The problem is that Australia doesn't recycle water. The reason they don't is because they have a peculiar habit of asking the population to vote on things and people are very hard to convince of this sort of thing.
Here in the UK we've survived for generations on recycled water but Queenslanders would rather go parched than drink 'shit'.
No, the problem is stupid and/or malevolent government. Here in my area in SE QLD there has been mild water shortage for over 20 years. It has also been one of the countries fastest growing population centres over that time. We also had water tank bans for aesthetic reasons.
This is a climate that has periodic droughts. It was obvious this was going to be a problem. If tanks and been allowed (and required for new building permits) and the expectation was that the council water supply was for a backup, we would quite simply not have any water supply problems now. We would have no need for recycled water if we took the view that in the ordinary course of life it is up to the individual to provide their own water, rather than depending on government supply.
Anybody with a rural background, such as myself, could have told them that 20 years ago if they were willing to listen.
I have to disagree with this. Copyright is there to protect the creator from the theft of what he creates.
Maybe where you live, but not according to the US Constitution. I'm not a US citizen, but this case is in the US so the US constitutions article that authorises copyright law is the supreme relevant law.
Section 8
The Congress shall have Power...
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited
Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings
and Discoveries;
So langelgjm is correct, "Copyright doesn't exist to make people lots of money. It exists to provide incentive for people to create things they otherwise wouldn't have created."
It wouldn't be fast at all. Linux is mostly useless for the average person. There is no short-term advantage in switching to it for anything the size of a government.
Linux in not at all useless for the average person. My (technophobe) mother, when shown my linux desktop (my demonstration/explanation consisted of "click here for writing documents, here to browse the internet, here to use email, etc) exclaimed "It's the same as windows". Most people get their windows box set up by someone else, if you apply the same circumstances then only to the extent that they need a particular proprietary application is linus "useless". Many people don't need such software.
As for no short-term advantage for governments to switch: security, ability to customise, ability to benefit local company rather than foreign company with expenditure (both economic and political benefit). I'm sure someone could add to these, but "no short-term advantage" has already been sufficiently addressed.
Anything that involves public money and is not a matter of national (or continental, in this case) security should be open to scrutiny.
Really? So the public should be able to view your tax returns?
That's not public money until after they have it. The total amount of various taxes collected should indeed be public information.
No, it's still in the government's interest not to scare Microsoft away from ever bidding on government business because the government can't keep to an NDA.
The government has no business agreeing the NDA's over public expenditure on software.
The "garage inventor" would be quickly displaced by a company that could exploit the invention. All they have to do is wait. Licensing a patent would be a thing of the past.
No, the company would want exclusive rights, so would license the patent rather than let it go into the public domain for their competitors.
unfortunately, the value of property is often is proportional to it's scarcity.
Always proportional to it's scarcity.
so if you make an exact copy of someone else's corn farm, you are directly changing value of their farm ( you are increasing supply of corn)
We call that "competition". It isn't unfortunate, it is the method by which people have incentive to produce higher {quality,quantity} products at lower price. The whole benefit of a competitive market system derives from the fact that any individuals produce can be devalued by others increasing the supply of that product or an alternative.
Patents and copyrights are to prevent that competition temporarily, increasing the incentive to produce innovation by the granting of a monopoly (competition-free market) to offset the competitive devaluations effect of disincentive to invest time and money in a product that could be uneconomical to produce in a free market if you are stuck with large sunk costs. It doesn't always work as intended and the idea that preventing others from copying is a natural or just right is one of the things that makes it difficult to get sensible laws written.
You don't have any automatic right to be free from competition. There are social contracts (patent, copyright) that grant that temporarily but many people seem to have forgotten that contracts have to benefit both parties, and the benefit to the public of the IP social contracts is the public domain, not the opportunity to pay monopoly prices in perpetuity.
From TFA: "From our standpoint, those governments, and indeed every customer, should always decide which software solutions meet their needs most appropriately..." - attributed to Thomas Hansen, regional manager for Microsoft West, East and Central Africa.
Isn't it obvious that customers should decide what to get? Why do MS need to convince us they believe that? Who else would be deciding what customers bought Mr Hansen?
How about their ability to talk and relate to their peers?
I said we've met teens who have the ability to talk and reason well and your immediate response is the suspicion that they will not be able to relate to other teens. You could benefit from pondering on this.
Why not kill the poor sods outright before they run amok. The best they can hope for is an accident instead of suicide.
You advocate killing teenagers who have the ability to talk and reason well. I can't think of any reason to pay attention to your advice on social skills. If you're trying to demonstrate the superior reasoning ability or social aptitude of people who have been processed through the school system, you've failed.
Do you believe that you have some inherent right to do such a thing?
Yes. Copying is inherent to our nature, from our life springing from the copying of DNA, to learning to walk by copying, learning to talk by copying, learning everything by copying really.
Copying is a natural right. Copyright is a social contract. The contract is:
(1) Publics obligation: Temporarily give up the right to copy in order to produce an incentive to create.
(2) Creators obligation: Deliver those created works to the public domain (available to be copied).
The same for patents. See the US Constitution.
Creators of copyright works have broken the contract, therefore the contract is void. That's not intended as a legal argument (I'd hate to try it in court) but it is the current reality.
My mother (special education teacher, now retired) had to "repair" a lot of kids who were home schooled. The parents invariably thought that they were teaching the kids enough "interpersonal skills", but it usually turned out that the parents themselves were socially defective & were incapable of judging whether their own kids had the proper skills to fit into society when "the time came".
I don't know you & your wife well enough to tell whether your family is an exception to that pattern,
That "pattern" you talk about is the exception. One of the things that made us interested in home schooling was meeting teenagers who had been homeschooled. We were impressed by their ability to talk and relate to us as adults and to have reasonable, well thought out conversations. I also know schooled teenagers like this, but with the homeschoolers it seems to be the norm rather than the exception.
From the "Home Schooling Review" done by my State government in 2003 http://education.qld.gov.au/publication/production/reports/homeschooling.pdf
In summary, researchers have found home schooled children are as well socialised as
students educated in traditional State and non-State schools. Boyer (1993)4 researched
the social stratification of children in schools by the lock-step age and grade approach to
schooling. He concluded that by the time children are teenagers, they have little idea how
to socialise with anyone outside of their peer group because of this approach to
education. Tillman (1995)5 has documented that home schooled children participated in a
wide range of extra curricular and community activities both with age peers and with
those of more than two years age difference outside the immediate family.
Quite apart from that, most school education here (Australia) is woefully inadequate. Outside of mathematics, no training in logic at all in most schools. Most people in their mid-thirties or younger I've mentioned that to are astonished to find out that logic is a subject. The majority just think "logical" means "agrees with me" and "illogical" means "disagrees with me". Many people in our society are completely incapable of putting together a reasoned argument, or logically analysing someone else's statements. This is one reason why people are so easily manipulated by advertising and propaganda. School, for some reason, is not addressing this.
We've got high suicide rates, high divorce rates, high failure rates for people starting their own businesses. A significant portion of people in this society (and it's similar in the US) seem to be incapable of self-determination and maintaining long term relationships. Why would I want them to fit in well with that?
Just because they will have to fend for themselves without help one day is no reason to abandon them to bullying now. Since they learn both martial arts and interpersonal skills from an early age I think they'll be OK.
One day my kids will have to be able to look out for themselves. I have this idea, I know it's radical, of preparing them first. Sort of like the same reason we don't leave toddlers exposed in the wild, but after some experience camping with parents or scouts etc we would let them go by themselves.
These two posts in this thread will give you a better idea on what I think the law regarding marriage should be and why.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1021887&cid=25682023http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1021887&cid=25687545
If you read those, you'll realize that I oppose some things that gay rights lobbyists want, but not out of homophobia or even a similar reason. Yet it is very likely to result in my being branded "homophobic" to even begin talking about it.
Whether visitation laws themselves are the problem or not, and whatever the purpose of marriage may be, this is an obvious area of the current legal disparity between heterosexual and homosexual partnerships.
They are, and the "gay rights" approach still leaves single people without those equal rights. Very few and far between are the gay rights issues that wouldn't be better approached as individual liberty issues. Addressing hospital visitation issues with gay marriage just perpetuates the injustice, but in a way gays don't have to care about, if they manage to get themselves into the "in" group.
My objection was not to gay marriage (I simply opined that it is not an equal rights issue) it was to the indiscriminate use of the word "homophobia". Someone could, for example, be a lying bigot without being afraid of homosexuality. Bigotry is not fear, hatred is not fear etc etc. I deliberately avoided stating my position on gay marriage and even pointed out that I had not done so, yet out of 9 replies so far not one has addressed why it should be acceptable to label people as having a particular phobia simply on the basis of opposition to any particular gay rights cause.
When on top of the endless bullying your cries for help go unanswered, you learn that you can't rely on anyone when you're in need, that no one cares about your well-being, and that people in practice have the right to mistreat you however they want.
I do not want to be expected to tell my children that "this is a part of life".
It is partly for this reason that my wife and I are homeschooling our children. My parents ignored my begging to leave the school I was at, I left both school and home.
I think it occurs to anybody who takes part in serious, open-minded discussions; but doing things "out of principle" doesn't make it right or rational.
I didn't say it does, I was arguing against indiscriminate use of the label "homophobic", not against gay marriage. {Irrational,wrong}!=homophobic
"Marriage" is also a legal institution that confers legal rights and responsibilities, it affects things from your taxes to hospital visitation rights. Yes, this is an equal rights issue. Don't be dense.
This is where I disagree with the gay rights lobby. This in an individual rights issue, not a gay rights issue and pursuing solutions to these issues as gay rights will result in the perpetuation of civil rights violations, just to a smaller group. What about single people? Why shouldn't you be able to have anyone you like visit you in hospital? What if you have no sexual partner or family but a very close friend? Hospitals are supposed to be about medical treatment, IMO they have no business restricting visitation (except on your behalf) for any other reason than to protect your health. I also don't think that single people have a lesser claim on the fruits of their labor than married people, or that people have less right to enter into financial and cohabitation agreements if sex is not a part of that agreement.
Individual liberty for all is the necessary thing. When disadvantaged by unjust government control, the solution is not to lobby for my group to get preference (since the problem is that another group has already successfully done that) but to demand individual liberties.
That said, I wasn't arguing against gay marriage, I was arguing against the indiscriminate labelling of people as homophobic. My second post on this topic describes what I would have the law re gay marriage be.
With any other contract, that wouldn't be true (afaik).
Indeed.
Another post of mine: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1021887&cid=25682023 Personally, I'm not against gay marriage as such, I'm against government interference in private relationships. I wouldn't have marriage controlled or determined by the state at all. In that case, people who wanted to enter into a contract regarding shared property rights, sexual exclusivity etc could do so. If they want to call that marriage, they could do so. If someone else doesn't want to acknowledge that, they don't have to, not being a party to the contract.
The "principles" they hold are based on religion which is little besides irrational fear
I'll quote myself from another post:
An irrational religious fear that led someone to hate homosexuality is not homophobia. That would be a combination of zeusophobia and bigotry. A person with an irrational religious fear that led them to fear homosexuality could be accurately described as homophobic.
Now it should have been perfectly obvious that in an argument over the appropriateness of the use of the word homophobic that the irrational fear I was referring to was homophobia. Maybe it isn't your fault though, for all I know, you could be phronemophobic.
but do you think it is possible that gay lobby groups could have a bad idea and that opposition to that idea could potentially be "sensible" rather than "homophobic".
No, if they were at all "sensible" then they would be making "sensible" arguments. All they've done is screech idiotic nonsense about "destroying marriage" and a bunch of other mindless ignorant crap.
I didn't ask if you know of any sensible arguments against gay marriage. I asked it if was possible for gay lobby groups to have a bad idea and for opposition to that idea to be sensible. If this is impossible then we would have to conclude that homosexuality produces logical infallibility. If it is possible then opposition to an idea proposed by a gay lobby group does not automatically require homophobia.
So dismissing their position as ignorant religious hate mongering is the only reasonable, rational course
I haven't raised any objection to calling it "ignorant religious hate mongering" I raised an objection to classifying all people opposed to gay agendas as homophobic. Can't you stay on topic just this once?
My view http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1021887&cid=25682023: Personally, I'm not against gay marriage as such, I'm against government interference in private relationships. I wouldn't have marriage controlled or determined by the state at all. In that case, people who wanted to enter into a contract regarding shared property rights, sexual exclusivity etc could do so. If they want to call that marriage, they could do so. If someone else doesn't want to acknowledge that, they don't have to, not being a party to the contract.
So, in the sense that gay lobbyists are now fighting for government administrated gay marriage, I am against that. I'm haven't the slightest fear of homosexuals, I'd abolish government administrated heterosexual marriage too.
Now I've seen enough of your posts, Darby, to know that you like to keep posting, pretending you are right even when it should be glaringly obvious that you've gone horribly wrong in your arguments. Be my guest, post last.
Does it ever occur to you all that "Homophobic" means fear of the same?
I am quite aware of the meaning of the word. Not everyone that is opposed to homosexuality is necessarily afraid of it. They may be aggressive about it, perhaps causing a situation where they do not fear homosexuals but instead homosexuals fear them.
To simplify it for you:
"Opposition to gay marriage"!="homophobia"
Does it ever occur to you that some people's principles are what cause/create irrational fear? Or that people's irrational fears morph their principles?
Of course, but that's not necessarily homophobia. An irrational religious fear that led someone to hate homosexuality is not homophobia. That would be a combination of zeusophobia and bigotry. A person with an irrational religious fear that led them to fear homosexuality could be accurately described as homophobic.
Now it should have been perfectly obvious that in an argument over the appropriateness of the use of the word homophobic that the irrational fear I was referring to was homophobia. Maybe it isn't your fault though, for all I know, you could be phronemophobic.
Slashdot Mirror
The Great Artesian Basin is the world's largest artesian water basin, covering 22% of Australia. There is water available. It would probably be possible to turn it into fertile land the way has been done in parts of the middle east, particularly Israel. Just depends how much we want to do it.
The problem is that Australia doesn't recycle water. The reason they don't is because they have a peculiar habit of asking the population to vote on things and people are very hard to convince of this sort of thing.
Here in the UK we've survived for generations on recycled water but Queenslanders would rather go parched than drink 'shit'.
No, the problem is stupid and/or malevolent government. Here in my area in SE QLD there has been mild water shortage for over 20 years. It has also been one of the countries fastest growing population centres over that time. We also had water tank bans for aesthetic reasons.
This is a climate that has periodic droughts. It was obvious this was going to be a problem. If tanks and been allowed (and required for new building permits) and the expectation was that the council water supply was for a backup, we would quite simply not have any water supply problems now. We would have no need for recycled water if we took the view that in the ordinary course of life it is up to the individual to provide their own water, rather than depending on government supply.
Anybody with a rural background, such as myself, could have told them that 20 years ago if they were willing to listen.
I have to disagree with this. Copyright is there to protect the creator from the theft of what he creates.
Maybe where you live, but not according to the US Constitution. I'm not a US citizen, but this case is in the US so the US constitutions article that authorises copyright law is the supreme relevant law.
...
Section 8
The Congress shall have Power
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
So langelgjm is correct, "Copyright doesn't exist to make people lots of money. It exists to provide incentive for people to create things they otherwise wouldn't have created."
It wouldn't be fast at all. Linux is mostly useless for the average person. There is no short-term advantage in switching to it for anything the size of a government.
Linux in not at all useless for the average person. My (technophobe) mother, when shown my linux desktop (my demonstration/explanation consisted of "click here for writing documents, here to browse the internet, here to use email, etc) exclaimed "It's the same as windows". Most people get their windows box set up by someone else, if you apply the same circumstances then only to the extent that they need a particular proprietary application is linus "useless". Many people don't need such software.
As for no short-term advantage for governments to switch: security, ability to customise, ability to benefit local company rather than foreign company with expenditure (both economic and political benefit). I'm sure someone could add to these, but "no short-term advantage" has already been sufficiently addressed.
Anything that involves public money and is not a matter of national (or continental, in this case) security should be open to scrutiny.
Really? So the public should be able to view your tax returns?
That's not public money until after they have it. The total amount of various taxes collected should indeed be public information.
No, it's still in the government's interest not to scare Microsoft away from ever bidding on government business because the government can't keep to an NDA.
The government has no business agreeing the NDA's over public expenditure on software.
The "garage inventor" would be quickly displaced by a company that could exploit the invention. All they have to do is wait. Licensing a patent would be a thing of the past.
No, the company would want exclusive rights, so would license the patent rather than let it go into the public domain for their competitors.
unfortunately, the value of property is often is proportional to it's scarcity.
Always proportional to it's scarcity.
so if you make an exact copy of someone else's corn farm, you are directly changing value of their farm ( you are increasing supply of corn)
We call that "competition". It isn't unfortunate, it is the method by which people have incentive to produce higher {quality,quantity} products at lower price. The whole benefit of a competitive market system derives from the fact that any individuals produce can be devalued by others increasing the supply of that product or an alternative.
Patents and copyrights are to prevent that competition temporarily, increasing the incentive to produce innovation by the granting of a monopoly (competition-free market) to offset the competitive devaluations effect of disincentive to invest time and money in a product that could be uneconomical to produce in a free market if you are stuck with large sunk costs. It doesn't always work as intended and the idea that preventing others from copying is a natural or just right is one of the things that makes it difficult to get sensible laws written.
You don't have any automatic right to be free from competition. There are social contracts (patent, copyright) that grant that temporarily but many people seem to have forgotten that contracts have to benefit both parties, and the benefit to the public of the IP social contracts is the public domain, not the opportunity to pay monopoly prices in perpetuity.
From TFA: "From our standpoint, those governments, and indeed every customer, should always decide which software solutions meet their needs most appropriately..." - attributed to Thomas Hansen, regional manager for Microsoft West, East and Central Africa.
Isn't it obvious that customers should decide what to get? Why do MS need to convince us they believe that? Who else would be deciding what customers bought Mr Hansen?
How about their ability to talk and relate to their peers?
I said we've met teens who have the ability to talk and reason well and your immediate response is the suspicion that they will not be able to relate to other teens. You could benefit from pondering on this.
Why not kill the poor sods outright before they run amok. The best they can hope for is an accident instead of suicide.
You advocate killing teenagers who have the ability to talk and reason well. I can't think of any reason to pay attention to your advice on social skills. If you're trying to demonstrate the superior reasoning ability or social aptitude of people who have been processed through the school system, you've failed.
Do you believe that you have some inherent right to do such a thing?
Yes. Copying is inherent to our nature, from our life springing from the copying of DNA, to learning to walk by copying, learning to talk by copying, learning everything by copying really.
Copying is a natural right. Copyright is a social contract. The contract is:
(1) Publics obligation: Temporarily give up the right to copy in order to produce an incentive to create.
(2) Creators obligation: Deliver those created works to the public domain (available to be copied).
The same for patents. See the US Constitution.
Creators of copyright works have broken the contract, therefore the contract is void. That's not intended as a legal argument (I'd hate to try it in court) but it is the current reality.
My mother (special education teacher, now retired) had to "repair" a lot of kids who were home schooled. The parents invariably thought that they were teaching the kids enough "interpersonal skills", but it usually turned out that the parents themselves were socially defective & were incapable of judging whether their own kids had the proper skills to fit into society when "the time came".
I don't know you & your wife well enough to tell whether your family is an exception to that pattern,
That "pattern" you talk about is the exception. One of the things that made us interested in home schooling was meeting teenagers who had been homeschooled. We were impressed by their ability to talk and relate to us as adults and to have reasonable, well thought out conversations. I also know schooled teenagers like this, but with the homeschoolers it seems to be the norm rather than the exception.
From the "Home Schooling Review" done by my State government in 2003 http://education.qld.gov.au/publication/production/reports/homeschooling.pdf
In summary, researchers have found home schooled children are as well socialised as students educated in traditional State and non-State schools. Boyer (1993)4 researched the social stratification of children in schools by the lock-step age and grade approach to schooling. He concluded that by the time children are teenagers, they have little idea how to socialise with anyone outside of their peer group because of this approach to education. Tillman (1995)5 has documented that home schooled children participated in a wide range of extra curricular and community activities both with age peers and with those of more than two years age difference outside the immediate family.
Quite apart from that, most school education here (Australia) is woefully inadequate. Outside of mathematics, no training in logic at all in most schools. Most people in their mid-thirties or younger I've mentioned that to are astonished to find out that logic is a subject. The majority just think "logical" means "agrees with me" and "illogical" means "disagrees with me". Many people in our society are completely incapable of putting together a reasoned argument, or logically analysing someone else's statements. This is one reason why people are so easily manipulated by advertising and propaganda. School, for some reason, is not addressing this.
We've got high suicide rates, high divorce rates, high failure rates for people starting their own businesses. A significant portion of people in this society (and it's similar in the US) seem to be incapable of self-determination and maintaining long term relationships. Why would I want them to fit in well with that?
Just because they will have to fend for themselves without help one day is no reason to abandon them to bullying now. Since they learn both martial arts and interpersonal skills from an early age I think they'll be OK.
One day my kids will have to be able to look out for themselves. I have this idea, I know it's radical, of preparing them first. Sort of like the same reason we don't leave toddlers exposed in the wild, but after some experience camping with parents or scouts etc we would let them go by themselves.
These two posts in this thread will give you a better idea on what I think the law regarding marriage should be and why. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1021887&cid=25682023 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1021887&cid=25687545 If you read those, you'll realize that I oppose some things that gay rights lobbyists want, but not out of homophobia or even a similar reason. Yet it is very likely to result in my being branded "homophobic" to even begin talking about it.
Whether visitation laws themselves are the problem or not, and whatever the purpose of marriage may be, this is an obvious area of the current legal disparity between heterosexual and homosexual partnerships.
They are, and the "gay rights" approach still leaves single people without those equal rights. Very few and far between are the gay rights issues that wouldn't be better approached as individual liberty issues. Addressing hospital visitation issues with gay marriage just perpetuates the injustice, but in a way gays don't have to care about, if they manage to get themselves into the "in" group.
And recognizing the lies and bigotry as such.
My objection was not to gay marriage (I simply opined that it is not an equal rights issue) it was to the indiscriminate use of the word "homophobia". Someone could, for example, be a lying bigot without being afraid of homosexuality. Bigotry is not fear, hatred is not fear etc etc. I deliberately avoided stating my position on gay marriage and even pointed out that I had not done so, yet out of 9 replies so far not one has addressed why it should be acceptable to label people as having a particular phobia simply on the basis of opposition to any particular gay rights cause.
I'm pretty sure Apple invented the iPod.
That was Kane Kramer. http://gizmodo.com/5046463/apple-admits-british-man-invented-ipod-in-1979-uses-him-to-win-patent-lawsuit
When on top of the endless bullying your cries for help go unanswered, you learn that you can't rely on anyone when you're in need, that no one cares about your well-being, and that people in practice have the right to mistreat you however they want.
I do not want to be expected to tell my children that "this is a part of life".
It is partly for this reason that my wife and I are homeschooling our children. My parents ignored my begging to leave the school I was at, I left both school and home.
I think it occurs to anybody who takes part in serious, open-minded discussions; but doing things "out of principle" doesn't make it right or rational.
I didn't say it does, I was arguing against indiscriminate use of the label "homophobic", not against gay marriage. {Irrational,wrong}!=homophobic
"Marriage" is also a legal institution that confers legal rights and responsibilities, it affects things from your taxes to hospital visitation rights. Yes, this is an equal rights issue. Don't be dense.
This is where I disagree with the gay rights lobby. This in an individual rights issue, not a gay rights issue and pursuing solutions to these issues as gay rights will result in the perpetuation of civil rights violations, just to a smaller group. What about single people? Why shouldn't you be able to have anyone you like visit you in hospital? What if you have no sexual partner or family but a very close friend? Hospitals are supposed to be about medical treatment, IMO they have no business restricting visitation (except on your behalf) for any other reason than to protect your health. I also don't think that single people have a lesser claim on the fruits of their labor than married people, or that people have less right to enter into financial and cohabitation agreements if sex is not a part of that agreement.
Individual liberty for all is the necessary thing. When disadvantaged by unjust government control, the solution is not to lobby for my group to get preference (since the problem is that another group has already successfully done that) but to demand individual liberties.
That said, I wasn't arguing against gay marriage, I was arguing against the indiscriminate labelling of people as homophobic. My second post on this topic describes what I would have the law re gay marriage be.
With any other contract, that wouldn't be true (afaik).
Indeed.
Another post of mine: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1021887&cid=25682023
Personally, I'm not against gay marriage as such, I'm against government interference in private relationships. I wouldn't have marriage controlled or determined by the state at all. In that case, people who wanted to enter into a contract regarding shared property rights, sexual exclusivity etc could do so. If they want to call that marriage, they could do so. If someone else doesn't want to acknowledge that, they don't have to, not being a party to the contract.
So you are basing the morality of gay marriage on the actions of a civilization that practiced slavery?
No, I am demonstrating that an opinion against gay marriage does not necessarily have to be based on fear, ie: homophobia.
For clarity, if you're interested, my own opinion on the topic of laws regarding gay marriage is here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1021887&cid=25682023
The "principles" they hold are based on religion which is little besides irrational fear
I'll quote myself from another post:
An irrational religious fear that led someone to hate homosexuality is not homophobia. That would be a combination of zeusophobia and bigotry. A person with an irrational religious fear that led them to fear homosexuality could be accurately described as homophobic.
Now it should have been perfectly obvious that in an argument over the appropriateness of the use of the word homophobic that the irrational fear I was referring to was homophobia. Maybe it isn't your fault though, for all I know, you could be phronemophobic.
I didn't ask if you know of any sensible arguments against gay marriage. I asked it if was possible for gay lobby groups to have a bad idea and for opposition to that idea to be sensible. If this is impossible then we would have to conclude that homosexuality produces logical infallibility. If it is possible then opposition to an idea proposed by a gay lobby group does not automatically require homophobia.
So dismissing their position as ignorant religious hate mongering is the only reasonable, rational course
I haven't raised any objection to calling it "ignorant religious hate mongering" I raised an objection to classifying all people opposed to gay agendas as homophobic. Can't you stay on topic just this once?
My view http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1021887&cid=25682023: Personally, I'm not against gay marriage as such, I'm against government interference in private relationships. I wouldn't have marriage controlled or determined by the state at all. In that case, people who wanted to enter into a contract regarding shared property rights, sexual exclusivity etc could do so. If they want to call that marriage, they could do so. If someone else doesn't want to acknowledge that, they don't have to, not being a party to the contract.
So, in the sense that gay lobbyists are now fighting for government administrated gay marriage, I am against that. I'm haven't the slightest fear of homosexuals, I'd abolish government administrated heterosexual marriage too.
Now I've seen enough of your posts, Darby, to know that you like to keep posting, pretending you are right even when it should be glaringly obvious that you've gone horribly wrong in your arguments. Be my guest, post last.
Does it ever occur to you all that "Homophobic" means fear of the same?
I am quite aware of the meaning of the word. Not everyone that is opposed to homosexuality is necessarily afraid of it. They may be aggressive about it, perhaps causing a situation where they do not fear homosexuals but instead homosexuals fear them.
To simplify it for you:
"Opposition to gay marriage"!="homophobia"
Does it ever occur to you that some people's principles are what cause/create irrational fear? Or that people's irrational fears morph their principles?
Of course, but that's not necessarily homophobia. An irrational religious fear that led someone to hate homosexuality is not homophobia. That would be a combination of zeusophobia and bigotry. A person with an irrational religious fear that led them to fear homosexuality could be accurately described as homophobic.
Now it should have been perfectly obvious that in an argument over the appropriateness of the use of the word homophobic that the irrational fear I was referring to was homophobia. Maybe it isn't your fault though, for all I know, you could be phronemophobic.