I often find those complaining about degredation of language are those of that generation which have to be shown how to open a word document.
Now while this isn't universal, I'd like to say this to the older generation. Face it old timers, where did all your learning times tables by rote and perfect spelling get you? It got you a set of redundant skills in a world of spell checkers, hand held calculators and 17 year olds who you have to ask nicely if you want that file you corrupted fixed.
The world moved on, we expect kids these days to have an insanely wide base of skills. So we diversified our curriculum, making qualifications easier but broader. And then wondered why it was we got a generation that couldn't spell or add.
The real travesty of the situation isn't that the younger generation cant spell or add. They have no need of these skills. The real travesty is that we dropped things like calculus from secondary education, matricies from high school, poetic techniques have been dumbed down to the point that we tell kids what an Alliteration is, and how to tell if words rhyme. All so we could keep a little bit of spelling, times tables and addition in the curriculum.
It is time to acknowledge that modern man does not need these outdated skills, and has found a better way. Drop them, and in thier place have children doing the hard stuff again.
At present, it is peace time (I don't buy this "war on terror" anymore than I buy the "war on drugs"). You can give provision for a government to become strong or weak based on the circumstances. A perpetually strong government is as you suggest, a recipie for giving away citizens rights.
Sometimes we recognise that responsibilities overide rights. In the US the presidents responsibilities to protect the United States and the constitution overides many of the rights of citizens.
But we see at present that an inefficient seperation of power mean that our government abuses a fake war to justify infringements of civil liberties. All this because the general public is on the whole too stupid and ill informed to make a sensible choice at the ballot box. We need a system that recognises that all men are created with equal rights, not equal capabilities.
Lol, I wasn't suggesting shooting this guy. I was pointing out if we wait until we have a 1984 style state, then we have left shooting this guy and people like him to late.
Sadly I feel it is rapidly becoming clear that maintaining liberty and democracy at the same time is, at present unworkable. We have widening and dangerous expansion of state control with the general population is what is generating this clamp down. In the countries where we are trying to export democracy we find the population desperate to give up rights, in some cases rights they used to have under the totalitarian regiem we "liberated" them from.
I question if we don't need to convert our democracy into a more constrained system, a system federalised along both regional and specialist discipline boundaries, where you are only able to vote for representatives in some system of government after you have demonstrated a willingness and capacity to understand the issues involved in that subsection of government. Then power could be better seperated by placing checks and balances on the specialised and generalised portions of government. Then those sections of government pertaining to civil liberties could only be subverted by an orchestrated attempt by a extremely well organised well educated segment of society battling another, instead of that aforemention section of society manipulating those idiots in the general public who wouldn't know an inalieable right if it beat them to death with a kipper.
Unfortunately democracy is for some reason held in higher esteme than the protection of civil liberties, we have forgotten that democracy is only useful in so far as it acts to protect the civil liberties of the population and provides good government. It is doing niether at the moment. Democracy is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. I would rather a benevolent dictator who understood and protected peoples rights (although we know such a dictator would not last long), than a democratically elected sleaze bag hell bent on stealing the God Given rights of citizens so that he can get his head rush of power for the day.
Not sure if you were being sarcastic but if we end up with a 1984 style state, one of the points the book made was that you cant beat it. It becomes the ultimate self propagating social model, unstoppable, with no accessible figure head to decapitate, no effective resistence, etc.
If it comes to revolution, we have left shooting people like this a little too late.
"If committed to rehabilitation and/or innocent, why incacerate?"
The former case is to supervise rehabilitation. In most cases this would not need to be a long period in my opinion, but I'm unqualified to comment.
As for the innocent. We shouldn't incacerate, you are correct. But mistakes will be made. Since the innocent require no rehabilitation, even if they are accused of serious crimes, if we take the view point that the criminal justice system exists only to rehabilitate and not to dish out vengence, then the innocent will be rehabilitated in no time at all. The innocent fair much better under my system than the current one.
You then argue that I am proceeding down a slippery slope by argueing that deprivation of liberty is sufficient punishment. Punishment is not the issue for me, rehabilitation is. I've had crimes committed against me and I would want a person punished, but what I want should count for precisely jack all as far as that goes. My emotional state when a crime is committed against me is a consequence of my conditioning.
Prisoners are still human being you are correct. And they do still have rights. If they make effort to reform, they cannot be denied food, shelter etc.. But the state has no responsibility to provide these things, merely to provide the means to obtain these things. If a prisoner decides to starve themself, or starves themself though thier own laziness that is not the responsibility of the state.
To me prisoners are still human being, but human being have both inalieable rights, and inalieable responsibilities. Prisoners have repeatedly demonstrated an unwillingness to perform the latter, or at least if we are sending them to prison they should have. The job therefore of prison should be to fix this defect. If because I feel prisons should focus on this I mislead you into believing that prisoners are little more than chattel then I apologies, that is not what I mean and should have made myself clearer.
I belive every human being has an inalieable responsibility to engage in useful employment. Prisoners do not undertake the former. Hence those institutions that seek to treat prisoners need to cure this problem. As a society we should strive to apply the minimal amount of pressure needed to induce this change in a person. At the moment we do no such thing. We apply either way to much, or way too little, and we apply it in totally the wrong way.
I also agree prison should not be the default punishment.
I can appreciate why, upon inspection of what I have said you might believe that I am trolling. It is a convient judgement to make which there does seem to be plenty of evidence suggesting as much.
However, I would like to point out evidence to the contrary. Firstly you will note the length of the post I made (which as it turns out was insufficient as the individual who has responded to what I've said clearly did not get the full picture of what I was argueing). I risked going off topic and explained what I think in depth, without a cut and paste job from some standard trolling text.
You will also note that although running contrary to popular opinion, my view point does not readily fit into any common target group. Extreme support for the welfare state coupled with a willingness to be tough with those individuals who abuse the system (and not merely using the word "get tough in a sentence and think that counts as a solution) is not charaturistic of any one ready target group. Were I looking to provoke a response, I could have pretended to be ultra left wing or Republican. Both would be ready targets.
Finally you will note that while in some ways abhorrent (even to myself) my views are clearly interconnected and thought out. Were I trolling I would do better to have my arguements make less logical sense and thus invite attack, rather than merely challenge the status quo belief that people have inalieable right but not inalieable responsibilities.
I respond to you in this way not out of desire to defend myself, because as I suggest, your conclusion that I might be a troll has plenty of supporting evidence. I respond in this way because I hope you will look again at what I am saying and consider it in the context of an individual who believe that people have an inalieable responsibility to work. You may not agree with that belief, but you will then realise where some of my ideas originate from.
The parent made the point that he was happy for these people to continue down thier self destructive spiral if they were prevented from harming others. There are ways we could do this if only we were willing to be tough enough on those who will not take employment.
"No, you'd just end up with a bunch of poor, starving and dead people."
Suits me. Peoples right to life does not extend to me paying for them to be fed.
"Oh, and more criminals. Stealing from you."
That is a problem for the criminal justice system, not welfare. If we are using welfare because of fear of crime we are making a big mistake.
Personally I believe the welfare system needs to be enlarged because it is insufficent for hard working people to maintain thier standard of living on during temporary redundancy. But I think it needs combining with a really big stick, and serious punishments to prevent corruption.
However for any of that to work we have to fix our criminal justice system. Which is seriously broke. Because you are right, if we implement the system myself or the parent describes, those lazy people who hold us to ransome at the moment will turn to crime. And we would have to deal with them.
Society is unwilling to take the harsh measures needed to generate a fair system, so we end up with the piece of crap that we have instead. A welfare system that doesn't fully support those who it is supposed to and that is seriously abused by useless people.
An individual who is committed to rehabilitation would not need to be broken. They would work and proove themselves capable of re-entering society. The innocent doubly so because they would show no criminal tendancies. I see no good reason for keeping people locked up who have been rehabilitated.
You are not describing 'the useless' there. Prisons can have more than one purpose, I described the primary one. You are describing secondary ones.
I do not see the two objectives as being mutually exclusive. As for torture, yes I agree it is torture. But we accept that after due process we can deprive people of certain rights. I would consider locking someone up to be a form of torture.
I'm more concerned about things like the death penalty (why waste what could be a perfectly useful human being, or worse an innocent one?). Or infinite sentences which again could waste a perfectly useful human being. Our current system of incarceration offers inmates a combination of no hope, and no reak discipline. Sure it is hard, unpleasant and punishing, but people don't come out the other end reformed.
We need a system that gives people another chance by giving themselves a chance to proove themselves, coupled with a system that can crack the really hard cases. Not a system that takes 18 year old manchilds and turns them into 23 year old ruthless violent criminals trained by other inmates and carrying a serious grudge against society for offering them no hope.
Exactly. Having children is not a right. We only want to think of it as a right because we are hard wired to want to propagte. Our current approach is to offer a carrot (the welfare system) that is too darn small for most genuinely desperate people, except those looking to abuse the system. And a tiny, piddling pathetic stick to use against those useless members of society who perpetrate the above abuse.
We need a system that combines compassion with cold hard unwillingness to go easy on slackers.
There is a way around that. You reform welfare so it couples a caring helping hand to those who need it with a big, big stick to those whose situation is thier own fault.
Of course, that means people starving, on the streets etc. And here in lies the problem. People see these useless, weak individuals and instead of showing moral courage, they show some weakness of their own. They convince themselves that these people obviously didn't have a good start in life, or that there might be some reason for their difficulty.
So they buy the sob story and fork out a few bucks for the "night shelter". Where the night shelter is actually alchol or whatever drug this person has addicted themselves to.
If that wasn't enough we make the situation worse by forking out yet more cash when these idiots breed instead of sterlising them and saving ourselves the cash and a future batch of idiots.
And then, as if that wasn't enough, at the other end of the spectrum we have useless barsteds whose daddies pay for everything for them. And so these lot are set up for life and do no work because everything can be bought for them. This lot we could fix by making transfers over a reasonable amount between parents and children illegal, and by making inheritence a thing of the past. If I had my way, everybody would work, no one would get a free ride.
This would increase revenue, which would mean that those who fell on hard times due to shifts in the economy could be retrained by state programs, unemployment would no longer be as scary because so long as you worked hard the state would equip you for a new job. You could even make welfare income for the hard up something people can live off for the short time that they need it. That way the majority of hard working people can be looked after by the state in the manner they deserve.
So I have to say I agree. Legalise prostitution, gambling, drugs, etc. And those who don't use them responsibly, let them starve. Now starving will inevitably lead them to crime, if thier addiction doesn't. And that is where the failures of our prison system comes in. We should treat prison as a centre for making the useless useful by mentally breaking them to the point where they are too scared to do anything other than what they are told, and them put these people to work. Prisons should be ran in such a way that the inmate population never see eachother, to ensure they do not enhance eachothers criminal capabilities, and should be ran on a "no work, no food" basis.
As a society we in the west have become soft, we don't reward excelence and make excuses for mediocrity. So what do we get? We get mediocrity.
Erm, I don't think you follow what copyright is for. It isn't about reimbursing creators (although that could be considered a positive side effect). It is about encouraging creation of new works that enhance the cultural heritage of a nation via enhancement of the public domain.
Copyright is already a compromise. Copyright admits that more works will be produced (eventually enhancing the public domain) if artists can eat, have a room over thier heads, etc by artificially giving monetary value to the work by restricting other individuals access to the aforementioned work.
If you make it so copyright can be extended indefinitely you defeat the whole point of copyright by preventing work from entering the public domain.
The founding principles here are that people have a right to access thier cultural heritage, and that it is proper to do as much as reasonably possible to enhance that cultural heritage. Result, you balance one against the other through reasonable copyright terms. Artists get to eat, and in a limited period of time people get access to the resulting cultural developments.
So what is reasonable? How about between 10 and 20 years? Life plus 70 seems a very excessive to me. You are not incentivising a dead man to produce art. In fact by preventing work entering the public domain you are stopping derivative works (impeding further enhancement of a nations cultural heritage) and encouraging 'one hit wonders' who produce one good work and stop because they, and thier children are set up for life. As far as I'm concerned that wasn't part of the plan.
Short response, no real content, no effort to address the the valid points I made. Off the cuff remark which is on the surface blatently false. I call troll. If you want a response post a real arguement both addressing what I've said and backing up what you are saying.
Except that property rights exist apriori, and copyrights are an incentive society has decided to trade in return for improving the public domain.
Having something you did not have before weakens your arguement because that is a good thing, it is the whole point of copyright law. It improves a countries cultural heritage.
The reason copyright violation is wrong under cirtain circumstances is because it makes producing more works less appealing, not because the right itself is violated because the right does not exist apriori. People have the right to own property before we legislate that they do, morally. They do not have copyrights apriori.
The two cases are morally and legally completely different.
I think you somewhat missed my point, which is probably my bad for not explaining it clearly enough. You talk about the moral rights of the creator to control how X or Y is done with thier creation. Unless it is covered by trademark law (which is another kettle of fish) a person has, in my opinion, no apriori rights to control how some set of information is used. Copyright is intended to stimulate creation of new information (broadly defined) through providing incentives to individuals and companies to create.
Creators of information have a say with regaurd to what is done with only in as far as it gives others and themselves incentive to create more. Morally it is wrong to violate an individuals copyright because you are in effect reducing the chances that that individuals will produce more works that enhance the public domain.
I reiterate that in my opinion it is not theft. It is totally morally different to theft because the individual creating had no apriori rights to the work that they created. Violation of copyright in the abstract is not wrong because it deprives someone of something, they have no right to that something. Violating copyright is wrong because it reduces the probability that the public domain will be enhanced by future work.
That makes the situation totally morally, and legally, different from theft.
Say I own a car and it is stolen. Then I no longer have that car. I have property rights which give me the capacity to own something, and they have been violated. These rights are if you will God given, they are considered apriori rights of an individual. They can only be violated by rights which are considered superior (if I repeatedly run people over then my car can be taken away because others right to be alive supercedes my right to own property).
With copyright, one does not apriori have the right to control the copying of material. It is a different kind of right, similar to the rights we grant corporations. It exists solely because it is believed it will do something good, and hence we are prepared to trade that right for that something good. But the right does not exist apriori. If you will no God given right is violated. This right can also be violated (morally and legally) under certain circumstances if other rights supercede it (fair use rights for instance). Now fair use right are an expression of a societies right to access it's cultural heritage, a right which does exist apriori, is God given.
Of course that doesn't make it morally right to violate copyright. The trade is, if the terms are fair, a good one. 20 years with provision for fair use was a reasonable deal, and violating someones copyright as you say reduces the value of that copyright which in turn reduces the incentive to produce new works. But it is not theft, morally or legally.
That is kind of the point. The movie is not a form of property in the conventional sense. It is a government granted monopoly that exists for the purpose of increasing the size, scope and quality of the public domain.
Since the movie is from this point of view ipso not owned by anyone (in the tradtional sense) from the moment of it's creation, it is not possible to steal it. What you can do is violate the rights of the copyright holder. The whole phrase intellectual property is a red herring. It is a violation of someones copyright, that is, someones government mandated right to control the reproduction of a work, under certain conditions.
I can infringe on that right, and under certain circumstances that is illegal, and I would argue immoral too. But it is not theft because that concept is not applicable in this case.
When we examine copyright we must remember it is a pact with the devil, in the sense that we are exchanging societies given right to have access to it's cultural heritige for the opertunity to enhance that heritige. It is not about the creation of jobs in the arts, or the protection of those jobs. It is not about the protection of an industry, unless one counts utilising that industry to enhance the public domain. It is accepted that pure scientific works (scientific or mathematical ideas) are not covered by any government mandated monopoly. Here we made a different pact with the devil. We agreed to fund scientists via grants in return for them producing useful research. It has so far prooved an effective system.
It has the advantage that it is far harder to form large monopolistic controlling entities who set out with the objective of twisting public opinion to talk of scientific research as property. If Einstien had proclaimed Special Relativity his property, and denounced anyone using without his permission a theif, he would have been laughed at. Here the situation is only different in that copyright can be an effective system only if the public is sufficiently informed enough to keep copyright terms a sensible length, deny that an artist has a 'right' to protect thier 'property' and control copyright law to ensure it serves the purpose of enhancing the public domain, and enhancing it in a reasonable time.
Our current copyright legislation fails at doing this. And our corporate bought and paid for media continues to brainwash the public into believing it is possible to steal without depriving of property.
Who said anything about thinking abortion should be illegal? Your people are trying to bypass the constitution by abusing power to load the supreme court with conservatives who have no interest in interpreting the constitution and every interest in mandating thier religion.
You are perfectly entitled to your opinion, and I never said you were not. You are even entitled to have that opinion made law in the US if you like but it will require a constitutional amendment. It is not something as you put it that belongs in the hands of the states, at least according to the supreme court back when it had at least some respect for the foundations of the United States. If you want it to be in the hands of the states, then I advise you to change the constitution, not load the supreme court with fundies who are interested only in plunging us into a second dark age and no interest in upholding it's secular constitution.
Scientists may have bias, science does not, science has over the past 200 year judged creationism and found it wanting.
The science that interprets fossil records? You mean like physics? Oh yeah lets open a real can of worms there. Physics is the single most reliable, accurate science we have. You want to pick a fight there you are welcome to.
It is the place of scientists as responsible citizens to ensure that science is apropriately labelled. Perhaps if people of religious background took the same attitude there would be a few less crusades and a few less suicide bombers. You only have to look at the scientific communities reaction to the fakery of Dr Haung to realise that the scientific community is much more serious about obtaining the facts.
"Then please explain to me how micro-biology is turning more scientists into creationists than evolutionists?". It is not, and whoever told you it was, was flat out lieing. As for specialist fields being contradictory, care to give an example?
As for your "theory", it is supernaturalist in nature. Using God to explain nature is no explanation at all. While it may or may not be true, it is unscientific. If you want to believe that, by all means go ahead it is a perfectly valid philosophical position. But science is not as you seem to hint open to interpretation. I'm afraid you have been sucked in by the propaganda. Creationism is not going to replace evolution, not because some group of people don't like it, but because that is the way science works. Supernatural explanations get replaced by naturalistic ones.
I'm afraid that you cannot reinterpret the multitude of Dinosaur fossils in favour of your proposed theory. Now I'm not going to write you off just because you are creationist. I will however write you off because none of what you have said is actually true. You have basically repeatedly used the age old creationist trick of throwing lots of mud and crossing your fingers that it sticks. Well I have a challenge for you. Show me a paper, in a respectable peer reviewed journal that demonstrates some of your claims.
I mean if so many scientists are coming around to your way of thinking, that shouldn't be so hard?
So what you are saying is you are a one issue fundamentalist who wants his religion to have the right to bypass the constitution of the United States, and wishes he lived in a theocracy. Hey you may just be in luck, as I understand it that is the plan...
Who said anything about thinking people are directly religious because else they would commit suicide. I'm not religious and you don't see me jumping off a bridge. We live in priviledged times in which we have to deal with much less stress than we once did. Perhaps we have socially evolved to deal better with our difficulties. Ask yourself this. If you assume religion is man made (which as an testable hypothesis is the only one I can think of), and you accept that it is endemic, then you must ask where it came from. It must give someone an edge in terms of survivability. But what edge. I presume that edge is that the suspension of rationality (or perhaps the bypassing it entirely, one should not assume man is inherently rational) enables humans to cope better, and hence more likely to mate. This does not mean that religious people are, in the modern age, religious because otherwise they would commit suicide, but rather that I feel religion originated as a survival mechanism to cope with life.
1) Please, for everyone's sake, learn to spell.
No, I'm a physicist, I don't need to, I don't care to, and you would do well to avoid the common creationist mistake of Ad Hominem attacks.
2) If there was a way to quantify irreducible complexity, I'd do it. If there was a way to quantify evolution, or intelligent design, or Charles Darwin, I'd do that too. What does quantification have to do with your point?
Some hypotheses are inherently quantative, or require quantative predictions to test. In so far as intelligent design is really just the experiment that Charles Darwin came up with to falsify his hypothesis repackaged as an antiscientific God of the Gaps theory, if we are to, given the overwhelming evidence for evolution, find evidence against it, that evidence had better be pretty darn good. So good I would argue it would need to be quantifiable at about the 95% confidence interval. You admit yourself you have no way to quantify irriducibly complexity, ergo you have no theory.
Debunking ID is very very easy. It is not a scientific theory. As I said above, all it is is an experiment that could disprove evolution, which has never been realised. I gave one quantifiable definition of Irriducible Complex, and then out of fairness asked you for your own (after all, my definition comes from my experience as a physicist, and perhaps you could have found one that had some means of being tested based on methods more grounded in biology).
Holes in existing theories do not constitute reasons to doubt them. They are reasons to expect that there might be more to a theory, or that they might be approximations to another more general theory. Heck we have already had one revolution that fundamentally redefined evolution in the form of genetics. There might well be more revolutions to be had. But what ever revolutions we might have, evolution will always be a good approximation to what is going on in nature.
Yes, yes, I'm sure you are all very peaceful and lovely and want to hold hands with science and dance around the may pole. Thats why all three branches of the American government are controlled by a party pandering to religious extremism. Here is an idea, turn things around so that your leader is in the same position as the UK Prime Minister, refusing to answer questions about when and where he prays because they are irrelevant to a person holding the premiership of a secular state, then I will believe you. Make religion a taboo in government, something you don't talk. Then maybe, just maybe I might start seeing you and your ilk as being reasonable and not antiscientific. Come on, the United States is being out done by a country that is technically a Christian Constitutional Monarch on the secular front. A majority of Americans are creationists. You live in your fantasy world where your religion isn't a force for bad in the world if that makes you feel better, but remember that by doing so you are not simply harming yourself but others as well.
Erm, you do know that a sizable portion of funding for Sinn Fein/IRA came from Irish Americans right? Bottom line is religions are only peaceful when they are the ones with the tanks, nukes and chemical warheads. Otherwise they launch things like the Crusades, plunge humanity into the Dark Ages or crashing planes into buildings, all with the tacit support of thier population. Bottom line, either you are free thinking and independent of organised religion, or on the whole you are three missed meals away from murdering your infidel neighbours and stealing his grain, with some exceptions.
While I don't agree that religion has to 'die', one can hardly argue that it has been a positive thing for much other than keeping people from killing themselves as a result of the hopelessness (in my opinion this is the best explanation for the origin of religion). I mean come on, recently we have had people killed over a cartoon of a long dead man with no relevance to modern society. How many wars have we had over which side has the best imaginary friend?
Modern man doesn't need dogmatic religion, and we would be better without it (for these purposes I include dogmatic atheism as well). That is not to say that open minded spirituality is a bad thing, we just don't need the controlling structures anymore, we don't need the organisation. Much of our population have evolved beyound them, and they should be left to die out.
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Any one else note that this guy spelled "Colour" wrong? (I'm British, and I'm making a point here).
I often find those complaining about degredation of language are those of that generation which have to be shown how to open a word document.
Now while this isn't universal, I'd like to say this to the older generation. Face it old timers, where did all your learning times tables by rote and perfect spelling get you? It got you a set of redundant skills in a world of spell checkers, hand held calculators and 17 year olds who you have to ask nicely if you want that file you corrupted fixed.
The world moved on, we expect kids these days to have an insanely wide base of skills. So we diversified our curriculum, making qualifications easier but broader. And then wondered why it was we got a generation that couldn't spell or add.
The real travesty of the situation isn't that the younger generation cant spell or add. They have no need of these skills. The real travesty is that we dropped things like calculus from secondary education, matricies from high school, poetic techniques have been dumbed down to the point that we tell kids what an Alliteration is, and how to tell if words rhyme. All so we could keep a little bit of spelling, times tables and addition in the curriculum.
It is time to acknowledge that modern man does not need these outdated skills, and has found a better way. Drop them, and in thier place have children doing the hard stuff again.
At present, it is peace time (I don't buy this "war on terror" anymore than I buy the "war on drugs"). You can give provision for a government to become strong or weak based on the circumstances. A perpetually strong government is as you suggest, a recipie for giving away citizens rights.
Sometimes we recognise that responsibilities overide rights. In the US the presidents responsibilities to protect the United States and the constitution overides many of the rights of citizens.
But we see at present that an inefficient seperation of power mean that our government abuses a fake war to justify infringements of civil liberties. All this because the general public is on the whole too stupid and ill informed to make a sensible choice at the ballot box. We need a system that recognises that all men are created with equal rights, not equal capabilities.
Lol, I wasn't suggesting shooting this guy. I was pointing out if we wait until we have a 1984 style state, then we have left shooting this guy and people like him to late.
Sadly I feel it is rapidly becoming clear that maintaining liberty and democracy at the same time is, at present unworkable. We have widening and dangerous expansion of state control with the general population is what is generating this clamp down. In the countries where we are trying to export democracy we find the population desperate to give up rights, in some cases rights they used to have under the totalitarian regiem we "liberated" them from.
I question if we don't need to convert our democracy into a more constrained system, a system federalised along both regional and specialist discipline boundaries, where you are only able to vote for representatives in some system of government after you have demonstrated a willingness and capacity to understand the issues involved in that subsection of government. Then power could be better seperated by placing checks and balances on the specialised and generalised portions of government. Then those sections of government pertaining to civil liberties could only be subverted by an orchestrated attempt by a extremely well organised well educated segment of society battling another, instead of that aforemention section of society manipulating those idiots in the general public who wouldn't know an inalieable right if it beat them to death with a kipper.
Unfortunately democracy is for some reason held in higher esteme than the protection of civil liberties, we have forgotten that democracy is only useful in so far as it acts to protect the civil liberties of the population and provides good government. It is doing niether at the moment. Democracy is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. I would rather a benevolent dictator who understood and protected peoples rights (although we know such a dictator would not last long), than a democratically elected sleaze bag hell bent on stealing the God Given rights of citizens so that he can get his head rush of power for the day.
Not sure if you were being sarcastic but if we end up with a 1984 style state, one of the points the book made was that you cant beat it. It becomes the ultimate self propagating social model, unstoppable, with no accessible figure head to decapitate, no effective resistence, etc.
If it comes to revolution, we have left shooting people like this a little too late.
"If committed to rehabilitation and/or innocent, why incacerate?"
The former case is to supervise rehabilitation. In most cases this would not need to be a long period in my opinion, but I'm unqualified to comment.
As for the innocent. We shouldn't incacerate, you are correct. But mistakes will be made. Since the innocent require no rehabilitation, even if they are accused of serious crimes, if we take the view point that the criminal justice system exists only to rehabilitate and not to dish out vengence, then the innocent will be rehabilitated in no time at all. The innocent fair much better under my system than the current one.
You then argue that I am proceeding down a slippery slope by argueing that deprivation of liberty is sufficient punishment. Punishment is not the issue for me, rehabilitation is. I've had crimes committed against me and I would want a person punished, but what I want should count for precisely jack all as far as that goes. My emotional state when a crime is committed against me is a consequence of my conditioning.
Prisoners are still human being you are correct. And they do still have rights. If they make effort to reform, they cannot be denied food, shelter etc.. But the state has no responsibility to provide these things, merely to provide the means to obtain these things. If a prisoner decides to starve themself, or starves themself though thier own laziness that is not the responsibility of the state.
To me prisoners are still human being, but human being have both inalieable rights, and inalieable responsibilities. Prisoners have repeatedly demonstrated an unwillingness to perform the latter, or at least if we are sending them to prison they should have. The job therefore of prison should be to fix this defect. If because I feel prisons should focus on this I mislead you into believing that prisoners are little more than chattel then I apologies, that is not what I mean and should have made myself clearer.
I belive every human being has an inalieable responsibility to engage in useful employment. Prisoners do not undertake the former. Hence those institutions that seek to treat prisoners need to cure this problem. As a society we should strive to apply the minimal amount of pressure needed to induce this change in a person. At the moment we do no such thing. We apply either way to much, or way too little, and we apply it in totally the wrong way.
I also agree prison should not be the default punishment.
I can appreciate why, upon inspection of what I have said you might believe that I am trolling. It is a convient judgement to make which there does seem to be plenty of evidence suggesting as much.
However, I would like to point out evidence to the contrary. Firstly you will note the length of the post I made (which as it turns out was insufficient as the individual who has responded to what I've said clearly did not get the full picture of what I was argueing). I risked going off topic and explained what I think in depth, without a cut and paste job from some standard trolling text.
You will also note that although running contrary to popular opinion, my view point does not readily fit into any common target group. Extreme support for the welfare state coupled with a willingness to be tough with those individuals who abuse the system (and not merely using the word "get tough in a sentence and think that counts as a solution) is not charaturistic of any one ready target group. Were I looking to provoke a response, I could have pretended to be ultra left wing or Republican. Both would be ready targets.
Finally you will note that while in some ways abhorrent (even to myself) my views are clearly interconnected and thought out. Were I trolling I would do better to have my arguements make less logical sense and thus invite attack, rather than merely challenge the status quo belief that people have inalieable right but not inalieable responsibilities.
I respond to you in this way not out of desire to defend myself, because as I suggest, your conclusion that I might be a troll has plenty of supporting evidence. I respond in this way because I hope you will look again at what I am saying and consider it in the context of an individual who believe that people have an inalieable responsibility to work. You may not agree with that belief, but you will then realise where some of my ideas originate from.
The parent made the point that he was happy for these people to continue down thier self destructive spiral if they were prevented from harming others. There are ways we could do this if only we were willing to be tough enough on those who will not take employment.
"No, you'd just end up with a bunch of poor, starving and dead people."
Suits me. Peoples right to life does not extend to me paying for them to be fed.
"Oh, and more criminals. Stealing from you."
That is a problem for the criminal justice system, not welfare. If we are using welfare because of fear of crime we are making a big mistake.
Personally I believe the welfare system needs to be enlarged because it is insufficent for hard working people to maintain thier standard of living on during temporary redundancy. But I think it needs combining with a really big stick, and serious punishments to prevent corruption.
However for any of that to work we have to fix our criminal justice system. Which is seriously broke. Because you are right, if we implement the system myself or the parent describes, those lazy people who hold us to ransome at the moment will turn to crime. And we would have to deal with them.
Society is unwilling to take the harsh measures needed to generate a fair system, so we end up with the piece of crap that we have instead. A welfare system that doesn't fully support those who it is supposed to and that is seriously abused by useless people.
An individual who is committed to rehabilitation would not need to be broken. They would work and proove themselves capable of re-entering society. The innocent doubly so because they would show no criminal tendancies. I see no good reason for keeping people locked up who have been rehabilitated.
You are not describing 'the useless' there. Prisons can have more than one purpose, I described the primary one. You are describing secondary ones.
I do not see the two objectives as being mutually exclusive. As for torture, yes I agree it is torture. But we accept that after due process we can deprive people of certain rights. I would consider locking someone up to be a form of torture.
I'm more concerned about things like the death penalty (why waste what could be a perfectly useful human being, or worse an innocent one?). Or infinite sentences which again could waste a perfectly useful human being. Our current system of incarceration offers inmates a combination of no hope, and no reak discipline. Sure it is hard, unpleasant and punishing, but people don't come out the other end reformed.
We need a system that gives people another chance by giving themselves a chance to proove themselves, coupled with a system that can crack the really hard cases. Not a system that takes 18 year old manchilds and turns them into 23 year old ruthless violent criminals trained by other inmates and carrying a serious grudge against society for offering them no hope.
Exactly. Having children is not a right. We only want to think of it as a right because we are hard wired to want to propagte. Our current approach is to offer a carrot (the welfare system) that is too darn small for most genuinely desperate people, except those looking to abuse the system. And a tiny, piddling pathetic stick to use against those useless members of society who perpetrate the above abuse.
We need a system that combines compassion with cold hard unwillingness to go easy on slackers.
There is a way around that. You reform welfare so it couples a caring helping hand to those who need it with a big, big stick to those whose situation is thier own fault.
Of course, that means people starving, on the streets etc. And here in lies the problem. People see these useless, weak individuals and instead of showing moral courage, they show some weakness of their own. They convince themselves that these people obviously didn't have a good start in life, or that there might be some reason for their difficulty.
So they buy the sob story and fork out a few bucks for the "night shelter". Where the night shelter is actually alchol or whatever drug this person has addicted themselves to.
If that wasn't enough we make the situation worse by forking out yet more cash when these idiots breed instead of sterlising them and saving ourselves the cash and a future batch of idiots.
And then, as if that wasn't enough, at the other end of the spectrum we have useless barsteds whose daddies pay for everything for them. And so these lot are set up for life and do no work because everything can be bought for them. This lot we could fix by making transfers over a reasonable amount between parents and children illegal, and by making inheritence a thing of the past. If I had my way, everybody would work, no one would get a free ride.
This would increase revenue, which would mean that those who fell on hard times due to shifts in the economy could be retrained by state programs, unemployment would no longer be as scary because so long as you worked hard the state would equip you for a new job. You could even make welfare income for the hard up something people can live off for the short time that they need it. That way the majority of hard working people can be looked after by the state in the manner they deserve.
So I have to say I agree. Legalise prostitution, gambling, drugs, etc. And those who don't use them responsibly, let them starve. Now starving will inevitably lead them to crime, if thier addiction doesn't. And that is where the failures of our prison system comes in. We should treat prison as a centre for making the useless useful by mentally breaking them to the point where they are too scared to do anything other than what they are told, and them put these people to work. Prisons should be ran in such a way that the inmate population never see eachother, to ensure they do not enhance eachothers criminal capabilities, and should be ran on a "no work, no food" basis.
As a society we in the west have become soft, we don't reward excelence and make excuses for mediocrity. So what do we get? We get mediocrity.
Erm, I don't think you follow what copyright is for. It isn't about reimbursing creators (although that could be considered a positive side effect). It is about encouraging creation of new works that enhance the cultural heritage of a nation via enhancement of the public domain.
Copyright is already a compromise. Copyright admits that more works will be produced (eventually enhancing the public domain) if artists can eat, have a room over thier heads, etc by artificially giving monetary value to the work by restricting other individuals access to the aforementioned work.
If you make it so copyright can be extended indefinitely you defeat the whole point of copyright by preventing work from entering the public domain.
The founding principles here are that people have a right to access thier cultural heritage, and that it is proper to do as much as reasonably possible to enhance that cultural heritage. Result, you balance one against the other through reasonable copyright terms. Artists get to eat, and in a limited period of time people get access to the resulting cultural developments.
So what is reasonable? How about between 10 and 20 years? Life plus 70 seems a very excessive to me. You are not incentivising a dead man to produce art. In fact by preventing work entering the public domain you are stopping derivative works (impeding further enhancement of a nations cultural heritage) and encouraging 'one hit wonders' who produce one good work and stop because they, and thier children are set up for life. As far as I'm concerned that wasn't part of the plan.
Short response, no real content, no effort to address the the valid points I made. Off the cuff remark which is on the surface blatently false. I call troll. If you want a response post a real arguement both addressing what I've said and backing up what you are saying.
Except that property rights exist apriori, and copyrights are an incentive society has decided to trade in return for improving the public domain. Having something you did not have before weakens your arguement because that is a good thing, it is the whole point of copyright law. It improves a countries cultural heritage. The reason copyright violation is wrong under cirtain circumstances is because it makes producing more works less appealing, not because the right itself is violated because the right does not exist apriori. People have the right to own property before we legislate that they do, morally. They do not have copyrights apriori. The two cases are morally and legally completely different.
I think you somewhat missed my point, which is probably my bad for not explaining it clearly enough. You talk about the moral rights of the creator to control how X or Y is done with thier creation. Unless it is covered by trademark law (which is another kettle of fish) a person has, in my opinion, no apriori rights to control how some set of information is used. Copyright is intended to stimulate creation of new information (broadly defined) through providing incentives to individuals and companies to create.
Creators of information have a say with regaurd to what is done with only in as far as it gives others and themselves incentive to create more. Morally it is wrong to violate an individuals copyright because you are in effect reducing the chances that that individuals will produce more works that enhance the public domain.
I reiterate that in my opinion it is not theft. It is totally morally different to theft because the individual creating had no apriori rights to the work that they created. Violation of copyright in the abstract is not wrong because it deprives someone of something, they have no right to that something. Violating copyright is wrong because it reduces the probability that the public domain will be enhanced by future work.
That makes the situation totally morally, and legally, different from theft.
Say I own a car and it is stolen. Then I no longer have that car. I have property rights which give me the capacity to own something, and they have been violated. These rights are if you will God given, they are considered apriori rights of an individual. They can only be violated by rights which are considered superior (if I repeatedly run people over then my car can be taken away because others right to be alive supercedes my right to own property).
With copyright, one does not apriori have the right to control the copying of material. It is a different kind of right, similar to the rights we grant corporations. It exists solely because it is believed it will do something good, and hence we are prepared to trade that right for that something good. But the right does not exist apriori. If you will no God given right is violated. This right can also be violated (morally and legally) under certain circumstances if other rights supercede it (fair use rights for instance). Now fair use right are an expression of a societies right to access it's cultural heritage, a right which does exist apriori, is God given.
Of course that doesn't make it morally right to violate copyright. The trade is, if the terms are fair, a good one. 20 years with provision for fair use was a reasonable deal, and violating someones copyright as you say reduces the value of that copyright which in turn reduces the incentive to produce new works. But it is not theft, morally or legally.
That is kind of the point. The movie is not a form of property in the conventional sense. It is a government granted monopoly that exists for the purpose of increasing the size, scope and quality of the public domain.
Since the movie is from this point of view ipso not owned by anyone (in the tradtional sense) from the moment of it's creation, it is not possible to steal it. What you can do is violate the rights of the copyright holder. The whole phrase intellectual property is a red herring. It is a violation of someones copyright, that is, someones government mandated right to control the reproduction of a work, under certain conditions.
I can infringe on that right, and under certain circumstances that is illegal, and I would argue immoral too. But it is not theft because that concept is not applicable in this case.
When we examine copyright we must remember it is a pact with the devil, in the sense that we are exchanging societies given right to have access to it's cultural heritige for the opertunity to enhance that heritige. It is not about the creation of jobs in the arts, or the protection of those jobs. It is not about the protection of an industry, unless one counts utilising that industry to enhance the public domain. It is accepted that pure scientific works (scientific or mathematical ideas) are not covered by any government mandated monopoly. Here we made a different pact with the devil. We agreed to fund scientists via grants in return for them producing useful research. It has so far prooved an effective system.
It has the advantage that it is far harder to form large monopolistic controlling entities who set out with the objective of twisting public opinion to talk of scientific research as property. If Einstien had proclaimed Special Relativity his property, and denounced anyone using without his permission a theif, he would have been laughed at. Here the situation is only different in that copyright can be an effective system only if the public is sufficiently informed enough to keep copyright terms a sensible length, deny that an artist has a 'right' to protect thier 'property' and control copyright law to ensure it serves the purpose of enhancing the public domain, and enhancing it in a reasonable time.
Our current copyright legislation fails at doing this. And our corporate bought and paid for media continues to brainwash the public into believing it is possible to steal without depriving of property.
Who said anything about thinking abortion should be illegal? Your people are trying to bypass the constitution by abusing power to load the supreme court with conservatives who have no interest in interpreting the constitution and every interest in mandating thier religion. You are perfectly entitled to your opinion, and I never said you were not. You are even entitled to have that opinion made law in the US if you like but it will require a constitutional amendment. It is not something as you put it that belongs in the hands of the states, at least according to the supreme court back when it had at least some respect for the foundations of the United States. If you want it to be in the hands of the states, then I advise you to change the constitution, not load the supreme court with fundies who are interested only in plunging us into a second dark age and no interest in upholding it's secular constitution.
Scientists may have bias, science does not, science has over the past 200 year judged creationism and found it wanting. The science that interprets fossil records? You mean like physics? Oh yeah lets open a real can of worms there. Physics is the single most reliable, accurate science we have. You want to pick a fight there you are welcome to. It is the place of scientists as responsible citizens to ensure that science is apropriately labelled. Perhaps if people of religious background took the same attitude there would be a few less crusades and a few less suicide bombers. You only have to look at the scientific communities reaction to the fakery of Dr Haung to realise that the scientific community is much more serious about obtaining the facts. "Then please explain to me how micro-biology is turning more scientists into creationists than evolutionists?". It is not, and whoever told you it was, was flat out lieing. As for specialist fields being contradictory, care to give an example? As for your "theory", it is supernaturalist in nature. Using God to explain nature is no explanation at all. While it may or may not be true, it is unscientific. If you want to believe that, by all means go ahead it is a perfectly valid philosophical position. But science is not as you seem to hint open to interpretation. I'm afraid you have been sucked in by the propaganda. Creationism is not going to replace evolution, not because some group of people don't like it, but because that is the way science works. Supernatural explanations get replaced by naturalistic ones. I'm afraid that you cannot reinterpret the multitude of Dinosaur fossils in favour of your proposed theory. Now I'm not going to write you off just because you are creationist. I will however write you off because none of what you have said is actually true. You have basically repeatedly used the age old creationist trick of throwing lots of mud and crossing your fingers that it sticks. Well I have a challenge for you. Show me a paper, in a respectable peer reviewed journal that demonstrates some of your claims. I mean if so many scientists are coming around to your way of thinking, that shouldn't be so hard?
So what you are saying is you are a one issue fundamentalist who wants his religion to have the right to bypass the constitution of the United States, and wishes he lived in a theocracy. Hey you may just be in luck, as I understand it that is the plan...
Who said anything about thinking people are directly religious because else they would commit suicide. I'm not religious and you don't see me jumping off a bridge. We live in priviledged times in which we have to deal with much less stress than we once did. Perhaps we have socially evolved to deal better with our difficulties.
Ask yourself this. If you assume religion is man made (which as an testable hypothesis is the only one I can think of), and you accept that it is endemic, then you must ask where it came from. It must give someone an edge in terms of survivability. But what edge. I presume that edge is that the suspension of rationality (or perhaps the bypassing it entirely, one should not assume man is inherently rational) enables humans to cope better, and hence more likely to mate.
This does not mean that religious people are, in the modern age, religious because otherwise they would commit suicide, but rather that I feel religion originated as a survival mechanism to cope with life.
1) Please, for everyone's sake, learn to spell. No, I'm a physicist, I don't need to, I don't care to, and you would do well to avoid the common creationist mistake of Ad Hominem attacks. 2) If there was a way to quantify irreducible complexity, I'd do it. If there was a way to quantify evolution, or intelligent design, or Charles Darwin, I'd do that too. What does quantification have to do with your point? Some hypotheses are inherently quantative, or require quantative predictions to test. In so far as intelligent design is really just the experiment that Charles Darwin came up with to falsify his hypothesis repackaged as an antiscientific God of the Gaps theory, if we are to, given the overwhelming evidence for evolution, find evidence against it, that evidence had better be pretty darn good. So good I would argue it would need to be quantifiable at about the 95% confidence interval. You admit yourself you have no way to quantify irriducibly complexity, ergo you have no theory. Debunking ID is very very easy. It is not a scientific theory. As I said above, all it is is an experiment that could disprove evolution, which has never been realised. I gave one quantifiable definition of Irriducible Complex, and then out of fairness asked you for your own (after all, my definition comes from my experience as a physicist, and perhaps you could have found one that had some means of being tested based on methods more grounded in biology). Holes in existing theories do not constitute reasons to doubt them. They are reasons to expect that there might be more to a theory, or that they might be approximations to another more general theory. Heck we have already had one revolution that fundamentally redefined evolution in the form of genetics. There might well be more revolutions to be had. But what ever revolutions we might have, evolution will always be a good approximation to what is going on in nature.
Yes, yes, I'm sure you are all very peaceful and lovely and want to hold hands with science and dance around the may pole. Thats why all three branches of the American government are controlled by a party pandering to religious extremism. Here is an idea, turn things around so that your leader is in the same position as the UK Prime Minister, refusing to answer questions about when and where he prays because they are irrelevant to a person holding the premiership of a secular state, then I will believe you. Make religion a taboo in government, something you don't talk. Then maybe, just maybe I might start seeing you and your ilk as being reasonable and not antiscientific. Come on, the United States is being out done by a country that is technically a Christian Constitutional Monarch on the secular front. A majority of Americans are creationists. You live in your fantasy world where your religion isn't a force for bad in the world if that makes you feel better, but remember that by doing so you are not simply harming yourself but others as well.
Erm, you do know that a sizable portion of funding for Sinn Fein/IRA came from Irish Americans right? Bottom line is religions are only peaceful when they are the ones with the tanks, nukes and chemical warheads. Otherwise they launch things like the Crusades, plunge humanity into the Dark Ages or crashing planes into buildings, all with the tacit support of thier population. Bottom line, either you are free thinking and independent of organised religion, or on the whole you are three missed meals away from murdering your infidel neighbours and stealing his grain, with some exceptions.
While I don't agree that religion has to 'die', one can hardly argue that it has been a positive thing for much other than keeping people from killing themselves as a result of the hopelessness (in my opinion this is the best explanation for the origin of religion). I mean come on, recently we have had people killed over a cartoon of a long dead man with no relevance to modern society. How many wars have we had over which side has the best imaginary friend? Modern man doesn't need dogmatic religion, and we would be better without it (for these purposes I include dogmatic atheism as well). That is not to say that open minded spirituality is a bad thing, we just don't need the controlling structures anymore, we don't need the organisation. Much of our population have evolved beyound them, and they should be left to die out.