The question is, and or at least definitely should be, are you doing harm to something that can suffer? here's the key issue: Does it have a nervous system, and does that nervous system couple to something sophisticated enough to convert those signals into suffering?
Aside from our own personal biases that lend us toward favouring our own systems, how would you define suffering?
If it is reacting to stimuli that causes it harm, plants, vegetables and many forms of life do that. If you try to not eat anything of that nature you'll quickly find yourself starving.
Why should only harm that can be applied to us or things like us be considered harm?
They don't care because it happened naturally without interference. Much like how if an old man dies in his sleep naturally people don't tend to care, but if he dies in his sleep with a pillow shoved over his face by a party conscious of what it will do, people do care.
Like how you don't see PETA activists trying to fight off all the violent animal deaths that happen in nature.. because there was no interference.
However, if I needed "little blue pills" and was employed at Hobby Lobby, they would be more than happy to provide them to me. They also see nothing wrong in investing in the contraception companies in their 401K. Apparently, making money off of "godless abortion pills" is perfectly fine religiously.
Wouldn't the abortion pills they're against in this case not count as contraception? I mean.. isn't the point of contraception to stop conception?
The only reason I can see to try to avoid the name "abortion pill" is the social stigma, but that can be worked on. (imitation of kang's voice) "Abortions for all!"
Why not just build an RC helicopter sizable enough to do what you want?
You want automation? It can be done on an rc helicopter too.
I just don't see the point of having a bunch of weak motors as opposed to a single strong one with control of thrust via cyclic and collective pitch controls on the blades.
The energy required to transport food from farms to houses is at least an order of magnitude less than the energy consumed by an automobile for commuting. Possibly two orders of magnitude. So the only way that growing your own food at home saves energy is if you don't drive.
We have a winner! When you have local production and consumption you tend to not have to drive so much. Also, trucks used for transportation of goods cause pretty much all non-weather related road wear, causing a lot of savings on road maintenance to boot.
That's how the right wing rationalizes their own flavor of totalitarianism, but I don't want to live in a country where the government doesn't let us live the way we want.
I don't see how "we would like this area to be designated for free range humans please" is totalitarian. Unless you consider no smoking zones, no parking areas, speed limits, and all zoning laws at all totalitarian.
If you want to make the land as efficient as possible in growing crops, you need to minimize roof and asphalt area and maximize cropland area.
You're forgetting the labor required to work the farm, unless you're talking about modern farming practices that are very petrol dependent.. in which case so much for 'sustainable'.
If every family household had a few acres, we could all effectively grow our own crops. While not all of our needs would be met, we would reduce our dependence on items transported from far away by a fair margin, reducing energy consumption from transportation.
The small'ish houses rooftops can be lined with solar panels, so the solar energy from that portion can be used also.
Unfortunately, the right wing opposes this, and they use density and height limits to achieve their goal of preventing people from living sustainably.
They use density and height limits to stop people having to live like caged chickens. To some people that is life, others would prefer to be free range humans.
Road damage rises steeply with axle weight, and is estimated "as a rule of thumb... for reasonably strong pavement surfaces" to be proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight. This means that doubling the axle weight will increase road damage (2x2x2x2)=16 times.
That's the opposite of the right wing, which supports road and fuel subsidies and zoning and density limits [baconsrebellion.com] that force people to drive more.
Or.. you know.. get a job closer to home?
I'm not sure having thousands of people crammed per square mile is a great idea.
I think less dense housing enables people to actually do things with land, like, I don't know, grow a small set of crops?
Local production and consumption is a win on energy losses through transportation.
City people often forget that it is the country that feeds them. When you are that sheltered from production you tend to think food just magically appears in shopping centres. Sure, you know that at some point that it came from a farm, but it doesn't cross peoples minds.
Shoving more and more people into dense cities is not sustainable. It seems to be a goal of the left to see how many people we can support even at cost of quality of life. Screw that, Let people live in open areas, and let them have some level of being able to do what they want with their land.
(going straight to the person's value as a sexual object is the definition of objectification)
Actually it has to do with their sense of agency. Agents can affect their surroundings, whereas things simply happen to objects, they are victims unable to affect anything.
In this sense a lot of people self labelling themselves as feminists are objectifying women a lot at times.
I think slashdot just has higher standards of evidence of racism etc than some other places.
For it to be true it has to be blatent and with very little possibility of error "you know what I mean" doesn't constitute that. There are plenty of other interpretations.
You have to try to not assume malice (or even ignorance) in these things. Come to them from the best possible light they could be from your perspective and goals.
Using a certain style of language can associate people with things that they shouldn't necessarily be associated with. Best to not assume ill will or malice
I think a fair portion of slashdot comes from a pragmatic line of thinking, nobody gives a crap about what race or sex a person is so long as the job gets done and well at that.
We've all encountered oversensitive people before and it can be a right pain in the ass and loss of efficiency trying to deal with them.. there's a tendency to not like enforced inefficiency from above. Things that affirmative action programs and the like can enforce.
I don't think that many people who use photoshop require the entirety of it's functionality.
It's like microsoft word vs openoffice, there are some fairly commonly required features that are catered for that handle the overwhelming majority of the population, but each person has their own little outlier function that only word handles.
gimp is becoming viable for more types of work by the day, it may not ever do everything photoshop does, but it doesn't have to. All it has to do is enough to "get the job done" for a decent subset of people.
No, by displacing the means of production of a whole agricultural sector. Eliminating slavery all at once when they were so dependent on it would be like us banning farming machines today in an instant. Recipe for disaster.
There was no moral duty to prop up a fundamentally corrupt way of exploiting people.
Who said anything about continuing slavery? You don't just ban it, you migrate away from it while providing solutions to the massive hole left in the labour sector.
Machine harvesters would have done the job.
Until the south started trading directly with europe instead of the north, few seemed to object to slavery in the north enough to take action.
The north had just spent a whole lot of money on other conflicts, and needed the resources.
It was more about the north trying to screw over the south economically. Provide an economical way for the cotton fields to be harvested and the need for slaves goes away. If someone tried to destroy my livelihood I'd fight against it tooth and nail too.
It is sad how much slavery there is today though. While there is officially no slavery, that tends to just means it's harder to know when you are one.
Really/ Because in the example provided it worked, and in fact was not unfair.
You're putting more resources towards one group because of their race/gender. This is unfair.
Given that afterwards, men and women were ranked the same according to achievements, please enlighten me as to how this was unfair?
It is unfair because it is striving for equal outcomes not equal opportunity.
You may have equal opportunity at the employer level, but at the education level you're fighting for equal outcomes, even if to get equal outcomes it requires a disproportionate amount of resources to certain groups.
For example if one of your ideas is that gay people shouldn't be allowed to be married, it affects your ability to be an effective leader of a diverse group for the same reason that "believing black people are criminals" would. I'm sure his bigoted ideas do not affect his abilities as a software engineer.
Except that it didn't, his gay coworkers would have never picked up on it because he's treated them fairly and by their ability to do the job (why some of them were so surprised).
This comes to separating personal views and business. You're assuming he can't, when it's quite clear he can considering what his gay coworkers have said about him.
It shouldn't matter what his views are so long as it does not affect how he does his work/manages people. Show me evidence he treated gays differently at work and it will be a different story.
I would say that it is essential to a functioning democracy that ideas and people who espouse those ideas are criticized.
You criticise the idea, not the man though.
That a person holds ideas you dislike in one area should not affect his work in a totally unrelated area. To do so is holding people to criteria not relevant to the task, what a lot of people tend to consider "unfair discrimination".
Let's be clear here, as you appear to have forgotten the significance of his actions: the man donated money to try to deny gays their equal rights. That's what a thousand dollars against gay marriage actually signifies. 'He can still be tolerant' doesn't even enter the equation - we know for a fact he is not!
If he had not donated money, and instead only voted, isn't voting worse? Instead of indirect action he's taking direct action. What is being advocated here is intolerance to others political views. The very people preaching tolerance are the ones being the most intolerant. You can want gay marriage to not be a thing while simultaneously respecting others views that it should be a thing.
Eich: Yeah? I really hope the government continues to deny you two the right to marry.
Marrying isn't really a right, it's a privilege. One that even the gay activists seem content to restrict to only "between two people" just like others want to restrict it to "between a man and woman" I don't see them fighting for polygamists or for people to be allowed to marry in-family. They want to extend the privilege to themselves without extending it to others who also aren't allowed it.
Ah, the Paradox of Tolerance. (Which only applies if you concede that Eich is intolerant.)
Actually, if he is tolerant, and others are being intolerant of him, we should tolerate their intolerance. So it applies anyway.
I'd like to think I'm being tolerant of your intolerance, I might not agree with you on things, but I'd hardly punish you over it like you would eich since you consider him intolerant. I would hope that you understand the troubles with hindering open discussion of things by having people punished for their views in unrelated items, even if it's for things people find abhorrent.
Incestuous relationships are very likely to produce children with birth defects.
Only for the first few generations, when inbreeding is common (think thoroughbred horses) the nasty recessive genes are filtered out over time.
Polygamous relationships allow wealthy men to build harems and reduce the supply for everyone else creating many nasty side-effects for society (see: middle east)
Doesn't necessarily have to be that way, there are women who would like multiple husbands etc. Complicates child rearing responsibility a bit, but that's their choice.
I think a lot of people in the poly crowd would think that saying "being poly is bad for society" is very similar to when some people say "being gay is bad for society".
Yes it is quite uncivil to murder people by nailing them to a cross. It's a good thing that nobody was crucified.
type "define crucify" into google, you will see aside from the first, literal meaning. 2.
informal
criticize (someone) severely and unrelentingly.
"our fans would crucify us if we lost"
synonyms: condemn, criticize severely, attack, tear apart, tear to pieces, censure, denounce, arraign, lambaste, pillory, carp at, cavil at, rail against, inveigh against, cast aspersions on, pour scorn on, disparage, denigrate, deprecate, malign, revile, vilify, besmirch, run down, give a bad press to; More
Chances are you knew the intent, purposefully misconstruing things to paint a different picture than intended can be a bit straw-man'ish.
Lynch mobs didn't just name and shame people. They murdered people. I think this comparison trivializes the crimes committed by actual lynch mobs.
Bigotry: 1.
intolerance towards those who hold different opinions from oneself.
No matter what he believes, he can be tolerant of what you believe in. It is not a 'bigoted opinion' or 'bigoted cause' because no matter what he believes in he can be willing to tolerate your difference of opinion.
But it does not do to tolerate intolerance. Not if you believe in a tolerant society.
"Tolerance doesn't mean tolerating only those who tolerate you. Tolerance means also tolerating those who don't tolerate you. If you live by the former, then you believe the Black Panthers were right, and Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. were wrong. The former leads to all-out war. The latter leads to coexistence. When Prop 8 passed, I didn't rub it in the faces of my gay friends. I encouraged them to not lose hope and to continue fighting for what they believed in, because that is the way our system is set up to work. Everyone gets their (thorough) say before society as a whole decides what to do, and the losers (usually the minority, though in Prop 8's case it was the majority) agree to live with the outcome without resorting to violence, while the winners do not resort to outbursts of Schadenfreude."
Being tolerant to the intolerant may be the harder path, but it is the path to a civil society. From what I've seen of the man he seems quite tolerant, if only his detractors were so.
Slashdot Mirror
The question is, and or at least definitely should be, are you doing harm to something that can suffer? here's the key issue: Does it have a nervous system, and does that nervous system couple to something sophisticated enough to convert those signals into suffering?
Aside from our own personal biases that lend us toward favouring our own systems, how would you define suffering?
If it is reacting to stimuli that causes it harm, plants, vegetables and many forms of life do that. If you try to not eat anything of that nature you'll quickly find yourself starving.
Why should only harm that can be applied to us or things like us be considered harm?
They don't care because it happened naturally without interference. Much like how if an old man dies in his sleep naturally people don't tend to care, but if he dies in his sleep with a pillow shoved over his face by a party conscious of what it will do, people do care.
Like how you don't see PETA activists trying to fight off all the violent animal deaths that happen in nature.. because there was no interference.
However, if I needed "little blue pills" and was employed at Hobby Lobby, they would be more than happy to provide them to me. They also see nothing wrong in investing in the contraception companies in their 401K. Apparently, making money off of "godless abortion pills" is perfectly fine religiously.
Wouldn't the abortion pills they're against in this case not count as contraception? I mean.. isn't the point of contraception to stop conception?
The only reason I can see to try to avoid the name "abortion pill" is the social stigma, but that can be worked on. (imitation of kang's voice) "Abortions for all!"
Why not just build an RC helicopter sizable enough to do what you want?
You want automation? It can be done on an rc helicopter too.
I just don't see the point of having a bunch of weak motors as opposed to a single strong one with control of thrust via cyclic and collective pitch controls on the blades.
The energy required to transport food from farms to houses is at least an order of magnitude less than the energy consumed by an automobile for commuting. Possibly two orders of magnitude. So the only way that growing your own food at home saves energy is if you don't drive.
We have a winner! When you have local production and consumption you tend to not have to drive so much. Also, trucks used for transportation of goods cause pretty much all non-weather related road wear, causing a lot of savings on road maintenance to boot.
That's how the right wing rationalizes their own flavor of totalitarianism, but I don't want to live in a country where the government doesn't let us live the way we want.
I don't see how "we would like this area to be designated for free range humans please" is totalitarian. Unless you consider no smoking zones, no parking areas, speed limits, and all zoning laws at all totalitarian.
Utter chaos isn't necessarily the best solution.
This is from some of the road regulation near me.
Single axle 4 tyres 9.0 tonne
The four tyres is the two each side you typically see on trucks, so 9 tonnes per axel.
Typical cars weigh 1-2.6 tonnes in total with two axels. so 0.5-1.3 tonnes per axel.
If you want to make the land as efficient as possible in growing crops, you need to minimize roof and asphalt area and maximize cropland area.
You're forgetting the labor required to work the farm, unless you're talking about modern farming practices that are very petrol dependent.. in which case so much for 'sustainable'.
If every family household had a few acres, we could all effectively grow our own crops. While not all of our needs would be met, we would reduce our dependence on items transported from far away by a fair margin, reducing energy consumption from transportation.
The small'ish houses rooftops can be lined with solar panels, so the solar energy from that portion can be used also.
Unfortunately, the right wing opposes this, and they use density and height limits to achieve their goal of preventing people from living sustainably.
They use density and height limits to stop people having to live like caged chickens. To some people that is life, others would prefer to be free range humans.
Road damage rises steeply with axle weight, and is estimated "as a rule of thumb... for reasonably strong pavement surfaces" to be proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight. This means that doubling the axle weight will increase road damage (2x2x2x2)=16 times.
That's the opposite of the right wing, which supports road and fuel subsidies and zoning and density limits [baconsrebellion.com] that force people to drive more.
Or.. you know.. get a job closer to home?
I'm not sure having thousands of people crammed per square mile is a great idea.
I think less dense housing enables people to actually do things with land, like, I don't know, grow a small set of crops?
Local production and consumption is a win on energy losses through transportation.
City people often forget that it is the country that feeds them. When you are that sheltered from production you tend to think food just magically appears in shopping centres. Sure, you know that at some point that it came from a farm, but it doesn't cross peoples minds.
Shoving more and more people into dense cities is not sustainable. It seems to be a goal of the left to see how many people we can support even at cost of quality of life. Screw that, Let people live in open areas, and let them have some level of being able to do what they want with their land.
(going straight to the person's value as a sexual object is the definition of objectification)
Actually it has to do with their sense of agency. Agents can affect their surroundings, whereas things simply happen to objects, they are victims unable to affect anything.
In this sense a lot of people self labelling themselves as feminists are objectifying women a lot at times.
I think slashdot just has higher standards of evidence of racism etc than some other places.
For it to be true it has to be blatent and with very little possibility of error "you know what I mean" doesn't constitute that. There are plenty of other interpretations.
You have to try to not assume malice (or even ignorance) in these things. Come to them from the best possible light they could be from your perspective and goals.
Using a certain style of language can associate people with things that they shouldn't necessarily be associated with. Best to not assume ill will or malice
I think a fair portion of slashdot comes from a pragmatic line of thinking, nobody gives a crap about what race or sex a person is so long as the job gets done and well at that.
We've all encountered oversensitive people before and it can be a right pain in the ass and loss of efficiency trying to deal with them.. there's a tendency to not like enforced inefficiency from above. Things that affirmative action programs and the like can enforce.
I don't think that many people who use photoshop require the entirety of it's functionality.
It's like microsoft word vs openoffice, there are some fairly commonly required features that are catered for that handle the overwhelming majority of the population, but each person has their own little outlier function that only word handles.
gimp is becoming viable for more types of work by the day, it may not ever do everything photoshop does, but it doesn't have to. All it has to do is enough to "get the job done" for a decent subset of people.
So long as it is advantageous to play the victim, people will.
It's all about the social power people can play using these types of manipulation. Unfortunately I can only see it getting worse.
Sure, the then unemployed slaves can then starve from the mass unemployment and lack of social security.
By "taking away their property"? Please...
No, by displacing the means of production of a whole agricultural sector. Eliminating slavery all at once when they were so dependent on it would be like us banning farming machines today in an instant. Recipe for disaster.
There was no moral duty to prop up a fundamentally corrupt way of exploiting people.
Who said anything about continuing slavery? You don't just ban it, you migrate away from it while providing solutions to the massive hole left in the labour sector.
Machine harvesters would have done the job.
Until the south started trading directly with europe instead of the north, few seemed to object to slavery in the north enough to take action.
The north had just spent a whole lot of money on other conflicts, and needed the resources.
It was more about the north trying to screw over the south economically. Provide an economical way for the cotton fields to be harvested and the need for slaves goes away. If someone tried to destroy my livelihood I'd fight against it tooth and nail too.
It is sad how much slavery there is today though. While there is officially no slavery, that tends to just means it's harder to know when you are one.
Really/ Because in the example provided it worked, and in fact was not unfair.
You're putting more resources towards one group because of their race/gender. This is unfair.
Given that afterwards, men and women were ranked the same according to achievements, please enlighten me as to how this was unfair?
It is unfair because it is striving for equal outcomes not equal opportunity.
You may have equal opportunity at the employer level, but at the education level you're fighting for equal outcomes, even if to get equal outcomes it requires a disproportionate amount of resources to certain groups.
The solution to unfair discrimination is not more unfair discrimination.
For example if one of your ideas is that gay people shouldn't be allowed to be married, it affects your ability to be an effective leader of a diverse group for the same reason that "believing black people are criminals" would. I'm sure his bigoted ideas do not affect his abilities as a software engineer.
Except that it didn't, his gay coworkers would have never picked up on it because he's treated them fairly and by their ability to do the job (why some of them were so surprised).
This comes to separating personal views and business. You're assuming he can't, when it's quite clear he can considering what his gay coworkers have said about him.
It shouldn't matter what his views are so long as it does not affect how he does his work/manages people. Show me evidence he treated gays differently at work and it will be a different story.
Polyamory is just a different word they're using for polygamy because of the stigma attached to it, same deal in the end.
Polygamy is having many spouses, perhaps you got polygamy mixed up with polygyny?
I would say that it is essential to a functioning democracy that ideas and people who espouse those ideas are criticized.
You criticise the idea, not the man though.
That a person holds ideas you dislike in one area should not affect his work in a totally unrelated area. To do so is holding people to criteria not relevant to the task, what a lot of people tend to consider "unfair discrimination".
Let's be clear here, as you appear to have forgotten the significance of his actions: the man donated money to try to deny gays their equal rights. That's what a thousand dollars against gay marriage actually signifies. 'He can still be tolerant' doesn't even enter the equation - we know for a fact he is not!
If he had not donated money, and instead only voted, isn't voting worse? Instead of indirect action he's taking direct action. What is being advocated here is intolerance to others political views. The very people preaching tolerance are the ones being the most intolerant. You can want gay marriage to not be a thing while simultaneously respecting others views that it should be a thing.
Eich: Yeah? I really hope the government continues to deny you two the right to marry.
Marrying isn't really a right, it's a privilege. One that even the gay activists seem content to restrict to only "between two people" just like others want to restrict it to "between a man and woman" I don't see them fighting for polygamists or for people to be allowed to marry in-family. They want to extend the privilege to themselves without extending it to others who also aren't allowed it.
Ah, the Paradox of Tolerance. (Which only applies if you concede that Eich is intolerant.)
Actually, if he is tolerant, and others are being intolerant of him, we should tolerate their intolerance. So it applies anyway.
I'd like to think I'm being tolerant of your intolerance, I might not agree with you on things, but I'd hardly punish you over it like you would eich since you consider him intolerant. I would hope that you understand the troubles with hindering open discussion of things by having people punished for their views in unrelated items, even if it's for things people find abhorrent.
Incestuous relationships are very likely to produce children with birth defects.
Only for the first few generations, when inbreeding is common (think thoroughbred horses) the nasty recessive genes are filtered out over time.
Polygamous relationships allow wealthy men to build harems and reduce the supply for everyone else creating many nasty side-effects for society (see: middle east)
Doesn't necessarily have to be that way, there are women who would like multiple husbands etc. Complicates child rearing responsibility a bit, but that's their choice.
I think a lot of people in the poly crowd would think that saying "being poly is bad for society" is very similar to when some people say "being gay is bad for society".
Yes it is quite uncivil to murder people by nailing them to a cross. It's a good thing that nobody was crucified.
type "define crucify" into google, you will see aside from the first, literal meaning. 2. informal criticize (someone) severely and unrelentingly. "our fans would crucify us if we lost" synonyms: condemn, criticize severely, attack, tear apart, tear to pieces, censure, denounce, arraign, lambaste, pillory, carp at, cavil at, rail against, inveigh against, cast aspersions on, pour scorn on, disparage, denigrate, deprecate, malign, revile, vilify, besmirch, run down, give a bad press to; More
Chances are you knew the intent, purposefully misconstruing things to paint a different picture than intended can be a bit straw-man'ish.
Lynch mobs didn't just name and shame people. They murdered people. I think this comparison trivializes the crimes committed by actual lynch mobs.
Associative meaning is a thing
Bigotry: 1. intolerance towards those who hold different opinions from oneself.
No matter what he believes, he can be tolerant of what you believe in. It is not a 'bigoted opinion' or 'bigoted cause' because no matter what he believes in he can be willing to tolerate your difference of opinion.
But it does not do to tolerate intolerance. Not if you believe in a tolerant society.
"Tolerance doesn't mean tolerating only those who tolerate you. Tolerance means also tolerating those who don't tolerate you. If you live by the former, then you believe the Black Panthers were right, and Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. were wrong. The former leads to all-out war. The latter leads to coexistence. When Prop 8 passed, I didn't rub it in the faces of my gay friends. I encouraged them to not lose hope and to continue fighting for what they believed in, because that is the way our system is set up to work. Everyone gets their (thorough) say before society as a whole decides what to do, and the losers (usually the minority, though in Prop 8's case it was the majority) agree to live with the outcome without resorting to violence, while the winners do not resort to outbursts of Schadenfreude."
Being tolerant to the intolerant may be the harder path, but it is the path to a civil society. From what I've seen of the man he seems quite tolerant, if only his detractors were so.