This is why your fidelity statistics don't matter.
You're saying "people behave in this way, we can't change it" - and then you advocate condoms. So why is it that we can change one type of behavior but not another? Why is fidelity just a given - we can't influence it - but condom use is variable? It seems like your argument hinges not on the statistics, but on your assumptions about which types of human behavior can change and which can't.
All I'm saying is that - assuming all types of human behavior can be changed - the best solution to HIV/AIDS at this time is to stop having extra-marital sex. Sure - if we have a cure then that works too. But the funny thing is we've had traditional sexual values for a long time (and we have them right now) but a cure is absent at he time.
I'm not saying don't look for a cure, I'm not saying don't use a cure. I'm not saying don't use condoms. I'm saying if we think we can change human behavior the best solution right now is a return to traditional morals. The second best solution is condom-use. And the solution that isn't available now is the cure (which we should work on).
I don't think I said anything about an HIV vaccine. I was talking about a "cure".
I gues the discussion of women's rights is beyond the scope of this discussion, but I'm certainly not acusing you of being a wife-beater or abusing women. I do think that many people engage in various forms of reverse-discrimination or cultural imperialism when they talk about 3rd-world nations, however. I really haven't seen enough of what your opinion is to know if that's what you're doing or not.
Because a lot of the people who think you should have sex according to traditional morals and values also think condoms are bad (which would help with those who don't want to live according to traditional values) and some of them even think that HIV/AIDS is God's wrath on the homosexuals and fornicators of the world.
On the other hand, a lot of the people most opposed to AIDS also react to traditional values as though there are inherently sexist (what is sexist about telling men AND women to only have sex with the person they're married to, I don't know) and are opposed to the very same patterns of behavior that would limit the spread of the disease.
I'm not really saying you can't do both, just observing that a lot of people refuse to.
it's that women in many of the hardest hit countries simply don't have the choice to abstain or pratice safer sex at all, for a variety of social, educational, and economic reasons.
Explain that to me. It sounds like you think women are inherently weaker creatures then men in more than just the physical sense. If we're talking about rape or sexual slaves, then I'm with you 100%, but it sounds like you mean non-coercive factors. In that case, I ask why is that you single women out as being vulnerable to poverty, as though a poor man is somehow inherently superior to a poor women. Sounds suspicious to me.
The fact that you wish that a magic pill makes it all go away doesn't change reality: a vaccine won't cure or help people already infected, a therapeutic vaccine is very unlikely, and we can't even deliver the cheap and effective drugs we already have.
I have no idea who you think you're talking to. I said "if people only had sex with their spouse - HIV/AIDS wouldn't spread any further, but we'd still have a huge people that have the disease and that would be a problem". Then you start going off about a magic pill? Huh?
Only education, womens rights, and economic developent are going to bring the AIDS epidemic under control
Now, let's just say as a hypothetical, that all women converted to Islam. And started following their religion. And men too. So they stopped having sex outside of marriage. Wouldn't that stop the spread of the disease? Not saying it would solve all problems of women's rights, just pointin out that your statement is just obviously false. There are other ways.
What are you trying to say here? The standard I'm advocatinig is: "only have sex with your spouse".
You've got this weird vision where there's a chaste women with a philandering husband (and therefore apparently some philandering women to help him along). What's the relevance?
You've got an axe to grind, alright, but that's not really very informative or relevant.
What I wrote was flamebait? How about this: Does being married, a man-made institution, suddenly make it OK?
You know very well that most religious faiths believe marriage is not a man-made institution. So how is assuming your premise (religions are wrong) a legitimate argument? It's logically vacuous and serves only as flamebait.
In any case: I never said anything was wrong with sex. I happen to like sex. A lot. I'm a fan. I just also happen to believe that sex is best enjoyed between by a married couple. You extrapolate from this that I'm making all these judgments about other people being "imoral". I know some "god-botherers" believe that, so I'm not faulting you for assuming that I do, I'm just telling you that I don't. I believe people who practice extra-marital sex would be happier if they didn't, but I'm not in the blame game or the coercion game.
I'll tell you what's wrong: fear bourne out of ignorance, like all the rest of the world's problems. And don't get me started on G. W. and Stem Cell Research...
It's clear to me you're just looking for a fight (not to mention a closing tag to your italics!;-) but I really have no desire to get drawn into a debate protecting G. W. (for whom I have no good feelings or loyalty) nor stem cell research.
I stand by what I said. It's my opinion that sex-between-marrieds (the traditional gold-standard of every world religion) is the best sexual practice. It does NOT follow that sex is bad, evil, gross, dirty, icky or whatever. It also does not follow that those who choose not to live by that standard are evil. These are not philosophical or theological necessities, they are cultural artifacts of our Puritan heritage (those guys were wack).
The best way to avoid sexually transmitted diseases is never having sex. The second best way (which is actually just as safe if both people do it) is to have sex only with the person you are married to (and not with anyone if you're not married). If people did this, there'd be almost no sexually transmitted diseases. The third option is to mitigate the risks of STDs with "safe sex". I'd say it would be best for people to go with traditional values, but I encourage you - and everyone else - to go with "safe sex" as a second option if you're not going to go with traditional values.
Dude - wtf? If someone has enough self-control to not have sex before marriage, they have enough self-control to not have extra-marital sex after they're married. Your statistics are meaninigless. They show people AREN'T treating sex as something that should be only between married couples, not that they CAN'T.
But the real problem I have with what you're saying is that you act as though it has to be either-or. I think that advocating traditional values is the best solution. People like you obviously difer. Since you're going to have sex anyway, I certainly want you to practice safe sex. But it's not really "safe" in the way that "no sex" is safe. There's always a real chance of you contracting diseases or getting (someone) pregnant.
So what's wrong with my solution: 1. Tell people the only absolutely safe sex is no sex until marriage, than only sex with a married partner who followed the same plan. Allow religious groups to advocate this as well (since practically every religion in existence opposes extra-marital sex traditionally, if not as much anymore.) 2. Tell people that if they really do want to have extra-marital sex, they should use condoms. And give them condoms if they are poor.
What's the issue there?
In any case, you're statistics about illegitimate children are just not really relevant.
I totally agree with you in principle, but not in fact. The biggest hole in your arument is this:
There was this story about the Chechenya war, about a soldier who saw a father holding his dead daughter and looking at him with hate filled eyes, and understood they weren't going to win it. Why? Because once you take away everything a person has you can hardly do anything worse to them. What you get is somebody with nearly no reason to live but trying to get revenge.
If the majority of suicide bombers and terrorists were from the underclasses you'd have a very, very strong case. But they aren't. Terrorists are frequenty from the upper-middle classes. Just look at the London bombers - born and raised in London in the past few decades.
I'm not trying to absolve the US of guilt from past mistakes - we've made some whoppers. But just as some people are evil for a reason, sometimes people are just plain evil. I know I'm fulfilling Godwin's law here, but you have to ask yourself if undderstanding the Nazis would have really helped avert violence in WW2.
The tragedy of violent conflict is this: it only takes one party to iniate violence. If the other guy is bound and determined to inflict physical injury on you and yours then violence is inescapable. You either fight back, or you get killed.
I think it's important to hold open the door of understanding. Some violent conflicts are evitable. Sometimes civil disobdiance and non-violent forms of protest work. But the other guy can ALWAYS force you into violence - that has to be remembered.
And as far as the pointless war in Iraq goes; I wasn't really in favor of invasion in the first place. I had serious doubts. But I also think that IF America could successfully erect a working democracy there, the impact could be tremendous for good.
So what it comes down to is mostly this: do you think the terrorists are acting rationally out of legitimate grievances? I do not. We didn't kill Osama's family, his friends, we did no harm to him. We actualy armed and trained him to fight the Soviets (whoops) - so how is he like the father in Chechnya? He's not. That's the point.
1. Condom use would also work. I'd certainly rather have people have sex outside of marriage with a condom than without. Still, condoms are not quite as good a solution as just not having sex (just in terms of effectiveness).
2. Its amazing to me that we'll have people use disease to back up thier so-called morals, nevermind the fact that most disease spreads other ways besides through sexual contact.
While it is possible for AIDS/HIV to spread through non-sexual contact, are you seriously suggesting it would be a world-wide health issue of this magnitude if you could only get it through, say, blood transfusion.
I agree that it is opportunist to jump on a disease as a way to reinforce morals, but it's also kind of silly to pretend that human choices have nothing to do with the spread of this disease.
I think a lack of money obviously motivates theft.
We should set aside the definition of "poverty" then - and you should have stated this in the first place. Poverty does NOT mean - by any standardly accepted definition - merely the lack of immediate access to funds. But if you want to restrict our discussion to purely "lack of money motivates theft", that's fine. We can do that.
Which is the only part of it that we need to consider as motivation for theft.
This comment is too stupid to take seriously. See Ken Lay.
Apparently in your exhaustive research into free will philosophies you somehow missed Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Goethe, etc. If you take the risk and go outside and walk past a music store, you're responsible for the consequences. The risk may be very small, but you're choosing to take it. We are all responsible for everything that happens to us or we are responsible for nothing. You can't draw an arbitrary line at what a person should have foreseen.
I have not read either Goethe or Aurelius positions on free-will, but I'm rather familiar with Socrates and most of the other big-names in Philosophy from Socrates through Dennet. I can not think of any reading of any of what any of them said that would lead to your conclusion that people are responsible for all of what happens to them, or none of it.
I'll let you get away with "risking X" and "causing X" because even though I think it's philosophically shaky at best, I don't have the time to get into it. What I'll say instead is that you can't be responsible for things that you have 0 awareness of. You would say your brother knew there was some chance he'd get hit by a piano, he took the risk, it's his fault. I'd say he didn't know there was a piano, so he didn't choose to take that risk. To make a stronger example just imagine there is an alien race that are 3 feet high and travel in UFOs shaped like cigars. Your brother does not know they exist. So he has no way of choosing to take the risk of being zapped by their death ray when he walks out of his house one spring morning. And yet he is, indeed, zapped. You're saying he's responsible for being killed by beings he not only didn't know exist, but had no way of knowing existed? The only way to defend that is to say that "you risk everything" by going outside. But that's not useful, because you risk everything by staying inside too if we're going to get technical - so there's no choice you can make that will affect your risk. So either by virtue of lack of information or by virtue of lack of option, you can not choose (or even wish to choose) to take or avoid at least some risks. Thus you can not possibly be responsible for everything. Despite dropping a few names, I sincerely doubt any of your philosophers would have agreed to your absurd and outlandish position.
By his definition because you are responsible for theft, no other factors can influence it or have importance.
He did not make this claim. Nowhere does he say that. Are you sure you're arguing with the right people here? You are so utterly weird sometimes I think you've either got to be messing with us, or you've got to be skipping your meds. I'm aware that there are some sort of strange logical connections behind the things you say, but I'm truly astonished at how wildly inaccurate your portrayal of my own or Specs arguments really is.
It's a very simple concept: extenuating circumstances. Let's say I decide to shoot someone. I make the decision of my own free will. I aim at them, I pull the trigger, and I kill them. I'm responsible.
Does this mean no other factors have influence? Of course not! If they were trying to shoot me at the same time (say they even already fired a couple of times) then I'm justified in what I did. I'm not LESS RESPONSIBLE, I'm justified. What Spec is saying is that people are always - barring extremely unusual circumstances where their decision-making is impaired - responsible for theft. Tha
Some people seem to have the bizarre idea that things exist by themselves in some sort of vaccuum with no causes
If only you'd applied that logic to the matter at hand, you'd have a much better understanding of this mysterious "American logic". The American theory that terrorists are just plain evil itself does not exist in a vacuum. It is a response to liberal notions (and I'm use the word in a descriptive and not pejorative sense) about punishment theory which seem to reduce personal responsibility almost to the point of exclusion. The basic idea is this new-fangled concept that punishment is about rehabilitation.
Of course that was back in the 50s when punishment as rehabilitation was new. Since then the debate was come back a little right-wards from there, and most liberals now sort of mash together punishment-as-rehabilitation as a subset of punishment-as-deterrence.
The result is this vague philosophy that the best way to reduce crime is to see crime chiefly in terms of the sociological drivers. Eliminate those drivers, and you reduce the problem.
There are a number of issues with this. 1. It can be seen to eclipse personal responsibility. 2. It's not so simple to find the sociological drivers. We know that poverty and crime have a positive correlation, but this does NOT mean that poverty drives crime. Something else may drive both of them, or some other set of "something else's" may drive both of them. 3. It's not clear that eradication of poverty is even a coherent goal, or one that would not be worse than the cure. Standard of livings are not static. Poverty is based on deviation from the standard of living. So the only way to eradicate poverty is to eradicate differences in standard of living. This is likely either impossible or something that would result in a lower standard of living for everybody - including the poor.
Americans, as pragmatic as we tend to be, have started to come to the conclusion that 1 - it may not be really that valid to find sociological reasons for crime, terrorism, etc. (since there's still precious little evidence crime is CAUSED by poverty) and 2 - that in any case, even if someone has a reason to do something evil it may be wiser and more pragmatic to stop them from doing the evil thing first and figure out why they wanted to do it second.
You'd think it's obvious to say that "crime is caused by criminals" but lately the world seems so interested in understanding terrorists and criminals that we're in danger of running out of people who are willing to actually oppose them. So if you come along and don't pay any attention to the prior discussion then sure - it looks stupid. But when you see the insane liberal desire to cure criminals and to reason with terrorists it starts to make sense. I'm all in favor of curing criminals, but I'd rather lock them up first and cure them second. I'm all in favor of understanding terrorists, but I'd rather stop them from blowing shit up first.
I was editing my post and accidentally hit submit, so the firs para is missing a statement. Here it is in full (missing sentences in bold):
This is the type of naive thinking indicative of your overall approach to arguing. First of all, poverty IS a long-term phenomena. If you go into a store to buy lunch today and realize you left your wallet at home, are you in a state of poverty until you go back and get the wallet? I would hope you agree that that is silly. It would be a logically consistent definition, but utterly useless for the discussion we're having. Furthermore, poverty is about more than just the possession of goods and cash (just visit any farmer who owns a few thousand acres, lots of farm equipment, etc, but is still struggling to make ends meet). A good working definition of poverty would be something like: chronic lack of economic power relative to societal norms If that is the definition of poverty, it would be very counter-intuitive for common theft to ever elevate anyone from poverty. Indeed, if it worked at all you'd expect to find people who'd used theft to go from poverty to middle or even upper class lifestyles. At least in America, this would seem to be the exception.
Since you responded to Spec, I can only wait in eager anticipation for you to respond to my post as well. Judging by the poor quality of your response, however, it will most likely be a let-down when it arrives. Since you still don't actually have a cogent point of your own, I'll adopt your guerrilla-warfare style of posting:
Poverty is lack of money and goods. Theft is a means of acquiring money or goods. Thus, theft directly mitigates poverty, even if not on a long-term basis.
This is the type of naive thinking indicative of your overall approach to arguing. First of all, poverty IS a long-term phenomena. If you go into a store to buy lunch today and realize you left your wallet at home, are you in a state of poverty until you go back and get the wallet? I would hope you agree that that is silly. Furthermore, poverty is about more than just the possession of goods and cash (just visit any farmer who owns a few thousand acres, lots of farm equipment, etc, but is still struggling to make ends meet). If that is the definition of poverty, it would be very counter-intuitive for common theft to ever elevate anyone from poverty. Indeed, if it worked at all you'd expect to find people who'd used theft to go from poverty to middle or even upper class lifestyles. At least in America, this would seem to be the exception.
You only took this point to be obvious based on your extremely superficial and naive definition of poverty as meaning "lack of immediately available funds".
People are victims of circumstances. If a piano falls on my brother, he was a victim of circumstance. That does not mean he was not responsible for walking by the music store and taking the risk of all those instrument related injuries, but that was not my point. Your implication that someone cannot be both responsible for their actions and a victim of circumstance is a false dichotomy.
Your writings indicate that you are not really familiar at all with the philosophical free-will discussion. It would be a very strange philosophy indeed that would hold a person responsible for having a piano fall on them. The actual definition of "responsibility" is very tricky, but there's no definition I know of that extends responsibility to people for being the victim of an act they could not foresee and did not cause. In your example your brother would be responsible for walking under the piano but NOT for the piano falling on him. So he would not, by any rational means, be responsible for having the piano fall on them. I'm not saying there's no room for shared responsibility - but this is not an example of that. Go do some reading on the free-will issue to get a good background in agent-causation and other theories for personal responsibility.
Your ethics are too inflexible and dogmatic for me. If my child was starving to death while someone else lived in luxury and threw out hundreds of pounds of food a day and refused to help, I'd have no ethical issues in stealing from them. If a man had a device that he planned to use to destroy the earth, then I'd have no ethical issues with stealing it from him to prevent this. I can respect your beliefs if you disagree, but don't try to hold me or anyone else to your belief system.
What the Hell are you talking about? Refusing to hold someone responsible does not mean condemning them. I see the exact failure of understanding you have here. Spec says "I hold people responsible, period." You think this means "no matter what the circumstances, theft is always wrong". But responsible DOES NOT MEAN guilty. If you steal a loaf of bread to feed your child YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT THEFT. But that doesn't mean what you did was wrong. If you rescue a kitty from starving, you're responsible for that too. The difference is that YOU think that if you are desperate to steal to live, this some how means you are no longer a free-agent. That somehow you're decision-making capacity is suddenly replaced by need. This is not the case. Your OPTIONS ma
Except in cases of rape, people can easily avoid getting infected with HIV/AIDS. Abstinence or safe sex cost nothing, and they have the additional benefit of reducing population growth.
This is true for adults, but not for the children of people infected with HIV/AIDS. I'm all in favor of personal responsibility and the obvious solution the spread of AIDS does seem to be "stop having sex outside of marriage", but it would still be a fairly massive world-wide problem just in terms of those who already have the disease - especially those who have the disease through no fault of their own.
What's frustrating is the way it seems as though this has to be an either-or. Either we ask people to keep their sexual drives under control OR we try to save those who catch the disease. Pity we can't do both.
Despite what a lot of people in the "the market will solve it" crowd here think certain things should not be privatised, medical research being one of them.
Clever you, except for the fact that this IS an example of privatized medical research. The example says the opposite of what you want it to say.
What is with you Slashdot leeches? You guys drive me nuts. You sit in the wings, waiting for someone to open up a perceived weakness, and then swoop in like vultures... for what? Ego? The joy of dishonestly attacking arguments? Do you get a thrill out of it - or are you just a troll who writes long posts?
In internet debate what is your goal? In my opinion, the goal should be constructive or you should shut up. There are two ways to be constructive: either proposing or defending arguments or critiquing/attacking arguments with intellectual honesty. If you're not doing one of these two things, you're just wasting everyone's time and getting in the way of people who want discussion to be productive.
Your post is a perfect example of pissing on an argument in unhelpful ways. You demonstrate a complete lack of ability to understand things like context. Rather than debate the overall arguments that I propose, you choose to pick apart the argument piece by piece - choosing to understand each distinct element of an argument in a way that provides you maximal leverage to score points. The first evidence that this is what you're doing is the fact that you cut the argument into almost entirely 1-sentence- long shreds and then attack each one. This may leave the rhetorical impression that you've cut my argument to ribbons, but there's a reason that serious philosophers, thinkers, and writers don't respond to one another's arguments in a line-by-line fashion. Reducing an argument to merely its parts rejects any and all of those parts of the argument which emerge from the structure of those parts combined. You could make any of the greatest writers of all time look like an idiot if you simply take their text and attack it line-by-line. I encourage you to try it with, say, Kant, if you don't believe me. But what does this prove? Only your own inability to see the forest for the trees. Your own inability to understand before you attack.
I would prefer to respond to your argument in kind - but this is exactly what I'm saying: you've presented no argument. There's no cohesive structure to your reply, no thesis, no claim. You are the ultimate intellectual coward for failing to actually expose yourself to return volleys of criticism.
Am I whining that you don't play fair? If you think the object of debate and discussion is to "win", then yes, I am. Your strategy is vastly superior in the same way that a street fighter would likely beat the crap out of a boxer who boxed according to the rules of boxing. Just kick 'em in the nads - you win. But if the point of debate and discussion is the revelation of truth - then you fail miserably. You neither present an actual argument of your own, nor does your attack of my argument get us any closer to the truth because your response is nothing but a patchwork mess of semi-appropriate comments, legitimate grievances, failures to understand, and batshit loco head-scratchers. It's a morass of intellectual refuse that serves no purpose other than to pollute conversation and (we can only assume) meet some deep-rooted psychological need of yours.
Examples? I have plenty.
Poverty leads to crime does not mean stealing an iPod is the direct result of poverty. Later you call out the fact that correlation is not causation, yet you base your argument upon that assumption here.
Your point is that poverty -> crime is not equivalent to crime -> poverty. This is basic logic, absolutely correct, and yet has no bearing on "my argument". I seriously doubt you could even tell me what my argument is. Not as in "tell me what I think my argument is", but as in "actually present what you think my argument is". You're just responding to fragments, you've given no indication whatsoever you're actually aware these fragments add up to something (or are supposed to add up to something) so how are you qualified to state what does, or does not, feed into my argument?
This is another mistake. Ethical/moral motivations
1. I was arguing for personal responsibility in addition to, and not instead of, sociological factors. A discussion of either one without the other is incomplete.
2. I think a lot of people who claim to take personal responsibility into account really just give the concept minimal lip-service before getting back to their peoples-as-trained-animals philosophy.
-stormin
(I'm not saying humans aren't technically animals. I'm OK with that. But I believe they are animals with free(r) will and a great(er) degree of personal responsibility than, say, a dog or a cat.)
You're definitely fitting the bill for liberal by my personal standards thanks to obviously bleeding heart statements like these: However poverty breeds desperation, and desperate people do desperate things.
Would you really typify the avg London street thug as "desperate"? They have no recourse, you say, other than to steal iPods? For food? To pay rent? To supplement their income? To pay tuition or buy books? Because if I was desperte to get out of poverty - that's the route I'd be taking. I might be stealing something like books or a computer to code on, but iPods? Show me these guys are cashing the iPods in to buy a sandwich and I'll start to feel like they have no recourse.
A much better explanation of the link between poverty and crime (in this case) is that your average street thug has less to lose. I don't have an iPod. I'd like one. I'd really like one actually. So I'm incented to take one - and it makes more economic sense to not pay for it rather than to pay for it. Leaving aside my own beliefs about morality, the strictly practical reason why I'm not actually tempted to steal one is simple: I have no criminal record and I'd rather not have one. It could mean losing my job, which would mean possibly losing my house, which puts me and my wife on the street with a new baby on the way. Being invested in society provides me with a lot of incentive not to get caught. But if you have less of a stake in society then you are less susceptible to deterrence.
But even this is just a theory. The only FACT we have is that high poverty correlates to high crime. For all we know it could be because some people hate work and would rather steal for a living than work for a living and it just so happens that crime doesn't pay very well. Not saying I think this is true - just pointing out what a bleeding heart you have to skip straight from the poverty/crime correlation to some explanation of stealing iPods as desperate cry for help.
The fact is you're just not qualified to say much about the relationship between crime and poverty anyway because your understanding of statistics is so damn poor. poverty is the largest single driver for this kind of low level crime Correlation DOES NOT EQUAL causation. This isn't even stat 101, it's like what you have to know to get into stat 101.
So your whole post is rife with these unjustified assumptions. That iPod thieves are desperate, that poverty causes crime, etc. But the worst point of all is that you say conditions... drive these people to make these choices.
Are you saying that if you were poor you would somehow no longer have the ability to make decisions? That you would be coerced into stealing iPods? That you would be DRIVEN to make that choice? I happen to believe that humans are free creatures. Being poor may change the makeup of the decision - but a poor person is 100% as capable of making a choice as a rich person. The only thing that changes are the inputs. The actual capacity to decide is not influenced by how much money is in your wallet.
What you are in essence saying (though I'm sure you will protest) is that poor people are sub-human. Because of their circumstances, they can't operate at the level of rational, self-governed thought that we privileged elite can. It's like white-man's burden all over again. You see some fundamental difference between us and them, and it's our duty - as the privileged elite - to control them. These are the inclinations of a despot and a dictator. Sure - a benevolent one - but a tyrant none the less. You see poor people not as independent agents, but as cogs who driven to act by societal forces.
Anyone with this attitude should be kept as far away from public policy decisions as possible. Your attitudes about the facts of the case are naive, and your assumptions about human behavior are authoritarian in the guise of sympathy. Sometimes going easy on people is not the right thing to do - someti
I will quote from my post: I complained about bad grammar making a post unreadable
So the only dolt here is you. I could care less about proper rules of grammar for their own sake (which is pretty much the definition of a grammar nazi). What's important is being able to communicate. It's hard enough to get your meaning across using only typed words (no facial or voice cues), but mashing the words together in such a way that there's just no coherence severely compounds the problem.
So maybe you're actually interested in having some pissing contest about who can conform to which standard of proper grammar better, or which standard of grammar is superior (honor vs. honour), but I'll stick to the point that I actually made (and that sailed over your head): bad grammar is a seriously bad thing when it prevents the average reader from understanding what you wrote.
The only thing more obnoxious than a smug know-it-all is a smug know-it-all that completely missed the point.
Poverty does correlate to higher crime rates. So do a lot of things - like lack of education. Poverty and education do not steal iPods, however.
The GPs point was that even if you have a situation that may be favorable for increasing crime rates, the crimes are still committed by PEOPLE. If you have a libertarian bent, or if you belief in human autonomy at all, then in any given crime you blame the criminal FIRST.
There's a belief out there that those with a more liberal bent tend to eclipse personal responsibility and act as though being poor somehow makes you less responsible for your own actions - less human. The response from those with a more conservative bent (e.g. me) is that if you're poor you have more to gain and less to lose from crime, but this means you have incentive to commit a crime. Having incentive to commit a crime is not the same as being forced to commit a crime. And so I, and many others, would consider the mugger to be responsible for the mugging.
So poverty - which creates incentive - really should be listed as a separate issue then the personal responsibility of those who commit the crimes.
But the last time I complained about bad grammar making a post unreadable it got modded as flamebait (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=191121&cid=15 715693). Apparently some people are offended by good grammar.
I'm just looking for a little legibility? Is that so much to ask?
-stormin
(note to real grammar nazis, I'm aware that I used "legibility" incorrectly there, but look at the alliteration! We're going to call this one 'artistic license'.)
I'm not a grammar nazi or anything, but I have to ask - is punctuation against your religion or something?
Seriously, give us poor readers a hand. I've tried to make sense of your comment for a couple of seconds, and by the time I started re-reading the entire thing I just gave up.
Honestly - how do you expect to actuaclly be able to communicate with anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
This is why your fidelity statistics don't matter.
You're saying "people behave in this way, we can't change it" - and then you advocate condoms. So why is it that we can change one type of behavior but not another? Why is fidelity just a given - we can't influence it - but condom use is variable? It seems like your argument hinges not on the statistics, but on your assumptions about which types of human behavior can change and which can't.
All I'm saying is that - assuming all types of human behavior can be changed - the best solution to HIV/AIDS at this time is to stop having extra-marital sex. Sure - if we have a cure then that works too. But the funny thing is we've had traditional sexual values for a long time (and we have them right now) but a cure is absent at he time.
I'm not saying don't look for a cure, I'm not saying don't use a cure. I'm not saying don't use condoms. I'm saying if we think we can change human behavior the best solution right now is a return to traditional morals. The second best solution is condom-use. And the solution that isn't available now is the cure (which we should work on).
-stormin
I don't think I said anything about an HIV vaccine. I was talking about a "cure".
I gues the discussion of women's rights is beyond the scope of this discussion, but I'm certainly not acusing you of being a wife-beater or abusing women. I do think that many people engage in various forms of reverse-discrimination or cultural imperialism when they talk about 3rd-world nations, however. I really haven't seen enough of what your opinion is to know if that's what you're doing or not.
-stormin
Because a lot of the people who think you should have sex according to traditional morals and values also think condoms are bad (which would help with those who don't want to live according to traditional values) and some of them even think that HIV/AIDS is God's wrath on the homosexuals and fornicators of the world.
On the other hand, a lot of the people most opposed to AIDS also react to traditional values as though there are inherently sexist (what is sexist about telling men AND women to only have sex with the person they're married to, I don't know) and are opposed to the very same patterns of behavior that would limit the spread of the disease.
I'm not really saying you can't do both, just observing that a lot of people refuse to.
-stormin
it's that women in many of the hardest hit countries simply don't have the choice to abstain or pratice safer sex at all, for a variety of social, educational, and economic reasons.
Explain that to me. It sounds like you think women are inherently weaker creatures then men in more than just the physical sense. If we're talking about rape or sexual slaves, then I'm with you 100%, but it sounds like you mean non-coercive factors. In that case, I ask why is that you single women out as being vulnerable to poverty, as though a poor man is somehow inherently superior to a poor women. Sounds suspicious to me.
The fact that you wish that a magic pill makes it all go away doesn't change reality: a vaccine won't cure or help people already infected, a therapeutic vaccine is very unlikely, and we can't even deliver the cheap and effective drugs we already have.
I have no idea who you think you're talking to. I said "if people only had sex with their spouse - HIV/AIDS wouldn't spread any further, but we'd still have a huge people that have the disease and that would be a problem". Then you start going off about a magic pill? Huh?
Only education, womens rights, and economic developent are going to bring the AIDS epidemic under control
Now, let's just say as a hypothetical, that all women converted to Islam. And started following their religion. And men too. So they stopped having sex outside of marriage. Wouldn't that stop the spread of the disease? Not saying it would solve all problems of women's rights, just pointin out that your statement is just obviously false. There are other ways.
-stormin
What are you trying to say here? The standard I'm advocatinig is: "only have sex with your spouse".
You've got this weird vision where there's a chaste women with a philandering husband (and therefore apparently some philandering women to help him along). What's the relevance?
You've got an axe to grind, alright, but that's not really very informative or relevant.
-stormin
What I wrote was flamebait? How about this: Does being married, a man-made institution, suddenly make it OK?
;-) but I really have no desire to get drawn into a debate protecting G. W. (for whom I have no good feelings or loyalty) nor stem cell research.
You know very well that most religious faiths believe marriage is not a man-made institution. So how is assuming your premise (religions are wrong) a legitimate argument? It's logically vacuous and serves only as flamebait.
In any case: I never said anything was wrong with sex. I happen to like sex. A lot. I'm a fan. I just also happen to believe that sex is best enjoyed between by a married couple. You extrapolate from this that I'm making all these judgments about other people being "imoral". I know some "god-botherers" believe that, so I'm not faulting you for assuming that I do, I'm just telling you that I don't. I believe people who practice extra-marital sex would be happier if they didn't, but I'm not in the blame game or the coercion game.
I'll tell you what's wrong: fear bourne out of ignorance, like all the rest of the world's problems. And don't get me started on G. W. and Stem Cell Research...
It's clear to me you're just looking for a fight (not to mention a closing tag to your italics!
I stand by what I said. It's my opinion that sex-between-marrieds (the traditional gold-standard of every world religion) is the best sexual practice. It does NOT follow that sex is bad, evil, gross, dirty, icky or whatever. It also does not follow that those who choose not to live by that standard are evil. These are not philosophical or theological necessities, they are cultural artifacts of our Puritan heritage (those guys were wack).
The best way to avoid sexually transmitted diseases is never having sex. The second best way (which is actually just as safe if both people do it) is to have sex only with the person you are married to (and not with anyone if you're not married). If people did this, there'd be almost no sexually transmitted diseases. The third option is to mitigate the risks of STDs with "safe sex". I'd say it would be best for people to go with traditional values, but I encourage you - and everyone else - to go with "safe sex" as a second option if you're not going to go with traditional values.
-stormin
Dude - wtf? If someone has enough self-control to not have sex before marriage, they have enough self-control to not have extra-marital sex after they're married. Your statistics are meaninigless. They show people AREN'T treating sex as something that should be only between married couples, not that they CAN'T.
But the real problem I have with what you're saying is that you act as though it has to be either-or. I think that advocating traditional values is the best solution. People like you obviously difer. Since you're going to have sex anyway, I certainly want you to practice safe sex. But it's not really "safe" in the way that "no sex" is safe. There's always a real chance of you contracting diseases or getting (someone) pregnant.
So what's wrong with my solution:
1. Tell people the only absolutely safe sex is no sex until marriage, than only sex with a married partner who followed the same plan. Allow religious groups to advocate this as well (since practically every religion in existence opposes extra-marital sex traditionally, if not as much anymore.)
2. Tell people that if they really do want to have extra-marital sex, they should use condoms. And give them condoms if they are poor.
What's the issue there?
In any case, you're statistics about illegitimate children are just not really relevant.
-stormin
I totally agree with you in principle, but not in fact. The biggest hole in your arument is this:
There was this story about the Chechenya war, about a soldier who saw a father holding his dead daughter and looking at him with hate filled eyes, and understood they weren't going to win it. Why? Because once you take away everything a person has you can hardly do anything worse to them. What you get is somebody with nearly no reason to live but trying to get revenge.
If the majority of suicide bombers and terrorists were from the underclasses you'd have a very, very strong case. But they aren't. Terrorists are frequenty from the upper-middle classes. Just look at the London bombers - born and raised in London in the past few decades.
I'm not trying to absolve the US of guilt from past mistakes - we've made some whoppers. But just as some people are evil for a reason, sometimes people are just plain evil. I know I'm fulfilling Godwin's law here, but you have to ask yourself if undderstanding the Nazis would have really helped avert violence in WW2.
The tragedy of violent conflict is this: it only takes one party to iniate violence. If the other guy is bound and determined to inflict physical injury on you and yours then violence is inescapable. You either fight back, or you get killed.
I think it's important to hold open the door of understanding. Some violent conflicts are evitable. Sometimes civil disobdiance and non-violent forms of protest work. But the other guy can ALWAYS force you into violence - that has to be remembered.
And as far as the pointless war in Iraq goes; I wasn't really in favor of invasion in the first place. I had serious doubts. But I also think that IF America could successfully erect a working democracy there, the impact could be tremendous for good.
So what it comes down to is mostly this: do you think the terrorists are acting rationally out of legitimate grievances? I do not. We didn't kill Osama's family, his friends, we did no harm to him. We actualy armed and trained him to fight the Soviets (whoops) - so how is he like the father in Chechnya? He's not. That's the point.
-stormin
1. Condom use would also work. I'd certainly rather have people have sex outside of marriage with a condom than without. Still, condoms are not quite as good a solution as just not having sex (just in terms of effectiveness).
2. Its amazing to me that we'll have people use disease to back up thier so-called morals, nevermind the fact that most disease spreads other ways besides through sexual contact.
While it is possible for AIDS/HIV to spread through non-sexual contact, are you seriously suggesting it would be a world-wide health issue of this magnitude if you could only get it through, say, blood transfusion.
I agree that it is opportunist to jump on a disease as a way to reinforce morals, but it's also kind of silly to pretend that human choices have nothing to do with the spread of this disease.
-stormin
I think a lack of money obviously motivates theft.
We should set aside the definition of "poverty" then - and you should have stated this in the first place. Poverty does NOT mean - by any standardly accepted definition - merely the lack of immediate access to funds. But if you want to restrict our discussion to purely "lack of money motivates theft", that's fine. We can do that.
Which is the only part of it that we need to consider as motivation for theft.
This comment is too stupid to take seriously. See Ken Lay.
Apparently in your exhaustive research into free will philosophies you somehow missed Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Goethe, etc. If you take the risk and go outside and walk past a music store, you're responsible for the consequences. The risk may be very small, but you're choosing to take it. We are all responsible for everything that happens to us or we are responsible for nothing. You can't draw an arbitrary line at what a person should have foreseen.
I have not read either Goethe or Aurelius positions on free-will, but I'm rather familiar with Socrates and most of the other big-names in Philosophy from Socrates through Dennet. I can not think of any reading of any of what any of them said that would lead to your conclusion that people are responsible for all of what happens to them, or none of it.
I'll let you get away with "risking X" and "causing X" because even though I think it's philosophically shaky at best, I don't have the time to get into it. What I'll say instead is that you can't be responsible for things that you have 0 awareness of. You would say your brother knew there was some chance he'd get hit by a piano, he took the risk, it's his fault. I'd say he didn't know there was a piano, so he didn't choose to take that risk. To make a stronger example just imagine there is an alien race that are 3 feet high and travel in UFOs shaped like cigars. Your brother does not know they exist. So he has no way of choosing to take the risk of being zapped by their death ray when he walks out of his house one spring morning. And yet he is, indeed, zapped. You're saying he's responsible for being killed by beings he not only didn't know exist, but had no way of knowing existed? The only way to defend that is to say that "you risk everything" by going outside. But that's not useful, because you risk everything by staying inside too if we're going to get technical - so there's no choice you can make that will affect your risk. So either by virtue of lack of information or by virtue of lack of option, you can not choose (or even wish to choose) to take or avoid at least some risks. Thus you can not possibly be responsible for everything. Despite dropping a few names, I sincerely doubt any of your philosophers would have agreed to your absurd and outlandish position.
By his definition because you are responsible for theft, no other factors can influence it or have importance.
He did not make this claim. Nowhere does he say that. Are you sure you're arguing with the right people here? You are so utterly weird sometimes I think you've either got to be messing with us, or you've got to be skipping your meds. I'm aware that there are some sort of strange logical connections behind the things you say, but I'm truly astonished at how wildly inaccurate your portrayal of my own or Specs arguments really is.
It's a very simple concept: extenuating circumstances. Let's say I decide to shoot someone. I make the decision of my own free will. I aim at them, I pull the trigger, and I kill them. I'm responsible.
Does this mean no other factors have influence? Of course not! If they were trying to shoot me at the same time (say they even already fired a couple of times) then I'm justified in what I did. I'm not LESS RESPONSIBLE, I'm justified. What Spec is saying is that people are always - barring extremely unusual circumstances where their decision-making is impaired - responsible for theft. Tha
Some people seem to have the bizarre idea that things exist by themselves in some sort of vaccuum with no causes
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If only you'd applied that logic to the matter at hand, you'd have a much better understanding of this mysterious "American logic". The American theory that terrorists are just plain evil itself does not exist in a vacuum. It is a response to liberal notions (and I'm use the word in a descriptive and not pejorative sense) about punishment theory which seem to reduce personal responsibility almost to the point of exclusion. The basic idea is this new-fangled concept that punishment is about rehabilitation.
Ironically enough, one of the earliest opponents of rehabilitation theory was C. S. Lewis - a brit. You can read his famous essay on the subject here: http://www.angelfire.com/pro/lewiscs/humanitarian
Of course that was back in the 50s when punishment as rehabilitation was new. Since then the debate was come back a little right-wards from there, and most liberals now sort of mash together punishment-as-rehabilitation as a subset of punishment-as-deterrence.
The result is this vague philosophy that the best way to reduce crime is to see crime chiefly in terms of the sociological drivers. Eliminate those drivers, and you reduce the problem.
There are a number of issues with this.
1. It can be seen to eclipse personal responsibility.
2. It's not so simple to find the sociological drivers. We know that poverty and crime have a positive correlation, but this does NOT mean that poverty drives crime. Something else may drive both of them, or some other set of "something else's" may drive both of them.
3. It's not clear that eradication of poverty is even a coherent goal, or one that would not be worse than the cure. Standard of livings are not static. Poverty is based on deviation from the standard of living. So the only way to eradicate poverty is to eradicate differences in standard of living. This is likely either impossible or something that would result in a lower standard of living for everybody - including the poor.
Americans, as pragmatic as we tend to be, have started to come to the conclusion that 1 - it may not be really that valid to find sociological reasons for crime, terrorism, etc. (since there's still precious little evidence crime is CAUSED by poverty) and 2 - that in any case, even if someone has a reason to do something evil it may be wiser and more pragmatic to stop them from doing the evil thing first and figure out why they wanted to do it second.
You'd think it's obvious to say that "crime is caused by criminals" but lately the world seems so interested in understanding terrorists and criminals that we're in danger of running out of people who are willing to actually oppose them. So if you come along and don't pay any attention to the prior discussion then sure - it looks stupid. But when you see the insane liberal desire to cure criminals and to reason with terrorists it starts to make sense. I'm all in favor of curing criminals, but I'd rather lock them up first and cure them second. I'm all in favor of understanding terrorists, but I'd rather stop them from blowing shit up first.
Then again, I *am* just a crazy American.
-stormin
I was editing my post and accidentally hit submit, so the firs para is missing a statement. Here it is in full (missing sentences in bold):
This is the type of naive thinking indicative of your overall approach to arguing. First of all, poverty IS a long-term phenomena. If you go into a store to buy lunch today and realize you left your wallet at home, are you in a state of poverty until you go back and get the wallet? I would hope you agree that that is silly. It would be a logically consistent definition, but utterly useless for the discussion we're having. Furthermore, poverty is about more than just the possession of goods and cash (just visit any farmer who owns a few thousand acres, lots of farm equipment, etc, but is still struggling to make ends meet). A good working definition of poverty would be something like: chronic lack of economic power relative to societal norms If that is the definition of poverty, it would be very counter-intuitive for common theft to ever elevate anyone from poverty. Indeed, if it worked at all you'd expect to find people who'd used theft to go from poverty to middle or even upper class lifestyles. At least in America, this would seem to be the exception.
Since you responded to Spec, I can only wait in eager anticipation for you to respond to my post as well. Judging by the poor quality of your response, however, it will most likely be a let-down when it arrives. Since you still don't actually have a cogent point of your own, I'll adopt your guerrilla-warfare style of posting:
Poverty is lack of money and goods. Theft is a means of acquiring money or goods. Thus, theft directly mitigates poverty, even if not on a long-term basis.
This is the type of naive thinking indicative of your overall approach to arguing. First of all, poverty IS a long-term phenomena. If you go into a store to buy lunch today and realize you left your wallet at home, are you in a state of poverty until you go back and get the wallet? I would hope you agree that that is silly. Furthermore, poverty is about more than just the possession of goods and cash (just visit any farmer who owns a few thousand acres, lots of farm equipment, etc, but is still struggling to make ends meet). If that is the definition of poverty, it would be very counter-intuitive for common theft to ever elevate anyone from poverty. Indeed, if it worked at all you'd expect to find people who'd used theft to go from poverty to middle or even upper class lifestyles. At least in America, this would seem to be the exception.
You only took this point to be obvious based on your extremely superficial and naive definition of poverty as meaning "lack of immediately available funds".
People are victims of circumstances. If a piano falls on my brother, he was a victim of circumstance. That does not mean he was not responsible for walking by the music store and taking the risk of all those instrument related injuries, but that was not my point. Your implication that someone cannot be both responsible for their actions and a victim of circumstance is a false dichotomy.
Your writings indicate that you are not really familiar at all with the philosophical free-will discussion. It would be a very strange philosophy indeed that would hold a person responsible for having a piano fall on them. The actual definition of "responsibility" is very tricky, but there's no definition I know of that extends responsibility to people for being the victim of an act they could not foresee and did not cause. In your example your brother would be responsible for walking under the piano but NOT for the piano falling on him. So he would not, by any rational means, be responsible for having the piano fall on them. I'm not saying there's no room for shared responsibility - but this is not an example of that. Go do some reading on the free-will issue to get a good background in agent-causation and other theories for personal responsibility.
Your ethics are too inflexible and dogmatic for me. If my child was starving to death while someone else lived in luxury and threw out hundreds of pounds of food a day and refused to help, I'd have no ethical issues in stealing from them. If a man had a device that he planned to use to destroy the earth, then I'd have no ethical issues with stealing it from him to prevent this. I can respect your beliefs if you disagree, but don't try to hold me or anyone else to your belief system.
What the Hell are you talking about? Refusing to hold someone responsible does not mean condemning them. I see the exact failure of understanding you have here. Spec says "I hold people responsible, period." You think this means "no matter what the circumstances, theft is always wrong". But responsible DOES NOT MEAN guilty. If you steal a loaf of bread to feed your child YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT THEFT. But that doesn't mean what you did was wrong. If you rescue a kitty from starving, you're responsible for that too. The difference is that YOU think that if you are desperate to steal to live, this some how means you are no longer a free-agent. That somehow you're decision-making capacity is suddenly replaced by need. This is not the case. Your OPTIONS ma
Except in cases of rape, people can easily avoid getting infected with HIV/AIDS. Abstinence or safe sex cost nothing, and they have the additional benefit of reducing population growth.
This is true for adults, but not for the children of people infected with HIV/AIDS. I'm all in favor of personal responsibility and the obvious solution the spread of AIDS does seem to be "stop having sex outside of marriage", but it would still be a fairly massive world-wide problem just in terms of those who already have the disease - especially those who have the disease through no fault of their own.
What's frustrating is the way it seems as though this has to be an either-or. Either we ask people to keep their sexual drives under control OR we try to save those who catch the disease. Pity we can't do both.
-stormin
Despite what a lot of people in the "the market will solve it" crowd here think certain things should not be privatised, medical research being one of them.
Clever you, except for the fact that this IS an example of privatized medical research. The example says the opposite of what you want it to say.
-stormin
What is with you Slashdot leeches? You guys drive me nuts. You sit in the wings, waiting for someone to open up a perceived weakness, and then swoop in like vultures... for what? Ego? The joy of dishonestly attacking arguments? Do you get a thrill out of it - or are you just a troll who writes long posts?
In internet debate what is your goal? In my opinion, the goal should be constructive or you should shut up. There are two ways to be constructive: either proposing or defending arguments or critiquing/attacking arguments with intellectual honesty. If you're not doing one of these two things, you're just wasting everyone's time and getting in the way of people who want discussion to be productive.
Your post is a perfect example of pissing on an argument in unhelpful ways. You demonstrate a complete lack of ability to understand things like context. Rather than debate the overall arguments that I propose, you choose to pick apart the argument piece by piece - choosing to understand each distinct element of an argument in a way that provides you maximal leverage to score points. The first evidence that this is what you're doing is the fact that you cut the argument into almost entirely 1-sentence- long shreds and then attack each one. This may leave the rhetorical impression that you've cut my argument to ribbons, but there's a reason that serious philosophers, thinkers, and writers don't respond to one another's arguments in a line-by-line fashion. Reducing an argument to merely its parts rejects any and all of those parts of the argument which emerge from the structure of those parts combined. You could make any of the greatest writers of all time look like an idiot if you simply take their text and attack it line-by-line. I encourage you to try it with, say, Kant, if you don't believe me. But what does this prove? Only your own inability to see the forest for the trees. Your own inability to understand before you attack.
I would prefer to respond to your argument in kind - but this is exactly what I'm saying: you've presented no argument. There's no cohesive structure to your reply, no thesis, no claim. You are the ultimate intellectual coward for failing to actually expose yourself to return volleys of criticism.
Am I whining that you don't play fair? If you think the object of debate and discussion is to "win", then yes, I am. Your strategy is vastly superior in the same way that a street fighter would likely beat the crap out of a boxer who boxed according to the rules of boxing. Just kick 'em in the nads - you win. But if the point of debate and discussion is the revelation of truth - then you fail miserably. You neither present an actual argument of your own, nor does your attack of my argument get us any closer to the truth because your response is nothing but a patchwork mess of semi-appropriate comments, legitimate grievances, failures to understand, and batshit loco head-scratchers. It's a morass of intellectual refuse that serves no purpose other than to pollute conversation and (we can only assume) meet some deep-rooted psychological need of yours.
Examples? I have plenty.
Poverty leads to crime does not mean stealing an iPod is the direct result of poverty. Later you call out the fact that correlation is not causation, yet you base your argument upon that assumption here.
Your point is that poverty -> crime is not equivalent to crime -> poverty. This is basic logic, absolutely correct, and yet has no bearing on "my argument". I seriously doubt you could even tell me what my argument is. Not as in "tell me what I think my argument is", but as in "actually present what you think my argument is". You're just responding to fragments, you've given no indication whatsoever you're actually aware these fragments add up to something (or are supposed to add up to something) so how are you qualified to state what does, or does not, feed into my argument?
This is another mistake. Ethical/moral motivations
Thank you Captain States-The-Obvious.
1. I was arguing for personal responsibility in addition to, and not instead of, sociological factors. A discussion of either one without the other is incomplete.
2. I think a lot of people who claim to take personal responsibility into account really just give the concept minimal lip-service before getting back to their peoples-as-trained-animals philosophy.
-stormin
(I'm not saying humans aren't technically animals. I'm OK with that. But I believe they are animals with free(r) will and a great(er) degree of personal responsibility than, say, a dog or a cat.)
You're definitely fitting the bill for liberal by my personal standards thanks to obviously bleeding heart statements like these: However poverty breeds desperation, and desperate people do desperate things.
... drive these people to make these choices.
Would you really typify the avg London street thug as "desperate"? They have no recourse, you say, other than to steal iPods? For food? To pay rent? To supplement their income? To pay tuition or buy books? Because if I was desperte to get out of poverty - that's the route I'd be taking. I might be stealing something like books or a computer to code on, but iPods? Show me these guys are cashing the iPods in to buy a sandwich and I'll start to feel like they have no recourse.
A much better explanation of the link between poverty and crime (in this case) is that your average street thug has less to lose. I don't have an iPod. I'd like one. I'd really like one actually. So I'm incented to take one - and it makes more economic sense to not pay for it rather than to pay for it. Leaving aside my own beliefs about morality, the strictly practical reason why I'm not actually tempted to steal one is simple: I have no criminal record and I'd rather not have one. It could mean losing my job, which would mean possibly losing my house, which puts me and my wife on the street with a new baby on the way. Being invested in society provides me with a lot of incentive not to get caught. But if you have less of a stake in society then you are less susceptible to deterrence.
But even this is just a theory. The only FACT we have is that high poverty correlates to high crime. For all we know it could be because some people hate work and would rather steal for a living than work for a living and it just so happens that crime doesn't pay very well. Not saying I think this is true - just pointing out what a bleeding heart you have to skip straight from the poverty/crime correlation to some explanation of stealing iPods as desperate cry for help.
The fact is you're just not qualified to say much about the relationship between crime and poverty anyway because your understanding of statistics is so damn poor. poverty is the largest single driver for this kind of low level crime Correlation DOES NOT EQUAL causation. This isn't even stat 101, it's like what you have to know to get into stat 101.
So your whole post is rife with these unjustified assumptions. That iPod thieves are desperate, that poverty causes crime, etc. But the worst point of all is that you say conditions
Are you saying that if you were poor you would somehow no longer have the ability to make decisions? That you would be coerced into stealing iPods? That you would be DRIVEN to make that choice? I happen to believe that humans are free creatures. Being poor may change the makeup of the decision - but a poor person is 100% as capable of making a choice as a rich person. The only thing that changes are the inputs. The actual capacity to decide is not influenced by how much money is in your wallet.
What you are in essence saying (though I'm sure you will protest) is that poor people are sub-human. Because of their circumstances, they can't operate at the level of rational, self-governed thought that we privileged elite can. It's like white-man's burden all over again. You see some fundamental difference between us and them, and it's our duty - as the privileged elite - to control them. These are the inclinations of a despot and a dictator. Sure - a benevolent one - but a tyrant none the less. You see poor people not as independent agents, but as cogs who driven to act by societal forces.
Anyone with this attitude should be kept as far away from public policy decisions as possible. Your attitudes about the facts of the case are naive, and your assumptions about human behavior are authoritarian in the guise of sympathy. Sometimes going easy on people is not the right thing to do - someti
You, sir, are a moron.
I will quote from my post: I complained about bad grammar making a post unreadable
So the only dolt here is you. I could care less about proper rules of grammar for their own sake (which is pretty much the definition of a grammar nazi). What's important is being able to communicate. It's hard enough to get your meaning across using only typed words (no facial or voice cues), but mashing the words together in such a way that there's just no coherence severely compounds the problem.
So maybe you're actually interested in having some pissing contest about who can conform to which standard of proper grammar better, or which standard of grammar is superior (honor vs. honour), but I'll stick to the point that I actually made (and that sailed over your head): bad grammar is a seriously bad thing when it prevents the average reader from understanding what you wrote.
The only thing more obnoxious than a smug know-it-all is a smug know-it-all that completely missed the point.
-stormin
Poverty does correlate to higher crime rates. So do a lot of things - like lack of education. Poverty and education do not steal iPods, however.
The GPs point was that even if you have a situation that may be favorable for increasing crime rates, the crimes are still committed by PEOPLE. If you have a libertarian bent, or if you belief in human autonomy at all, then in any given crime you blame the criminal FIRST.
There's a belief out there that those with a more liberal bent tend to eclipse personal responsibility and act as though being poor somehow makes you less responsible for your own actions - less human. The response from those with a more conservative bent (e.g. me) is that if you're poor you have more to gain and less to lose from crime, but this means you have incentive to commit a crime. Having incentive to commit a crime is not the same as being forced to commit a crime. And so I, and many others, would consider the mugger to be responsible for the mugging.
So poverty - which creates incentive - really should be listed as a separate issue then the personal responsibility of those who commit the crimes.
-stormin
Submission title is definitely ambiguous.
5 715693). Apparently some people are offended by good grammar.
But the last time I complained about bad grammar making a post unreadable it got modded as flamebait (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=191121&cid=1
-stormin
LOL, man.
I'm just looking for a little legibility? Is that so much to ask?
-stormin
(note to real grammar nazis, I'm aware that I used "legibility" incorrectly there, but look at the alliteration! We're going to call this one 'artistic license'.)
So it now seems that stating the obvious on slashdot is flamebait.
Oh well, it's probably 'cause I mentioned religion. LOOK AT MY NAME!!! Can we say "irony"?
Sheesh.
-stormin
I'm not a grammar nazi or anything, but I have to ask - is punctuation against your religion or something?
Seriously, give us poor readers a hand. I've tried to make sense of your comment for a couple of seconds, and by the time I started re-reading the entire thing I just gave up.
Honestly - how do you expect to actuaclly be able to communicate with anyone?
-stormin
I tossed out just one distro, not several. And it was probably a mistake for the reason you pointed out.
But IF someone's going to want to keep their hardware then what are they going to do: install win xp or a linux distro?
-stormin