It's time to abandon the mindlessly repeated mantra that religious belief has been the greatest source of human conflict and violence. Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history.
And therein lies the root of this entire argument, which can be summarised thus: people kill for reasons other than religion too, therefore religion is good. Oh, and all religions state that killing is wrong in their moral code, which makes them double good, so when people do kill in the name of religion, they're not *really* religious.
OK, let's ignore the fact that all of the reasons for killing which this "writer" lists are often uncomfortably close to religion (Hitler, "ethnic" troubles in Northern Ireland..) but -and i ask this genuinely- can anyone tell me, what exactly is his point? That we should *believe* in a story because the (already inate) values that it promotes are good ones? I've never heard an atheist argue with the values of the ten commandments (the big ones. Thou shalt not kill, steal etc. Not the ones about god), but rather argue that they are INSTINCTIVE within humans, but because religion has written them down it's somehow in the right, and because atheism does not have a "constitution" EVERY genocide in history is, by default, atheistic?
Or Is it merely, "nah, nah, politics can be bad for people too..let's all be religious"?
Just the biggest load of genocidal apologism i've heard from anyone who wasn't institutionalised.
Churchill and the US staying at home while the USSR fights Nazi Germany,
Small point, pedantic to some people, important to others: All the other examples were countries: Churchill was not a country. Lots of British people gave more than Churchill ever did, so let's remember them too, even in insignificant (as in comparatively insignificant: in a cosmic sense) analogies on slashdot.
Although it doesn't answer all of your questions the pdf of the "Expert Report" which the article links to has some discussion of the method. The sample size was 11,100 randomly selected 50,000 'Google supplied' websites and 39,999 from MSN supplied websites, if I'm not mistaken.
I completely agree with the sentiment of your post though. We have sloppy statistics from the media ('98% of Immigrants eat babies!'); from Advertising, which proclaims that "95% of participants loved their shampoo!" then in tiny small prints exclaims that the sample size was 30; and from Governments, which are infamous for it's statistical manipulation ("94% of people want to go to war").
there are the gems that make you stop fast forwarding the video - or stop you channel surfing.
In a way i PREFER ads to be really bad. I can go make a cup of tea, maybe give that book i'm reading another chance to hook me. Granted, i could do this with "great" ads too, but if i am sucked in to watching them at least if they're rubbish i can fall back onto a vague sense of self superiority to smirk my way through them. Good adverts are..insidious. Advertising is a huge business, there's tons of Psychological studies on what sort of adverts will appeal to what market etc.: my girlfriend learnt all about them at University. At least if an advert is just "buy this cooker" I can just mumble "no, i don't need a fucking cooker, you knob" to myself..
My problem stems from the frequency of the breaks, not the quality. I even watched "100 Greatest Adverts" on Channel 4.
I'd rather have adverts and not pay the license; the time between programs would stay about the same.
How d'you figure that? Every channel advertises it's own programs either side of the adverts, and none of them less so than the bbc. Buy a dvd with a bbc produced show on it and see how long the half hour shows are (usually around 28 minutes), and then look at the ones that run at half an hour on channel 4 (the simpsons on the bbc was a twenty or twenty five minute show if memory serves).
Go to the USA and watch tv, it's intolerable: the adverts are every two minutes (or feel like it). At least with the bbc the commercial channels are forced to regulate how often they break, for fear of pissing away viewers..
Additionally if we lost the bbc to advertising we'd lose a hell of a lot more than just the time between programs. The license fee means that they are publically accountable (and therefore not to the highest bidder). It allows them to innovate (I direct your attention to all the innovative comedy programs it's produced in the last 30 years). The website is a fantastic, in depth resource. The Radio stations cater to all tastes, they have informed debaters, all sorts of music for all cultures and we're saved from the embarrassement that are Radio Adverts. There's a million reasons why the bbc is hugely beneficial to British culture: "Time between programs" is not one of the big ones.
I've never done a "mod up!" message before and i don't like them, so i'll just write to say "cheers mate".. you managed to eloquently destroy some of the most infuriatingly ignorant arguments that perpetually bounce around slashdot in your last few posts.
What I've done is echoed the voices of millions of other people who think exactly the same thing, but have done so with my own personal experience.
So..An anecdote then. My point was not to debate whether or not your story was backed up by millions of people, my point was that for every anecdote you tell there are people who have an opposite opinion, and a story to back it up. It's the reason why politicians don't stand up in parliament and say "guess what happened to me yesterday?.." The point of all this is to measure numbers. There are millions of people who disagree with you too, that's why it's an "issue", and not a human right.
Have you ever kept a very crazy guy with a pipe from beating down your back door in the middle of the night while your terrorized spouse frantically dials 911 for a long-delayed response? I have, with a gun.
Have you ever told an anecdote to support an argument for a national policy? Why don't we round up all the anecdotes like yours (Guns saved my life) and all the anecdotes of people who have lost a mother, father, son or daughter to a gun crime, and we'll see who has the most.
Are you also tallying up kids that die from other poorly-supervised activities? Like, drowning in family pools, eating foods they're allergic to, sucking down carbon monoxide from a car idling in the garage, falling out of trees, etc?
Pools, food, cars and tree's have other uses. Their value is based on these other uses. Any accidents which happen are weighed up against their primary use. If millions of children are dieing from pools every day, they might justifiably be banned. Since they're not, they're not. Guns, on the other hand, exist only to maim and kill people* therefore the comparative number of children and other innocent people who have to die before a ban is considered should be set fairly low.
* not including wild animals, a legimate use if proven that it is necessary for someone's lifestyle (ie. not downtown chicago) and the person is adequately trained.
other people have already discredited most things you've said but one things stands out that you said highlights you as talking a crock of shit:
Even take violence at football games - yes, it's decreased here in the past 20 years but only because there are so many police involved in crowd control, no violence ever has the chance to break out.
Now, i know about this. I go to the football at Ipswich all the time. The violence at football matches has decreased in the past twenty years because more families and middle class people are going, and it's no longer the refuge of skinhead thugs that it was in the 70's who wanted someone to get rid of their violent aggression on to. The police have nothing to do with it apart from taking out the extreme fringe elements. Whether British society or just British football culture has changed is a valid point of debate but one things for certain, the suggestion that the police presence is at the heart of it is a knee-jerk reaction and i suggest you go and watch a few games and look around you the crowd around you before you comment.
I go out to other European countries a lot, particularly Spain, and I don't hear or see any of these kinds of behaviours
Is this the same Spain that made monkey noises at the black British players in a friendly match a year or so ago? Give me a rowdy town centre any day, if that's the alternative.
This is a really sad incident and we should be ashamed that it happened here
I'm more ashamed that you happened here. Your argument is really disjointed, veering from binge drinking to football violence to lamenting kids for wanting to keep up with what's cool (that's new) and to be honest it reads like an old mans "what's wrong with the world today?" speech (Winters are colder. Children don't RESPECT their elders). Go outside and meet some new people, it's not as bad as you think.
"Good" needs a context. For example, high level autism can result in people being expert in certain fields (maths, language) however it is the peripheral issues of social interaction that can cause problems requiring care. If it is just the sexuality that changes in homosexuals, by your argument, why would they become less "good"?
Do you know why there's no crime? Most of these people go to church! They have morals! It's not like NY City or Chicago, where you have to have Police on every street corner to keep the peace.
There is absolutely no way that the relationship between morals and church-going is causative and it is contentious whether it even has a correlative effect. Please stop propagating the myth that religion makes people better, it doesn't. This has been proved historically time and time again and continues to be proved in strongly secular countries across the world.
"The freedom not to get shot" isn't an actual freedom, however, so your argument is specious.
Yeah, it's why i called it flippant.
Since the value of a freedom (positive or negative) is a personal judgement of its pros and cons, giving an absolute label of positive or negative is meaningless.
It's not designed to "label" a freedom. It's designed to make you think about the concept of freedom. It's exactly relevant to the post I was replying to, as he was questioning whether "the land of the free" was indeed free, and then gave examples of different types of freedom. Also, as i've pointed out in this thread, people (especially Slashdotters) should be a lot less casual about disregarding the theories of Immanuel Kant.
Mate, I didn't define the word "cloud" either, but i don't expect to be attacked if i "assert" they exist.
What I did was point out that the terms and logic you were writing were classic logical fallacies and whomever you were quoting seems to have either been ignoring that or been a poor thinker
Immanuel Kant is not a "poor thinker" and he was the first to propose the possibility of positive and negative freedom.
Of course sense the lack of a constraint is one factor necessary to provide an ability to act, every single "positive" freedom must also be accompanied by a "negative" freedom
Please read Berlin, I., 1978, From Hope and Fear Set Free"', in I. Berlin, Concepts and Categories. Philosophical Essays, ed. H. Hardy, London: Hogarth Press; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Reprinted in Berlin 2002' in which he asserts that "negative and positive liberty are not merely two distinct kinds of liberty; they can be seen as rival, incompatible interpretations of a single political ideal."
Do you understand this? It's a political viewpoint on a concept. It's what i was talking about when I referred to your examples. Negative freedom is the absence of rules (you can shoot a bear or a mugger) whereas positive freedom requires "control, self-mastery, self-determination or self-realization". I'm really, genuinely, very sorry it's called "negative" and not Super Happy Cool Freedom but you should get over it, as i've already said, there are numerous supporters of it, "negative" in this context IS NOT A CRITICISM
Sorry, but it reads to me as a PR attack rather than true logic.
Yes, that's right. I did it for the PR.
I'm not interested in political ramifications and this is indeed politics, not philosophy.
You are being more than flippant, but it does end in -ant. It's more like ignorant.
Potato, potato..
Now, as a disclaimer, I am one of these stupid loud boorish americans that people all over the world love to sneer (and worse) at...
So are a lot of my family. Actually, for what it's worth, i'm quite close to the typical British "shy and slightly introvert" stereotype. Similar to my experience with Americans (the ones i've met) we rarely conform to our stereotype, although i'm the exception that proves the rule..
but the simple fact is that there are no cops anywhere whose job is to prevent crime. Their job is to deter it.
Ok, despite the fact you called me ignorant i liked your post. You generalised your own culture and did point out the contrary statistics. However, i would like to point out that cops jobs are not as black and white as you pointed out. Although their job IS to deter crime, all crime is not equal. We have tons of crime over here, binge-drink culture related et al. However, our political focus is on deterring people from getting shot and killed, and we have statistically proved that we have a pretty good argument for carrying on as we are.
It's definitely possible to get guns in the UK, and use them to commit crimes. Those numbers are actually ptentially low, they're from 2000, and since then crime (especially gun crime) has risen in the UK (according to the home office) and fallen in the US.
yeah, the rise and fall is pretty relative. Also, it's not like NO police officers have guns: we do have well trained armed response units, they just don't patrol. We have about the right level of control and protection for the amount of guns there are on the streets of Britain.
Ahh, but the determination as to what is 'negative' and what is 'positive' is wholly subjective.
No, it's not. It's been clearly defined.
Or Americans prefer the positive freedom (freedom to not be eaten by a bear or mugged by a criminal) while the Europeans prefer the negative freedom (freedom to tell other people they can't have a gun).
In those examples the American one is still negative and the European one is still positive. It's about the concept (owning a weapon), not the resulting action. i didn't invent the terms.
Your attempts to characterize them otherwise are simply semantic attacks that attempt to redefine the term freedom. It is a classic logical fallacy and just a way to capitalize on the negativity ratings of various words by appealing to emotive attachments to words, rather than real, logical arguments.
Ok, i'm sure you'd like to tell that to Kant, and various other thinkers of the twentieth century.
You made the (not uncommon) mistake of assuming that was i wrote was designed to be inflammatory, when in fact i was merely trying to provide information (i did have a sly dig at the american gun laws: i'm opposed to them, conceptually. it's why i referred to the digs, in my own words as "flippant".)
Your attempts to characterize them otherwise are simply semantic attacks that attempt to redefine the term freedom. It is a classic logical fallacy and just a way to capitalize on the negativity ratings of various words by appealing to emotive attachments to words, rather than real, logical arguments.
Please read: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive -negative/> before you start talking about a subject about which you obviously have no idea. There are numerous supporters of negative freedom, from the link: "the most widely cited supporters of the negative concept of liberty include Day (1971), Oppenheim (1981), Miller (1983) and Steiner (1994)."
The "emotional attachment" is not as straightforward as you ignorantly presume. Again, i was only providing information i deemed relevant and which i hoped would stimulate peoples ability to THINK and CONSIDER, rather than dumbly argue based on an already decided political agenda.
My suspicion is the latter, since you're referring to him as both a philosopher and journalist, which usually translates to a rabble rouser who represents shallow, obviously illogical concepts to sell papers.
I'm not dignifying this unfounded generality with a response.
Find an insurance company that insists on helmets and seatbelts, and charges more to those who ride without them.
I don't want to live my life wondering if what i'm doing will affect my claim with an insurance company. I also think it's a dangerous path encouraging insurance companies to put in MORE subclauses. Ethical they are not.
You say that prostitution should be legal, but the johns might be with your health insurance company. Thats going to cost you too.
Good. Take my money (and no i don't have that much of it). If it means that other people (which includes prostitutes. they are not, and never will be, dehumanised) are having safe sex and being responsible against the spread of disease and social problems derived from accidental pregnancy, then you can take my money and keep it. It's called compassion.
I'm convinced we're little better off than we would be if we let people make their own decisions and suffer the consequences for them.
Your final paragraph deals in generality, and only states that politically you are "right of the middle". We could talk all day in this manner (i personally believe that people should develop more of a responsibility to look out for their fellow man) but getting dragged into a debate which spans the entire political spectrum on the internet is not, in my experience, worthwhile.
If you're interested in this, i believe what you are referring to is the difference between "negative" and "positive" freedom. It's one of the points of culture clash between the typical American and European cultures. America -historically and culturally- tends to value negative freedom (the freedom to own a gun), whereas the Europeans tend towards positive freedoms (the freedom to not get shot). I'm being a little flippant in my examples but it is worth researching for any Americans who have developed a defensive attitude about their freedom, and it provides a more balanced insight into the political reasoning to some of the slashdot stories that are targetted at the "OMG! Big Brother!" crowd (not that i dislike Orwell or his ideology necessarily, quite the contrary, but i don't think that taking 1984 as a bible and appyling it to the minutaie of everyday political wrangling is productive. The most intelligent slashdot post i've seen in a while pointed out that if eventually "they" do "come for us", we won't be able to warn anyone cause everyones been crying wolf everytime a new Government database is announced..)
For even further information about negative and positive freedom the journalist, author and philosopher Julian Baggini has written about it in numerous books and articles
"Obviously there is a huge difference between filtering search results and gassing people and putting them in mass graves, but the logic doesn't improve any as the severity decreases."
So, do you advocate that we should declare war on China (as we did with the Nazis)?. Cause if the logic relating to the "crime" (Nazi genocide or China censorship) doesn't decrease, why does the logic relating to the punishment? (war or google pulling out of china). I'm being facetious, obviously, however I fail to see how your 'scalable' logic can be applied to find a solution to this situation when the punishment is so arbitrary. Using your model an inverted statement could also be made such as "American supermarkets do trillions worth of business each year with China, should Google be punished by not being allowed? Obivously there's a difference between selling a Chinese product and actually providing the information, but the logic doesn't improve any as the severity increases.."
And when you look at it from this angle it simply becomes: does the punishment fit the crime?
And what, prey tell, other than funding sources is the difference between a private charity for all who require welfare, and the current welfare state?
Except for the fact that the humanitarians among us would have to pay more to compensate for the more selfish ones?
Charities undeniably do a lot of good work but the argument that 'lower taxes = more giving' is incredibly naive, even without the inevitable media driven paranoia that would follow, all that we would see is a lot more desperation in the already desperate, and a lot more pin-stripe suits in BMW's..
also, have you considered what might happen when the country is in a recession and people don't feel like giving as much? Or when they're saving for their new fridge? I'm not using these as justification for not giving to charity but you can be damn sure others will.
So no, in answer to your question i wouldn't "just let them die" in the short term, but just because some people pay to build their own houses, doesn't mean they can be relied on to build a library..
take the money from everyone and monitor where it goes, it's the only way to guarantee we're all doing our bit..
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't he create a man, in his current form, from dust? And then women from a rib of man? On -what was it- wednesday?
Don't you dind it coincidental that the more advances in science, the more of the Bible becomes an "analogy"?
And therein lies the root of this entire argument, which can be summarised thus: people kill for reasons other than religion too, therefore religion is good. Oh, and all religions state that killing is wrong in their moral code, which makes them double good, so when people do kill in the name of religion, they're not *really* religious.
OK, let's ignore the fact that all of the reasons for killing which this "writer" lists are often uncomfortably close to religion (Hitler, "ethnic" troubles in Northern Ireland..) but -and i ask this genuinely- can anyone tell me, what exactly is his point? That we should *believe* in a story because the (already inate) values that it promotes are good ones? I've never heard an atheist argue with the values of the ten commandments (the big ones. Thou shalt not kill, steal etc. Not the ones about god), but rather argue that they are INSTINCTIVE within humans, but because religion has written them down it's somehow in the right, and because atheism does not have a "constitution" EVERY genocide in history is, by default, atheistic?
Or Is it merely, "nah, nah, politics can be bad for people too..let's all be religious"?
Just the biggest load of genocidal apologism i've heard from anyone who wasn't institutionalised.
Small point, pedantic to some people, important to others: All the other examples were countries: Churchill was not a country. Lots of British people gave more than Churchill ever did, so let's remember them too, even in insignificant (as in comparatively insignificant: in a cosmic sense) analogies on slashdot.
"There are two kinds of people I can't stand in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures, and the Dutch."
What answer were you hoping for? You question is only relevant to China by prejudice.
I completely agree with the sentiment of your post though. We have sloppy statistics from the media ('98% of Immigrants eat babies!'); from Advertising, which proclaims that "95% of participants loved their shampoo!" then in tiny small prints exclaims that the sample size was 30; and from Governments, which are infamous for it's statistical manipulation ("94% of people want to go to war").
In a way i PREFER ads to be really bad. I can go make a cup of tea, maybe give that book i'm reading another chance to hook me. Granted, i could do this with "great" ads too, but if i am sucked in to watching them at least if they're rubbish i can fall back onto a vague sense of self superiority to smirk my way through them. Good adverts are..insidious. Advertising is a huge business, there's tons of Psychological studies on what sort of adverts will appeal to what market etc.: my girlfriend learnt all about them at University. At least if an advert is just "buy this cooker" I can just mumble "no, i don't need a fucking cooker, you knob" to myself..
My problem stems from the frequency of the breaks, not the quality. I even watched "100 Greatest Adverts" on Channel 4.
Well, 5 minutes of it.
How d'you figure that? Every channel advertises it's own programs either side of the adverts, and none of them less so than the bbc. Buy a dvd with a bbc produced show on it and see how long the half hour shows are (usually around 28 minutes), and then look at the ones that run at half an hour on channel 4 (the simpsons on the bbc was a twenty or twenty five minute show if memory serves).
Go to the USA and watch tv, it's intolerable: the adverts are every two minutes (or feel like it). At least with the bbc the commercial channels are forced to regulate how often they break, for fear of pissing away viewers..
Additionally if we lost the bbc to advertising we'd lose a hell of a lot more than just the time between programs. The license fee means that they are publically accountable (and therefore not to the highest bidder). It allows them to innovate (I direct your attention to all the innovative comedy programs it's produced in the last 30 years). The website is a fantastic, in depth resource. The Radio stations cater to all tastes, they have informed debaters, all sorts of music for all cultures and we're saved from the embarrassement that are Radio Adverts. There's a million reasons why the bbc is hugely beneficial to British culture: "Time between programs" is not one of the big ones.
well done.
So..An anecdote then. My point was not to debate whether or not your story was backed up by millions of people, my point was that for every anecdote you tell there are people who have an opposite opinion, and a story to back it up. It's the reason why politicians don't stand up in parliament and say "guess what happened to me yesterday?.." The point of all this is to measure numbers. There are millions of people who disagree with you too, that's why it's an "issue", and not a human right.
Have you ever told an anecdote to support an argument for a national policy? Why don't we round up all the anecdotes like yours (Guns saved my life) and all the anecdotes of people who have lost a mother, father, son or daughter to a gun crime, and we'll see who has the most.
Are you also tallying up kids that die from other poorly-supervised activities? Like, drowning in family pools, eating foods they're allergic to, sucking down carbon monoxide from a car idling in the garage, falling out of trees, etc?
Pools, food, cars and tree's have other uses. Their value is based on these other uses. Any accidents which happen are weighed up against their primary use. If millions of children are dieing from pools every day, they might justifiably be banned. Since they're not, they're not. Guns, on the other hand, exist only to maim and kill people* therefore the comparative number of children and other innocent people who have to die before a ban is considered should be set fairly low.
* not including wild animals, a legimate use if proven that it is necessary for someone's lifestyle (ie. not downtown chicago) and the person is adequately trained.
Even take violence at football games - yes, it's decreased here in the past 20 years but only because there are so many police involved in crowd control, no violence ever has the chance to break out.
Now, i know about this. I go to the football at Ipswich all the time. The violence at football matches has decreased in the past twenty years because more families and middle class people are going, and it's no longer the refuge of skinhead thugs that it was in the 70's who wanted someone to get rid of their violent aggression on to. The police have nothing to do with it apart from taking out the extreme fringe elements. Whether British society or just British football culture has changed is a valid point of debate but one things for certain, the suggestion that the police presence is at the heart of it is a knee-jerk reaction and i suggest you go and watch a few games and look around you the crowd around you before you comment.
I go out to other European countries a lot, particularly Spain, and I don't hear or see any of these kinds of behaviours
Is this the same Spain that made monkey noises at the black British players in a friendly match a year or so ago? Give me a rowdy town centre any day, if that's the alternative.
This is a really sad incident and we should be ashamed that it happened here
I'm more ashamed that you happened here. Your argument is really disjointed, veering from binge drinking to football violence to lamenting kids for wanting to keep up with what's cool (that's new) and to be honest it reads like an old mans "what's wrong with the world today?" speech (Winters are colder. Children don't RESPECT their elders). Go outside and meet some new people, it's not as bad as you think.
Normality is relative.
Injuries (and homosexuality) occur in nature.
"Good" needs a context. For example, high level autism can result in people being expert in certain fields (maths, language) however it is the peripheral issues of social interaction that can cause problems requiring care. If it is just the sexuality that changes in homosexuals, by your argument, why would they become less "good"?
Asinine anecdotes about what happened in your sorry little life do not determine or influence a national immigration policy..
Step 2: Repeat their own argument back to them, only without the technical basis to back it up. (Inconveniant. Hyperbole is much more enjoyable).
Step 3: Propose a study that the person you're arguing with has already (virtually identically) proposed in an earlier post.
nice work..
There is absolutely no way that the relationship between morals and church-going is causative and it is contentious whether it even has a correlative effect. Please stop propagating the myth that religion makes people better, it doesn't. This has been proved historically time and time again and continues to be proved in strongly secular countries across the world.
Yeah, it's why i called it flippant.
Since the value of a freedom (positive or negative) is a personal judgement of its pros and cons, giving an absolute label of positive or negative is meaningless.
It's not designed to "label" a freedom. It's designed to make you think about the concept of freedom. It's exactly relevant to the post I was replying to, as he was questioning whether "the land of the free" was indeed free, and then gave examples of different types of freedom. Also, as i've pointed out in this thread, people (especially Slashdotters) should be a lot less casual about disregarding the theories of Immanuel Kant.
Mate, I didn't define the word "cloud" either, but i don't expect to be attacked if i "assert" they exist.
What I did was point out that the terms and logic you were writing were classic logical fallacies and whomever you were quoting seems to have either been ignoring that or been a poor thinker
Immanuel Kant is not a "poor thinker" and he was the first to propose the possibility of positive and negative freedom.
Of course sense the lack of a constraint is one factor necessary to provide an ability to act, every single "positive" freedom must also be accompanied by a "negative" freedom
Please read Berlin, I., 1978, From Hope and Fear Set Free"', in I. Berlin, Concepts and Categories. Philosophical Essays, ed. H. Hardy, London: Hogarth Press; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Reprinted in Berlin 2002' in which he asserts that "negative and positive liberty are not merely two distinct kinds of liberty; they can be seen as rival, incompatible interpretations of a single political ideal."
Do you understand this? It's a political viewpoint on a concept. It's what i was talking about when I referred to your examples. Negative freedom is the absence of rules (you can shoot a bear or a mugger) whereas positive freedom requires "control, self-mastery, self-determination or self-realization". I'm really, genuinely, very sorry it's called "negative" and not Super Happy Cool Freedom but you should get over it, as i've already said, there are numerous supporters of it, "negative" in this context IS NOT A CRITICISM
Sorry, but it reads to me as a PR attack rather than true logic.
Yes, that's right. I did it for the PR.
I'm not interested in political ramifications and this is indeed politics, not philosophy.
They are not mutually exclusive.
Potato, potato..
Now, as a disclaimer, I am one of these stupid loud boorish americans that people all over the world love to sneer (and worse) at...
So are a lot of my family. Actually, for what it's worth, i'm quite close to the typical British "shy and slightly introvert" stereotype. Similar to my experience with Americans (the ones i've met) we rarely conform to our stereotype, although i'm the exception that proves the rule..
but the simple fact is that there are no cops anywhere whose job is to prevent crime. Their job is to deter it.
Ok, despite the fact you called me ignorant i liked your post. You generalised your own culture and did point out the contrary statistics. However, i would like to point out that cops jobs are not as black and white as you pointed out. Although their job IS to deter crime, all crime is not equal. We have tons of crime over here, binge-drink culture related et al. However, our political focus is on deterring people from getting shot and killed, and we have statistically proved that we have a pretty good argument for carrying on as we are.
It's definitely possible to get guns in the UK, and use them to commit crimes. Those numbers are actually ptentially low, they're from 2000, and since then crime (especially gun crime) has risen in the UK (according to the home office) and fallen in the US.
yeah, the rise and fall is pretty relative. Also, it's not like NO police officers have guns: we do have well trained armed response units, they just don't patrol. We have about the right level of control and protection for the amount of guns there are on the streets of Britain.
No, it's not. It's been clearly defined.
Or Americans prefer the positive freedom (freedom to not be eaten by a bear or mugged by a criminal) while the Europeans prefer the negative freedom (freedom to tell other people they can't have a gun).
In those examples the American one is still negative and the European one is still positive. It's about the concept (owning a weapon), not the resulting action. i didn't invent the terms.
Your attempts to characterize them otherwise are simply semantic attacks that attempt to redefine the term freedom. It is a classic logical fallacy and just a way to capitalize on the negativity ratings of various words by appealing to emotive attachments to words, rather than real, logical arguments.
Ok, i'm sure you'd like to tell that to Kant, and various other thinkers of the twentieth century.
You made the (not uncommon) mistake of assuming that was i wrote was designed to be inflammatory, when in fact i was merely trying to provide information (i did have a sly dig at the american gun laws: i'm opposed to them, conceptually. it's why i referred to the digs, in my own words as "flippant".)
Your attempts to characterize them otherwise are simply semantic attacks that attempt to redefine the term freedom. It is a classic logical fallacy and just a way to capitalize on the negativity ratings of various words by appealing to emotive attachments to words, rather than real, logical arguments.
Please read: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive -negative/> before you start talking about a subject about which you obviously have no idea. There are numerous supporters of negative freedom, from the link: "the most widely cited supporters of the negative concept of liberty include Day (1971), Oppenheim (1981), Miller (1983) and Steiner (1994)."
The "emotional attachment" is not as straightforward as you ignorantly presume. Again, i was only providing information i deemed relevant and which i hoped would stimulate peoples ability to THINK and CONSIDER, rather than dumbly argue based on an already decided political agenda.
My suspicion is the latter, since you're referring to him as both a philosopher and journalist, which usually translates to a rabble rouser who represents shallow, obviously illogical concepts to sell papers.
I'm not dignifying this unfounded generality with a response.
I don't want to live my life wondering if what i'm doing will affect my claim with an insurance company. I also think it's a dangerous path encouraging insurance companies to put in MORE subclauses. Ethical they are not.
You say that prostitution should be legal, but the johns might be with your health insurance company. Thats going to cost you too.
Good. Take my money (and no i don't have that much of it). If it means that other people (which includes prostitutes. they are not, and never will be, dehumanised) are having safe sex and being responsible against the spread of disease and social problems derived from accidental pregnancy, then you can take my money and keep it. It's called compassion.
I'm convinced we're little better off than we would be if we let people make their own decisions and suffer the consequences for them.
Your final paragraph deals in generality, and only states that politically you are "right of the middle". We could talk all day in this manner (i personally believe that people should develop more of a responsibility to look out for their fellow man) but getting dragged into a debate which spans the entire political spectrum on the internet is not, in my experience, worthwhile.
For even further information about negative and positive freedom the journalist, author and philosopher Julian Baggini has written about it in numerous books and articles
So, do you advocate that we should declare war on China (as we did with the Nazis)?. Cause if the logic relating to the "crime" (Nazi genocide or China censorship) doesn't decrease, why does the logic relating to the punishment? (war or google pulling out of china). I'm being facetious, obviously, however I fail to see how your 'scalable' logic can be applied to find a solution to this situation when the punishment is so arbitrary. Using your model an inverted statement could also be made such as "American supermarkets do trillions worth of business each year with China, should Google be punished by not being allowed? Obivously there's a difference between selling a Chinese product and actually providing the information, but the logic doesn't improve any as the severity increases.."
And when you look at it from this angle it simply becomes: does the punishment fit the crime?
Except for the fact that the humanitarians among us would have to pay more to compensate for the more selfish ones?
Charities undeniably do a lot of good work but the argument that 'lower taxes = more giving' is incredibly naive, even without the inevitable media driven paranoia that would follow, all that we would see is a lot more desperation in the already desperate, and a lot more pin-stripe suits in BMW's..
also, have you considered what might happen when the country is in a recession and people don't feel like giving as much? Or when they're saving for their new fridge? I'm not using these as justification for not giving to charity but you can be damn sure others will.
So no, in answer to your question i wouldn't "just let them die" in the short term, but just because some people pay to build their own houses, doesn't mean they can be relied on to build a library..
take the money from everyone and monitor where it goes, it's the only way to guarantee we're all doing our bit..