which is completely legal. And most importantly many people would physically beat up a rapist and go to jail for a night or even not at all if the police don't mind.
The point is that if somebody is a serial rapist they aren't ever going to stop until somebody puts a stop to them. So the ethical thing to do is to stop them using all of your resources, without breaking the law. This isn't anarchy, as long as you follow the law.
Why? You explained your circumstances, but I don't understand your reasoning. If anything, it's the police who ignore you who are unethical. It's not unethical to do their job when they won't.
If somebody raped you, the first thing you should probably do is track them down. Later on you can determine what to do about them.
I can't (nor should I be allowed to) assume police powers because the person or group that has them doesn't want to excercise them. That's lunacy. If I want to track this guy down privately, using lawful channels, and the police are willing and able to prosecute -- it's a win for everyone. But if they don't, my only lawful recourse is to go to the media (weren't interested), protest (one person with a sign didn't exactly make an impact), write letters (got form letter replies and courteous brush-offs), and try to help the other victims to find him and build a case against him (only found one of the three I knew about, and that person didn't want to rehash an old wound).
Don't kid yourself -- I tried. I did more than this website did, and with less fanfare. But I never crossed the line of going public. The risk of someone being misidentified and harmed by that isn't one I am willing to take, then, now, or ever. I want him as bad as anyone else who's ever been raped. That doesn't give me the right to endanger innocent lives to correct that injustice.
Exactly. As long as no innocent lives are endangered and as long as you get the job done, let the ends justify the means. Just make sure that you don't put yourself or anyone you care about at risk of going to prison. You have an unlimited number of creative options for taking a person down.
Speaking as someone who was sexually assaulted, yes, tracking the person responsible down is unethical. In my case, they filed it under miscellany and never interviewed him, and less than a month later, three more cases turned up and the guy skipped state. The police never followed up, and so he's very likely still out there. I did the responsible thing and contacted the authorities once I got out of the hospital. Granted, I did it while staring at the floor, stuttering, and being held by a friend, but I did do it.
Can I say I'd do it the same way if it happened again? No, not really. It was a traumatic experience and I won't sit here and say if given half a chance I wouldn't have returned the favor at the time. But I don't think two wrongs make a right, and feeding this guy to a woodchipper because the police wouldn't do their job, while maybe emotionally fulfilling, isn't right.
If there is a such thing as right and wrong in a scientific context it must be based on the result of the act and not the emotion or nature of it. If reporting the rape to the police results in the rapist going to jail then that was right. If the police can't catch the rapist then you have a responsibility as a victim to do everything in your power to track the guy if you have the resources to do it. As long as you don't break any laws or hurt any innocent people in the process, it's ethical for the victims of crime to track down the individuals who victimized them. If the guy commits another rape then you got him, if he doesn't then you can blacklist him but the point is he must be stopped one way or the other if it is to be an ethical result.
So I have to stand by what I said -- vigilantism is not a public service. A public service would be my day in court, along with the others who that son of a bitch hurt. So I do understand the motivations behind such behavior on a very personal level. I don't agree with it.
If the rapist does not respect your civil or human rights, why respect his privacy? It all depends on what the law says, what you can get away with, the resources you have, the whether the police are corrupt or not. You cannot always depend on the police is what I'm saying. And no being a vigilante is not the answer but neither is depending entirely on the police. At some point you have to protect yourself.
The argument can be made that vigilantes cannot solve crime. The solution to this argument is to actually decide to stop being a victim and become a private investigator, and make it your personal mission to hunt down rapists and murderers.
So why not let the Vigilantes track the rapists and the rapists track the Vigilantes? Everyone can track anyone because privacy is already non-existent for anyone who has a very strong intellect.
I already can track people by their cellphone, IP address, cache, screen name, email address, Google Earth, employment history, not to mention I can form a posse and just follow them around everywhere they go.
And of course anybody can do that to me. So the fact that it happens to a rapist is not my concern. The concern is that it already happens to people who haven't committed any crime whatsoever and will continue to happen because the private investigation industry is a capitalist industry.
If you are a billionaire you can spend unlimited amounts of money to track anyone you want, or even track entire families of individuals you dislike. If you have billions of dollars you can decide to track all the powerful families in New York and there is nothing they can do about it.
Tracking people in this fashion is unethical, even if it is a rapist. Leave it to the authorities --
If you can prove the rapist actually is a rapist, and if you have physical and material evidence, a trail of victims you personally know, this is reason enough to start investigating on your own. Community policing is not new, and it's really the only method known to catch rapists. Got a better idea?
this is vigilantism, nothing more. And that's not something that we can tolerate in an information-saturated society. Anytime a person is tracked electronically like this by someone with a personal agenda, it's wrong. There should not be exceptions, because the moment we allow that line to be crossed, we damn all of us to the potential to have our privacy invaded under false pretext.
Privacy is dead. This sort of stuff already is happening under false pretexting to millions of people. The only way to stop it is to counter it with investigations into the "victims" to find out if they are lying or not and to examine their mental stability. I'm sure statistics and math can help determine whether the victims match the red flags of an individual with a personal agenda or not. Finally it should not be determined that an individual actually has raped someone unless DNA evidence and actual semen is found at the scene of the crime. He said she said does not a rape make.
You want to help? Volunteer your services to a responsible authority like the local police. Work with them and follow their ethical guidelines.
The police should be involved. But if your mother or sister were raped you know damn well you wouldn't wait for the police to detect the rapist. You would use every resource you had to catch and track the rapist. The simple fact is that people get tracked by vigilantes who aren't rapists. People can get tracked for commercial reasons, political reasons, or because they pissed off a rich person who can hire a private investigator, so the fact that it's happening to a rapist should not concern anybody.
Believe me, they want citizens to come to them and the system functions best when done under professional and ethical oversight by a disinterested party. This kind of behavior, however well-intentioned, harms those efforts and undermines the entire system of justice.
I agree it can go wrong. It does go wrong. And it is going wrong. What you don't understand is that you already do not have any privacy. You already get tracked. Whether the police do it or corporations make no difference. They will invade your privacy and track you and there is nothing you can do about it. There is really no law against tracking people. Anyone can hire a private investigator to track you, in fact they can hire a private investigator to track you just because you made a post on slashdot they disagree with. A corporation can hire a private investigator because you apply for a job, and corporations share what they discover. Your neighbor, your ex, your best friend, could decide to track you via facebook and there is nothing you can do about it.
If you have a problem why choose the one case where the person being tracked is a rapist? Why not use this argument when people are tracked for political purposes or just stalked on facebook? Obviously these individual trackers should be regulated by laws and if you have some ideas for how to do this lets figure it out, but privacy is dead and you cannot put the toothpaste back into the tube. You can either investigate the investigators, or you can regulate the investigators so they go to prison for a very long time if they investigate under false pretext.
Tracking people in this fashion is unethical, even if it is a rapist. Leave it to the authorities -- this is vigilantism, nothing more. And that's not something that we can tolerate in an information-saturated society. Anytime a person is tracked electronically like this by someone with a personal agenda, it's wrong. There should not be exceptions, because the moment we allow that line to be crossed, we damn all of us to the potential to have our privacy invaded under false pretext.
You want to help? Volunteer your services to a responsible authority like the local police. Work with them and follow their ethical guidelines. Believe me, they want citizens to come to them and the system functions best when done under professional and ethical oversight by a disinterested party. This kind of behavior, however well-intentioned, harms those efforts and undermines the entire system of justice.
If this tracking system actually helps to catch the rapist, it will be objectively ethical based on the actual results of the experiment. You can only measure whether something is ethical or not based on the outcome. I hope the rapist is captured and handled appropriately so that it is ethical. And if there is DNA evidence and multiple individuals coming forward thats enough to track the person.
If you stop breaking the law then they wont believe infringement is imminent.
And obviously don't click on any links to mp3s.
I don't know if I agree with your assessment of religion as the root cause of most conflicts. Making a blanket statement like that isn't much better than Hitler's mantra of blaming Jews for all the world's problems. Religion might be a convenient scapegoat, but probably isn't the root cause. In any case, the kind of instinctive reactions to people/animals that look different would have pre-dated Christianity by quite a bit, I'm talking caveman era stuff, where you unexpectedly encounter another being and have a reaction. War is kind of planned, and even then, the uniforms are different on each side :-)
Organized religion in specific. Religion throughout history has encouraged irrational behavior and irrational wars. Wars against other religions are inherently irrational. Genocide against entire groups based on religious dogma is inherently irrational. Religion caused more genocide and human rights abuses than anything else.
I'm not against individuals being religious, I'm not even against the church. I'm saying the church has a messed up history. The history of the church is a history of genocide against gays, women, atheists and other religions. This isn't just the church because Hitlers religion/nazism is just as bad.
It's not Christianity which caused racism. Race didn't even exist back then. Racism itself is based on another religion based around darwinism. Social darwinism combined with the teaching of pseudo scientists to produce pseudoscientific racism. I would say racism actually began as a tactic of war to justify slavery. Slavery was wrong and most people knew it so they had to invent racial ideas to justify the human rights abuses.
The point is that ignorance and irrationality are bad for the individual and bad for the world.
Actually I was not pushing the racial differentiation, simply the difference in how other tribes/groups/animals looked, since it is not just language, culture, and gene pools (which may have been similar for tribes residing close to one another). The tribes differentiated themselves with head dress, face paint, color of clothing, etc. They looked distinct from one another, how pronounced that distinction was is another matter. It still supports the "does not look like me" argument I mentioned in my original post.
But it's not look alone. I'm sure you have family members who don't look like you but you consider them one of your own. Then you have some people who look like you but their personality traits make them seem alien to you, in my opinion culture played a bigger role than appearance.
Look at the influence of Christianity, you had people who were of the same "race" and "appearance" fighting to the death over which God was the real God and many individuals died in wars which lasted for centuries over these sorts of arguments. When you look at it in that context you see that religion has had more influence on evolution than race because almost all the conflict on the massive scale has been caused by religion, this includes the holocaust in my opinion.
They might have killed the male members of the opposing tribe but our historic and genetic records show they had often a different purpose for the females. A good example is Iceland with it's Viking male and Celtic females settlers: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090116073205.htm
The whole racial thing might be the result of contemporary bias and perhaps future historians will present the PRAM II tool as evidence of how our current society is preoccupied with race.
Very good argument. Concise and it makes sense. Why would our ancestors kill the females? I doubt they would even kill all the males. Most of the time only the males who wont give in are killed and the males who submit or who surrender are spared except in the very worst of wars. These males are made into servants and the females are taken as wives, and over a period of hundreds of years their genes mix.
This has probably happened hundreds or maybe thousands of times in the history of a tribe and this would explain why the genes of one tribe is very different from the genes of another. Race on the whole really isn't a lot of genes, and if we describe race by the common diseases of a group then even here it's still not going to completely align with the social concept of race.
Slavery and war has always existed but racial slavery is new and did not exist until very recently. Genocide always existed but it was very rare and usually only happens when too many males are in the same location in a competition for natural resources.
You're an idiot, and your nick is misleading.
"Racism is ethical because they were racist against me first?" How do you expect to make any progress in eradicating it if you further it?
Ethics have nothing to do with eradicating the ism's. Ethics are about reward, punishment, and rational solutions to problems. The problem is the predatory behavior being rewarded by society not the ism. What this means is if you stop rewarding bullying this is the first step to decreasing the incentive to be racist.
If somebody is racist and it can be proven that they have committed a hate crime, why shouldn't we black list them? You want to hire someone who committed a hate crime? The simple fact is this person does not care about his/her neighbor, if you give money to this individual it supports their cause so there is a legit logical reason to deprive them of financial support. It's the same logic that goes into depriving terrorists of financial support for their cause, nobody calls the anti terrorism (terrorism) against the terrorists but I suppose you could call it that if you want.
The point is that racism should be punished unless the racism is applied to the racists. Terrorism must be punished unless the terrorism is applied to the terrorists. If a serial killer like Dahmer gets killed there is no rational reason to feel anything for Mr. Dahmer. If the only way to stop Mr. Dahmer is to kill him then that is the ethical solution to the problem because it costs only 1 life.
If destroying the life of a racist is the only way to reduce the effects of racism, then thats the ethical solution. I don't think hate criminals should be treated like normal criminals, just like we don't treat sex offenders like ordinary criminals. If a man beats up a woman and rapes her then hes both a hate and sex criminal, and I would not hire that man unless he wants to be a janitor.
No I'm not saying we shouldn't hire the people we assume are ignorant, I am saying we shouldn't hire the people we KNOW are ignorant. Save these jobs for people who aren't racist, sexist, etc.
And no I don't hate the ignorant, I just don't want to reward an ignorant person when I can reward an enlightened person instead.
You are saying personalized medicine is better than race based medicine? That I can agree with.
I'm against the concept of race based medicine because it's not personalized enough.
{Then you're part of that "race of bullies", just like me and 99% of all other human beings: we all are prewired for racism and violence. }
I'm not a bully. If nobody were racist and nobody wanted to exterminate people I care about I would not take on the attitude of active discrimination against the bully. No animal likes being preyed upon for any reason and the fight or flight instinct will kick in. This really has nothing to do with race, if you'd like I'll label them the predators of the human species and claim we must respond.
It has nothing to do with any prewiring. IF someone wants to commit genocide on you or someone you care about then they become the enemy. They become the threat or the problem. Whether it's socially acceptable or not, if an individual does not respect the human rights of others they should not expect others to respond to them as if they have rights.
Racists believe in discrimination by race. So the economic solution is to actively discriminate against the racists. It becomes do it to them or they'll do it to you. It's no longer a choice and it's got nothing to do with pre-wired instincts, genes, or anything like that beyond a will to survive. Just as if you were a jewish individual during the holocaust I'm sure you'd discriminate and be mean to the nazi's whereever you find them.
Like what? Skin cancer?
And which races are most likely to be affected?
I'm skeptical mainly because anybody can have genes from anywhere, especially if they are multi-racial. If this idea would work on an individual of mixed race then I would take it more seriously.
What I'm saying is none of these social constructs are based on science and just like the racist or the jock or whomever can try to use stereotypes to hurt one group of people, the group of people they use stereotypes on can just as easily create and use stereotypes as a weapon against them. And I'd go so far as to say this would be the ethical thing to do because the only way to show a bully why something is wrong is to do it to them so they can experience how it feels.
When the jock gets passed up on a job for being too blonde, too fit, too good looking, he will know how it feels and will learn "THATS WRONG!" and when this happens eventually he will learn "THAT IS BULLSHIT! RACE IS BULLSHIT!". But until he learns that I'm fine with discriminating against him because if someone believes stereotypes should apply to others, it should apply to them as well.
So why should I hire a racist? If they believe in races over believing in genetics then they are no better than individuals who don't believe in evolution. As far as I'm concerned they behave as a race, and they think and act alike so the stereotype applies until they decide to grow up.
The worst thing you can do is simply sit back and let the dumbest most retarded ignorant among us take control of and hijack all the stereotypes, do all the discrimination, and create countless numbers of victims without consequence. So would I hire someone who I suspect to be a racist? Sure I'd hire this person, but they shouldn't expect to get a high salary or get promoted, they can be the janitor.
And this is completely ethical because only the enlightened should be rewarded. Ignorance should never be rewarded and this is the problem with concepts like race, it primarily rewards the ignorant at the expense of the intelligent.
I'm saying relying on race in a medical context is as stupid as just looking at a persons weight or size and determining their health. Yes most of the time an obese individual is unhealthy, but this isn't always the case and we should not diagnose individuals merely by looking at them.
There is no link between physical appearance and race. You can look one race and have the genes of another which means race as a concept is unscientific and bogus. You do have genes but the genes you have aren't going to be known merely by looking at someone.
Sure you can see their race but their race isn't their genes.
A person who is fatter than me or who has a different body type is very likely not related.
Um, Huh? Because fatness is purely genetic? I know so many families where some are fat and some are skinny.
And I know some families which have a range of skin colors, body types, hair color and eye color. Thanks for taking the bait.
You could apply this to members of the same kinship group. Do children treat fat people in their own family the same as they treat skinny people?
A person who is fatter than me or who has a different body type is very likely not related. This would mean if I'm a big buff jock then that skinny wimp probably isn't related to me so I can go ahead and bully him right?