That's true, I don't eat meat, which apparently makes me hopelessly biased and unqualified to offer an opinion.
Perhaps someone with a neutral, fair and balanced perspective on the issue of eating meat (by which I mean a meat-eater, of course) could take my place in this discussion?
I respect your choice, but don't try to tell me MY choice is wrong because it doesn't fit with your ideals...</quote>
I'm not. Was there something I wrote that made you think I was trying to tell you what to do?
I tried to be fairly clear that people should make their own conclusions about what they think they should eat, and still I get this defensive "that's fine for you but don't preach that I have to be like you!" attitude...I admit, it's a little frustrating.
I sometimes get the feeling that not only do people not want to be told what to do, they don't even want to discuss this issue at all. Not to say that's your attitude though.
K. I read the whole thing and don't understand what you're getting at. Or were you being sarcastic when you suggested that it was a problem that billions of creatures would never have the privilege of existing? Maybe I just misunderstood.
If you're wondering whether I equated those things, I did not. The point I was trying to make is obvious to anyone who reads it in good faith, so I won't bother explaining again.
I think you're making a mistaken assumption about what I said, and doing it in a very defensive way.
The OP was implying that because we're omnivores, it therefore follows that we should eat meat. This is not necessarily true.
Make whatever conclusion you'd like about whether you should eat meat or not, but don't simply assume that because we're capable of digesting something that we need to or should eat it.
I think you have a useful point there - currently, humans don't even treat some other humans decently, let alone animals.
You may notice that historically, when one group of humans is targeted for oppression and violence, they'll be often characterized as "sub-human", often equated to some kind of animal. For example, black people were thought of as gorillas or monkeys, Jews as dogs, capitalists as pigs, Tutsis as cockroaches, etc.
This strategy points to an interesting inconsistency in our ethical system. We feel an instinctive empathy towards animals, often projecting even more human-like qualities than they actually have. This is widely acknowledged. However, we simultaneously assert that these animals - despite evoking feelings of empathy or compassion - are inferior to us and not subject to normal ethical considerations.
Basically, our ethical system has set up a special category for "creatures which you may feel empathy for, but can still be freely abused and killed". Once this paradigm is established, it's pretty easy to place a particular group of humans in there as well. After all, I'm sure that slave-owners felt an emotional connection to their slaves as sentient beings, but it was understood that just as with horses and cows, torturing and killing them was of course still acceptable.
Any time a society starts thinking of fellow humans as "sub-human", bad things happen. Perhaps this isn't only a problem with the society, but also with the concept of "sub-humanity" in general.
There's nothing morally wrong with eating meat. The moral problems are with how the meat is grown. Growing meat in a vat would be nice, but what PETA ignores is that if this was the only way we ever farmed meat, then billions of creatures would never even have the privilege of existing in the first place.
What, are you a Catholic fundamentalist? Do you believe every time you use birth control you're committing some kind of wrong by depriving a baby of the privilege of existing? Hell, how about any time you're doing anything other than actively procreating?
Creatures that don't exist don't care whether they exist or not. Creatures that do exist feel very strongly about the matter.
OK, let's accept your absurd premise that killing a plant is as bad as killing an animal.
Meat animals don't just grow themselves magically, they must be fed. And they're fed a lot of plants, for a long time.
So, when you eat some meat, you're effectively consuming many times that much plant matter, because of all the plants that were killed to feed that meat. Meat is fundamentally a very inefficient kind of food to produce.
A vegetarian, on the other hand, eats the plant matter directly, thereby requiring the deaths of only a fraction as many plants.
Not all creatures are designed to eat meat.
Similarly, not all creatures are designed to eat only plants.
Dude, we're not designed at all. We just exist, and our potential as individuals and as a species is virtually limitless.
We weren't "designed" to fly through the air, but we found a way to transcend our "design" - and that turned out to be great! It doesn't matter what we evolved to eat in prehistory. In the 21st century we have new ways to eat healthily, and many of them don't involve meat.
When Christian fundamentalists go off on things for being unnatural, everyone derides them. And yet the idea that vegetarianism "ain't natural" is a convenient excuse trotted out by people who feel a need to rationalize their diet without having to make any changes.
No, of course we shouldn't lock down technology, the Internet, or Freenet. That's exactly why I was saying that using DRM or watermarking is an absurd solution - those are things that cripple and restrict people's control over technology, but in trivial ways that any committed "bad guy" could evade.
That aside, I'm here to give you the bad news: We can't prevent the circulation of child porn. There's good news too, though: We don't need to. Pictures of naked kids are distasteful and fairly disturbing, but they're not really that big of a problem. The problem is the abuse the kids were subject to. The Drug War-esque concept that we can stop the "producers" of child porn by cutting off the "demand" is total insanity, and really only tolerated because it's super awkward to voice any opinion remotely resembling defending child pornography.
I mean, for real, let's apply that reasoning to another form of sexual violence: Can we prevent rape by hunting down and jailing people who look at internet pictures of people being raped? Of course not. It's fucked up that someone would enjoy those pictures, and makes me uncomfortable, and such pictures should probably be removed as much as reasonably possible from public circulation. But it has nothing to do with the real problem: stopping people from getting raped, and therefore isn't worth launching a mad, hugely expensive and invasive crusade to prevent it.
If we're gonna have a mad crusade about anything, at least make it about preventing the real problem.
The problems with propaganda is that in addition to being the least intrusive method, it's also one of the most effective.
In a propaganda state, the government always has a choice: Allow the truth to be told, or use propaganda to suppress it. This isn't a difficult choice. If you take away or limit the ability of the government to tell blatant lies and conceal facts, they're faced with a harder choice: Allow the truth to be told, or use military/police force to crush the truth tellers.
This choice is harder because suppressing the truth with violence is costly and risky for a government. International monitors may notice, other countries may punish the government, and people within the country may notice and turn against the government.
Because of the risk involved in forceful methods, governments (especially stable ones) are much less inclined to use them, and instead choose to tolerate the truth. And conversely, when they choose to suppress the truth, it's visible and provokes mass outrage and resistance.
And let's not forget that ultimately, effective propaganda states end up using much violent force against the public anyway. Because of course, once propaganda is firmly established, the costs and risks associated with violent repression are removed.
So, assuming a cynical take on the government, the choice is between a propaganda environment where nobody knows about widespread government violence, or one where everyone at least/knows/ that the government is persecuting its detractors.
Frankly I would rather have signs above the area where everyone clocks in rather than controlled and monitored labour camps.
You present a false choice between being deceived into obeying the government and being coerced into obeying the government. Your entire premise is based on the assumption that the government is always correct, and must get its way somehow or another.
However, sometimes the government is wrong, and it uses propaganda techniques to conceal its errors and suppress or disparage those who present embarrassing information. The choice in these situations is between being deceived into obeying the government and having the information you need to decide independently whether to obey the government.
Exactly - and name a DRM software technology that's impossible to break. There are none - it's not possible to create a media file that will display on normal personal computers and still prevent it from being "ripped" or re-encoded in a non-DRM format.
Unless you strongly understand every aspect of a technology like DRM or watermarking, it's unwise to assume that it will magically solve a given problem, such as tracing photographs.
Ok, so you don't like big bossy Stallman trying to tell you what to do. That's fine. But characterizing the GPL as some kind of tool to prevent voluntary exchanges is silly.
It comes down to this: either you believe in "intellectual property" rights or not. If you do, whenever a developer creates code, it's their property, and they can establish whatever conditions they like for other people getting to use it. Some people use the GPL as their conditions. They're not saying they swear allegiance to Stallman, nor are they saying all software should be free, they're just saying "if you want to use my intellectual property, in return you have to release the stuff you did with it under the GPL". Those are the conditions of the exchange, what's involuntary about that?
Or, you don't believe in intellectual property, and think the GPL unfairly restricts what people can do with the code. This makes sense initially, but then you realize that the only thing you can't do with GPL code is use it in "intellectual property" schemes, where someone uses IP law to restrict access to their software to force others to pay for it. If you don't believe in IP, why would you want to make it possible for your code to be used in such activities?
The only reasons to be angry with the GPL are a base self-interest (not liking competition for your own closed software), or a misplaced sense of rebellion against the perceived authority of Stallman - which is completely imagined. He's just a guy who had an idea, a lawyer wrote it up, and a lot of other people thought they would copy it.
Ah, the good old days of war, when a man could murder and be murdered honorably, in a gentlemanly contest of mass killing by two distinguished opponents. Do you think after WW2 was over, the generals on either side shook hands and said "good game"?
These days we have all these groups and individuals fighting wildly, desperately, as if their lives depended on it or something. Gone is the refined, chivalrous presence of a State to send its people off to die at the hand of a worthy enemy State according to tradition, now it seems like people will do just about anything to stay alive!
My words aren't indicative of a cynic, just a realist.
My words aren't of an idealist, just a realist. When you stop bowing down to the supposed ultimatums of commerce and instead take a principled stand, you'll be surprised how many people have your back. Wikimedia has stated that they'll shut down before running ads, and if it ever came to that, the outpouring of contributions would sustain them.
The easiest way to justify doing something unprincipled or unethical is to convince yourself and everyone around you that you simply have no other choice.
The guy could easily have created Wikipedia as a for-profit enterprise. It would be no different as a website or a resource, and he could be profiting immensely from it.
Wait, are you serious? Wales tried that exact thing, it was called Nupedia and it failed. The failure was at least partially attributed to the fact that nobody felt inspired to volunteer their time and energy for what was effectively someone else's internet startup company.
Providing free content to corporate websites has become semi-normalized behavior these days among a lot of people, but Wikipedians (on average) have a deeper analysis of what's going on. The relatively small number of wikipedians who do most of the work and are responsible for the site functioning - many of them pour 20 hours or more a week into the site, and they do that because they feel they're contributing to an egalitarian project for the benefit of all humanity, not just some business.
Many of these people would be deeply alienated if advertising were introduced, and that's really all that matters. Just like with open source software, Wikipedia doesn't really care what a bunch of pundits think, they care what the people actually working on the project think - because if you piss them off, it doesn't matter how much money you can generate. The hardcore volunteers will be gone and the project will be dead.
I like this idea a lot. What would be really neat would be to write a virtual server for the sneakernet software - so basically you operate your computer as though it's connected to the internet, only all requests to the internet are recieved by the local server software and "queued" for delivery via the sneakernet.
The server component could be designed to accept connections and handshakes for popular protocols like HTTP, SMTP, POP3, etc, but when sent data, it would queue it instead of sending directly. And when data was requested, it could just check the existing cache and supply the content when requested (for example new emails or earlier requested web pages).
The advantage of doing it this way is it would be compatible with existing software, you could use most common internet apps with no modification, only a new service written for the virtual server.
How much oil per year do you think is consumed to produce plastics and other synthetic materials, versus how much is burned to power engines? The answer might surprise you.
Yes, if a cost-effective alternative fuel was found, there would still be a market for oil, but it would be so drastically reduced that it'd become just another industrial commodity, like silicon or copper. And nobody talks about Big Silicon or Big Copper.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah? How's that? Please give an example scenario.
Yep. I call it a list of "things that are not necessarily a good idea". There are lots more things that could go on that list, things like:
:)
- Wearing a silly hat in court
- Poking a pitbull in the eye
- Setting a fire
- Eating funnel cake before you ride the roller-coaster
Look what I did now, I put eating funnel cake on the same list as rape! OMGZ, I must be some kind of wacko!!!1
Sadly, you fail at debate. But, I did have more fun making this half of the list, so I guess something good came of it after all
That's true, I don't eat meat, which apparently makes me hopelessly biased and unqualified to offer an opinion.
Perhaps someone with a neutral, fair and balanced perspective on the issue of eating meat (by which I mean a meat-eater, of course) could take my place in this discussion?
I respect your choice, but don't try to tell me MY choice is wrong because it doesn't fit with your ideals ...</quote>
I'm not. Was there something I wrote that made you think I was trying to tell you what to do?
I tried to be fairly clear that people should make their own conclusions about what they think they should eat, and still I get this defensive "that's fine for you but don't preach that I have to be like you!" attitude...I admit, it's a little frustrating.
I sometimes get the feeling that not only do people not want to be told what to do, they don't even want to discuss this issue at all. Not to say that's your attitude though.
K. I read the whole thing and don't understand what you're getting at. Or were you being sarcastic when you suggested that it was a problem that billions of creatures would never have the privilege of existing? Maybe I just misunderstood.
If you're wondering whether I equated those things, I did not. The point I was trying to make is obvious to anyone who reads it in good faith, so I won't bother explaining again.
I think you're making a mistaken assumption about what I said, and doing it in a very defensive way.
The OP was implying that because we're omnivores, it therefore follows that we should eat meat. This is not necessarily true.
Make whatever conclusion you'd like about whether you should eat meat or not, but don't simply assume that because we're capable of digesting something that we need to or should eat it.
I think you have a useful point there - currently, humans don't even treat some other humans decently, let alone animals.
You may notice that historically, when one group of humans is targeted for oppression and violence, they'll be often characterized as "sub-human", often equated to some kind of animal. For example, black people were thought of as gorillas or monkeys, Jews as dogs, capitalists as pigs, Tutsis as cockroaches, etc.
This strategy points to an interesting inconsistency in our ethical system. We feel an instinctive empathy towards animals, often projecting even more human-like qualities than they actually have. This is widely acknowledged. However, we simultaneously assert that these animals - despite evoking feelings of empathy or compassion - are inferior to us and not subject to normal ethical considerations.
Basically, our ethical system has set up a special category for "creatures which you may feel empathy for, but can still be freely abused and killed". Once this paradigm is established, it's pretty easy to place a particular group of humans in there as well. After all, I'm sure that slave-owners felt an emotional connection to their slaves as sentient beings, but it was understood that just as with horses and cows, torturing and killing them was of course still acceptable.
Any time a society starts thinking of fellow humans as "sub-human", bad things happen. Perhaps this isn't only a problem with the society, but also with the concept of "sub-humanity" in general.
What, are you a Catholic fundamentalist? Do you believe every time you use birth control you're committing some kind of wrong by depriving a baby of the privilege of existing? Hell, how about any time you're doing anything other than actively procreating?
Creatures that don't exist don't care whether they exist or not. Creatures that do exist feel very strongly about the matter.
I see what you did there.
OK, let's accept your absurd premise that killing a plant is as bad as killing an animal.
Meat animals don't just grow themselves magically, they must be fed. And they're fed a lot of plants, for a long time.
So, when you eat some meat, you're effectively consuming many times that much plant matter, because of all the plants that were killed to feed that meat. Meat is fundamentally a very inefficient kind of food to produce.
A vegetarian, on the other hand, eats the plant matter directly, thereby requiring the deaths of only a fraction as many plants.
By omnivore, you mean we are capable of digesting both plant and animal flesh. It's undeniable that we have the ability to get nourishment from meat.
However, there are a lot of things that humans are capable of that we've decided - either as individuals or societies - not to do anymore.
Humans can steal, humans can rape and murder each other, humans can even design devices capable of destroying all life on the planet.
Just 'cause we can eat meat doesn't automatically mean it's a good idea.
Dude, we're not designed at all. We just exist, and our potential as individuals and as a species is virtually limitless.
We weren't "designed" to fly through the air, but we found a way to transcend our "design" - and that turned out to be great! It doesn't matter what we evolved to eat in prehistory. In the 21st century we have new ways to eat healthily, and many of them don't involve meat.
When Christian fundamentalists go off on things for being unnatural, everyone derides them. And yet the idea that vegetarianism "ain't natural" is a convenient excuse trotted out by people who feel a need to rationalize their diet without having to make any changes.
Wackos without common sense, you say? Well I'm for common sense, and I'm against wackos!
Thanks for breaking the issues down for me, I didn't realize things were so cut and dry!
I believe we call it "fuzzy math" these days.
No, of course we shouldn't lock down technology, the Internet, or Freenet. That's exactly why I was saying that using DRM or watermarking is an absurd solution - those are things that cripple and restrict people's control over technology, but in trivial ways that any committed "bad guy" could evade.
That aside, I'm here to give you the bad news: We can't prevent the circulation of child porn. There's good news too, though: We don't need to. Pictures of naked kids are distasteful and fairly disturbing, but they're not really that big of a problem. The problem is the abuse the kids were subject to. The Drug War-esque concept that we can stop the "producers" of child porn by cutting off the "demand" is total insanity, and really only tolerated because it's super awkward to voice any opinion remotely resembling defending child pornography.
I mean, for real, let's apply that reasoning to another form of sexual violence: Can we prevent rape by hunting down and jailing people who look at internet pictures of people being raped? Of course not. It's fucked up that someone would enjoy those pictures, and makes me uncomfortable, and such pictures should probably be removed as much as reasonably possible from public circulation. But it has nothing to do with the real problem: stopping people from getting raped, and therefore isn't worth launching a mad, hugely expensive and invasive crusade to prevent it.
If we're gonna have a mad crusade about anything, at least make it about preventing the real problem.
The problems with propaganda is that in addition to being the least intrusive method, it's also one of the most effective. In a propaganda state, the government always has a choice: Allow the truth to be told, or use propaganda to suppress it. This isn't a difficult choice. If you take away or limit the ability of the government to tell blatant lies and conceal facts, they're faced with a harder choice: Allow the truth to be told, or use military/police force to crush the truth tellers. This choice is harder because suppressing the truth with violence is costly and risky for a government. International monitors may notice, other countries may punish the government, and people within the country may notice and turn against the government. Because of the risk involved in forceful methods, governments (especially stable ones) are much less inclined to use them, and instead choose to tolerate the truth. And conversely, when they choose to suppress the truth, it's visible and provokes mass outrage and resistance. And let's not forget that ultimately, effective propaganda states end up using much violent force against the public anyway. Because of course, once propaganda is firmly established, the costs and risks associated with violent repression are removed. So, assuming a cynical take on the government, the choice is between a propaganda environment where nobody knows about widespread government violence, or one where everyone at least /knows/ that the government is persecuting its detractors.
Frankly I would rather have signs above the area where everyone clocks in rather than controlled and monitored labour camps.
You present a false choice between being deceived into obeying the government and being coerced into obeying the government. Your entire premise is based on the assumption that the government is always correct, and must get its way somehow or another.
However, sometimes the government is wrong, and it uses propaganda techniques to conceal its errors and suppress or disparage those who present embarrassing information. The choice in these situations is between being deceived into obeying the government and having the information you need to decide independently whether to obey the government.
It's the same technology they use to have DRM.
Exactly - and name a DRM software technology that's impossible to break. There are none - it's not possible to create a media file that will display on normal personal computers and still prevent it from being "ripped" or re-encoded in a non-DRM format.
Unless you strongly understand every aspect of a technology like DRM or watermarking, it's unwise to assume that it will magically solve a given problem, such as tracing photographs.
Ok, so you don't like big bossy Stallman trying to tell you what to do. That's fine. But characterizing the GPL as some kind of tool to prevent voluntary exchanges is silly.
It comes down to this: either you believe in "intellectual property" rights or not. If you do, whenever a developer creates code, it's their property, and they can establish whatever conditions they like for other people getting to use it. Some people use the GPL as their conditions. They're not saying they swear allegiance to Stallman, nor are they saying all software should be free, they're just saying "if you want to use my intellectual property, in return you have to release the stuff you did with it under the GPL". Those are the conditions of the exchange, what's involuntary about that?
Or, you don't believe in intellectual property, and think the GPL unfairly restricts what people can do with the code. This makes sense initially, but then you realize that the only thing you can't do with GPL code is use it in "intellectual property" schemes, where someone uses IP law to restrict access to their software to force others to pay for it. If you don't believe in IP, why would you want to make it possible for your code to be used in such activities?
The only reasons to be angry with the GPL are a base self-interest (not liking competition for your own closed software), or a misplaced sense of rebellion against the perceived authority of Stallman - which is completely imagined. He's just a guy who had an idea, a lawyer wrote it up, and a lot of other people thought they would copy it.
Ah, the good old days of war, when a man could murder and be murdered honorably, in a gentlemanly contest of mass killing by two distinguished opponents. Do you think after WW2 was over, the generals on either side shook hands and said "good game"?
These days we have all these groups and individuals fighting wildly, desperately, as if their lives depended on it or something. Gone is the refined, chivalrous presence of a State to send its people off to die at the hand of a worthy enemy State according to tradition, now it seems like people will do just about anything to stay alive!
My words aren't indicative of a cynic, just a realist.
My words aren't of an idealist, just a realist. When you stop bowing down to the supposed ultimatums of commerce and instead take a principled stand, you'll be surprised how many people have your back. Wikimedia has stated that they'll shut down before running ads, and if it ever came to that, the outpouring of contributions would sustain them.
The easiest way to justify doing something unprincipled or unethical is to convince yourself and everyone around you that you simply have no other choice.
The guy could easily have created Wikipedia as a for-profit enterprise. It would be no different as a website or a resource, and he could be profiting immensely from it.
Wait, are you serious? Wales tried that exact thing, it was called Nupedia and it failed. The failure was at least partially attributed to the fact that nobody felt inspired to volunteer their time and energy for what was effectively someone else's internet startup company.
Providing free content to corporate websites has become semi-normalized behavior these days among a lot of people, but Wikipedians (on average) have a deeper analysis of what's going on. The relatively small number of wikipedians who do most of the work and are responsible for the site functioning - many of them pour 20 hours or more a week into the site, and they do that because they feel they're contributing to an egalitarian project for the benefit of all humanity, not just some business.
Many of these people would be deeply alienated if advertising were introduced, and that's really all that matters. Just like with open source software, Wikipedia doesn't really care what a bunch of pundits think, they care what the people actually working on the project think - because if you piss them off, it doesn't matter how much money you can generate. The hardcore volunteers will be gone and the project will be dead.
I like this idea a lot. What would be really neat would be to write a virtual server for the sneakernet software - so basically you operate your computer as though it's connected to the internet, only all requests to the internet are recieved by the local server software and "queued" for delivery via the sneakernet.
The server component could be designed to accept connections and handshakes for popular protocols like HTTP, SMTP, POP3, etc, but when sent data, it would queue it instead of sending directly. And when data was requested, it could just check the existing cache and supply the content when requested (for example new emails or earlier requested web pages).
The advantage of doing it this way is it would be compatible with existing software, you could use most common internet apps with no modification, only a new service written for the virtual server.
How much oil per year do you think is consumed to produce plastics and other synthetic materials, versus how much is burned to power engines? The answer might surprise you.
Yes, if a cost-effective alternative fuel was found, there would still be a market for oil, but it would be so drastically reduced that it'd become just another industrial commodity, like silicon or copper. And nobody talks about Big Silicon or Big Copper.