I don't know why ye, the slashdotters, have such a difficult time understanding.
You make the assumption that the people who disagree with you don't understand. That's a big assumption. The possibility that it is you who don't understand is logically possible.
Most of ye are ALSO writing ephemeral products known as "programs". Ye think it's okay to copy songs, but what if someone copied your programs and spread them via piratebay? How would you survive without that income?
Whether something is personally beneficial to me does not determine if it is theft or not, nor if it is right or wrong. Perhaps owning slaves would be beneficial to me, that doesn't mean I support the practice.
I'm in favor of copyright, but I'm convinced that it is rightly viewed as a social contract rather than an inherent right of people to restrict the actions of those with whom they have shared ideas. Copying, as I tried to explain to you, is a fundamental human right, being the basis of our physical existence, learning and progress. A contract has to benefit both parties to be valid. A contract that includes giving up such an important right must confer substantial benefit on the party giving up such right. The entry of the work into the public domain is the intended equivalent benefit. Since a work produced now will for practical purposes never enter the public domain (Most current works will be useless for anything but historical study by the time the copyright expires) and so there cannot be said to be a valid contract by which society agrees to be bound by copyright law. Deliver to us our benefit and validate the contract.
My ability or otherwise to abuse unjust laws for my own profit is not a reasoned argument in favor of unjust laws.
Just because you can now illegally download jerky for free doesn't quite make it 'right'.
I disagree. If you were capable of distributing food to everyone at zero or near zero cost and effort, it would be pretty hard to make a case that you were doing the wrong thing. You would have the good that many people desire of a social safety net without the problem of taxing productive people to pay for unproductive. The collapse of the beef jerky market is irrelevant. Find something else to do, we're not going to give up abundant free food to protect your business.
Well, should they win, the "jury" box failed. Time for the next one.
If the juries decisions weren't being acted on it would be time for the ammo box. Juries giving bad decisions is a problem that needs a whole different solution. Armed revolution doesn't seem likely to work if you don't have the support of most of the population. If you consistently can't get the decisions you want from jurors then it would seem unlikely that you have enough support in the population to win your cause through revolution.
Although I haven't read 1984 yet, isn't Newspeak about eliminating terms with no distinction between them?
Newspeak was primarily for the control of thought and discussion. IIRC they would be unable to articulate the declaration of independence or some other revolutionary document because the concepts necessary would have been eliminated from the language. Reduction of vocabulary through the elimination of words reduces your ability to think.
I could have been clearer in the way I wrote my post. No need to apologize. Besides, after insisting that I misunderstood you in that other thread I found your reply to me here quite amusing. All entertainment value and no offence.
If the product of that labor is an idea then it raises different issues than physical items as property. Once you share that idea with me (gratis or for money) it becomes a part of my thought process. Copying is inherent to our existence and viability as a life form. We grow copying DNA. We learn to walk/talk by copying. Skills we acquire are most usually acquired by taking and using ideas from someone else, building on them ourselves on the way. Our entire education system is built on the concept.
So attributing property rights to ideas interferes with people's natural inclinations. It restricts the right to use the contents of your mind for your own purpose. Now I'm fully aware of the advantages of a social contract where we give up that right in return for something we see as more valuable. An increase in public domain works is so far as I can see the only thing worth temporarily giving up the right to copy for.
When a copyright work is produced now, it will not likely to enter the public domain during the lifetime of my children, let alone my lifetime. I don't see the argument that copyright as it currently stands is a valid social contract. It is the abuse of copyright law to act as a way for the rich to set up another perpetual flow of income from the rest of the people to themselves that is the human rights violation.
That said, I also pay for things I could just download or copy because I also believe in the rule of law and I don't think that the best way to fight this abuse is as a defendant in court.
I worked for a small ISP once. The training we got from our wholesale provider was that:
(1) Unlimited is not unlimited. With the top bandwidth users find a way to slow them down or get rid of them. It was fraud in my opinion, but the way they went about it they were unlikely to get charged.
(2) The customer service you provide is the setup disk. If the setup disk didn't work for them let them go to another provider.
They didn't like having technically competent people as CSRs. They spend too much time helping people, it costs money. They didn't like us because we were a repair shop as well.
... did you even notice my name? Who are you calling a wuss?
I know who you are, you're Jane Q. Public. You tried to sell me a bridge with vampires under it.
Jesus Christ!
For the record, I was not calling Jesus a wuss.
Won't you at least take the trouble to figure out who you are conversing with, and what about, before you go calling names?
Toughen up, wuss was not a comment from me to you, it was my paraphrase of the first line of influenza's post. Influenza was replying to Duradin. Nobody has called you any names.
Except "Vampire infested bridge seller". I'm calling you that, you vampire infested bridge seller.
the reason that adult males have REAL reasons to fear the consequences of attempting to help a strange child.
I'll paraphrase influenza's first line:
It's really too bad that you're that afraid. That society has somehow put so much fear in you that you're afraid of helping a child.
Toughen up, wuss.
He then offers some practical advice on how to reduce his risk and therefore fear.
I agree with you there is a heap of anti-male stuff in society today and women have had a hand in that. However women are entirely powerless to solve this problem. If a man thinks he needs permission from women or children or society to be masculine then he's approaching the whole issue of manhood the wrong way and can't really live it out, no matter how nice the women agree to make the world for him.
WAAAHHH! Women won't make the world safe for me, WAAAHHH! What sort of childish attitude is that for a man to take.
I guess either you don't have any children, or they are very young, otherwise you'd have a clue of the normal state of development at the age of 2.
Passionately curious and imitating Mum and Dad at every opportunity is the normal state of development at the age of 2, from my observation. I'm not the poster you replied to but my kids are 5, 4 and 2. The 2 year old "writes" (scribbles) on paper and tells us what she has "written". They all like to type things on the computer. They love books, story time is one of their favourite things. We have never had to force them, we read regularly ourselves and we read to them pretty much every day.
Children are generally very keen to learn. Particularly grown up stuff, like reading and writing for example.
This is also one of its biggest disadvantages. The fact that there are tons of distros means that if someone wants to write a device driver, office suite, browser plugin, game, etc that targets Linux, they have to deal with a myriad possible configurations of library versions, desktop environments, themes, sound systems, etc.
Nonsense, they don't have to deal with that, they can write the code and let the distros package it.
Most commercial developers decide it's not worth it.
Oh I see, you mean proprietary software developers decide it isn't worth it. You wouldn't really have meant commercial developers because that would include Red Hat, Sun, etc who write linux software.
Seriously, the whole linux thing is not centred around making things convenient for proprietary software developers. This seems to surprise a lot of people but I don't know why.
The only ones who made any real money were the ones who bought in early; the vast majority of Amway reps break even at best.
The vast majority of any commission only sales reps break even at best. What is it, about 9/10 businesses fail in the first 5 years? Here's the reality, most people are conditioned to employment and have lousy sales ability. A business that relies completely on individual sales success where you go out and "learn the trade" without anyone organising the work for you and paying you a wage just isn't going to work for most people. That's not necessarily a fault in the business model.
But now scientists are finding that being in an urban environment impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory and suffers from reduced self-control.
Revenge at last. Suck it up, slickers!
City slickers brains don't work properly, who'da thunk it? Guess that's why they can't trust themselves with guns.
so how is that working out in the USA? you guys sure showed your government how you felt when they tried to open guantanomo bay, introduced the patriot act and started an illegal war in the middle east didn't you?
Yeah, that showed em! And to think, they might have got away with all that crap if you guys didn't have your guns...
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should
not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all
experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while
evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to
which they are accustomed. The Declaration of Independence of The
United States of America by Thomas Jefferson.
I'm not an American, but from here it looks like it's working out quite according to plan. I don't think the idea is to start civil wars over relatively minor problems. I say "relatively minor" in comparison to the abuses by the British that caused the US rebellion.
I've heard the US had about the same ratio of murders to the UK even when guns were freely accessible in the UK. I don't have a reference handy though.
I'm not saying it's a worthy justification, but it simply isn't true to say that they'd find another deadly weapon. Yes, they may then just strike with their hands in an attempt to kill, but it is less likely to succeed than a gun or knife.
All that does is disadvantage the physically weaker rather than let everyone be equal through the use of a tool. Many people carry lethal capability through their size and strength, in particular men have it over women, but also others, the elderly or disabled. Personal firearms are to self-defence what the printing press and then the internet are to education and discussion. Such tools of freedom should never be given up by democratic people.
using copyright for a purpose diametrically opposed to most people's idea of the purpose of copyright
That's because most people don't understand the purpose of copyright (according the the US Constitution statement of the purpose anyway). "To promote the progress of science and useful arts" seems to me to be exactly what the GPL does. If the code went straight to the public domain so that distributed changes didn't have to be released with source it would significantly hamper that progress.
It's the subversion of the purpose of copyright that the GPL is diametrically opposed to, the locking up of knowledge as private property forever rather than increase of publicly available knowledge and invention. Unfortunately most people now do see the purpose of copyright as the locking up of knowledge. Personally I think a sensible measure to take would be to deny copyright protection to software unless the source is released, after all it is the source that is written by the creator. That does not preclude proprietary licensing terms.
It [the GPL] does *not* give the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements. It only grants that freedom when you promise to carry on releasing said improvements in an open way.
True enough, it doesn't give that freedom, it exchanges that freedom with you. That's only with modifications and linked code though, you are still completely free to licence any code you write in its entirety under any licence you want. If you don't want to give free access to your non-GPL code it seems a strange thing to say that it's the GPL that is less free as a result.
The GPL has always been intended to make the software free for the end user. If you wish to release your code under an non-GPL license (1) then in the case of that code being modified GPL code you are no longer the end user, you are a distributor, those you distribute to are the end users whose free access to the software is protected (2) you are still free to do so provided you don't use other peoples GPL code. All people who GPL code are saying is that they won't provide you help for gratis to do something they don't want to do. You can work with them on software under a licensing model that ensures the continued free access of the developed work, or you can work on something else without them.
Seriously, if you provide a consumer service of any kind, and you expect the consumers to do anything more than just use the service, you are seriously deluded.
To be fair, if you use a consumer service and expect the providers to do anything you haven't paid for and they haven't promised, you are seriously deluded. My short time in consumer computer sales demonstrated amply to me that people have unrealistic expectations, usually that the price of a computer included a training package on how to use it as well. This did not cause us to provide free training.
Letting go and doing whatever you crave for can be a recipe for disaster in any area of your life, sex being no exception. Self discipline is a necessity. Alcoholics Anonymous and similar organisations put in a lot of effort to help people recover from letting go and doing whatever they crave for. Bankruptcy court deals with such people all the time, as do divorce courts, hospitals etc, etc. It is indeed a moral issue.
there are tons of other things that are "sinful" for no real reason, other that to make you a sinner.
All you've established is that you don't understand the reason for some teaching, but I'm not here to try and justify all or any of church teaching, I'm just challenging your specific claims (1) that there is no relation between sex and morality and (2) that churches teach the immorality of sex "to make their believers sinners forever".
I elaborate a bit in this other reply http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1079041&cid=26315031
You mean that they don't say that all sex is sinful - that would be silly, as the human race would die out.
I was addressing 2 specific claims made by Hurricane78 (1) that there is no relation between sex and morality and (2) that churches teach the immorality of sex "to make their believers sinners forever".
When you consider that at the time that teaching was originally made there was no real contraceptive or abortion or porn. They had an agrarian society in which an unmarried mother would have been at significant risk of poverty and being unable to care for the children. Restricting sex to marriage made sense. Now people make the case that those teachings are no longer relevant, no problem, freedom of religion and all that, but to claim that the church developed that teaching as a deliberate lie in order to make people sinners? I stand by my comment to Hurricane78, it would be appropriate for someone condemning the lies of others to be a bit more diligent with the truth themselves.
I think the GP's point was that politicians tend to act based not on whether "enough" people want it, but on what a particular small group of people wants. The silent majority may be more permissive about the sex-and-drugs-on-the-Internet issue than you think.
People who don't speak up have no valid complaint about their views not being considered.
Especially since there is no relation between sex and morality.
All actions can have moral implications including sex. Sex can be done immorally, people just differ on where the moral line is drawn. Molestation, rape, consensual sex where one party knowingly infects the other with STD's.
It's just so common to use that lie that the churches use to make their believers sinners forever, that everybody thinks there is.
I've never heard of any church preaches sex is inherently sinful, just that it should be within marriage and excluding gays. While you obviously disagree with that position it would be appropriate for someone condemning the lies of others to be a bit more diligent with the truth themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know why ye, the slashdotters, have such a difficult time understanding.
You make the assumption that the people who disagree with you don't understand. That's a big assumption. The possibility that it is you who don't understand is logically possible.
Most of ye are ALSO writing ephemeral products known as "programs". Ye think it's okay to copy songs, but what if someone copied your programs and spread them via piratebay? How would you survive without that income?
Whether something is personally beneficial to me does not determine if it is theft or not, nor if it is right or wrong. Perhaps owning slaves would be beneficial to me, that doesn't mean I support the practice.
I'm in favor of copyright, but I'm convinced that it is rightly viewed as a social contract rather than an inherent right of people to restrict the actions of those with whom they have shared ideas. Copying, as I tried to explain to you, is a fundamental human right, being the basis of our physical existence, learning and progress. A contract has to benefit both parties to be valid. A contract that includes giving up such an important right must confer substantial benefit on the party giving up such right. The entry of the work into the public domain is the intended equivalent benefit. Since a work produced now will for practical purposes never enter the public domain (Most current works will be useless for anything but historical study by the time the copyright expires) and so there cannot be said to be a valid contract by which society agrees to be bound by copyright law. Deliver to us our benefit and validate the contract.
My ability or otherwise to abuse unjust laws for my own profit is not a reasoned argument in favor of unjust laws.
Just because you can now illegally download jerky for free doesn't quite make it 'right'.
I disagree. If you were capable of distributing food to everyone at zero or near zero cost and effort, it would be pretty hard to make a case that you were doing the wrong thing. You would have the good that many people desire of a social safety net without the problem of taxing productive people to pay for unproductive. The collapse of the beef jerky market is irrelevant. Find something else to do, we're not going to give up abundant free food to protect your business.
Well, should they win, the "jury" box failed. Time for the next one.
If the juries decisions weren't being acted on it would be time for the ammo box. Juries giving bad decisions is a problem that needs a whole different solution. Armed revolution doesn't seem likely to work if you don't have the support of most of the population. If you consistently can't get the decisions you want from jurors then it would seem unlikely that you have enough support in the population to win your cause through revolution.
Although I haven't read 1984 yet, isn't Newspeak about eliminating terms with no distinction between them?
Newspeak was primarily for the control of thought and discussion. IIRC they would be unable to articulate the declaration of independence or some other revolutionary document because the concepts necessary would have been eliminated from the language. Reduction of vocabulary through the elimination of words reduces your ability to think.
Found a link http://books.google.com.au/books?id=yxv1LK5gyV4C&pg=PA311&lpg=PA311&dq=orwell+1984+declaration+of+independence&source=bl&ots=ol73x86YS7&sig=4e504XEf5pSj4PyPRICYpWH3SgE&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result
I could have been clearer in the way I wrote my post. No need to apologize. Besides, after insisting that I misunderstood you in that other thread I found your reply to me here quite amusing. All entertainment value and no offence.
:-)
You can steal somebody's else's labor.
If the product of that labor is an idea then it raises different issues than physical items as property. Once you share that idea with me (gratis or for money) it becomes a part of my thought process. Copying is inherent to our existence and viability as a life form. We grow copying DNA. We learn to walk/talk by copying. Skills we acquire are most usually acquired by taking and using ideas from someone else, building on them ourselves on the way. Our entire education system is built on the concept.
So attributing property rights to ideas interferes with people's natural inclinations. It restricts the right to use the contents of your mind for your own purpose. Now I'm fully aware of the advantages of a social contract where we give up that right in return for something we see as more valuable. An increase in public domain works is so far as I can see the only thing worth temporarily giving up the right to copy for.
When a copyright work is produced now, it will not likely to enter the public domain during the lifetime of my children, let alone my lifetime. I don't see the argument that copyright as it currently stands is a valid social contract. It is the abuse of copyright law to act as a way for the rich to set up another perpetual flow of income from the rest of the people to themselves that is the human rights violation.
That said, I also pay for things I could just download or copy because I also believe in the rule of law and I don't think that the best way to fight this abuse is as a defendant in court.
Computer illiterate CSRs make me stabby.
I worked for a small ISP once. The training we got from our wholesale provider was that:
(1) Unlimited is not unlimited. With the top bandwidth users find a way to slow them down or get rid of them. It was fraud in my opinion, but the way they went about it they were unlikely to get charged.
(2) The customer service you provide is the setup disk. If the setup disk didn't work for them let them go to another provider.
They didn't like having technically competent people as CSRs. They spend too much time helping people, it costs money. They didn't like us because we were a repair shop as well.
... did you even notice my name? Who are you calling a wuss?
I know who you are, you're Jane Q. Public. You tried to sell me a bridge with vampires under it.
Jesus Christ!
For the record, I was not calling Jesus a wuss.
Won't you at least take the trouble to figure out who you are conversing with, and what about, before you go calling names?
Toughen up, wuss was not a comment from me to you, it was my paraphrase of the first line of influenza's post. Influenza was replying to Duradin. Nobody has called you any names.
Except "Vampire infested bridge seller". I'm calling you that, you vampire infested bridge seller.
the reason that adult males have REAL reasons to fear the consequences of attempting to help a strange child.
I'll paraphrase influenza's first line:
It's really too bad that you're that afraid. That society has somehow put so much fear in you that you're afraid of helping a child.
Toughen up, wuss.
He then offers some practical advice on how to reduce his risk and therefore fear.
I agree with you there is a heap of anti-male stuff in society today and women have had a hand in that. However women are entirely powerless to solve this problem. If a man thinks he needs permission from women or children or society to be masculine then he's approaching the whole issue of manhood the wrong way and can't really live it out, no matter how nice the women agree to make the world for him.
WAAAHHH! Women won't make the world safe for me, WAAAHHH! What sort of childish attitude is that for a man to take.
I guess either you don't have any children, or they are very young, otherwise you'd have a clue of the normal state of development at the age of 2.
Passionately curious and imitating Mum and Dad at every opportunity is the normal state of development at the age of 2, from my observation. I'm not the poster you replied to but my kids are 5, 4 and 2. The 2 year old "writes" (scribbles) on paper and tells us what she has "written". They all like to type things on the computer. They love books, story time is one of their favourite things. We have never had to force them, we read regularly ourselves and we read to them pretty much every day.
Children are generally very keen to learn. Particularly grown up stuff, like reading and writing for example.
This is also one of its biggest disadvantages. The fact that there are tons of distros means that if someone wants to write a device driver, office suite, browser plugin, game, etc that targets Linux, they have to deal with a myriad possible configurations of library versions, desktop environments, themes, sound systems, etc.
Nonsense, they don't have to deal with that, they can write the code and let the distros package it.
Most commercial developers decide it's not worth it.
Oh I see, you mean proprietary software developers decide it isn't worth it. You wouldn't really have meant commercial developers because that would include Red Hat, Sun, etc who write linux software.
Seriously, the whole linux thing is not centred around making things convenient for proprietary software developers. This seems to surprise a lot of people but I don't know why.
The only ones who made any real money were the ones who bought in early; the vast majority of Amway reps break even at best.
The vast majority of any commission only sales reps break even at best. What is it, about 9/10 businesses fail in the first 5 years? Here's the reality, most people are conditioned to employment and have lousy sales ability. A business that relies completely on individual sales success where you go out and "learn the trade" without anyone organising the work for you and paying you a wage just isn't going to work for most people. That's not necessarily a fault in the business model.
But now scientists are finding that being in an urban environment impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory and suffers from reduced self-control.
Revenge at last. Suck it up, slickers!
City slickers brains don't work properly, who'da thunk it? Guess that's why they can't trust themselves with guns.
so how is that working out in the USA? you guys sure showed your government how you felt when they tried to open guantanomo bay, introduced the patriot act and started an illegal war in the middle east didn't you? Yeah, that showed em! And to think, they might have got away with all that crap if you guys didn't have your guns...
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. The Declaration of Independence of The United States of America by Thomas Jefferson.
I'm not an American, but from here it looks like it's working out quite according to plan. I don't think the idea is to start civil wars over relatively minor problems. I say "relatively minor" in comparison to the abuses by the British that caused the US rebellion.
I've heard the US had about the same ratio of murders to the UK even when guns were freely accessible in the UK. I don't have a reference handy though.
I'm not saying it's a worthy justification, but it simply isn't true to say that they'd find another deadly weapon. Yes, they may then just strike with their hands in an attempt to kill, but it is less likely to succeed than a gun or knife.
Australian crime : facts and figures 2007 page 21: "18% of homicides were committed using physical force (hands/feet)"
All that does is disadvantage the physically weaker rather than let everyone be equal through the use of a tool. Many people carry lethal capability through their size and strength, in particular men have it over women, but also others, the elderly or disabled. Personal firearms are to self-defence what the printing press and then the internet are to education and discussion. Such tools of freedom should never be given up by democratic people.
TFA doesn't address the cost of that, and tripling your testing along must be huge.
Your /. post testing process failed. Are you underfunding your testing department?
using copyright for a purpose diametrically opposed to most people's idea of the purpose of copyright
That's because most people don't understand the purpose of copyright (according the the US Constitution statement of the purpose anyway). "To promote the progress of science and useful arts" seems to me to be exactly what the GPL does. If the code went straight to the public domain so that distributed changes didn't have to be released with source it would significantly hamper that progress.
It's the subversion of the purpose of copyright that the GPL is diametrically opposed to, the locking up of knowledge as private property forever rather than increase of publicly available knowledge and invention. Unfortunately most people now do see the purpose of copyright as the locking up of knowledge. Personally I think a sensible measure to take would be to deny copyright protection to software unless the source is released, after all it is the source that is written by the creator. That does not preclude proprietary licensing terms.
It [the GPL] does *not* give the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements. It only grants that freedom when you promise to carry on releasing said improvements in an open way.
True enough, it doesn't give that freedom, it exchanges that freedom with you. That's only with modifications and linked code though, you are still completely free to licence any code you write in its entirety under any licence you want. If you don't want to give free access to your non-GPL code it seems a strange thing to say that it's the GPL that is less free as a result.
The GPL has always been intended to make the software free for the end user. If you wish to release your code under an non-GPL license (1) then in the case of that code being modified GPL code you are no longer the end user, you are a distributor, those you distribute to are the end users whose free access to the software is protected (2) you are still free to do so provided you don't use other peoples GPL code. All people who GPL code are saying is that they won't provide you help for gratis to do something they don't want to do. You can work with them on software under a licensing model that ensures the continued free access of the developed work, or you can work on something else without them.
Seriously, if you provide a consumer service of any kind, and you expect the consumers to do anything more than just use the service, you are seriously deluded.
To be fair, if you use a consumer service and expect the providers to do anything you haven't paid for and they haven't promised, you are seriously deluded. My short time in consumer computer sales demonstrated amply to me that people have unrealistic expectations, usually that the price of a computer included a training package on how to use it as well. This did not cause us to provide free training.
Sex is letting go. Doing whatever you crave for.
Letting go and doing whatever you crave for can be a recipe for disaster in any area of your life, sex being no exception. Self discipline is a necessity. Alcoholics Anonymous and similar organisations put in a lot of effort to help people recover from letting go and doing whatever they crave for. Bankruptcy court deals with such people all the time, as do divorce courts, hospitals etc, etc. It is indeed a moral issue.
there are tons of other things that are "sinful" for no real reason, other that to make you a sinner.
All you've established is that you don't understand the reason for some teaching, but I'm not here to try and justify all or any of church teaching, I'm just challenging your specific claims (1) that there is no relation between sex and morality and (2) that churches teach the immorality of sex "to make their believers sinners forever".
I elaborate a bit in this other reply http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1079041&cid=26315031
You mean that they don't say that all sex is sinful - that would be silly, as the human race would die out.
I was addressing 2 specific claims made by Hurricane78 (1) that there is no relation between sex and morality and (2) that churches teach the immorality of sex "to make their believers sinners forever".
When you consider that at the time that teaching was originally made there was no real contraceptive or abortion or porn. They had an agrarian society in which an unmarried mother would have been at significant risk of poverty and being unable to care for the children. Restricting sex to marriage made sense. Now people make the case that those teachings are no longer relevant, no problem, freedom of religion and all that, but to claim that the church developed that teaching as a deliberate lie in order to make people sinners? I stand by my comment to Hurricane78, it would be appropriate for someone condemning the lies of others to be a bit more diligent with the truth themselves.
I think the GP's point was that politicians tend to act based not on whether "enough" people want it, but on what a particular small group of people wants. The silent majority may be more permissive about the sex-and-drugs-on-the-Internet issue than you think.
People who don't speak up have no valid complaint about their views not being considered.
Especially since there is no relation between sex and morality.
All actions can have moral implications including sex. Sex can be done immorally, people just differ on where the moral line is drawn. Molestation, rape, consensual sex where one party knowingly infects the other with STD's.
It's just so common to use that lie that the churches use to make their believers sinners forever, that everybody thinks there is.
I've never heard of any church preaches sex is inherently sinful, just that it should be within marriage and excluding gays. While you obviously disagree with that position it would be appropriate for someone condemning the lies of others to be a bit more diligent with the truth themselves.
The *luck* of the United States recently? WTFF?
You elect an imbecile to the most powerful office in the world. Twice.
What are you talking about? Ben Bernanke has only held his position since 2006 and he was appointed, not elected.