is such that certain crimes are so grave that they transcend the realm of due process and require summary execution.
The whole point of due process is to ensure that yes, this is indeed the guilty party to be punished. Historically, the witch hunt was one popular alternative.
If you look at this list, the majority of these problems are man-made. Other than a super volcano and an asteroid impact, the solution seems pretty simple. We must abandon all technology and kill all but a small percentage of the population. And those that are left must live in isolated groups. That way there will not be a world wide disease outbreak.
Yep, that's the only option. There's nothing between doing nothing and that option. It's all we have. And if anyone starts to talk about mitigation strategies, planning ahead of time or devoting a single cent of taxpayer money toward preparing for it, we are just all going to have a meltdown and throw a tantrum with teabags on our hats. Thank god we have these strawman arguments for what these ivory tower Oxford elitists are telling us to do: eliminate the human race to protect the human race. I cannot believe they would actually come to that conclusion but there it is, right in the article. Those environmentalists will have us starving in mud huts by the end of the month if we just sit by and let this academic report go unabated and without criticism!
*tortured sigh*
The current maintainer has said he will apply the patches anyway so it's really a non issue. None of that seems to be mentioned in the summary at least.
That part IS mentioned in the summary
The Emacs maintainer has called the statements irrelevant and won't affect their decision to merge the LLDB support.
You can be sure Stallman is miffed. Publicly calling his input irrelevant on code he wrote is one step away from calling him irrelevant.
Whenever you relieve yourself of a responsibility by giving it to someone else, you accept that that person is not you and may not make the same decisions that you would make. If Stallman is to be blamed for anything, it should be in the form of Stallman blaming himself for choosing a maintainer who does not more closely share his views.
Now that persuasion has failed, I suppose he could fork it.
He's presenting and supporting a position that he holds. He's not flaming anybody, he is participating in a rational public debate about something that he helped to start, which seems entirely fair. He chose not to keep maintaining emacs day to day, and so that is his role; to say what he thinks the people running it now should do.
What you're doing, though, is just to flame him... for speaking his mind... while trying to accuse him of being against the speaking of minds.
It should be very easy to form a rational basis for views contrary to his. Unfortunately you abandon the attempt right at the start, and resort instead of a basket of logical fallacies. His views are at an extreme end, it shouldn't be hard at all to be both contrary and reasonable.
It seems like every time there is a discussion that remotely touches on the subject of freedom, someone in some form or another has to rehash this same discussion. The subject matter changes, the circumstances change, the exact pseudo-logic has a few variations, and it's articulated with varying degrees of skill, but at heart it's really the same discussion.
Excellent point, open and free but only in the way he sees freedom... We are talking about the man who is insisting to call Linux, GNU/Linux and likes to flame people for speaking up their minds, with different world visions...
So he tries to persuade people to agree with him, perhaps passionately, perhaps vehemently, maybe even not so nicely
If your opinion of the guy is correct, then his methods will cause fewer people to listen to him and he will thereby undermine his own efforts. This means such a situation would be self-correcting. I've never heard of RMS using force or threat of force to make you call it "GNU/Linux". The degree of power he has over you is determined entirely by how much you decide to listen to him*. The ability to recognize this is generally called perspective.
It's as though some people have an entitlement mentality, a manner in which they are self-centered. It leads to them feeling like they've been wronged or mistreated somehow when they discover that someone doesn't agree with them, won't support or otherwise validate them (probably the part that really bothers you), and speaks against them.
* I started to add "and use his software", but then I realized that's not true - you could use Emacs with the LLVM debugger
the school is teaching the kid that threats have consequences.
Credible threats have consequences. Threatening to magically make someone magically vanish lacks credibility.
and a pretty good lesson
"Good" lessons have a point to them. Teaching kids to fear imaginary threats does not.
There is one good lesson they're teaching this boy: those with authority are not to be trusted.
Name calling is not shunning or shaming. It is attaching the person and not the argument and therefore has no place on civil discourse.
By the way, now that I re-read this during a spare moment and once again think about it, I can again respond to you in what I hope to be a worthy way, yet this time focus on a different dimension of the thing at hand.
I would ask you to consider, simply, this other and possibly alien point of view: the "name-calling" types are simply enacting the lower (or if you like, "gutter") form of an idea that is nonetheless technically true. The name-callers are merely those who recognize this but also have a need to make you look worse in order that they know better, or otherwise focus on what they think is wrong with you, with little or no serious constructive suggestion concerning what precisely is wrong with your view and how better to regard the situation. Liike the thinking individuals, they see what the problem is; otherwise, they lack the clarity and objectivity to identify the problem and suggest a sensible solution. By contrast, they're simply bitching. But even those people are correctly identifying that somethng is amiss. They're just the least clever and easiest to ridicule among those who all arrive at the same conclusion.
Today, all one needs to do is say the government wants it and many will assume it is bad. It is the flip side of the same coin.
That's because there is a limit to how many times they can lie to people, blatantly and without remorse, before the people stop trusting them. My grandparents grew up during a time when this went on, like it does today, but not nearly as much and was not well known (consider Hoover's FBI, or the involuntary radiation exposure experiments carried out against black people, or the use of the CIA to overthrow democratically elected foreign leaders). They saw it as a matter of honor or duty to have trust and faith in the republic and the leaders its processes have put there. That's been shattered and won't be repaired any time soon.
In the personal realm, most people become suspicious of everything someone says after the very first confirmed deliberate deception. The amazing part is that government is given so many chances, that people are so impressed with official symbols and pomp and circumstance that they would ever believe known liars who have never faced any serious consequences for their deceptions.
And how does one find those targets in the first place if they have no connection with known targets? How does one find the group to infiltrate? The point is that there are many new cells that are popping up that have no connection what so ever with known terrorists. How do you find those new cells?
The idea is that limiting police powers in order to safeguard freedoms (and with them, the balance of power between the individual and the government) is acknowledged as making the job of police harder. The polices' job being harder does, in fact, mean that some number of criminals will go free some of the time, criminals who otherwise would have been caught and prosecuted. This is why absolute security is the antithesis of absolute freedom, so the question then is how to balance the two. When you safeguard liberty as your first priority and assign a lower priority to the effectiveness of law enforcement, you understand that you are taking a higher risk that you yourself will be harmed by a criminal that law enforcement could have stopped.
That's why freedom is not for cowards. The problems you worry about are well known to people who understand and value freedom. They choose freedom anyway. They also realize that the danger with which you're so concerned has been overstated. You're much more likely to be killed by a cop than a terrorist, and any factual inquiry into that based on facts would lead you to the same conclusion. Incidentally, you're also more likely to be injured by lightning. In the last 100 years, many, many more people were killed by their own governments than by any foreign enemy, so the credibility of this danger has been well established. Limited, transparent government is a time-tested manner of managing this danger.
As an aside, if terrorism is truly such a great problem and we want to reduce it in a real and effective manner, we should also stop giving excuses to the people who hate us. It's much easier for an enemy to justify their position, raise their troops' morale, and recruit new members into their brand of exteremism when they can point to concrete acts of ruthless domination the USA has actually committed. Law enforcement would certainly be more effective if its list of potential suspects could be reduced, facilitating a more focused approach on those that remain.
Anyway, the real spirit of freedom, the more value-based, individual, and courageous part that you and so many others keep failing to even recognize, let alone try to understand, is that those who understand freedom realize that a few more guilty men may go free. They consider that a small price to pay, an exchange of a finite quantity that numbers can describe in order go gain something priceless and worthwhile. It's yet another instance of failing to comprehend a viewpoint because you do not personally share it, therefore you get sidetracked by related but irrelevant issues because you have no idea how to articulate a meaningful response to it.
Berating me is doing nothing to change my mind. I do not respond well to bullies.
Actually, the social shunning/shaming of those who advocate positions that are detrimental to society does serve a useful and positive function. Consider the way most people would respond to someone who openly advocates racism, for example. The response such a person receives would not be a pleasant one and really would discourage them. This is a good thing and it's a service to everyone else.
The only difference between racist views and pro-authoritarian views is the method by which they damage society for everyone else. Honestly the idea that your safety is in terrible danger from terrorism, and that giving up freedom and privacy is an acceptable solution, is a form of cowardice. It enables tyranny and those who advocate it are enablers. It's also inconsistent with reality: you're more likely to be injured by lightning than by terrorists, and you're very much more likely to be harmed by police or other members of your own government than any terrorist. If you were truly interested in your safety you would religiously monitor weather reports and you would advocate that the federal government be reduced in size and power.
Meanwhile, it's a fact of life that not all opinions are equally valid. Some, like yours, are rooted in ignorance and cowardice and have proven extremely dangerous each time they are put into practice, as an honest reading of history would reveal to you. Yes, the USA is not the first nation to use the idea of a foreign threat as an excuse to curtail civil liberties. The delusional among us seem to believe that it does happen to be the very first nation that will do this without causing a complete disaster (which has always taken the form of a totalitarian government under which human life is without value). Neither an understanding of history nor of human nature could possibly support this delusion.
I'd like to leave you with two quotations that this conversation reminds me of. You see, we (collectively) keep rehashing these same old debates not realizing that great effort has already been poured into thinking about what are not new issues. The first is from C. S. Lewis:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
The other is a dialog between Hermann Goring, a leading member of the Nazi Party, and a man named Gilbert, during an interview conduced in Goering's prison cell during the Nuremburg trials, on April 18, 1946:
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Goring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
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Something I hope you will consider.
To be fair to Zuckerberg and Facebook, the company must obey the law of any country in which it operates.
No. He came out in support of a universal maxim and then went back to his board who showed him X dollars of income they get by operating in Turkey. Just like the revenue lost when Google left mainland China. Instead of sacrificing that revenue to some other social network in Turkey run by cowards, he became a coward himself in the name of money. It is an affront to the deaths and memory of the Charlie Hebdo editors. His refusal could have worked as leverage for social change in Turkey but now it will not.
So no, your statement isn't fair to Zuckerberg and his company and the platinum backscratcher he gets to keep with "TURKEY" inscribed on it. Fuck that greedy bastard and his petty meaningless lip service.
Real Programmers don't eat quiche. They eat Twinkies and Szechwan food.
