"Redhat is an enterprise Distro. Slackware is a hobbiest Distro Tow very different things."
True that they are two different things, sure. Though they are actually extraordinarily similar (to the point I usually get modded down when I say that they should be treated as two different, though closely related, Operating Systems, rather than being carelessly referred to as 'Linux'.)
"IT's like comparing Boeing to Cessna. They both make airplanes... but they both target completely different markets."
A very misleading analogy. It's more like if Boeing and Cessna were both building a plane based on the same chassis and engine. Slackware just produces one that lifts off a thousand pounds lighter, has engines that produce more thrust, and a stark, functional control layout, and gives it away for free expecting whoever uses it to have pilots, airplane mechanics, etc. on staff and to do their own due diligence and accept their own liability, while Redhat produces a much heavier version on the same airframe that they essentially rent to you, under a support contract where their mechanics keep it flying and they accept (some of the) liability.
That analogy isnt great either actually but it's a lot better than one that implies that RHE is somehow going to 'lift more weight' than Slackware. Given the same hardware the opposite would be true.
The Patriot Act is a very bad piece of legislation passed in a very rushed manner and yes certainly more people should have spoken out about this earlier but nonetheless, no act of Congress has authority to over-ride the Constitution, and any law that purports to, e.g. over-rule the 4th Amendment is null and void on its face. So no, I dont think it's silly at all.
The big problem here is that the watchers entrusted with enforcing the laws have set themselves above the laws. Not exactly news but with more confirmation coming out every day more and more people are becoming aware.
But there are technical problems. Our technical systems (computers and the internet) are very poorly designed. I have been saying this since the 80s but everyone was focused on making something happen now, instead of designing it right so it would continue to work in the future. So we have computers that are impossible to secure, communicating over network protocols where encryption is an afterthought, if that. And a mass of Septemberizens online reliant on extremely poorly designed browsers that will happily run code from any random server that they see a reference to. None of these technical problems are 'the problem' here but they certainly contribute to it, by making it absurdly easy for this spying to be performed, by the US government or anyone else.
"It so absolutely makes business sense to repel half of your target market (and more than that of your potential target market) in order to pursue a small marginal edge in your existing customer base."
It doesnt repel anywhere near half their market, obviously. The gamer chicks I know drool over the booth babes more than I do (which isnt saying much actually but it's there.) The only people that are repelled are chronic busy-bodies and those people are far too busy trying to run everyone elses lives to spend time playing video games anyway. They are not the target audience.
"I notice that you're stuck speculating because apparenlty you've never actually, like, talked with (or more to the point, listented to) women on the subject. Hmmmmm."
Huh? He said specifically he knew many women that were fine with it. I do too. Yes, it's sexist if you want to look at it that way, but primarily against men (presuming that we are brainless idiots who will buy crap simply because there is a healthy young woman nearly nude associated with it.) The girls are getting paid outrageous amounts of money just to show up and look pretty. If that's a bad message (and I tend to agree it is) the fact is it's sent in every other area of society, singling out conventions over it is silly. Worrying about booth babes when people are starving strikes me as the drama of the overprivileged busybody.
We read it instead of staring at it indefinitely waiting for the meaning to somehow invade our pores without any effort on our part. You should try it sometime.
"Apple and Microsoft want users who are happy with being locked down. They're easier to manage and make money from, and above all, they accept what they're given."
This makes sense. What doesnt make sense is how the GNOME program wound up being run by a bunch of idiots that want the same thing. They dont have the same financial incentives to take that position, and based on their origin you would expect them to be exactly the opposite. Yet they are not, and they detoured to their present course many years ago. Why?
Yes, if he ran the stop sign then he is at fault in the resulting accident. We werent talking about that. We were talking about a case where e.g. the *other* guy ran the stop sign and plowed into him, was clearly at fault according to observation of the accident, but the blame is shifted to the guy he hit simply because of the later determination that his BAC was over an arbitrary level.
"I didn't say it was right, I just pointed out the way it is. You cause a fender bender, you've got a little bit of trouble to deal with. You get caught drunk behind the wheel, regardless of how you got caught, pose for your mug shot."
And once that insanity was accepted the slippery slope to the destruction of the 4th amendment was only a matter of time.
This is exactly the kind of idiocy that I was thinking of.
"We had an incident in town where everyone who saw the wreck was pointing at one person as being at fault, but the guy who got hit was drunk. Guess who got cuffs?"
Assuming he has a reason to need that information in the first place.
Which seems a huge assumption. What happened to figuring out which car actually caused the accident? Do they no longer teach that in police academies these days?
"I'll hijack this here, because that's an important point. One of the strongest correlators of crime is the (inverse) quality of public education [0]. "
Agreed, excepting that the word 'public' here is unnecessary, inaccurate, and seems quite likely to amount to question-begging.
"Paying a small share for the education of your neighbours kids, even if you don't have any on your own, means paying for things you don't use. Yet the reduced stealing, robbing and killing 10 years down the road will benefit you personally."
Would that this was true! But you set a false scenario because you are assuming that without public education they wont get an education at all. This is false. My contention is that they would have the opportunity to receive a better, not a worse or simply no, education. Even if nothing else changed, simply the fact that someone is paying for something makes them less likely to waste it.
Good education is vitally important, on that I think we agree. My point is it's far too important to hand it over to an unaccountable monopoly.
I trained as an anthropologist for a few years under some excellent teachers, though I dont claim a degree in it. And quite simply, Dr. Diamond is wrong or you have misunderstood him. It's been many years since I read that book but I dont recall getting that message exactly. At any rate, in a band society the band is the common practical unit of organisation, but it is not the only one. Band members are not normally all related (a band might be composed of two families and several non family members) and band membership is extremely fluid, with people changing from band to band through the year, often essentially at will. Clans and tribes of people (generally related mythologically, not always literally) were larger groupings which could encompass many bands. Certainly sometimes groups fought each other, but peaceful interaction would still be the norm in most times and places. Horror stories regarding modern societies of this type consist of simple lies mixed with truths about things that happened only after the society was already broken down and effectively destroyed.
And yes, there is a danger of falling into the noble savage delusion, but there is also danger of denigrating our ancestors and underestimating them as well. It's all too easy to see our current state as the end of history, the pinnacle of achievement, etc. But an honest approach that can see our flaws as well as our achievements is probably better.
"Most libertarians wouldn't think taking a pair of shoes from a store without paying for it was just or reasonable, but when it comes to paying the bills for society, it suddenly becomes just and reasonable to take without paying."
Not at all. This is an absolute straw man.
We have no problem paying for what we use. But we dont want to pay for the things we dont use. Like the wars, the spying, the surveillance. And the things that we do use, we want provided in a competitive market-place where abusive unresponsive or otherwise problematic suppliers cannot simply continue to bill us as much as they wish and use it for whatever they want!
Stability is important but it must not be our supreme value. To do its job a society has to be founded on principles of basic decency and respect for your fellow man. Robbing your fellow man or, if he resists, shooting him, in order to fund your favorite pet project (whether the project itself is worthy or not) simply doesnt fit the bill.
"On the otherhand, I do understand the Libertarian argument that you're taking the fruits of someone's labour to pay for society. But I fail to see how it's any different than paying any other shareholder his fair share of the profits."
Really? You fail to see the difference between a consensual relationship, and a non-consensual one? The difference is clearly in whether or not each individual has the choice of whether or not to enter and remain in the relationship. The consequences of that difference is that consensual relationships inevitably offer a net value to all parties (otherwise consent is not granted or is withdrawn) while non-consensual relationships do not necessarily offer that value, as one or more parties is captive. It seems quite clear, and hardly a trivial distinction.
"Although I was talking about the US health system, and you are clearly not a supporter (who is?!) what I haven't heard is any alternatives that you offer, except for the right to self-determination."
I havent put forth any alternatives, except for the alternative I have put forth. Of course if you arbitrarily rule it out (why?) then I guess you will not hear any alternatives, but it doesnt mean I didnt propose one.
Self determination is the key. Respect for human rights is the key. A system built on a foundation of violating both - or a system allowed to grow on a foundation of respecting both, that is the difference between our proposals.
"The problem with that is that it sort of forgets that a market economy is governed by the inefficiencies of marketing - and profit-making. Neither of which are beneficial to the end-user. I wish it were so that humans were less prone to the mechanisms of advertising, but we are, and we make bad decisions on this."
Marketing is a plague, granted. But it is the state, and the welfare mentality, which encourages and exacerbates the weaknesses that are preyed upon.
Never expected a couple of posts on slashdot would make you agree with me against decades of schooling and indoctrination. Happy if maybe I expanded your mind a little, made you aware of a possibility you were previously unaware of. That's the most I would hope for.
"The thing is that so many people seem to forget (apparently you included) is that women are humans and as such behave like humans. Humans are on the whole social animals and there is generally a really bad feeling associated with being the odd one out."
Cry me a bloody river. Please. To a degree this is true and it's always been true, in every profession or other group, and so what? It's just pathetic that you have such an expectation of pampering, for life to have no adversity in it.
"Have you ever been to a computer science confrerence, especially a not especially prestigious one? I have many times and the behaviour on display from my fellow men made me embarrassed to be a guy, to be honest."
Not just at computer science conferences, but many places that is true. You can do some good in those situations as an individual, but I dont see them as justifying let alone necessitating sexist behaviour in retaliation.
"I'm still only going to give you a small portion of my income. 0.1% should suffice."
And in the system I advocate, you could say that, while in the system you defend, you cannot. Or you can, but it wont fly, of course. Find a way to refuse (difficult in europe, where the money is nearly always taxed before you get it) and you will eventually see why we say the power of the state grows out of the barrel of the gun.
"Surprisingly I hear from some US citizens that this wouldn't work, which doesn't make sense since most of Europe is proof that it does."
Of course in part that's because Americans tend to be pretty provincial and may not realise the degree to which it does work. But it wont work, not long term. It has worked for a few decades in western Europe on the back of a number of (ultimately unsustainable) distortions, and the system is straining and cracking badly in a number of cases already.
One paradox you face is that while a relatively wealthy nation with a culture that values work and production can maintain a welfare state and pay for it with taxes without destroying your productivity overnight, you still sap the very qualities that make this possible in the longer term. Which is to say, over time doing this makes you a less wealthy nation with a culture that places less value on productive work.
Another is that the spending has been effectively subsidised by the US. It's much easier to find the money for health care if you can simply count on someone else to defend you and skimp on defence. But it might be a big mistake to expect that situation to last forever.
I will give you examples from the country I am most familiar with - Sweden. At the end of WWII Sweden was in an enviable position. Neutrality had preserved Swedish industry, and Swedish companies cleaned up rebuilding the rest of Europe. The social democrats built their ideal welfare state with that wealth, and look what's happened. Sure, it worked to a degree, but as time passed it became more and more untenable. Eventually 'right wing' governments came in and cut costs and rationalised it into quite possibly the best designed welfare state in the world, but it's still sinking. And the areas where it functions best, such as education, have actually morphed from social democrat to nearly libertarian forms in practice.
Not at all. Derived ultimately from the band societies that humans lived in for roughly a quarter of a million years *before* the beginnings of the city states.
"The convention of the 'nation state' is a powerful one, which appears to have served us well. "
It may appear that way because the state has many apologists who credit it with good it doesnt do, and sweep the damage it does under the rug whenever possible.
For example, between 1900 and 1999 states around the world murdered around 262,000,000 people in straight up situations of mass murder. (See http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE5.HTM Statistics of Democide.)
I suggest you re-read my posts and try to find anywhere that I was holding up the us system as a model. (I havent and wouldnt. In fact I already explicitly stipulated that the current US system is even more screwed up than in western Europe. So your reply here is completely off target, it's completely inapplicable.
I guess the question is why would any community, should it be given a choice, have voluntarily agreed to such an extraordinarily inefficient and dehumanising way of "providing for itself."
It's a trick question. No one would, without being tricked or bribed. Only a few have to be bribed, and they trick the rest.
I, in fact, see very clearly that humans are social animals, and how important society is to us, how critical it is for our ability to thrive.
What you dont see is that the state is not the same thing as the society. Since you attribute all the benefits of society to the state, it's easy to see how you can view it as mostly benevolent, but this is a great miscalculation. Society, voluntary cooperation, community, all those things were old in our species long before the modern state was dreamed up.
"The farmer can and should be forced to give a small portion of his sellable produce to fulfill someone elses right not go hungry."
Not enough. I had a very bad year, broke my leg and been out of work for months. Got me an the missus and 7 kids. A small portion aint gonna do it buddy. Now where's our food?
Again, I dont contend that the farmer should be prohibited from contributing what he can afford (and in my experience, they do, constantly, and no one goes hungry around here because of that.) What I object to is your transformation of one mans hunger to another mans *obligation* to take positive action to satisfy that hunger no matter what. That path leads to total breakdown of society, to bloodbath and 'anarchy' in the very worst sense of the word. In highly status-conscious societies like Germany as an example, there is some natural resistance and the path gets trod more slowly, while in certain areas of the US and large parts of the third world it goes much faster, but ultimately it is the same path.
One of the most basic parts of becoming human is learning that you are not omnipotent. And one of the most common failings of humans is refusing to accept that. We keep trying to create a world where nothing can ever go wrong, either through religion (do what we say and no matter how bad it gets here it wont matter, because you're going to heaven) or the state (give us the power to tax and spend, to kidnap and imprison, and we will use it to create paradise on earth) doesnt really matter, because neither can actually provide what they promise, no matter how much is given to them.
So you want to guarantee no one will ever go hungry. Good! I consider that a genuinely worthy goal, and I have spent many a night working on that problem myself as a result. It seems, at first glance, such an easy problem to solve, right? Because we know we produce far more food on the planet than we would actually need to keep everyone alive, right? It's not a production problem, it's a distribution problem. See a nail, grab a blunt object, you have a distribution problem and a government empowered to tax and spend and shoot people, so just have the government gather up some 'excess' food and redistribute it to the people that need it and we have solved one of the big problems of humankind and can give ourselves a great big pat on the back.
If only it were so easy. But in fact it isnt. Hunger isnt a production problem, and it's not a distribution problem either. It's a *political* problem.
Just because people keep repeating it doesnt make it any less bunk.
The only real 'dump' from WIkileaks was in a case where it was the banality of the majority of the information that was really the story. Hundreds of thousands of documents that had no possible national security sensitivity that had been simply classifed by reflex. You could (and IIRC they actually did) go through and pull out a handful of documents that were evidence of other, specifically illegal, behaviour, and that's one story. But the larger story here that also needed to be told was how the government is reflexively classifying *everything* without any regards to whether there is any legitimate reason to do so or not. That's fundamentally contradictory to the basic assumptions of the classification system, and it indicates an absolute breakdown of government function here.
And you just cant make that case without being able to pull out the whole 'dump' and go through it document by document.
At first they only allowed selected people from major newspapers to go through them, iirc, and only later after they had been analyzed and the contents was known, one of the newspapers, not wikileaks, dumped the whole stack.
The whole meme of 'wikileaks just dumped everything irresponsibly' is what us old-timers used to call disinformation. They probably have another word for it today.
We all know how it would work out if someone did something similar to this for men instead.
As you say, separate but equal isnt the way to go here.
I dont agree with this groupthink that somehow women choosing to go into other fields is somehow a horrible phenomenon that "WE" somehow are obligated to remedy. That's bullshit. Most women dont want to be programmers. The ones that do, are not in any way prohibited or locked out of all the same resources the guys use.
So what's the message this group and others like it are putting out? Are they trying to tell us that women arent good enough? They have to have all this special gender-specific help or they will fail? They just arent smart enough? Is that really what they are trying to say?
Cause I think that's bullshit too. Plenty of women I know with plenty of brains. Most of them dont go into programming for perfectly rational reasons - there is something else that interests them more.
If something else interests you more, you should go do that instead. Man or woman, doesnt matter.
100% correct. Now you just need to apply it consistently.
The sort of 'positive rights' you are advocating cannot even in theory be made to work out so that this is true. 'Rights' as unearned claims to someone elses product is entirely antithetical to this goal, in fact. You simply cant have a 'right to health care' without infringing on the rights of those who provide health care.
The only way you can actually fulfill this goal is to define rights strictly and properly. You COULD have a right to seek and receive health care freely without THAT interfering with anyone elses liberty, you see?
"No man should be denied a fair job with fair pay."
Sure, in a perfect world that would be true (and in a perfect world people would have more opportunity to work for themselves instead of having to get a job from someone else as well) but you cant elevate that to the level of a right without big problems. Jobs, and labor, are economic goods and the most effective way to work towards your goal here is to remove all the interference and allow the market to work properly. Artificial unemployment would be all but eliminated.
Slashdot Mirror
"Redhat is an enterprise Distro. Slackware is a hobbiest Distro Tow very different things."
True that they are two different things, sure. Though they are actually extraordinarily similar (to the point I usually get modded down when I say that they should be treated as two different, though closely related, Operating Systems, rather than being carelessly referred to as 'Linux'.)
"IT's like comparing Boeing to Cessna. They both make airplanes... but they both target completely different markets."
A very misleading analogy. It's more like if Boeing and Cessna were both building a plane based on the same chassis and engine. Slackware just produces one that lifts off a thousand pounds lighter, has engines that produce more thrust, and a stark, functional control layout, and gives it away for free expecting whoever uses it to have pilots, airplane mechanics, etc. on staff and to do their own due diligence and accept their own liability, while Redhat produces a much heavier version on the same airframe that they essentially rent to you, under a support contract where their mechanics keep it flying and they accept (some of the) liability.
That analogy isnt great either actually but it's a lot better than one that implies that RHE is somehow going to 'lift more weight' than Slackware. Given the same hardware the opposite would be true.
The Patriot Act is a very bad piece of legislation passed in a very rushed manner and yes certainly more people should have spoken out about this earlier but nonetheless, no act of Congress has authority to over-ride the Constitution, and any law that purports to, e.g. over-rule the 4th Amendment is null and void on its face. So no, I dont think it's silly at all.
The big problem here is that the watchers entrusted with enforcing the laws have set themselves above the laws. Not exactly news but with more confirmation coming out every day more and more people are becoming aware.
But there are technical problems. Our technical systems (computers and the internet) are very poorly designed. I have been saying this since the 80s but everyone was focused on making something happen now, instead of designing it right so it would continue to work in the future. So we have computers that are impossible to secure, communicating over network protocols where encryption is an afterthought, if that. And a mass of Septemberizens online reliant on extremely poorly designed browsers that will happily run code from any random server that they see a reference to. None of these technical problems are 'the problem' here but they certainly contribute to it, by making it absurdly easy for this spying to be performed, by the US government or anyone else.
"It so absolutely makes business sense to repel half of your target market (and more than that of your potential target market) in order to pursue a small marginal edge in your existing customer base."
It doesnt repel anywhere near half their market, obviously. The gamer chicks I know drool over the booth babes more than I do (which isnt saying much actually but it's there.) The only people that are repelled are chronic busy-bodies and those people are far too busy trying to run everyone elses lives to spend time playing video games anyway. They are not the target audience.
"I notice that you're stuck speculating because apparenlty you've never actually, like, talked with (or more to the point, listented to) women on the subject. Hmmmmm."
Huh? He said specifically he knew many women that were fine with it. I do too. Yes, it's sexist if you want to look at it that way, but primarily against men (presuming that we are brainless idiots who will buy crap simply because there is a healthy young woman nearly nude associated with it.) The girls are getting paid outrageous amounts of money just to show up and look pretty. If that's a bad message (and I tend to agree it is) the fact is it's sent in every other area of society, singling out conventions over it is silly. Worrying about booth babes when people are starving strikes me as the drama of the overprivileged busybody.
"How does that not hurt anyone's eyes?"
We read it instead of staring at it indefinitely waiting for the meaning to somehow invade our pores without any effort on our part. You should try it sometime.
"Apple and Microsoft want users who are happy with being locked down. They're easier to manage and make money from, and above all, they accept what they're given."
This makes sense. What doesnt make sense is how the GNOME program wound up being run by a bunch of idiots that want the same thing. They dont have the same financial incentives to take that position, and based on their origin you would expect them to be exactly the opposite. Yet they are not, and they detoured to their present course many years ago. Why?
Yes, if he ran the stop sign then he is at fault in the resulting accident. We werent talking about that. We were talking about a case where e.g. the *other* guy ran the stop sign and plowed into him, was clearly at fault according to observation of the accident, but the blame is shifted to the guy he hit simply because of the later determination that his BAC was over an arbitrary level.
"I didn't say it was right, I just pointed out the way it is. You cause a fender bender, you've got a little bit of trouble to deal with. You get caught drunk behind the wheel, regardless of how you got caught, pose for your mug shot."
And once that insanity was accepted the slippery slope to the destruction of the 4th amendment was only a matter of time.
This is exactly the kind of idiocy that I was thinking of.
"We had an incident in town where everyone who saw the wreck was pointing at one person as being at fault, but the guy who got hit was drunk. Guess who got cuffs?"
Assuming he has a reason to need that information in the first place.
Which seems a huge assumption. What happened to figuring out which car actually caused the accident? Do they no longer teach that in police academies these days?
"I'll hijack this here, because that's an important point. One of the strongest correlators of crime is the (inverse) quality of public education [0]. "
Agreed, excepting that the word 'public' here is unnecessary, inaccurate, and seems quite likely to amount to question-begging.
"Paying a small share for the education of your neighbours kids, even if you don't have any on your own, means paying for things you don't use. Yet the reduced stealing, robbing and killing 10 years down the road will benefit you personally."
Would that this was true! But you set a false scenario because you are assuming that without public education they wont get an education at all. This is false. My contention is that they would have the opportunity to receive a better, not a worse or simply no, education. Even if nothing else changed, simply the fact that someone is paying for something makes them less likely to waste it.
Good education is vitally important, on that I think we agree. My point is it's far too important to hand it over to an unaccountable monopoly.
I trained as an anthropologist for a few years under some excellent teachers, though I dont claim a degree in it. And quite simply, Dr. Diamond is wrong or you have misunderstood him. It's been many years since I read that book but I dont recall getting that message exactly. At any rate, in a band society the band is the common practical unit of organisation, but it is not the only one. Band members are not normally all related (a band might be composed of two families and several non family members) and band membership is extremely fluid, with people changing from band to band through the year, often essentially at will. Clans and tribes of people (generally related mythologically, not always literally) were larger groupings which could encompass many bands. Certainly sometimes groups fought each other, but peaceful interaction would still be the norm in most times and places. Horror stories regarding modern societies of this type consist of simple lies mixed with truths about things that happened only after the society was already broken down and effectively destroyed.
And yes, there is a danger of falling into the noble savage delusion, but there is also danger of denigrating our ancestors and underestimating them as well. It's all too easy to see our current state as the end of history, the pinnacle of achievement, etc. But an honest approach that can see our flaws as well as our achievements is probably better.
"Most libertarians wouldn't think taking a pair of shoes from a store without paying for it was just or reasonable, but when it comes to paying the bills for society, it suddenly becomes just and reasonable to take without paying."
Not at all. This is an absolute straw man.
We have no problem paying for what we use. But we dont want to pay for the things we dont use. Like the wars, the spying, the surveillance. And the things that we do use, we want provided in a competitive market-place where abusive unresponsive or otherwise problematic suppliers cannot simply continue to bill us as much as they wish and use it for whatever they want!
Stability is important but it must not be our supreme value. To do its job a society has to be founded on principles of basic decency and respect for your fellow man. Robbing your fellow man or, if he resists, shooting him, in order to fund your favorite pet project (whether the project itself is worthy or not) simply doesnt fit the bill.
"On the otherhand, I do understand the Libertarian argument that you're taking the fruits of someone's labour to pay for society. But I fail to see how it's any different than paying any other shareholder his fair share of the profits."
Really? You fail to see the difference between a consensual relationship, and a non-consensual one? The difference is clearly in whether or not each individual has the choice of whether or not to enter and remain in the relationship. The consequences of that difference is that consensual relationships inevitably offer a net value to all parties (otherwise consent is not granted or is withdrawn) while non-consensual relationships do not necessarily offer that value, as one or more parties is captive. It seems quite clear, and hardly a trivial distinction.
"Although I was talking about the US health system, and you are clearly not a supporter (who is?!) what I haven't heard is any alternatives that you offer, except for the right to self-determination."
I havent put forth any alternatives, except for the alternative I have put forth. Of course if you arbitrarily rule it out (why?) then I guess you will not hear any alternatives, but it doesnt mean I didnt propose one.
Self determination is the key. Respect for human rights is the key. A system built on a foundation of violating both - or a system allowed to grow on a foundation of respecting both, that is the difference between our proposals.
"The problem with that is that it sort of forgets that a market economy is governed by the inefficiencies of marketing - and profit-making. Neither of which are beneficial to the end-user. I wish it were so that humans were less prone to the mechanisms of advertising, but we are, and we make bad decisions on this."
Marketing is a plague, granted. But it is the state, and the welfare mentality, which encourages and exacerbates the weaknesses that are preyed upon.
Never expected a couple of posts on slashdot would make you agree with me against decades of schooling and indoctrination. Happy if maybe I expanded your mind a little, made you aware of a possibility you were previously unaware of. That's the most I would hope for.
Wish you well.
"The thing is that so many people seem to forget (apparently you included) is that women are humans and as such behave like humans. Humans are on the whole social animals and there is generally a really bad feeling associated with being the odd one out."
Cry me a bloody river. Please. To a degree this is true and it's always been true, in every profession or other group, and so what? It's just pathetic that you have such an expectation of pampering, for life to have no adversity in it.
"Have you ever been to a computer science confrerence, especially a not especially prestigious one? I have many times and the behaviour on display from my fellow men made me embarrassed to be a guy, to be honest."
Not just at computer science conferences, but many places that is true. You can do some good in those situations as an individual, but I dont see them as justifying let alone necessitating sexist behaviour in retaliation.
"I'm still only going to give you a small portion of my income. 0.1% should suffice."
And in the system I advocate, you could say that, while in the system you defend, you cannot. Or you can, but it wont fly, of course. Find a way to refuse (difficult in europe, where the money is nearly always taxed before you get it) and you will eventually see why we say the power of the state grows out of the barrel of the gun.
"Surprisingly I hear from some US citizens that this wouldn't work, which doesn't make sense since most of Europe is proof that it does."
Of course in part that's because Americans tend to be pretty provincial and may not realise the degree to which it does work. But it wont work, not long term. It has worked for a few decades in western Europe on the back of a number of (ultimately unsustainable) distortions, and the system is straining and cracking badly in a number of cases already.
One paradox you face is that while a relatively wealthy nation with a culture that values work and production can maintain a welfare state and pay for it with taxes without destroying your productivity overnight, you still sap the very qualities that make this possible in the longer term. Which is to say, over time doing this makes you a less wealthy nation with a culture that places less value on productive work.
Another is that the spending has been effectively subsidised by the US. It's much easier to find the money for health care if you can simply count on someone else to defend you and skimp on defence. But it might be a big mistake to expect that situation to last forever.
I will give you examples from the country I am most familiar with - Sweden. At the end of WWII Sweden was in an enviable position. Neutrality had preserved Swedish industry, and Swedish companies cleaned up rebuilding the rest of Europe. The social democrats built their ideal welfare state with that wealth, and look what's happened. Sure, it worked to a degree, but as time passed it became more and more untenable. Eventually 'right wing' governments came in and cut costs and rationalised it into quite possibly the best designed welfare state in the world, but it's still sinking. And the areas where it functions best, such as education, have actually morphed from social democrat to nearly libertarian forms in practice.
"Of course - derived from the greek city states."
Not at all. Derived ultimately from the band societies that humans lived in for roughly a quarter of a million years *before* the beginnings of the city states.
"The convention of the 'nation state' is a powerful one, which appears to have served us well. "
It may appear that way because the state has many apologists who credit it with good it doesnt do, and sweep the damage it does under the rug whenever possible.
For example, between 1900 and 1999 states around the world murdered around 262,000,000 people in straight up situations of mass murder. (See http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE5.HTM Statistics of Democide.)
I suggest you re-read my posts and try to find anywhere that I was holding up the us system as a model. (I havent and wouldnt. In fact I already explicitly stipulated that the current US system is even more screwed up than in western Europe. So your reply here is completely off target, it's completely inapplicable.
I guess the question is why would any community, should it be given a choice, have voluntarily agreed to such an extraordinarily inefficient and dehumanising way of "providing for itself."
It's a trick question. No one would, without being tricked or bribed. Only a few have to be bribed, and they trick the rest.
I, in fact, see very clearly that humans are social animals, and how important society is to us, how critical it is for our ability to thrive.
What you dont see is that the state is not the same thing as the society. Since you attribute all the benefits of society to the state, it's easy to see how you can view it as mostly benevolent, but this is a great miscalculation. Society, voluntary cooperation, community, all those things were old in our species long before the modern state was dreamed up.
"The farmer can and should be forced to give a small portion of his sellable produce to fulfill someone elses right not go hungry."
Not enough. I had a very bad year, broke my leg and been out of work for months. Got me an the missus and 7 kids. A small portion aint gonna do it buddy. Now where's our food?
Again, I dont contend that the farmer should be prohibited from contributing what he can afford (and in my experience, they do, constantly, and no one goes hungry around here because of that.) What I object to is your transformation of one mans hunger to another mans *obligation* to take positive action to satisfy that hunger no matter what. That path leads to total breakdown of society, to bloodbath and 'anarchy' in the very worst sense of the word. In highly status-conscious societies like Germany as an example, there is some natural resistance and the path gets trod more slowly, while in certain areas of the US and large parts of the third world it goes much faster, but ultimately it is the same path.
One of the most basic parts of becoming human is learning that you are not omnipotent. And one of the most common failings of humans is refusing to accept that. We keep trying to create a world where nothing can ever go wrong, either through religion (do what we say and no matter how bad it gets here it wont matter, because you're going to heaven) or the state (give us the power to tax and spend, to kidnap and imprison, and we will use it to create paradise on earth) doesnt really matter, because neither can actually provide what they promise, no matter how much is given to them.
So you want to guarantee no one will ever go hungry. Good! I consider that a genuinely worthy goal, and I have spent many a night working on that problem myself as a result. It seems, at first glance, such an easy problem to solve, right? Because we know we produce far more food on the planet than we would actually need to keep everyone alive, right? It's not a production problem, it's a distribution problem. See a nail, grab a blunt object, you have a distribution problem and a government empowered to tax and spend and shoot people, so just have the government gather up some 'excess' food and redistribute it to the people that need it and we have solved one of the big problems of humankind and can give ourselves a great big pat on the back.
If only it were so easy. But in fact it isnt. Hunger isnt a production problem, and it's not a distribution problem either. It's a *political* problem.
Just because people keep repeating it doesnt make it any less bunk.
The only real 'dump' from WIkileaks was in a case where it was the banality of the majority of the information that was really the story. Hundreds of thousands of documents that had no possible national security sensitivity that had been simply classifed by reflex. You could (and IIRC they actually did) go through and pull out a handful of documents that were evidence of other, specifically illegal, behaviour, and that's one story. But the larger story here that also needed to be told was how the government is reflexively classifying *everything* without any regards to whether there is any legitimate reason to do so or not. That's fundamentally contradictory to the basic assumptions of the classification system, and it indicates an absolute breakdown of government function here.
And you just cant make that case without being able to pull out the whole 'dump' and go through it document by document.
At first they only allowed selected people from major newspapers to go through them, iirc, and only later after they had been analyzed and the contents was known, one of the newspapers, not wikileaks, dumped the whole stack.
The whole meme of 'wikileaks just dumped everything irresponsibly' is what us old-timers used to call disinformation. They probably have another word for it today.
We all know how it would work out if someone did something similar to this for men instead.
As you say, separate but equal isnt the way to go here.
I dont agree with this groupthink that somehow women choosing to go into other fields is somehow a horrible phenomenon that "WE" somehow are obligated to remedy. That's bullshit. Most women dont want to be programmers. The ones that do, are not in any way prohibited or locked out of all the same resources the guys use.
So what's the message this group and others like it are putting out? Are they trying to tell us that women arent good enough? They have to have all this special gender-specific help or they will fail? They just arent smart enough? Is that really what they are trying to say?
Cause I think that's bullshit too. Plenty of women I know with plenty of brains. Most of them dont go into programming for perfectly rational reasons - there is something else that interests them more.
If something else interests you more, you should go do that instead. Man or woman, doesnt matter.
"No man should have more rights than any other."
100% correct. Now you just need to apply it consistently.
The sort of 'positive rights' you are advocating cannot even in theory be made to work out so that this is true. 'Rights' as unearned claims to someone elses product is entirely antithetical to this goal, in fact. You simply cant have a 'right to health care' without infringing on the rights of those who provide health care.
The only way you can actually fulfill this goal is to define rights strictly and properly. You COULD have a right to seek and receive health care freely without THAT interfering with anyone elses liberty, you see?
"No man should be denied a fair job with fair pay."
Sure, in a perfect world that would be true (and in a perfect world people would have more opportunity to work for themselves instead of having to get a job from someone else as well) but you cant elevate that to the level of a right without big problems. Jobs, and labor, are economic goods and the most effective way to work towards your goal here is to remove all the interference and allow the market to work properly. Artificial unemployment would be all but eliminated.