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Richard Stallman response to Boston Police efforts

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Re: Richard Stallman response to Boston Police efforts

#221

Post by marknutter »

tiredofcareer wrote: post #199
kiba wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How they cannot be compared? The metric here is the rate of death and the probability of incidents. The goal is to reduce suffering in the most impactful way as possible.

Be careful, applying your engineering mindset to real life. We cannot quantify the human experience. Let's take one tiny minutiae of both incidents with the strong and clear prior warning that there are countless examples of these points: in general, a parent would expect her child to be safer watching the Boston Marathon than standing several feet from a fertilizer plant. That's an expectation that, while your data…

Parents also assume that their children are safer swimming in their backyard pools than standing several feet from a fertilizer plant, yet swimming pools are orders of magnitude more dangerous. I'm not sure what you're trying to say, exactly. Ignore the statistics because they don't account for the "human experience"? What is the goal here, preventing senseless deaths or preserving the "human experience"?

Re: Richard Stallman response to Boston Police efforts

#222

Post by wavesounds »

danielweber wrote: post #215
wavesounds wrote: post #71

Carmen Ortiz (Same DA who prosecuted Aaron Swartz) said that because of some public safety exemption loophole they didn't read him his maranda rights.

This doesn't make sense. Cops don't have to read Miranda to you when they arrest you. It's just that anything you say following arrest and prior to Miranda is not admissible in a court of law.

They will be questioning him without reading him his Miranda rights and via a loophole it will be admissible is what I've gathered. I think a lot of people are afraid that this an example of us giving up our freedoms out of fear.

Re: Richard Stallman response to Boston Police efforts

#223

Post by temphn »

reader5000 wrote: post #124
temphn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprising to resist one kind of massive state power and then support another. If the US government really didn't want mentally ill people to get guns then the homeless would be off the streets and in prisons or asylums. Instead there was an attempt to criminalize transactions by law abiding people, purely as an expression of media animus against gun owners and with zero concern for false positive rates. As for popul…

I'd bet 90% of gun owners would support virtually anything after being subjected to four months of corporate gun industry propaganda. You know, bullshit like how owning a gun "empowers" you.

How much money does the NRA have? How big is the gun industry? How much money does the mainstream media and the federal government have? Or OFA and Soros, for that matter?

Worth a bit of Googling. Methinks you don't have a good order-of-magnitude estimate of how much money is on each side.

Re: Richard Stallman response to Boston Police efforts

#224

Post by marknutter »

reader5000 wrote: post #219
marknutter wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a deep breath and ask yourself why you responded so emotionally to these terrorist attacks and not the fertilizer explosion. Is it the loss of life? There was tragic loss of life in both instances. Is it the presence of a human instigator? Or maybe the presence of evil? Are terrorists somehow a greater threat than fertilizer explosions because they are supposed to be rational, sentient actors? Are they represent…

I don't work at a fertilizer plant. I do go out in public. For how many people are the above statements both true? Now, what is more rational to be concerned about?

Replace "work at a fertilizer plant" with "drive an automobile" or "swim in a pool" or "use a bath tub" or with any other seemingly innocuous activity that's orders of magnitude more likely to kill you than terrorists. What is more rational to be concerned about?

Re: Richard Stallman response to Boston Police efforts

#225

Post by reader5000 »

wyager wrote: post #188
reader5000 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd bet 90% of gun owners would support virtually anything after being subjected to four months of corporate gun industry propaganda. You know, bullshit like how owning a gun "empowers" you.

Do you think the gun lobby helped to write the second amendment? I'd also like to point out that the gun industry doesn't really run ads in the same way most industries do. I've never seen a single gun ad outside of a gun magazine.

Do I think corporate gun interests influence how the 2a is interpreted? Absolutely.

Re: Richard Stallman response to Boston Police efforts

#226

Post by u2328 »

emily37 wrote: post #174
u2328 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're taking RMS's statement out of context. His point was that we not allow fear to overwhelm our senses so that we trade individual rights for security in police states, saying: "Every death or injury is a sad thing, but the fact is that many happen every day, and we should not let these few upset us disproportionally more than the others. Let's make an effort not to get bent out of shape about them, so that we ca…

This main point is ridiculous. Our response to deaths should scale exactly proportionately to the number? I shouldn't let the death of a friend upset me disproportionately more than the death of a stranger? A reasonable statement would have been, "Let's not let these deaths be cited as an excuse for tyranny." But what he said was more along the lines of, "Let's not be very upset about these deaths, because then they…

Well, that's a different issue than what Bain was attempting to argue, but I'll indulge. You said,

"Our response to deaths should scale exactly proportionally to the number? I shouldn't let the death of a friend upset me disproportionally more than the death of a stranger?"

You're misrepresenting what he said. He never compared the death of a stranger to the death of a loved one. What he said is that it's silly to raise the tragedy the those who lost their lives in Boston to those who lost their lives in Texas this week. All premature death is a tragedy, but I didn't know anyone personally in Boston or Texas. So why should the deaths of those in Boston be more prolific to me than those that died in Texas?

You said,

"But what he said was more along the lines of, 'Let's not be very upset about these deaths, because then they will be used as an excuse for tyranny.'"

What he actually said was,

"Every death or injury is a sad thing, but the fact is that many happen every day, and we should not let these few upset us disproportionally more than the others. Let's make an effort not to get bent out of shape about them, so that we can resist when people try to cite them as an excuse for tyranny."

You can't change the words he used to misrepresent his argument because you didn't appreciate his bluntness. I'll admit, RMS is a very emotionally detached person, but that doesn't allow the opportunity to bend his words so that it makes it easier for you to shame him.

Re: Richard Stallman response to Boston Police efforts

#227

Post by marknutter »

tiredofcareer wrote: post #218
marknutter wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a deep breath and ask yourself why you responded so emotionally to these terrorist attacks and not the fertilizer explosion. Is it the loss of life? There was tragic loss of life in both instances. Is it the presence of a human instigator? Or maybe the presence of evil? Are terrorists somehow a greater threat than fertilizer explosions because they are supposed to be rational, sentient actors? Are they represent…

It's interesting that you wrote that in reply to bane but not me, when a couple of your points specifically call out things that I wrote. Why is that? Is it because I made the same point without emotion, and he's just a little more wrapped up in it? (Not being snarky, genuinely curious.)

I thought it might be the best way to reply to both posts without having to write two since there's no way to reply to multiple posts. The emotion in the second post was definitely what prompted me to respond, though.

Re: Richard Stallman response to Boston Police efforts

#228

Post by GHFigs »

reader5000 wrote: post #129
lotyrin wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's worth sacrificing our freedoms in exchange for (only theoretically improved) safety (from causes of death that we are already extremely safe from - statistically speaking).

You and your neighbors packing assault weapons does not make you "free". It makes you "the Taliban".

That's a weak point. You could just as easily say it makes you "the Northern Alliance", "the French Resistance", "the Black Panthers", or "the Swiss". Weapons do not dictate ideology.

Re: Richard Stallman response to Boston Police efforts

#229

Post by bane »

marknutter wrote: post #217
bane wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. RMS, like any intelligent sentient being is capable of thinking complex thoughts and making good points. But I rail against his thoughtlessness. His constant... sociopathy ...it's why he's ineffective in getting his views across, why he treats people like automatons (well documented) and why he's plain and simply put, "not a good person". I never put it in these terms before, I just always felt "skeeved ou…

Take a deep breath and ask yourself why you responded so emotionally to these terrorist attacks and not the fertilizer explosion. Is it the loss of life? There was tragic loss of life in both instances. Is it the presence of a human instigator? Or maybe the presence of evil? Are terrorists somehow a greater threat than fertilizer explosions because they are supposed to be rational, sentient actors? Are they represent…

I genuinely want to know. If you kill somebody with an intention to kill them, you are a bad person. If you kill somebody without an intention to kill them, it's tragic, but you probably aren't a bad person.

Why exactly is that hard to understand?

RMS is not being a sociopath, he's analyzing an emotional situation in an unemotional way.

He's bringing forth a dispassionate, disturbingly cold analysis of an event that should be emotional by any psychological norm before the day has even closed out. It's so outside of social norms as to only be classifiable as an emotional disconnect so extreme it has to be the result of a severe psychological disturbance.

Re: Richard Stallman response to Boston Police efforts

#230

Post by bane »

marknutter wrote: post #224
reader5000 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't work at a fertilizer plant. I do go out in public. For how many people are the above statements both true? Now, what is more rational to be concerned about?

Replace "work at a fertilizer plant" with "drive an automobile" or "swim in a pool" or "use a bath tub" or with any other seemingly innocuous activity that's orders of magnitude more likely to kill you than terrorists. What is more rational to be concerned about?

Here ya go.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm

The detailed statistical list of things to be worried about and in what order.

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