Perhaps the New Zealander reviewer wouldn't have invested so much time and preparation into one meal if he didn't have high expectations? Sure it's bad if they didn't respect his reservation, but you don't reserve a seat at McDonalds that far in advance so you don't have the opportunity to suffer that problem.
You can calculate the GDP per man-hour to compare "smartness". Of course that doesn't mean individual workers are doing something smarter, but that together they've built a system which operates more efficiently. Maybe past generations of Germans spent their work doing something that benefits current generations (figuring out how to make reliable car parts?), while past generations of Greeks worked on less helpful things (tourism?).
How is it hate speech? Are there people who would start killing Jews if they discovered it didn't really happen? Serious question, maybe Germany has people who are ready to commit violence but are held back by the thought that the holocaust probably happened? I can't think of the chain of causation from saying "It didn't happen" to someone killing someone else.
The closest I can find on Wikipedia's definition of hate speech is "...disparages ... a protected individual or group." Who is that group? Is it "people who believe the holocaust happened"? Surely belief in an arbitrary claim doesn't count for defining a "protected individual or group". Is the group Jews? How does it harm Jews?
Genocide denial is extremely insulting to the victims and the survivors.
Jews have been murdered in europe for centuries as a vent for fear and political impotence.
We've had enough. The fact that the germany that produced so much culture and science was the culprit of the last genocide in western europe is an absolute horror on so many scales.
Yes, the horrors went on elsewhere but the only way for us as a species to move ahead of our bloodspattered history is to take a stand against fear and brutalism. whitewashing history is a dangerous thing because it gives the signal that political leadership could have a way to escape history's judgement.
In essence, it's a matter of accountability that we must uphold vigorously.
Holocaust victims can't feel insulted because they're dead. Survivors can but they're few in number and will soon be extinct. Are you sure these are the main groups of people who would be hurt by legalized holocaust denial? I find that hard to believe, especially since we allow denial of most other large scale killings - even those bigger than the holocaust.
Survivors are few and will soon be extinct, but what about their children and grandchildren, who kept hearing their stories and were raised feeling their trauma and terror?
If you publish it, it's libel. There's a difference between "so-and-so is an asshole" (not a fact, haha), and "so-and-so committed a crime" (a fact). Whether it's a civil or criminal matter depends on the jurisdiction. The UN is against criminalizing defamation because it limits freedom of expression.
> Can you clarify why insulting someone with "rapist" is outlawed?
In case the second link did not lead you to the correct section:
Section 186
Defamation
Whosoever asserts or disseminates a fact related to another person
which may defame him or negatively affect public opinion about him,
shall, unless this fact can be proven to be true, be liable to
imprisonment not exceeding one year or a fine and, if the offence
was committed publicly or through the dissemination of written
materials (section 11(3)), to imprisonment not exceeding two years
or a fine.
> So? So is calling people "rapists" (without proof or conviction), but we don't outlaw it.
Falsely calling someone a rapist is unlawful and subjects the person doing it to legal consequences many places (including most jurisdictions in the US); where the burden of proof is on demonstrating the truth or falsity of the statement, whether and in what circumstances a good-faith mistake of fact will excuse the offense, etc., vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but it is certainly not a matter on which it is some widely accepted principal that people are free to make false claims without consequence.
Hm... plenty of men have been publicly accused of rape by women (Duke lacrosse case, the Mattress Girl, Rolling Stone "Rape on Campus", to list a few). I don't recall any legal repercussions for those women. I'm guessing that's because it's really hard to prove they're lying (even though in many cases there is very obvious evidence that they were), but this fact doesn't really support your claim that calling someone a rapist ever results in legal consequences (let alone criminal consequences).
Damaging untruths are widely punished, either as civil offenses, criminal offenses, or both, in the US and elsewhere; countries differ in details of where the burden of proof lies in truth/untruth of harmful statements, what the standard of proof required is, what degree and kind of harms are covered, and whether and how those kind of rules vary for different categories of harmful statements.
In general, these punishments reflect the common belief that infliction of harm without consent of the harmed is improper, and warrants either punishment or compensation or both.
And, anyway, ostracism is a punishment (historically viewed as a fairly severe one.)
I think it's worse than that - it distorts our record of history. In another couple of hundred years, if people want to find out what happened, they'll see how it was banned and realize that most information that we did publish must have been biased. They could reasonably assume that it's largely false since no serious well funded attempts to refute it were allowed. So they could conclude that they have no idea what really happened. They might conclude as you did, that it might not have happened, otherwise information about it wouldn't have been subject to so much suppression.
We should probably make the same conclusion today. Since when have legally enforced official versions of history been trusted over free and open research?
So we should be allowing holocaust denial here and now, because otherwise people in the future might turn out holocaust deniers?
Holocaust denial has been refuted again and again. The reason why it keeps surfacing is not because of academics are still arguing about the facts. The facts don't matter: holocaust denial is one of the ways in which a very dangerous ideology searches for an entry point into the mainstream.
Holocaust denial is a form of Nazi apologism. It keeps resurfacing because there are still many neo-fascist groups trying to bring their message to the mainstream. Lifting the ban would only help them reach a wider audience.
(Do you really need an explanation as to why Nazism is incompatible with democracy?)
Evolution denial is a form of Church apologism. It keeps resurfacing because there are still many religious groups trying to bring their message to the mainstream. Lifting the ban would only help them reach a wider audience.
(Do you really need an explanation as to why theocracy is incompatible with democracy?)
Then we fight it by continually showing them to be wrong. We can't ban Nazism without opening the flood gates - any government that comes into power can claim that whatever their rival party supports is 'incompatible with democracy'.
The key difference is that denying the Holocaust is a couple orders of magnitude more hurtful to a lot of people than denying "flat Earth", creation, of evolution.
Your POV reflects your status as an intelligent, educated person capable of, and presumably accustomed to, doing free and open research. It's wildly inaccurate to assume that even a small fraction of the population is in the same boat. Indeed, if you think I'm being unfair or elitist, I recommend a few semesters teaching at a state university in the US -- your doubts will surely be erased after that.
What most people will infer from such laws is the simplest conclusion: that they reflect reality, and that denying the Holocaust is what stupid people do. Most people absorb the majority of their views from what they commonly hear and see as being acceptable. If they see enough people discussing something, no matter how objectively wrong or stupid, they will put it into the category of "subjective things that might be true," and be done with it.
Ironically, many intelligent people are blind to this, because it is so far from how they operate themselves.
In real life, Tan Bao wouldn't have been evicted, he would have preferred the opportunity to accumulate money instead of not accumulating money, despite the temporary lower quality of life working in the factory. I'd say he has less poverty now. He can still survive but can also save.
I think depends on the medicine. Like fixing a bullet wound, some medicines obviously work and you don't need a study to know that (for blood pressure, insulin, severe pain, etc). But those are perhaps the ones we take for granted and don't really include when we think about the idea of medicine being bunk.
What's more suspicious is medicine that people use just because they're in a culture of taking medicine for everything. Reliefs for colds, coughs, mild pain, sore throat, psychological problems, etc. These illnesses have a strong get-better-anyway effect so it's very easy for people to believe that whatever they took cured them. Don't believe me? Go to China and you'll see people taking herb drinks for the same illnesses and having just as much faith in their effectiveness. Other popular cures include drinking warm water and "growing a pair".
I'm not sure if your second paragraph is aimed at mainstream medicine, or "alternative" medicine. Mainstream medicine does not claim to have a cure for a cold. Mainstream medicine masks the symptoms so that people are less miserable while the cold runs its natural course.
What's curious with your list is that one is a disease ("cold"; the rhinovirus) while the others are symptoms ("cough, mild pain, sore throat"), and the other is an entire class ("psychological problems"). It's hard to respond to what you said because you called them all "illnesses".
While you wrote "I think depends on the medicine", I think it actually depends on the disease.
I think you are correct in that many people confuse palliative treatment/medicines (eg, cough drops, warm water, gargling with salt water) with curative treatment/medicines. However, in doing so I think you've changed the topic from the differences in medical vs. alt. med., as measured in patient outcomes, to the differences in how patients subjectively view the different forms of treatment.
They say it's still cheaper and less energy intensive than credit card processing. So it's a step in a greener direction. We don't have to get to the final solution in the first try. Dogecoin, etc have their own shortcomings that make them far worse than bitcoin for exchange and storing value.
Pet peeve as a viewer - avoid disguisting body nioses - lip smacking and sighing between sentences, sniffing and saliva sliding around the mouth. I guess that last one is a microphone thing.
> in a millennia copyright is looked back upon with the same disgust and insanity that human sacrifice, child wives, and genital mutilation are
1000 years is enough time for our contemporary culture to change. Those things you listed may even become acceptable by then. Just to compare with what we already accept - capital punishment, abortion, children being controlled by their parents, and even forced to eat food, circumcision.
And all are valid examples of potentially backwards thinking, and the many more even us are not recognizing because we have not dedicated the mental energy required to break out of our respectively imprinted expectations of social organization.
I only speak of one example amongst many, but I stand by it being in our best interests to recognize and correct them before they cause too much injury to either individuals or the collective.
I personally make money selling software that I wrote expecting to be able to sell it in the future. Without copyright, I wouldn't have done it in the first place. How do you see this sort of activity in a world without copyright?
This is always the first comment, and its always the easiest. You do not treat your information as a scarce resource when it is not. You treat your scarce resources as scarce. Seek payment to develop, not for the fruits of development, at least not to be treated as a falsified scarce commodity. The time and mental energy to create is the limited resource, not the creation itself.
