Of course, because sdfjhzhawrnzhj zsfdjhisf ZSDHJyief.
(Closed captions: "you should express yourself any way you want - if you don't care about anybody understanding your message." That is actually the opposite of communication: mumbling to yourself in a one-person language about nobody taking the effort to understand you.)
> Treat them with the same respect you would like to be shown when people are unhappy with you.
Why do you think everyone deserves respect?
I prefer the brutal honesty of the internet rather than the fake civility you advocate for. It cuts through the static and gets to the core issue. My experience has been that people dislike harsh comments because many times it contains the truth and they don't want to be confronted by the truth.
Also, instead of crying that the world is harsh, why not toughen up? When did it become fashionable to be so soft and weakminded? Especially over something so silly as github comments?
Personally, I feel the people who are turning the internet into a toxic mess are people like you who attack speech. If you don't like harsh comments, don't read them. What's so hard about that?
Besides, everyone has different levels on what they consider toxic. I and nobody I know considers "jerks" a toxic word. Why should everyone lower themselves to your definition of toxic?
The most "un-celebrity"? I'd say carter is the most "celebrity" ex-president we've had in a long time. He has used his celebrity to advocate for his charities ( habitat for humanity for example ) and for human rights ( same sex marriage, race equality, etc ) and political issues ( north korea, iran, etc ).
If you equate celebrity with making it rain in clubs, then I guess carter is "un-celebrity". But the guy has been the most visible ex-president in media. Think that makes him the most celebrity ex-president in history.
I didn't downvote you but my guess: because your "opinion" included facts that were so obviously incorrect that they could only be the result of tremendous amounts of bias that make you unable to correctly judge reality. Which makes your "opinion" not a useful contribution on a site that (tries to) value correctness.
If you were able to express your opinion without resorting to tremendous amounts of hyperbolism that make it trivially easy to imagine you as a frothing-at-the-mouth partisan you probably would have been able to more effectively convey whatever it was you wanted to get across to the readers at HackerNews.
No. This is as silly as vegans saying animals deserve the same rights as humans because we are animals too. Does that mean we have to prosecute a lion that kills a wildebeest? Or what happens when my dog kills a rodent or a cat kills a bird? Should they be imprisoned?
If rivers have rights does it also has responsibility and culpability? What happens if a river overflows and few people drown? Do we punish the river?
A question in the title aside, I love the advocacy embedded in the title. "A growing movement"? From what to what? 2 to 3 people? The article is trying to grow the movement, it isn't reporting on a growing movement.
The only way to give rivers rights is to give it personhood rights in the same vein as corporations. But that means that rivers become privately owned entities. Do we want rivers to be owned by shareholders?
Rivers, like animals, are natural resources. Nations and states are stewards of it.
The Bill of Rights is a list of transgressions the federal government may not make against its people. It makes no guarantees about the actions of an independent lion, nor imposes consequences.
> If rivers have rights does it also has responsibility and culpability?
I think that question is key to understanding what rights are and how they function in the constitution of a polity.
Animals, rivers, etc. don't interact with us in the way other humans do. There may be analogous aspects to that interaction, so we can recognize that we have a responsibility to keep rivers clean, but that's an obligation on our part, not a "right" that the river has.
>That said, I've never really seen a consistent argument against _protecting_ prey animals from lions (and letting lions die out).
You might begin your research into this subject with reading about the reintroduction of wolves into various locations where they had been eliminated. The prey populations always fare better when there are predators around them. Without the pressure of predators to balance the population, deer and beaver and other prey animals tend to over-populate, which results in damage to the environment (over-grazing) and then eventually starvation of the prey animals.
The deer are either going to be killed by a wolf, killed by a human, or killed by disease and starvation. At least the first two options don't also cause extensive damage to the environment before they happen.
When deer don't have predators (of whatever species) they overpopulate and die of starvation or of running in front of vehicles.
I'm not convinced that dying of starvation is better than a sudden death. The vehicle accidents harm humans as well as the deer. The hungry deer damage crops and gardens.
I think the overpopulation also causes the spread of parasites (ticks etc.) which carry disease.
>No, because other animals don't have mental capacity to truly understand the consequences of their action.
A lion knows full well that it survives another month when it kills a wildebeest and that it can feed it cubs. What more is there to "truly" understand?
When a mentally capable human kills another human, they do so with the understanding that killing that human will cause other humans to grieve the death of that human, and will remove that human's productivity from the world. They've made that connection and have decided to end that human's life anyway, so they are held responsible for the outcome of that. This is why people who are mentally incapable of understanding this are not punished the same way as people who are mentally capable.
A lion is not, to the best of our understanding, capable of understanding that killing another animal will cause grief to that other animal's family. If that other animal's family is even capable of understanding and/or grieving their death. And then we'd have to prove the killing was done with malicious intent, because just merely being responsible for someone's death, even as a human, is not immediately a criminal offense.
But it's a silly argument anyway because humans are often not prosecuted for the death of non-human animals, especially when that non-human animal is killed for food. So the idea that we would prosecute a lion for killing and eating an antelope is laughable when we don't prosecute a farmer for killing a cow for food.
Prey animals must have a right to get eaten by predators, just as the predator must have the right to prey on them. They both have evolved to balance each other out, after all.
Alternatively, prey animals would have to have the right to birth control, whereas predators would require a food program. Both would need to be provided by humans, of course, which would inevitably lead to an animal welfare state.
Have you spent any time watching nature? Predation? Animals fundamentally consider each other such. Cougars consider horses food and horses "prosecute" cougars if they come close enough by kicking them to death. Killing threats is what any animal capable of doing does.
Animals are fundamentally incapable of grasping the concepts of rights and would not respect them. Applying human standards to them is fundamentally anthropomorphic chauvinism and absurd hubris.
Under human standards we should start hunting or capturing more male lions because they would happily commit infanticide to make lionesses reproductively available. Naked mole rats are incestuous pedophiles. It is important to remember that nature does not care about you and cannot care about you.
First, there are plenty of example where other animals do grasp these concepts very well.
Second, as I have shown earlier humans already do "prosecute" animals for such behaviour. So why would argue that "absurd hubris" should be applied in these cases?
Third, my point was not to start "prosecuting" other animals, but that humans do not follow their own standards.
Said humans were giving the elephant more than the standard technically given that death to an animal that kills a human was a longstanding standard and would be mocked as absurd hicks even in their day. A monkey was hanged as a possible French spy and again regarded with mockery for being so stupid to think it was possible or mistake the poor creature for a cabin boy. The precedent of animal trials indicates it doesn't help the animals or justice and usually indicates a profound detachment from objective reality. Judging ideas on human precedent alone isn't a good idea. Even precedent by all judges in the 20th century.
What about HN's addiction to news about facebook? I thought after a year of relentless facebook spam, we were past this. Now the top two posts are about facebook. We have to kick this habit.
Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Saladin, Tamerlane, almost an endless list of greater military leaders than napoleon. People who actually won and built empires.
I'd even put george washington and Vo Nguyen Giap above napoleon.
The amount of undeserved praise napoleon gets irks me. He was handed the largest empire ( french empire ) with the greatest army and destroyed it in a few years. He is the architect of a few of the military history's greatest follies. The invasion of egypt, the invasion of russia, the continental blockade, amongst others. Every major military endeavor of his was a colossal failure.
Were it not for the artificial propaganda and myth around the guy, he'd be viewed as one of history's greatest military laughingstocks.
Napoleon's greatness wasn't in the military sphere. His genius was in the bureaucratic and legal spheres.
> Nothing fundamental is stopping us from creating a synthetic one.
Ethical considerations are preventing us or at the very least limiting the speed of development. But mostly our lack of knowledge of the brain was what stopped us. Now that we are advancing on all fronts, I think we are going to be forced to deal with the ethics of neural/brain creation/destruction/experimentation.
If scientists are able to keep disembodied brains "alive", then it will open up avenues for experimentation and ethical issues.
There are even ethical issues of hybrid organ growth ( starting from the embryonic level ) where human organs are grown in pigs. The question is whether human cells can travel to pig's brains and cause pigs to be "more conscious".
Sigh. Here they go alternating from AI is a "super genius threat" to "it isn't that smart".
Maybe an objective, honest and non-clickbait "Current State of AI" would mean they wouldn't have to swing from one extreme to the other every few months.
However you define "smart", currently AI is mostly domain-specific "smart". Though there have been advances in general AI (non-domain specific AI), but we are nowhere close an autonomous generalized AI.
The state of AI is such that it can be used to detect faces from a crowd to falsely arrest you, deny you a home loan based on nothing, cut you off from social media based on a misunderstanding, and still can't transfer knowledge between domains.
It's a term used by both the left and the right. By politicians and the media.
> In the doubt I changed the wording. I did not expect the term to be political.
You shouldn't have. Who cares if it is political. You are the author and you should express yourself the way you want.