"Once such a domain exists, sites that don't join the.xxx TLD have a greater risk of lawsuits and criminal actions against them. A site that offers information about health issues that impinge upon sexuality can be deemed too dirty for the regular intarweb."
That's a good point, and it points to a larger issue of why free speech should be interpreted extremely liberally. Even so, these site could move to ".xxx" as well. They would then have two arguments against being shut down: 1. We're not pornography. 2. Even if we were, we're in the "dirty zone" anyway.
All in all, I still think a ".xxx" TLD would help rather than hinder free speech.
"The Internet was built by and for adults, and the presumption should be that a site is for adults unless otherwise specified."
Not all adults want to see all or every one of those sites either. Just because a library is built by and for adults doesn't mean that when I walk in there I expect to see people having sex. The.xxx TLD is a good idea because:
1. It's voluntary - no fascist government is defining pornography. The owners of the pornographic sites do. 2. It would provide filters with an easy, foolproof way to block a lot of sites with zero false positives.
A benefit for the pornographic sites is that lawsuits would be more likely to fail since the.xxx TLD would be an explicit "brown bag".
"To counter the notion that my statement was predicated upon the assumption of you being selfish, I included the clause 'Regardless of whether or not you're selfish.'"
You did... but then proceeded to assume selfishness anyway.
"That you find these facts 'hypothetical'--as if a person can think something other than what he thinks, then, presumably, act in a manner inconsistent with his thoughts--is what I often refer to as a 'startling disconnect from reality.'"
They weren't facts. They were hypothets. The statement was, basically, IF (someone offered you money to kill your family AND you were purely selfish) THEN you would do it. There's no disconnect from reality. Even if one were selfish, he wouldn't kill his family by that statement unless someone offered him money to. I could define p's and q's and do a full logic proof for you, but I somehow doubt that would help you...
"...my argument does not hinge upon its frame of reference. It rests on two main premises: 1) that people act to obtain and keep that which they value and nothing else..."
That sounds like an assumption of selfishness to me. Let's look at your definition and see if it does to you.
"'"SELF-ISH - Regarding one's own interest chiefly or solely; influenced in actions by a view to private advantage.' That is my definition."
"People act to obtain and keep that which they value and nothing else" versus "regarding one's own interest chiefly or solely". Where do you see a difference between those? You can't take an assumption away by rephrasing it.
"To start, the notion of a selfless desire is a contradiction in terms: desires originate from nowhere but the self."
Well, you've taken the dictionary definition as your definition now, and that only selfish things originate from the self does not follow from your definition. A counterexample is that a desire not "regarding one's own interest chiefly or solely" or "influenced... by a view to private advantage" (and I know I mutated that a little, but the dictionary definition defines selfish relative to people instead of abstract concepts) would be unselfish. For example, I desire that less logging be done in the Amazon rain forest. Whether logging is done in the Amazon rain forest doesn't really affect me too much personally, but I think it's important for all mankind that the logging be controlled. I don't care enough about it to do anything, but other people no more affected by it than I am do care, and they take unselfish actions based on their caring when they get together with picket signs and shout about it to try and get the logging to stop.
"An organism cannot act without some inner compulsion; the mind cannot spontaneously order a muscle in the absence of intent."
Yes it can. It's called a reflex. If a doctor hits you on the knee with a special type of hammer and you don't kick, there's something wrong with you.
"...the thing that acts cannot act out of reference to itself. The notion that persons can act out of reference to themselves is, again, that 'startling disconnect from reality' to which I often refer. This is the pitfall of all but a handful of philosophies, incidentally."
Since I'm having enough trouble getting you to see zero-order logic, I'd really rather not expand this already off-topic debate to less well-grounded philosophy as well. Most of the above makes no sense anyway. For example, what do you mean by a thing's "reference to itself"? It's so vague as to be meaningless.
"What you fail to grasp about your 'logic proof' is its origin: your own thoughts, desires and convictions. Regardless of whether or not you're selfish (which you are), whatever you honesly believe 'a selfish person' would desire can only be your own desire."
This is a reasonable argument. I now see the reasoning behind what I considered groundless personal attacks. I didn't see the reasoning until you just explicitly stated it here because it is severely flawed for two reasons. The first is that the statements were hypothetical. The second is that you assume your desired conclusion in your argument.
When you state that "whatever you honesly believe 'a selfish person' would desire can only be your own desire", you tacitly assume that everyone is purely selfish. You had me at first because the assumption is so subtle: a person would have purely selfish desires iff ("if and only if") that person is selfish. Thus, you're breaking the rules: whether or not all people are entirely selfish is what we are disputing. If your argument to prove that everyone is selfish rests on assuming that everyone is selfish, you haven't really said anything.
"There's no way around it. BUT, if you really do not wish to murder your family or leave your sick spouse, then your projection of this 'selfish person' is dishonest (which it is)."
We may have a definitional problem here. I hope we don't, because if we do, we have to resolve it before we can continue any sort of rational debate. If we can't agree, then we don't have enough common assumptions to be able to convince each other of anything. In the above statement, you seem to be defining "selfish" as something similar to "self motivating", which is not my understanding of the word. In short, if you are saying that if a person takes an action of his own free will, it must be a selfish action by the definition of selfishness, I disagree with your definition.
Please allow me to give you my definition now. The following paragraph assumes the existence of an unselfish person for the purpose of illustrating my definition of selfishness. Since you think no such person exists, you will disagree with the truth of these statements. That's okay, because I'm just trying to illustrate my definition of selfishness, not prove you wrong. I think my definition is commonly accepted. If you disagree with me, we need to resolve the definitional ambiguity before continuing to debate whether all people are selfish. I'll probably just take your definition and see if I still disagree with you if you're operating under a different definition because I don't like debating definitions. However, if you do disagree with me, I request that you make your own definition of selfishness explicit.
That a person has a desire does not imply it is a selfish desire. Some desires are selfish, and some are unselfish. A selfish desire is a desire to act in a way that would further a person's own well-being. Sometimes acting out the desire would harm another person's well-being, but not always. An unselfish desire is a desire to act in a way that furthers the well-being of another person or group of people. Sometimes acting out an unselfish desire would harm a person's own well-being, but not always.
Just to be clear: under my definition of selfishness, the above paragraph is true iff there exists a person who is not selfish. If you agree that the existence of an unselfish person implies that the above paragraph is true, I think we have similar enough definitions that we can debate rationally. As a side effect, you should agree that your statement that "if you really do not wish to murder your family or leave your sick spouse, your projection of this 'selfish person' is dishonest" is false if I am an unselfish person, whether or not I am married (I never said I was). As a person who is not entirely selfish, I have unselfish desires, and one of those desires could easily be a desire to take care of those I love.
"Considering it's an obvious copy, as a matter of fact the copying is the whole draw, it would be fairly easy."
Wrong. COPYRIGHT PROTECTS EXPRESSIONS, NOT IDEAS! If the FreeCiv developers had copied Civilization source code or used Civilization graphics, they'd be in trouble. They did not. FreeCiv is totally clean. It is legal for FreeCiv to do what it did to Civilization for the same reason it is legal for Linux to do what it did to UNIX. Or do you think SCO has a case, too?
"If one can't trust the jury's judgement in general, then one should do away with juries totally."
Yes. Juries are obsolete, and they weren't that good an idea to begin with anyway. I probably would demand a judge trial if I were charged with a crime unless I had reason to believe the judge was corrupt. Btw, I don't know if a defendant can demand a trial by judge. If someone knows (really knows), please inform me.
Your contention that people are to be graded and judged solely by physical health, that the physically unfit are "liabilities," and that "selfish reasoning suggests the healthy spouse should leave the sick spouse" does not follow anything I said. It is your own belief, Dr. Strangelove.
Have you never done a logic proof, or are you just being ignorant for the sake of argument? People are not entirely selfish _because if they were they would judge people like that_. Of course I don't judge the moral worth of someone based solely on their physical health, _because I am not a purely selfish person_. I don't love my family because they are "assets". I don't think that a man should leave his wife if she gets seriously ill (or vice versa). _If I were purely selfish, I would_. That there exist people, including me, who wouldn't do these things (would you?) disproves your statement that all people are purely selfish.
Now as far as "selfishness necessitates violence" goes, I was stating that _pure selfishness would imply violent behavior_ in that instance. Selfish behavior isn't always violent, and it isn't always evil. It would be evil to kill your family for money. I hope you can see this.
I can't make it any clearer than this. If you still don't get it, you either lack any understanding of rational thought or are being intellectually dishonest with yourself.
I ignored this stuff first time, but I see you are going to keep up these bizarre, ad hominem attacks, so I'll correct you in both cases now.
"Your belief that selfishness necessitates violence is a confession of the fact that you believe people desire to act in such a way. What does that say about you?"
That selfishness necessitates violence does not follow from what I said. I don't know how you got that I said that; I've looked at my comment and I never said selfishness necessitates violence. In fact, selfishness isn't even a prerequisite for violence. Now, I agree that violence often does result from selfishness, but I never made even that statement in my comment.
"I _do_ see that you evaluate a person's worth by their physical health."
No, you think you see it, or at least you'd like to pretend to see it because it fits with your twisted view of humanity. I was assuming your description of a loved one as "an asset" temporarily in order to derive a contradiction. Let me spell it out for you: Assume that everyone is totally selfish and care for other human beings only because they are "assets" to him. If a spouse becomes seriously ill and is dying, requiring constant care, he becomes a liability. Since the relationship is no longer beneficial to the healthy spouse, selfish reasoning suggests the healthy spouse should leave the sick spouse. However, I have a case where not only does the healthy spouse not leave the sick spouse, but spends countless hours caring for her. Contradiction, and you lose.
"In fact, the only genuine example of altruistic behavior would be when one sacrifices something significant for a complete stranger _for no reason other than the receiver's well-being_."
Why would it have to be a complete stranger? You haven't proven that. Further, to act altruistically one doesn't have to complete disregard his own well-being. He just has to take the other person's well-being into account and make a decision that, while it may benefit him, won't benefit him as much as an alternative action would. Basically, to act altruistically the person must incur an opportunity cost that outweighs his action. An act that saves someone's life might net $1,000,000 for the actor and still be altruistic if by helping the other person he forgoes the opportunity to make $2,000,000 instead.
"This, of course, never occurs as we find the impetus is always social pressures/religious delusions, etc."
Social conventions and religous beliefs encouraging unselfish behavior are created by society. Society is composed of people. Therefore, some people have unselfish motives. QED.
"A man's spouse, children and closest friends are assets to him."
Well, that may be true, but how do you explain the man who stays by his wife even when she has a dreadful illness, and spends countless hours caring for her? I know someone who did just that. That answer is a cop-out, and you probably knew it when you said it. All I have to do is find one example of nonselfish behavior to disprove your general statement that EVERYONE IS IN IT--THIS THING WE CALL LIFE--FOR THEIR OWN GOOD.
"There is no legal concept for what you just made up." Well, I wasn't speaking in legal concepts. I thought the term "wrongful acquittal" was obvious enough that it needed no definition. I still don't think it needs a definition, but I'll give one anyway. Someone is wrongfully acquitted if the following two conditions hold: 1. They are acquitted of the crime for which they were charged. 2. There does not exist reasonable doubt that they committed the crime for which they were charged.
The goal of the justice system is to dispense justice. Whenever someone gets off even though they committed the crime, that is unjust, but we as a society think it's worse if someone gets punished for a crime we didn't commit, so we only convict if there isn't "reasonable doubt" that they are guilty. If there isn't resasonable doubt that they committed the crime but they get off anyway, the justice system has failed to do its duty, and that is wrong.
"They overrode it, let's face facts here, because it offends their religion." I agree with you that if the Supreme Court ruled on their personal biases instead of the law, they are being activist, and that is bad. I'm not sure if I agree with you that this particular case was incorrectly decided because I've neither the Oregon statute in question nor the Supreme Court decision.
Conservative activism isn't any better than liberal activism, and I certainly agree with you that there are conservative (especially neocon) judges who are corrupt and are making bad rulings. I wasn't making a right wing vs. left wing statement; I was talking about the concept of abuse of judicial power in general. Both major parties abuse power, and it's equally bad when either does it.
I was partially incorrect in my previous statement: If a jury abuses its power and acquits someone on an incorrect basis, the judge doesn't have the power to rectify the situation. This is due to double jeapordy. It's somewhat of a shame that this means criminals go free, but I can see why the prohibition on double jeapordy exists and that a jury's verdict should be given more weight when, if the judge were corrupt, an innocent man might go to jail or die.
Jury nullification is still an abuse of power in this case, just as legislating from the bench is. In the case of wrongful criminal acquittals, it's just an abuse of power that is impossible for the judge to fix. This doesn't make it any more valid than legislating from the bench. Congress and the Executive Office need to cooperate, and correction often must wait until the corrupt judge dies.
Jury nullification and judicial activism are two sides of the same coin: both are cases of corruption in the judiciary that usurp democratic process and carry a threat to impose tyranny of the minority. It is fortunate that juries are weak. Were they more powerful, jury nullification might be more of a problem than it is. Fortunately, all a corrupt nullifying jury can do is let a single criminal go free. Corrupt activist judges have the power to make precedent and send innocent people to jail. They are thus a bigger threat.
"Ive [sic] read Thoreau, but I fail to see how the definition of a term as it was 150 odd years ago has anything to do with how a term is defined now. Words do not have static unshifting meaning, they change with time."
How profound! Good point! Let's look up civil disobedience and see what it means right now, shall we?
From [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience%5 D: "Protesters practice this non-violent form of civil disorder with the expectation that they will be arrested, or even attacked or beaten by the authorities. Protesters often undergo training in advance on how to react to arrest or to attack, so that they will do so in a manner that quietly or limply resists without threatening the authorities."
You lose. Badly.
You can argue Wikipedia as a source if you feel pedantic now that you have lost, and I'll admit that words mean whatever the listener wants them to mean. I have a different definition of civil disobedience than you do, but you're free to define the word however you want. Unless you define it sufficiently similar to the rest of us, though, you won't be able to communicate with anyone on the topic very well. You have demonstrated this quite clearly.
"But you have to watch the ones who say they aren't, that they're here for the sake of everyone else, and that you should be too. They're running a con game and they want your blood. Unless it involves physical violence, government is never the solution."
What the hell are you talking about? You think that everyone would murder his spouse, children and closest friends for a fee if he could get away with it? I'll admit that people can be frustratingly selfish sometimes, but it's not true that selfishness is the only motivator of mankind. Do you think that Habitat for Humanity is "running a con game"?
Your statement reflects extreme immaturity, and I hope you're just a cynical 14 year old and still have time to mature. A philosophy like that suggests that you can do nothing but harm to the sum of human happiness.
Parent is correct, people. Your own quote says that "jury nullification is not normally described as a right."
Jury nullification is a result of THE JURY ABUSING ITS POWER. If a jury attempts, a judge can (and a good judge will) rule that the jury ruled on an incorrect basis and reverse the jury's verdict. If the jury and judge disagree on the law and push comes to shove, the judge wins. This is a good thing: imagine a scenario where there was no evidence against a defendant on trial for murder except a slew of character witnesses testifying to the ignorant, bigoted Christian jury that the accused denied God and any absolute standard for morality. Judges are sometimes corrupt, yes, but they're still better than a group of 12 dumbasses taken off the street who know the laws of neither the land nor probability.
If you're still a fan of jury trials, read up on the Scopes trial and get back to me.
This is complete and utter BS. Repeat after me, slowly: A SALE IS NOT A CONTRACT. You DO NOT enter a contract when you buy food, clothes, lawnmowers, computers, or CD's. It is a SALE. That's DIFFERENT. In fact, in many cases Linux users have been able to successfully sue in small claims court for a Windows refund. They had bought the computer, but REFUSED to agree to the contract that Micro$oft tries to shove down our throats.
The earliest patent law by wikipedia's count is 1474. This pre-dates the "Middle Ages".
Umm, no... you really need to read up on basic European history before you start shooting your mouth off. 1474 is WAY after the European Middle Ages. See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance%5D. Actually, the fact that patent laws weren't passed until 1474 supports the anti-patent argument, since it means that THE RENAISSANCE HAPPENED WITHOUT PATENTS.
As far as copyright, there are hundreds of examples of societies with no or very weak copyright that produced rich creative works. Take the Greeks, for example. Almost all of their myths are anonymous, and it's a good thing they DIDN't have copyright because otherwise Homer's works may not have been passed on to us. The Romans had a few copyright laws, but very rarely enforced them. Piracy was rampant, yet _The Aeneid_ still got done.
Arguing through historical example isn't going to help you on this one, anyway. It is easier now to copy creative works and useful ideas than it ever was in the past. This means that the opportunity cost of preserving the copyright and patent monopolies is higher than ever. When the sole true marginal cost of an electronic book is the bandwidth needed to download it, virtually the entire price of the book is due to a monopoly. Combine this with an elastic demand curve for music at near-zero prices and you find that near-infinite copyright is a very inefficient form of resource reallocation.
Is there a better alternative to a limited copyright system? I don't know; we'd have to try some stuff and see. Creative works will ALWAYS be written - they have been since the beginning of time - but if we want to allocate more resources to it than the artists are willing to allocate by themselves (which is a big if - _I_ don't want another Britney Spears), we do need some sort of government interference. As a first guess, how about just subsidizing the artists? We already subsidize scientists through the NSF, why not repeal copyright and subsidize artists too?
Re:Does anybody buy this Bullshit?
on
Pornified
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· Score: 1
There was an article in my local newspaper about five years ago on this topic. Porn actually DID spur the INVENTION, not just adoption, of quite a few Internet technologies. Here are two examples that I can remember off the top of my head. I'm afraid I can't debate these too well, since I'm just regurgitating what I read in the newspaper.
(1). It spurred the development of image compression at the beginning of mainstream Internet adoption so they could transmit their wares over 14.4K pipes. (2). It invented Internet marketing techniques such as giving away "samples" of the product (think crippled shareware).
There were many more, but these are the only ones I can remember right now.
Hmmm. How about if someone buys it, opens the package, and then resells it to his friend, who doesn't even see the box and so can't _possibly_ have agreed to any contract. That looks like enough to invoke first sale to me.
If restrictions got too bad, maybe companies would form to do this. Their employees would buy these products at retail en masse, then sell them to geeks who like to tinker, exhausting the first sale.
Wrong: you misread the category. The Entertainment and Recreation category includes LIVE performances and the like. The motion Picture and sound recording industries are included in the INFORMATION sector of the economy, which takes in almost $900 billion dollars per year! I agree with your point that the tactic wouldn't really work; it's still a small fraction of the total economy, but you nevertheless underrepresented our society's allocation to movies & music.
Government should only subsidize goods with spillover benefits - where a good benefits more people than just the person who buys it. One person buying Internet access doesn't benefit anyone else (unencrypted wireless networks aside; that's a different issue). So why do you think government should subsidize Internet access? Because it's good for the people who get to buy it at subsidized prices? Subsidizing Internet access would lead to an overallocation of resources to Internet infrastructure in this country. If people aren't willing to buy Internet access at the prices private industry would charge to provide it, they don't want it enough to justify diverting the resources used to provide Internet access from their alternate uses.
-linuxrocks123
My opinions are my own and are not necessarily shared by my employer. This is not legal advice.
"There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is -- other people!"
-Jean Paul Sartre
Slashdot Mirror
"Once such a domain exists, sites that don't join the .xxx TLD have a greater risk of lawsuits and criminal actions against them. A site that offers information about health issues that impinge upon sexuality can be deemed too dirty for the regular intarweb."
That's a good point, and it points to a larger issue of why free speech should be interpreted extremely liberally. Even so, these site could move to ".xxx" as well. They would then have two arguments against being shut down:
1. We're not pornography.
2. Even if we were, we're in the "dirty zone" anyway.
All in all, I still think a ".xxx" TLD would help rather than hinder free speech.
"The Internet was built by and for adults, and the presumption should be that a site is for adults unless otherwise specified."
.xxx TLD is a good idea because:
.xxx TLD would be an explicit "brown bag".
Not all adults want to see all or every one of those sites either. Just because a library is built by and for adults doesn't mean that when I walk in there I expect to see people having sex. The
1. It's voluntary - no fascist government is defining pornography. The owners of the pornographic sites do.
2. It would provide filters with an easy, foolproof way to block a lot of sites with zero false positives.
A benefit for the pornographic sites is that lawsuits would be more likely to fail since the
"To counter the notion that my statement was predicated upon the assumption of you being selfish, I included the clause 'Regardless of whether or not you're selfish.'"
... but then proceeded to assume selfishness anyway.
... by a view to private advantage" (and I know I mutated that a little, but the dictionary definition defines selfish relative to people instead of abstract concepts) would be unselfish. For example, I desire that less logging be done in the Amazon rain forest. Whether logging is done in the Amazon rain forest doesn't really affect me too much personally, but I think it's important for all mankind that the logging be controlled. I don't care enough about it to do anything, but other people no more affected by it than I am do care, and they take unselfish actions based on their caring when they get together with picket signs and shout about it to try and get the logging to stop.
You did
"That you find these facts 'hypothetical'--as if a person can think something other than what he thinks, then, presumably, act in a manner inconsistent with his thoughts--is what I often refer to as a 'startling disconnect from reality.'"
They weren't facts. They were hypothets. The statement was, basically, IF (someone offered you money to kill your family AND you were purely selfish) THEN you would do it. There's no disconnect from reality. Even if one were selfish, he wouldn't kill his family by that statement unless someone offered him money to. I could define p's and q's and do a full logic proof for you, but I somehow doubt that would help you...
"...my argument does not hinge upon its frame of reference. It rests on two main premises: 1) that people act to obtain and keep that which they value and nothing else..."
That sounds like an assumption of selfishness to me. Let's look at your definition and see if it does to you.
"'"SELF-ISH - Regarding one's own interest chiefly or solely; influenced in actions by a view to private advantage.' That is my definition."
"People act to obtain and keep that which they value and nothing else" versus "regarding one's own interest chiefly or solely". Where do you see a difference between those? You can't take an assumption away by rephrasing it.
"To start, the notion of a selfless desire is a contradiction in terms: desires originate from nowhere but the self."
Well, you've taken the dictionary definition as your definition now, and that only selfish things originate from the self does not follow from your definition. A counterexample is that a desire not "regarding one's own interest chiefly or solely" or "influenced
"An organism cannot act without some inner compulsion; the mind cannot spontaneously order a muscle in the absence of intent."
Yes it can. It's called a reflex. If a doctor hits you on the knee with a special type of hammer and you don't kick, there's something wrong with you.
"...the thing that acts cannot act out of reference to itself. The notion that persons can act out of reference to themselves is, again, that 'startling disconnect from reality' to which I often refer. This is the pitfall of all but a handful of philosophies, incidentally."
Since I'm having enough trouble getting you to see zero-order logic, I'd really rather not expand this already off-topic debate to less well-grounded philosophy as well. Most of the above makes no sense anyway. For example, what do you mean by a thing's "reference to itself"? It's so vague as to be meaningless.
"What you fail to grasp about your 'logic proof' is its origin: your own thoughts, desires and convictions. Regardless of whether or not you're selfish (which you are), whatever you honesly believe 'a selfish person' would desire can only be your own desire."
This is a reasonable argument. I now see the reasoning behind what I considered groundless personal attacks. I didn't see the reasoning until you just explicitly stated it here because it is severely flawed for two reasons. The first is that the statements were hypothetical. The second is that you assume your desired conclusion in your argument.
When you state that "whatever you honesly believe 'a selfish person' would desire can only be your own desire", you tacitly assume that everyone is purely selfish. You had me at first because the assumption is so subtle: a person would have purely selfish desires iff ("if and only if") that person is selfish. Thus, you're breaking the rules: whether or not all people are entirely selfish is what we are disputing. If your argument to prove that everyone is selfish rests on assuming that everyone is selfish, you haven't really said anything.
"There's no way around it. BUT, if you really do not wish to murder your family or leave your sick spouse, then your projection of this 'selfish person' is dishonest (which it is)."
We may have a definitional problem here. I hope we don't, because if we do, we have to resolve it before we can continue any sort of rational debate. If we can't agree, then we don't have enough common assumptions to be able to convince each other of anything. In the above statement, you seem to be defining "selfish" as something similar to "self motivating", which is not my understanding of the word. In short, if you are saying that if a person takes an action of his own free will, it must be a selfish action by the definition of selfishness, I disagree with your definition.
Please allow me to give you my definition now. The following paragraph assumes the existence of an unselfish person for the purpose of illustrating my definition of selfishness. Since you think no such person exists, you will disagree with the truth of these statements. That's okay, because I'm just trying to illustrate my definition of selfishness, not prove you wrong. I think my definition is commonly accepted. If you disagree with me, we need to resolve the definitional ambiguity before continuing to debate whether all people are selfish. I'll probably just take your definition and see if I still disagree with you if you're operating under a different definition because I don't like debating definitions. However, if you do disagree with me, I request that you make your own definition of selfishness explicit.
That a person has a desire does not imply it is a selfish desire. Some desires are selfish, and some are unselfish. A selfish desire is a desire to act in a way that would further a person's own well-being. Sometimes acting out the desire would harm another person's well-being, but not always. An unselfish desire is a desire to act in a way that furthers the well-being of another person or group of people. Sometimes acting out an unselfish desire would harm a person's own well-being, but not always.
Just to be clear: under my definition of selfishness, the above paragraph is true iff there exists a person who is not selfish. If you agree that the existence of an unselfish person implies that the above paragraph is true, I think we have similar enough definitions that we can debate rationally. As a side effect, you should agree that your statement that "if you really do not wish to murder your family or leave your sick spouse, your projection of this 'selfish person' is dishonest" is false if I am an unselfish person, whether or not I am married (I never said I was). As a person who is not entirely selfish, I have unselfish desires, and one of those desires could easily be a desire to take care of those I love.
"Considering it's an obvious copy, as a matter of fact the copying is the whole draw, it would be fairly easy."
Wrong. COPYRIGHT PROTECTS EXPRESSIONS, NOT IDEAS! If the FreeCiv developers had copied Civilization source code or used Civilization graphics, they'd be in trouble. They did not. FreeCiv is totally clean. It is legal for FreeCiv to do what it did to Civilization for the same reason it is legal for Linux to do what it did to UNIX. Or do you think SCO has a case, too?
"If one can't trust the jury's judgement in general, then one should do away with juries totally."
Yes. Juries are obsolete, and they weren't that good an idea to begin with anyway. I probably would demand a judge trial if I were charged with a crime unless I had reason to believe the judge was corrupt. Btw, I don't know if a defendant can demand a trial by judge. If someone knows (really knows), please inform me.
Your contention that people are to be graded and judged solely by physical health, that the physically unfit are "liabilities," and that "selfish reasoning suggests the healthy spouse should leave the sick spouse" does not follow anything I said. It is your own belief, Dr. Strangelove.
Have you never done a logic proof, or are you just being ignorant for the sake of argument? People are not entirely selfish _because if they were they would judge people like that_. Of course I don't judge the moral worth of someone based solely on their physical health, _because I am not a purely selfish person_. I don't love my family because they are "assets". I don't think that a man should leave his wife if she gets seriously ill (or vice versa). _If I were purely selfish, I would_. That there exist people, including me, who wouldn't do these things (would you?) disproves your statement that all people are purely selfish.
Now as far as "selfishness necessitates violence" goes, I was stating that _pure selfishness would imply violent behavior_ in that instance. Selfish behavior isn't always violent, and it isn't always evil. It would be evil to kill your family for money. I hope you can see this.
I can't make it any clearer than this. If you still don't get it, you either lack any understanding of rational thought or are being intellectually dishonest with yourself.
I ignored this stuff first time, but I see you are going to keep up these bizarre, ad hominem attacks, so I'll correct you in both cases now.
"Your belief that selfishness necessitates violence is a confession of the fact that you believe people desire to act in such a way. What does that say about you?"
That selfishness necessitates violence does not follow from what I said. I don't know how you got that I said that; I've looked at my comment and I never said selfishness necessitates violence. In fact, selfishness isn't even a prerequisite for violence. Now, I agree that violence often does result from selfishness, but I never made even that statement in my comment.
"I _do_ see that you evaluate a person's worth by their physical health."
No, you think you see it, or at least you'd like to pretend to see it because it fits with your twisted view of humanity. I was assuming your description of a loved one as "an asset" temporarily in order to derive a contradiction. Let me spell it out for you: Assume that everyone is totally selfish and care for other human beings only because they are "assets" to him. If a spouse becomes seriously ill and is dying, requiring constant care, he becomes a liability. Since the relationship is no longer beneficial to the healthy spouse, selfish reasoning suggests the healthy spouse should leave the sick spouse. However, I have a case where not only does the healthy spouse not leave the sick spouse, but spends countless hours caring for her. Contradiction, and you lose.
"In fact, the only genuine example of altruistic behavior would be when one sacrifices something significant for a complete stranger _for no reason other than the receiver's well-being_."
Why would it have to be a complete stranger? You haven't proven that. Further, to act altruistically one doesn't have to complete disregard his own well-being. He just has to take the other person's well-being into account and make a decision that, while it may benefit him, won't benefit him as much as an alternative action would. Basically, to act altruistically the person must incur an opportunity cost that outweighs his action. An act that saves someone's life might net $1,000,000 for the actor and still be altruistic if by helping the other person he forgoes the opportunity to make $2,000,000 instead.
"This, of course, never occurs as we find the impetus is always social pressures/religious delusions, etc."
Social conventions and religous beliefs encouraging unselfish behavior are created by society. Society is composed of people. Therefore, some people have unselfish motives. QED.
"A man's spouse, children and closest friends are assets to him."
Well, that may be true, but how do you explain the man who stays by his wife even when she has a dreadful illness, and spends countless hours caring for her? I know someone who did just that. That answer is a cop-out, and you probably knew it when you said it. All I have to do is find one example of nonselfish behavior to disprove your general statement that EVERYONE IS IN IT--THIS THING WE CALL LIFE--FOR THEIR OWN GOOD.
"There is no legal concept for what you just made up."
Well, I wasn't speaking in legal concepts. I thought the term "wrongful acquittal" was obvious enough that it needed no definition. I still don't think it needs a definition, but I'll give one anyway. Someone is wrongfully acquitted if the following two conditions hold:
1. They are acquitted of the crime for which they were charged.
2. There does not exist reasonable doubt that they committed the crime for which they were charged.
The goal of the justice system is to dispense justice. Whenever someone gets off even though they committed the crime, that is unjust, but we as a society think it's worse if someone gets punished for a crime we didn't commit, so we only convict if there isn't "reasonable doubt" that they are guilty. If there isn't resasonable doubt that they committed the crime but they get off anyway, the justice system has failed to do its duty, and that is wrong.
"They overrode it, let's face facts here, because it offends their religion."
I agree with you that if the Supreme Court ruled on their personal biases instead of the law, they are being activist, and that is bad. I'm not sure if I agree with you that this particular case was incorrectly decided because I've neither the Oregon statute in question nor the Supreme Court decision.
Conservative activism isn't any better than liberal activism, and I certainly agree with you that there are conservative (especially neocon) judges who are corrupt and are making bad rulings. I wasn't making a right wing vs. left wing statement; I was talking about the concept of abuse of judicial power in general. Both major parties abuse power, and it's equally bad when either does it.
I was partially incorrect in my previous statement: If a jury abuses its power and acquits someone on an incorrect basis, the judge doesn't have the power to rectify the situation. This is due to double jeapordy. It's somewhat of a shame that this means criminals go free, but I can see why the prohibition on double jeapordy exists and that a jury's verdict should be given more weight when, if the judge were corrupt, an innocent man might go to jail or die.
Jury nullification is still an abuse of power in this case, just as legislating from the bench is. In the case of wrongful criminal acquittals, it's just an abuse of power that is impossible for the judge to fix. This doesn't make it any more valid than legislating from the bench. Congress and the Executive Office need to cooperate, and correction often must wait until the corrupt judge dies.
Jury nullification and judicial activism are two sides of the same coin: both are cases of corruption in the judiciary that usurp democratic process and carry a threat to impose tyranny of the minority. It is fortunate that juries are weak. Were they more powerful, jury nullification might be more of a problem than it is. Fortunately, all a corrupt nullifying jury can do is let a single criminal go free. Corrupt activist judges have the power to make precedent and send innocent people to jail. They are thus a bigger threat.
"Ive [sic] read Thoreau, but I fail to see how the definition of a term as it was 150 odd years ago has anything to do with how a term is defined now. Words do not have static unshifting meaning, they change with time."
5 D:
How profound! Good point! Let's look up civil disobedience and see what it means right now, shall we?
From [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience%
"Protesters practice this non-violent form of civil disorder with the expectation that they will be arrested, or even attacked or beaten by the authorities. Protesters often undergo training in advance on how to react to arrest or to attack, so that they will do so in a manner that quietly or limply resists without threatening the authorities."
You lose. Badly.
You can argue Wikipedia as a source if you feel pedantic now that you have lost, and I'll admit that words mean whatever the listener wants them to mean. I have a different definition of civil disobedience than you do, but you're free to define the word however you want. Unless you define it sufficiently similar to the rest of us, though, you won't be able to communicate with anyone on the topic very well. You have demonstrated this quite clearly.
"But you have to watch the ones who say they aren't, that they're here for the sake of everyone else, and that you should be too. They're running a con game and they want your blood. Unless it involves physical violence, government is never the solution."
What the hell are you talking about? You think that everyone would murder his spouse, children and closest friends for a fee if he could get away with it? I'll admit that people can be frustratingly selfish sometimes, but it's not true that selfishness is the only motivator of mankind. Do you think that Habitat for Humanity is "running a con game"?
Your statement reflects extreme immaturity, and I hope you're just a cynical 14 year old and still have time to mature. A philosophy like that suggests that you can do nothing but harm to the sum of human happiness.
Parent is correct, people. Your own quote says that "jury nullification is not normally described as a right."
Jury nullification is a result of THE JURY ABUSING ITS POWER. If a jury attempts, a judge can (and a good judge will) rule that the jury ruled on an incorrect basis and reverse the jury's verdict. If the jury and judge disagree on the law and push comes to shove, the judge wins. This is a good thing: imagine a scenario where there was no evidence against a defendant on trial for murder except a slew of character witnesses testifying to the ignorant, bigoted Christian jury that the accused denied God and any absolute standard for morality. Judges are sometimes corrupt, yes, but they're still better than a group of 12 dumbasses taken off the street who know the laws of neither the land nor probability.
If you're still a fan of jury trials, read up on the Scopes trial and get back to me.
By what rationale does a lawmaker determine where and where not a child can go in a completely open public place (online or real)?
By the same rationale that they pass curfew laws. IMHO, the ban will be even less effective than curfew laws.
This is complete and utter BS. Repeat after me, slowly: A SALE IS NOT A CONTRACT. You DO NOT enter a contract when you buy food, clothes, lawnmowers, computers, or CD's. It is a SALE. That's DIFFERENT. In fact, in many cases Linux users have been able to successfully sue in small claims court for a Windows refund. They had bought the computer, but REFUSED to agree to the contract that Micro$oft tries to shove down our throats.
The earliest patent law by wikipedia's count is 1474. This pre-dates the "Middle Ages".
... you really need to read up on basic European history before you start shooting your mouth off. 1474 is WAY after the European Middle Ages. See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance%5D. Actually, the fact that patent laws weren't passed until 1474 supports the anti-patent argument, since it means that THE RENAISSANCE HAPPENED WITHOUT PATENTS.
Umm, no
As far as copyright, there are hundreds of examples of societies with no or very weak copyright that produced rich creative works. Take the Greeks, for example. Almost all of their myths are anonymous, and it's a good thing they DIDN't have copyright because otherwise Homer's works may not have been passed on to us. The Romans had a few copyright laws, but very rarely enforced them. Piracy was rampant, yet _The Aeneid_ still got done.
Arguing through historical example isn't going to help you on this one, anyway. It is easier now to copy creative works and useful ideas than it ever was in the past. This means that the opportunity cost of preserving the copyright and patent monopolies is higher than ever. When the sole true marginal cost of an electronic book is the bandwidth needed to download it, virtually the entire price of the book is due to a monopoly. Combine this with an elastic demand curve for music at near-zero prices and you find that near-infinite copyright is a very inefficient form of resource reallocation.
Is there a better alternative to a limited copyright system? I don't know; we'd have to try some stuff and see. Creative works will ALWAYS be written - they have been since the beginning of time - but if we want to allocate more resources to it than the artists are willing to allocate by themselves (which is a big if - _I_ don't want another Britney Spears), we do need some sort of government interference. As a first guess, how about just subsidizing the artists? We already subsidize scientists through the NSF, why not repeal copyright and subsidize artists too?
There was an article in my local newspaper about five years ago on this topic. Porn actually DID spur the INVENTION, not just adoption, of quite a few Internet technologies. Here are two examples that I can remember off the top of my head. I'm afraid I can't debate these too well, since I'm just regurgitating what I read in the newspaper.
(1). It spurred the development of image compression at the beginning of mainstream Internet adoption so they could transmit their wares over 14.4K pipes.
(2). It invented Internet marketing techniques such as giving away "samples" of the product (think crippled shareware).
There were many more, but these are the only ones I can remember right now.
Hmmm. How about if someone buys it, opens the package, and then resells it to his friend, who doesn't even see the box and so can't _possibly_ have agreed to any contract. That looks like enough to invoke first sale to me.
If restrictions got too bad, maybe companies would form to do this. Their employees would buy these products at retail en masse, then sell them to geeks who like to tinker, exhausting the first sale.
Wrong: you misread the category. The Entertainment and Recreation category includes LIVE performances and the like. The motion Picture and sound recording industries are included in the INFORMATION sector of the economy, which takes in almost $900 billion dollars per year! I agree with your point that the tactic wouldn't really work; it's still a small fraction of the total economy, but you nevertheless underrepresented our society's allocation to movies & music.
Government should only subsidize goods with spillover benefits - where a good benefits more people than just the person who buys it. One person buying Internet access doesn't benefit anyone else (unencrypted wireless networks aside; that's a different issue). So why do you think government should subsidize Internet access? Because it's good for the people who get to buy it at subsidized prices? Subsidizing Internet access would lead to an overallocation of resources to Internet infrastructure in this country. If people aren't willing to buy Internet access at the prices private industry would charge to provide it, they don't want it enough to justify diverting the resources used to provide Internet access from their alternate uses. -linuxrocks123 My opinions are my own and are not necessarily shared by my employer. This is not legal advice. "There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is -- other people!" -Jean Paul Sartre