nihil architecture blogs

Okay, so let’s say you have to be operated. You go to meet your doctor, he shakes your hand, he’s friendly, he makes a little small talk, tries to ensure you that it’s not a big deal, that this operation is routine work for him and that he’s done it for years and the risks are really quite small, he’s friendly, and he seems genuinely concerned for your well-being. There’s just one catch.

He’s some-one who look to be in his twenties, and he has long, green hair and an eye-brow piercing.

Now, as you go to the operating table, you see him there again, he’s removed his piercing, his hair is tucked back, he’s wearing his white coat, his gloves, and he’s wearing an operating mask and all that good stuff. Obviously none of this interferes with his task at hand.

However he’s still a youthful bloke who’s got long green hair and an eye-brow piercing when he first introduces himself to his patients. The quæstion at hand is if people can, or should, be able to be refused for a job like this regardless of meeting all other qualifications because they don’t radiate the authority with that that they should.

Where-ever you go, laws regarding this are opaque at best, the concept of ‘discrimination’ is vague and arbitrary. Discrimination was illegal when it was legal to not hire women into executive functions because they didn’t radiate authority enough. And it is still illegal this day while for a lot of legal things the only qualification one needs is to be older than a certain age. What is ‘discrimination’ and what is not, is quite simply just translating the mass consensus of the people about ‘how far you can go’.

And quite obviously, there are a lot of people who would not feel that women radiate enough authority to be able to be a doctor. However not hiring women because of that rule is out of the quæstion in most western countries these days, that’s ‘discrimination’. And of course being a woman is irrelevant for one’s capabilities as a surgeon. Just as having green, long long and an eye-brow piercing is. However people grow a lot more sympathetic to requiring doctors to change that, because people might not feel safe then. Even though obviously it’s just conceding to their præjudices.

Of course, there is a fundamental difference between being a woman and having a piercing and green hair, you can change the latter easily, but not the former. Or is that entirely true? Quite absurdly one can say: ‘You can also change your sex!, and that’s quite true. But of course, a very big sacrifice to make for most people to be a doctor. But perhaps not bigger than for some people to live their lives in a hair colour they do not like just because some people are small-minded bigots?

Piercings and green hair are again different, you can take out a piercing quite easily, but to die your hair back and forth from every interview is quite cumbersome, to cut it and let it re-grow is again completely impossible.

But this is all still the public service. Let’s say you are a commercial entity with a for-profit raison d’être, if the law would require you to hire women, even though the sad reality is that hiring women in certain positions will simply mean less profit—then you’re stuck with that. You might even think that this is a sad thing and honestly want to give these woman a chance to prove themselves, but the reality is that you’re primary responsibility as a ceo is delivering profit to your shareholders, and not hiring women accomplishes that. You cannot let your political convictions interfere with your job, so to speak.

As said, what the law requires and what not of employers is opaque. However it seems to have been established some-what by præcedence that sex and ethnicity are not a quality you cannot hire people on. Even though it will eventually hamper your profit because the world is simply filled with small-minded bigots. You can also argue that this has a good reason, as you cannot (easily) change these qualities of yourself. It’s imaginable that you for same reason also can’t disqualify short people on the argument that clients are simply still small-minded bigots.

But it seems to go deeper than that. Long hair poses a risk in various job situations, but women seem to never be required to cut their hair short even though it could hamper their performance. Women simply in various cultures conventionally have long hair, and you can’t ask them to cut it, because it would be seen as quite hard for a woman to live without long hair should she desire to have it.

However, say you’re a male waiter in a classy restaurant, it’s quite imaginable that they require you to cut your long hair. Admittedly it hampers with your job performance, and not even for a tangible reason, but only because the world is filled with small-minded bigots. But because it’s ‘unconventional’ for males to have long hair, this can be required of them. Even though some security risks that are far more important cannot require women to cut their hair short. It would be unsurprising for me if some men have just as much troubles having short hair as some women. This can also be a cultural thing though, indeed, to ask a Sikh to cut his hair, a thing his religion forbids, is again more complicated.

A fundamental difference between public services like health-care and commercial things is though that health-care is seen as a right provided free of charge, at least in the civilized world outside of that isolated greatest nation in the world. While those commercial things are privileges you pay, if you pay for it, should you not be able to demand that you are assisted by some-one who is not a foreigner if you so please? While if it’s a thing the government provides free of charge, you have nothing to complain, take it or leave it. If you don’t like it, then try to pay a doctor out of your own pocket.

There’s been a lot of confusion and fighting over this so called ‘Mosque’ that’s being built at Ground Zero. Opponents noting the insensitivity, proponents saying this is religious freedom and one of the principles that Nation Under God was built on. Then there’s still the debate of Okay, it should be legal, religious freedom says it is, but is it wise?.

Well, wise, maybe not, probably not, but only because of the stupidity of man. Why is this ‘insensitive’? Is it ‘insensitive’, if a crime is done by Christian people to place a church close to that site? Many of the most infamous US criminals were Christians of course. Don’t ask me how they combine this, and don’t ask me how people combine Islam with suicide bombings either; people find their ways. There seems to be a sliding scale of acceptability of bigotry here. If your girlfriend was a bitch, to hate all women thenceforth is unacceptable and bigoted. If your boyfriend was one, to hate all men, well, that’s more acceptable. If you’re robbed by a black man, to then say all black people are scum goes too far and is præjudiced. But to think the same after being robbed by some obscure ethnicity such as Slovenes, that’s more acceptable again. To don’t trust punkers after a group of them beat you up, that’s just a nice argument to demonstrate why supposedly they [all] are scum.

So what is this ‘considering the sensitivity of the issue’ really but compromising for the bigots that can’t see the difference between different people who just happen to all profess being ‘Islamic’; that’s really all it is. Islam, unlike various schools of Christianity is not monolithical in nature, there is no One Supreme Authority such as a pope, there are no churches and people above churches, no bishops and so on. There are people who say they are Muslim, and they of course each all mean a totally different thing with it. For some, being Muslim is little more than faith into The One God and his righteousness and almightiness, and to others, this involves covering women in elaborate cloths. So basically, wise as it may be to be ’sensitive’ to avoid further polarization, it’s still basically giving people what they want for their bigotry and ignorance.

And ignorance is quite the word to describe what most people know of this place, on the right we have a picture of how it’s going to look. Looks kind of like modern architecture nay? And it’s more like a plaza than a Mosque really. These are some of its features accordingly New York Daily News:

• An auditorium
• A theatre
• A swimming pool
• A child-care area
• A basketball court
• A performing arts centre
• A book-store
• A fitness centre
• A restaurant, serving kosher dishes
• … last but not least, an Islamic praying centre

Obviously this thing has more in common with a plaza than a Mosque, indeed it’s modeled after 92nd Y. It’s just a plaza with a place people can also pray, how insensitive.

To put matters worse, the thing is not planned at Ground Zero at all, rather so near, three blocks to be præcise… do we really have to pay that much for bigots that people who are part of some religion cannot built a modern art centre three blocks away from some sight that other people who are part of the same religion did some crime?

And I think the simple answer is yes, it’s stupid, but we have no other option. It will polarize people even more and lead to more deaths if they do not give. Just because people are so damned stupid and do so damned little research. Stupid people—alas—are surprisingly powerful when in large groups, and alas surprisingly numerous. Thank you Sarah.

Friend of mine’s recently got a tortoise and commented to that he seems to reject food the information books and sides all say his species should really like, and seems to præfer food said media never even mentioned. But looking at such media like Tortoise Care the things that are immediately noticeable are:

• The source does not refer to many rational arguments, nor to any empirical research that can make compelling its claims.
• For a very large portion of the things the source claims, testing the accuracy of it scientifically would either be very unethical and tortoise-abuse, or simply downright theoretically impossible.

Which seems to be the trend on about all sites, books, professionals or what-ever that seem to deal in the care of pets or even children, many child psychologists and pædagogues will claim various things about child care that should raise the eye-brow ‘If they ever tested this hypothesis this means that they for 16 year long mistreated a group of children, lucky control group there…’, also, once in a while, these theories are outright rejected, again, with no real empirical or rational argument to support it. No-one nowadays will claim your child needs a substantial amount of physical punishment to grow up, nowadays that’s considered detrimental to the development of a child. Teenagers masturbating used to be a thing best prævented, nowadays part of a child’s ‘natural development’… I hope we all know that phrases like ‘natural’ are best avoided in serious scientific literature, especially when used to communicate a value judgement about some practice…

The term value judgement might be essential, all these sources are inhærently præscriptive; sure, they bring it as descriptive, as simply describing what actions supposedly hurt a tortoise or a child. But in the end the main effort of people communicating and originating such information is to change the way people behave, not to simply inform them with knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Researches into things which can cause certain things in animals that have no such præscriptive character tend to indeed be based on the actual scientific method, whence things such as your child should not be exposed to too much cursing come, I haven’t an idea. Or wait, I do, quite obviously people just don’t want their children to curse and go invent whole faux-sciences like ‘child psychology’ just to give this obviously moralistic notion some false illusion of a ’scientific character’.

General elections have just been in this district-less country, as it seems, The Christian Democrat Appeal (CDA), the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), and the Party for Freedom (PVV) have the majority they need by one seat in the parliament, they have 76/150 seats between them, enough to support themselves a coalition in our parliamentary constitutional monarchy. A thing some monkeys are satisfied with, and some other monkeys fear.

PVV being the important factor here, a party that’s spun of from the VVD, probably internationally, and nationally known best, nay only for its leader, the enigmatic, charismatic and controversial Geert Wilders; in the eyes of some monkeys, but not his own, a racist and most importantly Islamophobe. As people’d expect, he initially got most of its vote from the lower-educated ‘common man’, but this trend has been decreasing slightly recently. He is partially one-issue, focussing a lot on the problems Islam brings, but he also has other issues, some his voter-base don’t know for a large deal. For instance, he wants the Dutch flag standing proudly on all official buildings, wants to have baby monkeys sing the anthem when classes start, focus more on getting them to know Dutch history, but conversely, wants to look into abolishing the international Dutch football-monkey team. He’s a nationalist, pretty much, he just hasn’t realized that a powerful tool to instigate nationalistic pride are the European Cups.

Any sane monkey would outright object to these guys getting into coalition, the party is quite new, very new, all members have next to no experience, they were personally picked by Geert, while most parties have a quasi-democratic voting model to settle these internal issues, Geert holds are the ropes here, he’s the autocrat of the party he founded, what he decides goes. And consequently, no one really knows all these people, all they know is Geert. As a fellow monkey I am partially guilty of this, one simply doesn’t hear any thing of it in the news outside Geert.

This echoes a prævious situation, the situation with the Pim Fortuyn Party (LPF), no one really knew any but Pim, he hand-picked them all, and the party got in a coalition with same CDA, and VVD; it was about the shortest lasting cabinet ever. Except that in this case, they’re all even more faultering idiots than in the last case, the few exposures I had to these people seem to imply that they—including Geert—have no understanding of the Dutch political system what-so-ever.

The point it comes down to is if the VVD (largest party) and the CDA‘ve learnt from this mistake to enter coalition with a bunch of far-right, populist newcomers that have no idea of how the political system works. Assuming they chose not to, what then? They heavily favour each other, and it means they’ll have to get their majority else-where, the other option would immediately be the Labour Party, who is second in the elections and has more seats than the PVV, but Labour’s really not that eye-to-eye with VVD or CDA and is centre-left, opposed to their centre-right. To classify them, a thing I abhor, it would be liberal-right, Christian-democrat, and social-democrat respectively, the former two associatively ‘right wing’ in Dutch politics, the latter ‘left’.

What if they’d rather go with the PVV? They only have a one vote majority, a vote of no confidence will be very easy to get, and I and all the other high-educated monkeys are all expecting them to bumble and screw things up beyond a reasonable margin. It’s a complex situation, but it’s not half as bad as people think, the last four governments fell before they had their four years due, it all started with the change of climate, towards open xenophobia. It’d be lovely to add this government to that list.

Robert Spitzer, M.D. claimed in a 1975 criticism of Rosenhan’s study which sparked controversy regarding the professionalism of psychiatry:

If I were to drink a quart of blood and, concealing what I had done, come to the emergency room of any hospital vomiting blood, the behaviour of the staff would be quite predictable. If they labelled and treated me as having a peptic ulcer, I doubt I could argue convincingly that medical science does not know how to diagnose that condition.

Which is obscenely true. Just as it’s true that if you were to come there and complained about a stomach pain, got an interview and they labelled and treated you as having a peptic ulcer that would be irresponsible, and probably do more harm than good. Would medicine be effective if practised in that way? of course not, that’s why they do more than talk with you, they run tests on you via objective apparatus and instruments.

Psychiatry is tantamount to giving people radiation therapy for breast cancer because they claim they feel pain in their chest without putting an X-ray through them first. I’m not saying there’s a better way, I’m just saying that since most mental conditions are not fatal, moving like this is completely irresponsible and does more harm than good.

Kay, let’s say a random person murders a kitten or mistreats a child or beats up what-ever, naturally we—or most people—would beat that person up if we had the chance, or at least severely punch him in the face to make sure he does not carry out his intentions or threat to empty a can of liquid on the poor cat and drop an object warmer than said liquid’s ignition temperature on the cute critter.

Now, some would call this altruïsm or a desire to protect the cat or what-ever victim at stake here, can’t say I’m absolutely sure of that. I don’t mean the clichéd story of feeling better for yourself. I mean another facet to it, because people are simply too selfish to care that much about cats or even children or even their best friends.hat’s in any such of this cases always strangely præsent is that the people that are out to protect these people put a lot more focus on the aggressor than they do on the victim.

In fact—people seem to completely stop caring if there’s only a victim, but not a tangible aggressor, and seem to care a lot if there’s an aggressor, but not tangible victim, the so called ‘victimless crimes’ that exist in various jurisdictions that some (a few) people find stupid and should be repelled.

In the case that a certain person has some suffering going on but there’s no tangible aggressor, as in, it happened by pure accident or it was even due to downright bad luck, people tend to have a lot less of an emotional response. For instance, take these two examples.

• A woman by sheer accident without any one really being at fault has nude pictures of herself thrown on the internet.
• That very same woman is photographed in the shower and uploaded to the internet.

Now, in both cases the victim is humiliated, ashamed, a victim, but in the latter case, there is an aggressor, some-one whom we can blame for this thing. The latter always provokes fierce responses from most parties getting notice of it, often a desire for retribution, the first will merely provoke either a small dose of sympathy, fake sympathy, or simply laughing at that woman.

When I was quite young, seven years old I think, I saw a couple of people capturing frogs and bullying them. So knight in the shining armour that I was, I raced to there, liberated the frogs, and got beat up for that by the guys. A mate that was there with me wanted to follow them to beat them up, I was more like ‘You might call an ambulance first?’, he didn’t even think of that, he didn’t care for my suffering, he cared for making the person that caused it pay, not to help me who was lying pretty battered there.

However, looking back in retrospect, I also have to conclude another thing of myself: I would not have stopped to rescue those frogs if they got trapped on their own, and as hell not risked several injuries for that. Only the fact that there were some aggressors into play galvanized my desire to free those frogs, I wasn’t trying to help the frogs, I was trying to at some way compromise the action of the aggressors if I look deep down inside, and I think that almost all people would do the same.

Same with animal rights activist group, all their actions have one thing in common, the suffering is always due to human influence, due to some-one they can place blame on. They (read: we, I pay for that too and chain myself to fences) are not out to help animals they are out to compromise the efforts of people that are trying to hurt them, a completely different thing. Yet we (they) tell ourselves that we want to help animals, in reality we just want to make people pay we don’t like, don’t like for for instance doing cruel shit to animals. It’s also the same in every trial, in every news report about it, the news isn’t  about that some person has greatly suffered, the news is about that some person has caused great suffer to another.

Almost never is there a report about suffer in the news if it’s not done by some crime or some goof-up of some-one. The only exception I can think of to this rule are reports about mass natural disasters, and it makes you think why we all still remember 9/11, but have forgotten about natural disasters that caused so much more destruction hmm? There’s never news about some old grandmother sitting at home feeling like shit, but if she got into that position by some human error like the wrong drug præscribed oh as hell it would have come into the papers. We don’t care about suffering, we care about the people that cause it.

Then of course comes the even more interesting situation of an aggressor, but no victim. How can there be an aggressor but no victim? Let’s say you have this stereotypical really sweet girl that likes to help people, she cleans up for her boyfriend, makes him sandwiches, the whole she-bang, well, she doesn’t mind to that, it probably gives her a nice feeling, maybe she likes to cook, who knows? But still a lot of people will target their criticism at the boyfriend for ‘taking advantage of her’, regardless of her not minding. I’m not saying that he should take advantage of her, or that people shouldn’t target complaints, I’m just saying that they don’t target it to help the girl, the so-called victim, but to punish the guy, the so-called aggressor. It’s not about some-one getting hurt, it’s about some-one doing a thing people don’t like. They will most likely try to make the girl realize that she shouldn’t do that and should mind, now assuming they succeed in doing that, from an utilitarian perspective they’ve greatly failed then; the girl has lost one fun activity to do, and the guy get’s less sandwiches, no one-wins, every-body loses.

Some time back, I had a conversation with a district attorney about the idea of the legal system, not so much a debate, she felt of course that people that commit crimes should be put into jail, let’s not get too nihilistic and hold that axiom as dogma for sake of argument. I was more openly quæstioning the issue of how many innocent people are put into jail as a sacrifice for that ideal. After all—all there is to this is a lower bound of how many innocent faced legal discipline, ignoring for the time being the possibility that—of course—a guilty man can also later be ruled innocent.

Now, I personally believe one can ask and force people to compromise to help others, I think one can kill one man to save to others. And until some one has given me a tangible definition of the difference between ‘compromising another man for one’s own benefit’ and ‘refusing to put effort into helping another man’ I shall assume them to be merely politically differently coloured terms for the same concept. The difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter of you like. Both come down to you gaining advantage and willingly letting another man losing some-thing for that goal.

So, I agree that—assuming the legal system helps to stop crimes—to a certain degree it’s reasonable to force innocent people to be compromised to help more innocent people. In fact, I of course don’t believe in the moral nature of legal systems and see it purely as asking a certain group, here criminals, to give up their gains for another larger group, here productive citizens. Seeing how the definition and popular opinion about what constitutes a ‘criminal’ changes dramatically over time, I have no reason at the moment to believe it’s any more than simply a system people have evolved to justify their system and actions and not having to face the fact that they as a majority sacrifice a minority for themselves by mentally labelling them ‘criminals’ and believe that some how they ’should’ be punished.

Her reasonable response in some-what similar colours to my open thoughts were. ‘Yes, but it’s a price we pay for it.’, the ‘we’, here is an interesting one. Who exactly pays for it? not I, I’m not innocently in jail, I assume her to not be either while we talked on Jabber. So it’s a price  ’we’ ask other people to pay for us as I illustrated above. But it’s not as unfair as it sounds, as it’s still a democratic system and people have by majority vote chosen for it under the understanding that by sheer bad luck they too could be incarcerated innocently and have accepted that risk for the benefit of their secured safety. Though—it only takes 51% of the adult population that does not yet reside in jail—innocent or not—to decide this for the entire population. So theoretically, the minority can decide this for the majority, though that doesn’t seem to be the case and legal systems are overwhelmingly supported.

But there’s a catch to it, the population seems to support legal systems under misinformation, people make this choice effectively on the knowledge of only the lower bound I spoke of before, not many people seem to be actively conscious of the fact that it could, and most likely is, a lot higher than all the cases that were discovered of people being put to justice for a crime they didn’t commit. More so, the legal system itself seems to spread propaganda about lady justice being blind and judges being impartial, supposedly that people are innocent until proven guilty and other romanticized ideas about the functioning of the legal system that are blatantly not true. Judges as human are they are are far from impartial, one may be innocent until proven guilty on paper but de facto one has to face interrogations, one is ‘held for quæstioning’, one has already been compromised in one’s freedoms and desires before being formally convicted and most legal systems offer no compromise if a conviction is not obtained. Furthermore, of course a lot of judges have already made up their mind in advance. Maybe people know this on the street, but do they realize it? Are they really as conscious of this as of the fact that they have five fingers? Or do they just know this as a given to answer on tests but make their choices of life as if that fact isn’t there?

I don’t think people realize it at all, and many don’t even know it, people indeed seem to live their lives as if it’s true, the romanticized version of the legal system of impartial and blind judges that can separate fact from lies and speculation—it isn’t. Judges are essentially often amateurs about the things they have to rule over, often they have their experts with them but just as often they overrule their advice. The fact that in all cases, taking it to a higher court changes the decision of the judge, at least in magnitude and quite a lot of times changes the guilty to the innocent and the inverse seems to give it quite clear. Lady justice is not blind at all, she has very acute vision. If ‘justice’ takes into account that also the magnitude of the penalty is that which one ‘deserves’, then I don’t think a single man has ever been put to ‘justice’. Yet the populace that supports this system overwhelmingly seems to live in the feeling that it does function as an apparatus of justice rather than order. And perhaps not as orderly as many people also think. The fact remains that despite the legal system being there, crimes still happen. An interesting fact is also that on a world map, countries which have a very strict legal system tend to have a higher crime rate. Of course, either could cause the other and it’s well-conceivable that the populace demands higher punishments if crime rate increases, though it would seem intuïtive that as a larger percentage of the populace is composed of criminals, they would seek for less. An often cited example of course is that the Netherlands has very low cannabis consumption rates, despite the fact that it’s infamously legal in this country.

Another thing to account for is that even if people realized the true figures of the innocent being compromised in the name of the greater good, and even if they were quite high, people still maintain the ‘it’s not going to happen to me’, attitude. People tend to have this feeling that if they know, or even realize that bad thing x has a certain chance of occurring to random people. They still have the feeling it’s going to occur sooner to their neighbour than to the, and even sooner to a random person they never heard of. Humans are indeed inærently optimistic, and probably this weighs in their decision to maintain a legal system.

So, seeing that the people have been misled, and have misled themselves to make their decision to have a legal system? What would happen if there weren’t one? How moral is a random human being? What if there were just rules to keep, but one wouldn’t receive punishment for breaking them? Do humans beings not steal because they feel it to be ‘wrong’, or do they not because they don’t want to go to jail?

A thing to take into account is that ‘You will not beat a man to death because he stole a thing from you but call the police instead’ is another rule and law in this society. So, if one abolishes the state’s role in punishing people, the people will jump into that vacuum and take it on their own to punish criminals. Now some people might see this as an advantage and many people indeed have more often called for people being allowed to enforce the law on their own and have looked with dismay to people being punished more severely than a person that robbed their shop, because they beat that person practically to death for it.

And those rules are another example of order, say that a person has raped my daughter and I proceed to kill that person in rage. Many people would feel that I should not be put into prison and I can imagine it, the catch is here, ‘say that a person has raped my daughter.’. What I have done there is administered a death penalty for a crime as judge, jury, executioner, prosecutor, and legislative power against a man that ‘had a fool for a client’. I find it quite plausible that—certainly in my emotional rage—I got the wrong man. Maybe my daughter wasn’t even raped but just put up a story for some candy. So, imagine if we remove those rules? Then a lot of innocent people are going to get killed, and if we say you get acquitted afterwards only if you turned out right; still a lot of innocent people are going to get killed because people often think they are right when they are not in a fit of rage, and they have to go to jail themselves too afterwards. So this rule that you can’t take justice into your own hand serves as a rule of order.

Back to the example of the shop, we have a man caught in the act there, maybe a bit more trustworthy than a daughter coming to you crying that she’s been raped by a teacher and you jumping to your gun in rage. Say you can use more force than necessary to defend yourself on people you caught in the act, you of course have to prove afterwards that that person was really robbing your shop, that’s a lot harder to do of a dead man lying on the floor. So say you fail to prove that, and they did prove that you shoot him. You go to jail yourself, alternatively you can say that they have to prove that that person didn’t rob your shop. Well, then you’ve created a really handy way for killers to escape conviction as they can always claim those things, making it very hard for you to prove they lied. So then you end up with a system that lets the guilty go. The rule again serves for order, to let the legal system operate practically and efficiently.

Ultimately, the perception a lot of people have that these things should be allowed again seem to work on a romanticized idea of the legal system and the human ability to spot criminals you see in CSI and Law and Order. Take the film ‘Dirty Harry‘, it of course triggered a mass response from the people that police offers should have more freedom. But what happened in that film is fiction, and not reality. Understandably, many people find it strange that evidence that is illegally obtained cannot be used, after all, evidence is evidence no matter how it was obtained? Well, if you allow it and just discipline the officer that did so, they have a motivation to obtain that evidence, there being very good reasons that some of those methods are illegal. Say your hunches are wrong? you never see that in fiction do you? An officer trying to obtain evidence illegally but simply being wrong and having violated the privacy of an innocent man, or worse, tortured him. There’s a reason you can only go so far to obtain evidence. It doesn’t seem to happen in films like Dirty Harry, but police officers that are overly emotional about their cause and try to bring criminals to justice because they hate them tend to not think that clear and if they are set to get an innocent man into jail they better not have the luxury of obtaining their evidence in all the ways they like. Unusual in that this rule is there to protect the innocent at the expense of letting some guilty people walk away.

The thing I ask myself in this is what the optimum is, for me, clearly punishments should be lighter, not heavier, I see no single plausible reason why crime should increase if punishments are lighter, and they are and should be seen as a lesser evil and a vessel of order and not justice. Prævention should also have more emphasis over punishment, you don’t take innocents with that and better stop a crime than punishing some-one to prævent it a later time.

Ultimately, a tool I see to stop crime is to combat poverty, why resort to breaking the law if you have a comfortable life? It doesn’t apply to all people, I know and realize though. Another thing is to simply migrate the effect of crimes on the victim. How often have you been the patient of a crime you could ask yourself? Killed surely not, maybe a friend was killed? Not in my case or in most cases at least. Most people I knew that died died due to conditions, old age or bad driving, either of themselves or others. Not many people are truly that taken by crime, it might even be less than are innocently put away. A better solution for me would to provide for better funding and accommodations in cases of theft. As in the case of driving, many people that support higher punishments seem to also favour higher maximum driving speeds, while traffic is still a far higher cause of death than murder. It seems indeed that people are not that much interested in stopping death rates after all with their legal systems but simply getting people behind bars or punished in some way that conduct behaviour they do not approve of. No one hates a speeder, unless perhaps he crashed into your mother and killed her. But a thief or murderer, that’s another story.

That’s the deal apparently in Germany I heard, and Australia too, forum admins can be held liable for the content users post on their fora, or forum owners I guess. I heard this on IRC so don’t quote me but it’s not all that relevant if it’s true or not for the argument at had, assume it be true for argument’s sake.

Many people’ll probably find this an insane idea, I find it a very reasonable one actually. I mean, what is a forum? A forum is a place the owner of some web space has set up there for people to publish ideas, and the forum owner lets them publish those without checking or editing them first. Well, the forum owner is the one that ultimately makes these ideas public and has the power to pull the plug, so I don’t see why he or she shouldn’t be responsible in the end. I mean, an analogy outside the digital medium means you can’t hold the owner of a paper that decides to print all things any person sends to that paper in it, including things like child porn or in Australia two sisters kissing. No idea why fora ever got so popular to set up as this is what it is, a place you host where random strangers can just insert their—potentially illegal—information into your database to that it gets published on the web, without you ever checking it, or editing it for facts, only after you published it, and then you can take it back if you have to, after some people may have already seen it? Of course, you place a big banner there saying ‘this is not our opinion, this is of our guests’, but really? Would that help a Newspaper if it just published illegal content people sent to it via some automated process without a human ever doing some reading? It’s the very same argument people keep putting forward against cigarettes. ‘It’s more dangerous than weed, and this is known for a long time, but you can’t take it away because it has become part of our lifestyle, if it were introduced today and all the risks where known, it would be illegal.’. So, if you used that argument, be a little more consistent and see it also applies to fora? It’s a medium to which any person can just send any content and some automated process publishes it to the world without any one checking it? You expect it to even be legal? If it is, of course people that start such a strange and risky service should be held liable if it goes wrong, it was their own damned stupid move to make. Which reasonably they made under the idea that they would not be held liable. Which makes the operation of fora very costly to nigh impossible.

Of course, this holds under the assumption that you live in a society which bans making publicly accessible or even ‘possessing’ certain information—what ever possessing information may mean…—which is even more stupid, but a reasonable consequence of that is indeed that fora are pretty risky environments. So see it as a reductio ad absurdum, to how stupid banning the possession and publishing of certain types of information really is, it implies these kind of things namely.

In 2001, Flight Simulator became a reality; two aëroplanes just flew into the Manhatten WTC, people died, our WTC in South Amsterdam is still standing, but then again, that’s built more horizontally than vertically given our lousy soil. But that doesn’t change that people died there, but aëroplanes are still the safest way to kill it seems as it’s about 1/10th of yearly US motor vihicle deaths. [source, source] So George II of America wouldn’t just let his honour be disputed, the global war on terror had begun. And if you’re not with them, then you’re against them, you know it.¹

As far as wars go, it has been going on for quite some time. But then again, many would argue it to be a cold war, after all, the US and all those with them haven’t really yet formally declared war upon this ‘terror’. Kind of explains why both parties don’t really uphold any international conventions regarding captured soldiers if there’s no formal wartime going on? What the hell are those with them fighting any way?

That’s more or less the point? Has any one ever asked the self in that administration under what conditions this ‘war’ is actually won? You’re not fighting a sovereign entity that can just surrender itself at some point and say ‘Okay, we stop fighting’. You’re fighting an ideology, there’s no centralized leadership that has the ability to command the rest to stop fighting and sign some treaty.  If you crush one organisation the rest is still going strong, if you crush them all, new ones will be put into place. They’re not defending a land which at some point becomes a lost cause to defend, you’re not invading to gain access to resources (no really) that you at one point have secured. They’re just flying planes into your towers because they don’t like you, and they aren’t affiliated with any government you can just go and kick butts of to get them to stop. And to begin with it’s not a war, skirmishes at best, which entity have you declared war upon any way?

And then there’s the added complication that you live in the world and not some idealized piece of fiction your mind makes up where every thing is nice and simple. The truth of the matter is that—indeed—violence is not always the answer and some things actually do grow stronger if you hit them. One kill a ‘terrorist’, one create him a martyr; then another will join his cause. They aren’t in it because they get paid for it, or to defend some land for their children, they’re simply in it because they hate you and want to bug you. And they’re doing a fine job there, don’t they?

Reverse is also quite true, you’re bugging each other like a bit of immature children. I still can’t really get my head to just how that invasion of Iraq passed through, he allowed weapon’s inspection, he complied with all demands, they still invaded half way during the inspection. And nothing was found of any substantiality later on, without sanctioning of the United Nations.

And even though officially the invasion of Iraq and martial time are over. There have been more deaths after the war to now than in the war, [source, source] pretty much showing why you can’t beat an ideology. They just don’t like you and are going to attack you, not because they’re paid, not because some one orders them, not to protect some land for their children. But simply because they don’t like you. Also, Iraq hasn’t really become that much of a safer place, people die sooner there now then before the war. [source]

I fail to see how this man got a second term, of course, a lot of people would say that he never won the first term, so more how he got elected after a coup d’état. The rest of the world probably isn’t any better, they just don’t have the army to back them up.

1: I can’t fathom how any serious politician could say this  with pride. It so echoes Darth Vader in Revenge of the Sith, or rather the reverse perhaps…

One invent a hamburger, make it as flavourless as possible, just some salt, little ketchup and pickles that really doesn’t taste like any thing at all. But that’s good, because then no one will really hate it. Then one launch a huge advertising campaign behind it and abacadabra, not only will people buy it, people’ll also magically believe it’s some how very high standard stuff. Of course, it has to be neutral and flavourless, you can’t have it that some porition of your target group finds the taste not to their very subjective liking. It’s called fashion-maffia, and it’s a viable tool in marketing.

So, let’s say one take an MP3 player, makes the design totally cl.. lacking in detail, just a plain white thing so featureless in design, so much lacking in any detail, that no one can possible find it a pain to the eyes. Then you launch a gigantic marketing campaign and you’ve some how made people believe that that featureless little thing devoid of any detail is ‘design’, by calling it clean, and every one swallows it, some evolutionary psychologists might say this is to do with people’s subconscious evolutionary desire to swallow the white cum of the alpha-male like Steve Jobs. I’d just keep it on human stupidity. And more so, people’ll start to believe it’s some how technically innovative.

No it isn’t, high end MP3 players used to be a niche market, but they were already there, they were targeted at technical geeks, not cool, stupid, brain dead people that crawl behind Steve Jobs. And iPod’s models aren’t very technical brilliant either. I’m not going to name any brands so the only way you can confirm this is just see if this exists (good exercise for the apple fanatics, to search) but what I’ve got for years has:

• 32 GB space (so 30 or some thing, but hey, it’s better than 28)
• SD card reader
• Microphone for memorecording
• FM radio
• Connects to any computer without the need to install software via a standard USB cable, the computer sees it as an external volume and you just copy your file to, or from the ‘Music’ directory. Keeps your file system-hiërarchy as it is.
• Plays videos, but not al lot of formats.
• Pictures
• Audio, but alas no FLAC or Ogg Vorbis
• Thinner than an iPod
• Smaller
• I’d call the sound a lot better
• A mantual hardware reset, you poke a paperclip into a hole and simply manually cut the power.

The equivalent iPod at that time had:

• The need to install iTunes for it
• Can only connect to one PC, you have to clean it out before you connect to another
• Pictures
• Videos
• And music of course
• 30.. 28 GB storage
• Why don’t iPods have a manual reset? If the OS is jammed a software reset is pretty useless, and it’s a common problem.
• Scratches, but only after a couple of hours, be patient.

And the iPod is more expensive, how? No, of course the iPod is more expensive, do you think advertisement is free? It adds to the production costs, but not to the quality of the product and Apple has to make it back some how…

Next on the line is the Macbook Air… you thought katana were lethal? Think again, this baby is so thin you probably need to own a weapon’s licence to take it to Starbucks because you’re so stylish you might kill people from agony. Naturally, hardware takes up volume. So you can kiss your DVD Drive and eighty per cent of all the things that came into computers since 1994 goodbye. It does have a whopping one USB port… damned, you can connect your CD Drive externally to it, kind of defeats the purpose of looking lethally stylish in Starbucks. But shit, you have to have your iPod on display to connected to it, what do you do then? You can’t double-front that USB port, so you have to bring in a hub to Sandwitch her. Oh basted curses… then you have three appliances already with wires between them where normal, not stylish people had one. It’s like a corset; oh: mouse.

And the iPhone, oh dear. The revolutionary most feature-rich phone one the planet, this pH-one will burn on the retinae of all your cool friends as the epitome of style. And indeed, it’s the one of the most feature-rich phone around I’d reckon, and expensive mobile phones are for cool kids remember? Except that if you simply call it a PDA; it’s the lousiest most over-expensive shit PDA around that only recently could copy-paste… it doesn’t even have an expandible keyboard. My mother has a better PDA she never uses and just got for her work, she’s profoundly technically illiterate. It’s not revolutionary, they just call a bad PDA a phone and wash it into their trademark ‘design’ and the fashionably stupid elite just goes for it like bees go for nuclear power plants. Because PDA’s are utterly nerdy and for geeks but expensive phones are stylish business for some reason.

It’s every where, even the layout of this blog has recently been updated to featureless white. Oh mother of all gods… Apple’s entire marketing technique seems to be based on trying to get once-geeky stuff to the masses under a different name and make them believe it’s 1: revolutionary and 2: ‘design’. I’d take Alienware design over this Britney McOscars shit any day. That’s true design, it has features and as any proper art it will displease a lot of people, if clearly go in a direction with your design, a lot of people aren’t going to like it. I don’t consider a flame on my eyes, they’re just… uninterestingly-looking. Throw a shitload advertising campaign behind it and you’ve created fashion.