Absolute rights aren't so bad if you also have absolute responsibility. In your example, you exercising freedom of speech to shout "Fire!" in a theater directly resulted in people being hurt. You could be (and should be) prosecuted for "acting with intent to harm" or whatever. (IANAL.) This is an appropriate response, because there are laws that apply to situations where you harm someone else. An inappropriate response would be to pass a law forbidding any talking in theaters, or requiring theater-goers to wear muzzles (with a small hole for a straw, of course), just in case someone's exercise of their rights might harm someone in the future. Yes, speech may hurt somebody sometime, but that doesn't mean we should forbid speech. You shouldn't even restrict shouting "Fire!" in a theater because, well, there might actually be a fire someday.
free speech gives you the right to speak, not the right to force someone to hear you, and certainly not the right to force someone else to bear the cost of publication
I hope the people who think that elections should be publicly funded read this. Paying for unwanted political spam, on my TV and in my newspapers no less, would be even worse. No thanks, I'll support my favorite candidates myself, and you do the same.
Yup. If you have to defend your home with force, you're better off killing an intruder than wounding him. And if he makes it outside onto the lawn before expiring, drag him back inside just to be sure his family can't sue you for killing an innocent passer-by. *sigh* Mighty sad commentary on our screwed-up legal system.
On the other hand, this guy is innocent until proven guilty, and deserves his day in court. Is there a clause in the law that says it's your own fault if you are injured (however injury is defined in the particular situation) during commission of a crime? There should be. It could be called the "Personal Responsibility Act".
When people say hateful things, we don't pass laws repressing the freedom of speech. When people invent kooky religions, we don't pass laws repressing freedom of religion, even when sometimes the kooky people commit mass suicide or something.
I couldn't have said it better. With your rights come responsibilities. Your rights are powerful things that can be used for good or for ill. Society trusts you to use them for good. If you use them for ill, you should be punished, but other people should not have their powerful potential to do good limited just because you chose to do ill! It's about personal responsibility. Don't blame someone else when you do something wrong. Limit the person, not the right.
If the criminal breaking into my house is armed with an attack dog, then a dog may be a good way to defend yourself. Since he is more likely to be carrying personal arms, that will also be the best defense.
Owning a good guard dog takes a lot of maintenance. Owning a gun takes very little in comparison. You guess which one is preferable.
As with the police, having a dog for protection is putting your trust in a third party. (Though the dog would probably have a better response time.) No, thanks, I'll provide my own, directly.
Like the AC says, "That makes more sense than supporting rights to unlimited abortion and opposing the death penalty. At least the convict to be fried was tried and found guilty. The fetus gets no such due process."
Life is good, and killing is bad. One train of logic, however, says killing might be justifiable if it saves more lives in the process, or saves lives innocent of wrongdoing.
For example, your spouse is threatened by a burglar. The burglar is clearly in the wrong, your spouse is innocent. You'd be justified in killing the burglar if it were the only way to stop him from killing your spouse.
Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all murdered millions of their own people. Would you be justified in killing these men to stop the massacres they ordered? Following this logic, yes.
Leave a 1-month-old alone outside anywhere for a few days, and what happens? It dies.
Leave a 20-year-old alone on the Antarctic icecap for a few hours, and what happens? It dies.
Leave anybody alone in a vacuum for a few minutes, and what happens? It does.
I don't find your argument compelling. Everybody requires an environment that is not inimical to his life. The requirements of a preborn child are simply different than yours. The requirements change over time, rapidly at first when development is fast, and then more slowly by adulthood.
Thirty years ago, you could barely save babies born 2 months premature. Now those delivered 4 months premature (or more?) can live outside the womb, with help. Again the point is we all need help of some kind. The whole "viability" argument is so much garbage because it's arbitrary.
A baby is a complete, unique, living human being from the moment of conception. If left in a nurturing environment for ~9 months, a human baby will be born. Do you think some "magic" happens at some point to turn it from a "mass of cells" into a "real" baby? Now that's unscientific.
Until I see the pro-life folks standing up and admitting it's going to cost billions to handle the new flood of children, I have a problem with them just saying "Adoption works". It does, and it's a wonderful thing, but it's simply not going to solve this problem.
It will never work until people realize that actions have consequences, and that they must take responsibility for them. If you go about creating a child, why should you expect that you can just "dump" it on society? (Whether it's an individual waiting to adopt, or an orphanage paid for by government, doesn't make a difference. You're still expecting someone else to take care of it for you.) Society needs to regain it's moral base, and see children as lives that need to be cherished, and respect sex as an act that often results in a child being born. As long as sex is seen as nothing more than a cheap momentary pleasure without ramifications, the problem only gets worse.
I'm tired of other people taking the easy way out, and having it cost me the "billions" you mention to pay for their bad choices. I'm a charitable person, and quite willing to help those who need a hand up. But don't demand it of me, especially if you're not willing to make the lifestyle changes to avoid having the same problem next year.
And this justifies, in your mind, killing the baby before birth? "Well, it might be abused later, so let's just kill it now." Man, that's warped. That child might go on to be the next Einstein or Beethoven! Give life a chance. Killing an unborn baby on a statistical possibility, now that's punishment.
Choice: kill a baby, don't kill a baby. Not much of a choice if life means anything at all.
It's clear that NOW is pro-abortion, however. If it were really a choice issue, they wouldn't be supporting the single-child, forced-abortion policy of mainland China. Where's the reproductive choice in that?
Regarding labels, I hear "anti-abortion" far more often than I hear "pro-abortion" BTW. "Abortion" is such a sanitized term that it carries little connotation of its own any more. However "anti" anything almost automatically associates a negative connotation to the person being so labeled.
Easy to hide behind words such as "blastocyst". What is growing inside the woman's body? If left uninterrupted, what will the result be in 9 months? A human baby! No surprise there. Women don't give birth to pigs or turnips or "blastocysts".
Of course it's alive. If it were dead, it would be gangrenous, and start poisoning the mother.
Women can control their reproductive processes. If they don't want a baby, they can abstain from sex. The problem is that sex is seen as such a cheap act, not something special to be shared between a married man and woman, that can have significant and awesome consequences. If you can't deal with the consequences of creating a new life, I suggest you abstain from sex.
So a person's life has no intrinsic value, but only the value other's assign to it? "If I'm cared for, or if I'm careworthy, then I deserve to live." Who the heck are you to decide if someone else's life is worthwhile? Every life is valuable. It's this kind of relativistic thinking that led the Romans to view mass slaughter as sport, and the Nazis to view Jews as disposable guinea pigs.
You couldn't be farther from the truth. If you want to have sex, go ahead, that's your choice. I may not agree with your choice to fornicate, and I believe it will ultimately be harmful to yourself and your partner, but it's still your choice.
If you choose the action, you choose the consequences of the action. If those consequences are STDs, deal with it. If those consequences are the creation of a human life, deal with it. Murder is not an acceptable way to deal with a human life that happens to be inconvenient to you.
There is no jolting shift in attitude. It's all about personal responsibility and respect for life. Accept responsibility for the baby you created. Murder is not acceptable. If you cannot raise it yourself, let someone adopt it.
I cut my teeth on tcsh on Linux, too. But I ran into this problem, which the SAs at my new job talk about too: how do you redirect stderr in csh? You can't do it, you can only redirect stdout and stderr together. But you can with ksh or bash. When I was a tcsh user I just lived with the limitation, but now I wonder how I ever dealt with the hassle.
System instability is not the only reason to restart a system. Many people like to conserve power, as well. If the machine has a good sleep mode, this is probably not an issue.
Yeah, I've seen that around, but tcsh sucks. First thing I'm doing is installing bash and making it the default shell. Seems I saw a similar hack for that, too...
Case-sensitivity is a PITB. When you speak a filename to someone, how does the difference in capitalization sound? Apple took the user-oriented solution of making case irrelevant. The only people that presume that case-sensitivity in something as accessible as the filename is a good thing are geeks. If we want our source code to be case-sensitive, fine. As far as filenames go, "CT Stuff" and "ct stuff" should mean the same thing. Making case the only difference between two names is as bad as calling your variables x instead of millisecondsBeforeShuttleLaunch.
Some may dismiss this as pandering to "lusers". Yet case-sensitivity makes your life harder, too. Claiming it's a desirable feature is just a way of trying to show off how 31337 you are. No one's impressed that you can type mixed-case filenames. The rest of us just want to get work done.
This from WND's letters page today. Thought it fit in here.
As the wire editor of a daily newspaper, I am responsible for selecting and displaying stories and photographs for the top news stories of the day. It wasn't until I discovered the Internet news sites - especially WorldNetDaily.com - that I was even aware that I might be unintentionally giving more weight to one side or the other in our Middle East coverage.
Wrong assumptions can be made when all of the news stories I handle come from the mainstream wire services. I thank WorldNetDaily.com for alerting me to the possibility that I might not have been as fair and balanced as I could have been.
Look back at what I've already written. Pedophilia is sex with kids, but most of these victims had already passed puberty. Most of the victims that have come forward are male. The first point says this is not strictly pedophilia. The second point says that homosexuality may play a role here. By using terms that are not strictly accurate, the media diverts your attention.
There have already been people on TV discussing the relevance of chastity in the Catholic priesthood in the 21st century. ("If they weren't so sexually repressed, they wouldn't be doing these sick things!") Clearly the media is attacking the beliefs of the Catholic church. It's not paranoia when it's a fact right in front of your face.
You also ignore the other point, just like the media wants you to: the Boy Scouts. The BSA has been slammed for not allowing homosexuals in trusted leadership positions. But in the Catholic case, we have an example of what can happen when homosexuals are in those leadership positions. (I think the homosexuality of the priests is evident by the fact that most of the victims are male.) The Scouts know you don't send sexually compatible people off into the woods together! Especially when one is in a position of authority over another. This is why media wants to divert us from these facts in the Catholic case, because it damages what they've been saying in the Scout case.
Right. Like how mainstream media's reporting of the current Catholic scandal doesn't have an obvious pro-gay bias.
Are you arguing that bias is good, as long as it's bias you agree with?
In case you didn't catch it, the bias is the inherent assumption that there's something wrong with Catholicism that's causing this, not with the homosexual men who happen to be Catholic priests. Also note the hot-button term "pedophile priests" that's used constantly, though victims have not been children equally of both sexes but mostly teen boys. Mainstream media has the inherent bias that homosexuality is morally acceptable, regardless that a large segment of the population holds beliefs to the contrary. For them, 'gay' is OK so obviously the problem is elsewhere. That conclusion is not so obvious if you remove that underlying assumption.
Fair and accurate reporting would not be making these kinds of assumptions and "deductions". Maybe it's the stress of the job. Maybe it's the vow of chastity. Maybe it's the vow of poverty. Some still do that, right? Or maybe it's the sexual tendency. Good investigative reporting shouldn't rule any out, but should find the angle that best fits the facts. If some indy news sources (like WND) tend to focus a bit more on the "flip side" view, I'd hazard a guess it's simply to counterbalance the overwhelming view from mainstream media.
WND is a "conservative rag" just because it has some views you disagree with? Get a grip. WND has a number of columnists I almost consistently disagree with. It also has a number I almost consistently agree with. That's a good balance, IMO.
Are you so used to the typical Leftist slant in media that anything standing unslanted looks like a "conservative rag" to you? Media is biased. I prefer honest reporting that lets me arrive at my own conclusions.
Hadn't heard of that one. I'll put it on my list. Thanks.
Since mainstream media is biased Leftwards, a good balance could be considered news that is biased Rightwards. In the words of Rush Limbaugh, "I am equal time!"
In my view though, I just want news that doesn't cover up or embellish facts, and doesn't pick and choose which stories to report on. Persecution of Christians worldwide is rampant, especially in places like Sudan, but why don't we ever here about this?
Slashdot Mirror
Absolute rights aren't so bad if you also have absolute responsibility. In your example, you exercising freedom of speech to shout "Fire!" in a theater directly resulted in people being hurt. You could be (and should be) prosecuted for "acting with intent to harm" or whatever. (IANAL.) This is an appropriate response, because there are laws that apply to situations where you harm someone else. An inappropriate response would be to pass a law forbidding any talking in theaters, or requiring theater-goers to wear muzzles (with a small hole for a straw, of course), just in case someone's exercise of their rights might harm someone in the future. Yes, speech may hurt somebody sometime, but that doesn't mean we should forbid speech. You shouldn't even restrict shouting "Fire!" in a theater because, well, there might actually be a fire someday.
I hope the people who think that elections should be publicly funded read this. Paying for unwanted political spam, on my TV and in my newspapers no less, would be even worse. No thanks, I'll support my favorite candidates myself, and you do the same.
Yup. If you have to defend your home with force, you're better off killing an intruder than wounding him. And if he makes it outside onto the lawn before expiring, drag him back inside just to be sure his family can't sue you for killing an innocent passer-by. *sigh* Mighty sad commentary on our screwed-up legal system.
On the other hand, this guy is innocent until proven guilty, and deserves his day in court. Is there a clause in the law that says it's your own fault if you are injured (however injury is defined in the particular situation) during commission of a crime? There should be. It could be called the "Personal Responsibility Act".
I couldn't have said it better. With your rights come responsibilities. Your rights are powerful things that can be used for good or for ill. Society trusts you to use them for good. If you use them for ill, you should be punished, but other people should not have their powerful potential to do good limited just because you chose to do ill! It's about personal responsibility. Don't blame someone else when you do something wrong. Limit the person, not the right.
If the criminal breaking into my house is armed with an attack dog, then a dog may be a good way to defend yourself. Since he is more likely to be carrying personal arms, that will also be the best defense.
Owning a good guard dog takes a lot of maintenance. Owning a gun takes very little in comparison. You guess which one is preferable.
As with the police, having a dog for protection is putting your trust in a third party. (Though the dog would probably have a better response time.) No, thanks, I'll provide my own, directly.
Like the AC says, "That makes more sense than supporting rights to unlimited abortion and opposing the death penalty. At least the convict to be fried was tried and found guilty. The fetus gets no such due process."
Life is good, and killing is bad. One train of logic, however, says killing might be justifiable if it saves more lives in the process, or saves lives innocent of wrongdoing.
For example, your spouse is threatened by a burglar. The burglar is clearly in the wrong, your spouse is innocent. You'd be justified in killing the burglar if it were the only way to stop him from killing your spouse.
Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all murdered millions of their own people. Would you be justified in killing these men to stop the massacres they ordered? Following this logic, yes.
Leave a 1-month-old alone outside anywhere for a few days, and what happens? It dies.
Leave a 20-year-old alone on the Antarctic icecap for a few hours, and what happens? It dies.
Leave anybody alone in a vacuum for a few minutes, and what happens? It does.
I don't find your argument compelling. Everybody requires an environment that is not inimical to his life. The requirements of a preborn child are simply different than yours. The requirements change over time, rapidly at first when development is fast, and then more slowly by adulthood.
Thirty years ago, you could barely save babies born 2 months premature. Now those delivered 4 months premature (or more?) can live outside the womb, with help. Again the point is we all need help of some kind. The whole "viability" argument is so much garbage because it's arbitrary.
A baby is a complete, unique, living human being from the moment of conception. If left in a nurturing environment for ~9 months, a human baby will be born. Do you think some "magic" happens at some point to turn it from a "mass of cells" into a "real" baby? Now that's unscientific.
It will never work until people realize that actions have consequences, and that they must take responsibility for them. If you go about creating a child, why should you expect that you can just "dump" it on society? (Whether it's an individual waiting to adopt, or an orphanage paid for by government, doesn't make a difference. You're still expecting someone else to take care of it for you.) Society needs to regain it's moral base, and see children as lives that need to be cherished, and respect sex as an act that often results in a child being born. As long as sex is seen as nothing more than a cheap momentary pleasure without ramifications, the problem only gets worse.
I'm tired of other people taking the easy way out, and having it cost me the "billions" you mention to pay for their bad choices. I'm a charitable person, and quite willing to help those who need a hand up. But don't demand it of me, especially if you're not willing to make the lifestyle changes to avoid having the same problem next year.
And this justifies, in your mind, killing the baby before birth? "Well, it might be abused later, so let's just kill it now." Man, that's warped. That child might go on to be the next Einstein or Beethoven! Give life a chance. Killing an unborn baby on a statistical possibility, now that's punishment.
Choice: kill a baby, don't kill a baby. Not much of a choice if life means anything at all.
It's clear that NOW is pro-abortion, however. If it were really a choice issue, they wouldn't be supporting the single-child, forced-abortion policy of mainland China. Where's the reproductive choice in that?
Regarding labels, I hear "anti-abortion" far more often than I hear "pro-abortion" BTW. "Abortion" is such a sanitized term that it carries little connotation of its own any more. However "anti" anything almost automatically associates a negative connotation to the person being so labeled.
Easy to hide behind words such as "blastocyst". What is growing inside the woman's body? If left uninterrupted, what will the result be in 9 months? A human baby! No surprise there. Women don't give birth to pigs or turnips or "blastocysts".
Of course it's alive. If it were dead, it would be gangrenous, and start poisoning the mother.
Women can control their reproductive processes. If they don't want a baby, they can abstain from sex. The problem is that sex is seen as such a cheap act, not something special to be shared between a married man and woman, that can have significant and awesome consequences. If you can't deal with the consequences of creating a new life, I suggest you abstain from sex.
So a person's life has no intrinsic value, but only the value other's assign to it? "If I'm cared for, or if I'm careworthy, then I deserve to live." Who the heck are you to decide if someone else's life is worthwhile? Every life is valuable. It's this kind of relativistic thinking that led the Romans to view mass slaughter as sport, and the Nazis to view Jews as disposable guinea pigs.
Vengeance is the Lord's, yes. It doesn't saying anything about justice being reserved only for the Lord, though.
You couldn't be farther from the truth. If you want to have sex, go ahead, that's your choice. I may not agree with your choice to fornicate, and I believe it will ultimately be harmful to yourself and your partner, but it's still your choice.
If you choose the action, you choose the consequences of the action. If those consequences are STDs, deal with it. If those consequences are the creation of a human life, deal with it. Murder is not an acceptable way to deal with a human life that happens to be inconvenient to you.
There is no jolting shift in attitude. It's all about personal responsibility and respect for life. Accept responsibility for the baby you created. Murder is not acceptable. If you cannot raise it yourself, let someone adopt it.
I cut my teeth on tcsh on Linux, too. But I ran into this problem, which the SAs at my new job talk about too: how do you redirect stderr in csh? You can't do it, you can only redirect stdout and stderr together. But you can with ksh or bash. When I was a tcsh user I just lived with the limitation, but now I wonder how I ever dealt with the hassle.
System instability is not the only reason to restart a system. Many people like to conserve power, as well. If the machine has a good sleep mode, this is probably not an issue.
Yeah, I've seen that around, but tcsh sucks. First thing I'm doing is installing bash and making it the default shell. Seems I saw a similar hack for that, too...
Case-sensitivity is a PITB. When you speak a filename to someone, how does the difference in capitalization sound? Apple took the user-oriented solution of making case irrelevant. The only people that presume that case-sensitivity in something as accessible as the filename is a good thing are geeks. If we want our source code to be case-sensitive, fine. As far as filenames go, "CT Stuff" and "ct stuff" should mean the same thing. Making case the only difference between two names is as bad as calling your variables x instead of millisecondsBeforeShuttleLaunch.
Some may dismiss this as pandering to "lusers". Yet case-sensitivity makes your life harder, too. Claiming it's a desirable feature is just a way of trying to show off how 31337 you are. No one's impressed that you can type mixed-case filenames. The rest of us just want to get work done.
Hope you caught my other post, sibling to yours.
This from WND's letters page today. Thought it fit in here.
Look back at what I've already written. Pedophilia is sex with kids, but most of these victims had already passed puberty. Most of the victims that have come forward are male. The first point says this is not strictly pedophilia. The second point says that homosexuality may play a role here. By using terms that are not strictly accurate, the media diverts your attention.
There have already been people on TV discussing the relevance of chastity in the Catholic priesthood in the 21st century. ("If they weren't so sexually repressed, they wouldn't be doing these sick things!") Clearly the media is attacking the beliefs of the Catholic church. It's not paranoia when it's a fact right in front of your face.
You also ignore the other point, just like the media wants you to: the Boy Scouts. The BSA has been slammed for not allowing homosexuals in trusted leadership positions. But in the Catholic case, we have an example of what can happen when homosexuals are in those leadership positions. (I think the homosexuality of the priests is evident by the fact that most of the victims are male.) The Scouts know you don't send sexually compatible people off into the woods together! Especially when one is in a position of authority over another. This is why media wants to divert us from these facts in the Catholic case, because it damages what they've been saying in the Scout case.
Right. Like how mainstream media's reporting of the current Catholic scandal doesn't have an obvious pro-gay bias.
Are you arguing that bias is good, as long as it's bias you agree with?
In case you didn't catch it, the bias is the inherent assumption that there's something wrong with Catholicism that's causing this, not with the homosexual men who happen to be Catholic priests. Also note the hot-button term "pedophile priests" that's used constantly, though victims have not been children equally of both sexes but mostly teen boys. Mainstream media has the inherent bias that homosexuality is morally acceptable, regardless that a large segment of the population holds beliefs to the contrary. For them, 'gay' is OK so obviously the problem is elsewhere. That conclusion is not so obvious if you remove that underlying assumption.
Fair and accurate reporting would not be making these kinds of assumptions and "deductions". Maybe it's the stress of the job. Maybe it's the vow of chastity. Maybe it's the vow of poverty. Some still do that, right? Or maybe it's the sexual tendency. Good investigative reporting shouldn't rule any out, but should find the angle that best fits the facts. If some indy news sources (like WND) tend to focus a bit more on the "flip side" view, I'd hazard a guess it's simply to counterbalance the overwhelming view from mainstream media.
WND is a "conservative rag" just because it has some views you disagree with? Get a grip. WND has a number of columnists I almost consistently disagree with. It also has a number I almost consistently agree with. That's a good balance, IMO.
WND also reports on stories that mainstream media will not touch. Willingness to look at the tough stories demonstrates journalistic integrity.
Are you so used to the typical Leftist slant in media that anything standing unslanted looks like a "conservative rag" to you? Media is biased. I prefer honest reporting that lets me arrive at my own conclusions.
Hadn't heard of that one. I'll put it on my list. Thanks.
Since mainstream media is biased Leftwards, a good balance could be considered news that is biased Rightwards. In the words of Rush Limbaugh, "I am equal time!"
In my view though, I just want news that doesn't cover up or embellish facts, and doesn't pick and choose which stories to report on. Persecution of Christians worldwide is rampant, especially in places like Sudan, but why don't we ever here about this?
Balanced reporting, and they often scoop the Big Players too.
Fox has pretty good, balanced news, too.