I can sleep at Burning Man with ear splitting sound camps blaring mere feet from my tent. It's called earplugs, they work well and they're very cheap. I've used them to equal success at home on the Fourth of July, too. It simply isn't a big deal. Let Cletus light firecrackers and work on his car in his own drive way. Who the hell are you to tell him otherwise? Go live in an HOA if you want to tell your neighbors how they can and can't behave on their own property.
Just because something works for you, it doesn't mean it works for everyone else, or that everyone else would even find it tolerable.
I have a lot of difficulty falling asleep (exacerbated by even the most comfortable of earplugs), and a decent amount of difficulty staying asleep once I do. It is absolutely not unreasonable to expect that people adhere to low noise levels at night. If you want to stay in a place where people are exploding things outside your house, knock yourself out. You are certainly in the minority.
There are those of us for whom 32db NRR earplugs are a necessity when sleeping in a normal house in a normal neighborhood, where we don't have such extremes of noise coming from the outside world.
We would be completely unable to survive in the world that you so casually dismiss.
I would encourage you to be very careful in choosing the kind of world that would be turned into your own personal hell.
Wait 'til they wake up your baby and toddler at OMG o'clock. At this point you value how considerate your neighbours are, because confrontation or police calls are inevitable if you don't have a good relationship with them.
Or your could tell your partner to stick earplugs in the baby's ears and see what happens...
I've had a couple employers offer to transfer my personal number to my work-provided cell phone. I said no thanks, and carried two phones around instead. But it was a surprisingly popular option among my coworkers. They'd rather let their boss own their personal, everyday smartphone than carry around two phones.
And yet, kids still drink and smoke. Yes, age restrictions are foolish and invalid, century of public policy notwithstanding. Not every policy that has existed should continue to exist.
> CONCLUSIONS:
The preponderance of evidence indicates there is an inverse relationship between the MLDA[minimum legal drinking age] and two outcome measures: alcohol consumption and traffic crashes. [1]
That's no different from showing yourself to your theater seat replacing ushers, or throwing your hamburger trash away replacing busboys. Pumping your own gas. Or bagging your own groceries at some grocery stores. This is a very old trend and self-checkout is nothing different.
>The number of sexual partners adults have has been steadily rising
Got a cite for that? I was under the impression the opposite was true.
And even if it is the case, see the book "More Sex is Safer Sex" by Steven Landsburg:
"You’ve read elsewhere about the sin of promiscuity. Let me tell you about the sin of self-restraint.
Suppose you walk into a bar and find four potential sex partners. Two are highly promiscuous; the others venture out only once a year. The promiscuous ones are, of course, more likely to be HIV-positive. That gives you a 50-50 chance of finding a relatively safe match.
But suppose all once-a-year revelers could be transformed into twice-a-year revelers. Then, on any given night, you’d run into twice as many of them. Those two promiscuous bar patrons would be outnumbered by four of their more cautious rivals. Your odds of a relatively safe match just went up from 50-50 to four out of six."
Why would you expect more people to miss books? Books didn't go anywhere. Anyone who wants them can easily buy them or borrow them.
You know what I miss? Dead tree user manuals that used to come with hardware and software. That's something that has gone the way of the Dodo, unlike most other books. Luckily I can still buy printed manuals from the FSF.
There's a pattern where people go along with technology and progress because it's the thing to do, rather than by making a conscious decision. We're constantly sold new ways of doing things by getting bombarded with messaging about their strengths. We have to figure out their weaknesses on our own and they creep up on us more quietly. There's no industry shouting at us about the pros of physical books the way Amazon does about the Kindle.
So it's not hard to believe that there are people who switched to e-books by default and later could realize they miss real books.
I just miss manuals, dead tree or otherwise. Where’s the manual for my iPhone? It’s just a vast unordered, sprawling, inconsistent, incomplete subsection of apple.com.
What I miss are schematics and parts lists. Of course, that would be virtually impossible with today's electronics, short of a bunch of PDF documents or something. Even then, they would almost be worthless.
But...back in the 1980s, just about any electronic device you bought (especially if you bought it from Radio Shack), the manual would have a schematic in the back, plus a list of parts (and in the case of RS - the parts list would usually have part numbers you could pick up off-the-shelf at the store!).
There's too many black-box chips on a typical product to make any sort of schematic meaningful.
There used to be full wiring diagrams for cars in manuals, but imagine that now where your car has 200 separate computerized systems, each with their own intricate circuits.
Democracy is not a synonym for "good". Whether something is democratic or not tells you very little about whether it is worth keeping. Most things are not democratic, nor should they be.
I agree with the notion that democracies aren't synonymous with "good", but I disagree that things shouldn't be democratic. The sole purpose of democracies is to make people's problems their fault. Most systemic issues we see today have a root cause in people giving up their ability to vote -- electorally, financially, or otherwise. Keeping things democratic means keeping people's options open and legally, in writing, preserving each person's share in the power pie. IMHO, that's a worthwhile goal in and of itself.
Things shouldn't be democratic. Governments should be.
Both corporations and charitable foundations often emulate democratic governments in some ways, most notably in their shareholder and/or board meetings. There's nothing wrong with emulating the good parts of democracy in other suitable contexts. But I'm not sure whether it's worthwhile to emulate them in every context.
Even when things are run democratically, it is sometimes better to limit participants to those who are directly involved. Would you like some democratic input from the general public as to what happens in your bedroom between consenting partners, for example?
The main answer is "minorities". Look at the American South during the Jim Crow era.
Minorities need protection from majorities in democracies. And not just racial, religious or ethnic minorities. Everyone is a minority in multiple ways.
You have hobbies, beliefs, goals and connections that the majority in your country doesn't have. And they are all at risk under a democracy. This is why we don't have a "pure" democracy. This is why the Founders put many anti-democratic features in the US Constitution.
Every right you enjoy is a point where society drew a line and said "this will not be subject to a vote".
For one, it would be a terrible choice for a charity dedicated to helping the poorest of the world. People in democracies tend to vote for their own interests.
The U.S. spends about 1% of their budget on foreign aid. Yet in polls, most Americans think foreign aid should be further reduced [1].
1) Animals on family farms are actually treated pretty well. "Torture" is absolutely not the word for it, though it probably does apply to varieties of factory farming, in effect if not intent.
2) More animals die, in absolute numbers, from plowing fields and harvesting crops than are slaughtered for their meat, mostly because we choose large animals for their meat while small animals like to live in grain fields. The only way to conclude that vegetarianism is more ethical is to discount the lives of smaller, wild animals in comparison to their larger, meat-producing cousins, or else define having habitats and homes destroyed, starving to death, or being snagged on a thresher as more humane treatment than being stunned and having their throat slit after being fed and cared for until adulthood.
In general, living closer to nature shows that death and suffering is unavoidable. Certainly we should strive to minimize suffering, but interruption of a huge source of food for most of the human population is a bad way to go about it.
There is an ethical angle you missed: no animal wants to die, with or without torture. I am vegetarian mostly because I chose not to contribute to the death of any animal, if I have alternatives. Yes, death is unavoidable but it doesn't mean it should be encouraged.
And your point 2 is discounting the animals that died to produce the food that cows and such eat. Besides, personally not all animals are equal to me. When I drive I squash insects, and if I would hit a dog I would feel worse.
This is a man made concept. Morality in general is man made.
In nature there is a very clear symbiosis between predator and pray. A herbivore population can get out of control if not hunted by predators, and then destroy the environment. Of course, humans are not in any symbiosis, we just consume and produce waste in the process.
So if you want to talk about how we destroy the environment via CAFO operations, then that's a valid worry, but the morality of killing animals for food (something we've been doing since the dawn of men) is just religion.
This is the best reasoning I have seen as to why it is not morally wrong to eat meat. Point 2 specifically. I had not stopped to consider the impact of preparing farming land.
Thank you for your time to write that out.
I still personally feel that in my position in life, it would be unethical for me to consume meat. Seemingly the amount of animals killed by a plant farm would decrease as time goes on yet a slaughterhouse would continue at least linearly in its pace of killing animals. I do admit that in some way I believe that it is " more ethical is to discount the lives of smaller, wild animals in comparison to their larger, meat-producing cousins" and I know that this is an undefendable position.
Most crops are used to feed the animals that are later slaughtered. A tiny amount is directly consumed by humans. So you're not actually reducing the number of animals killed by eating them.
If a fish were living inside your body, you'd have the right to expel it, too. That has nothing to do with the treatment fish deserve or don't deserve, and everything to do with human bodily autonomy.
Expel a fish? Sure. Expel a fish even if it kills the fish? Still, sure.
Expel a human even if it kills the human? That's a tougher sell. And that's always been the problem. Yell as much as you want about "a woman's right to her own body", but there's something there besides her body, something that is 1) still genetically human, 2) genetically different from the mother, and 3) will die if expelled by the methods used. It's not just the woman's body.
I think of it in terms of the Declaration of Independence: "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". Well here, "life" is at war with "liberty and the pursuit of happiness" in a way where, whichever one wins, the other has to lose.
If a homeless person was living in your home, even if you invited him there in the first place, you still have every right to kick him out of your home if you decide you don't want him there anymore. Even if it's winter, and he'll die of starvation or freeze out on the streets without your hospitality. It may be a cruel and heartless thing to do, but it's perfectly legal, and should remain so. I believe we should have at least as much autonomy over our own bodies as over our real estate.
All right, what if the only way you can get the homeless person to leave is to murder him and then remove the body? Do your real estate rights give you the right to do that? Because, bluntly, that's the way abortion (almost always) works - you kill the fetus and then remove it, or at least kill it in the process of removing it.
I could see a libertarian principle, but most pro-choice people aren't exactly against seatbelt laws or opting out of national health services. So this is a principle, but generally a selectively applied one. Which was my point.
EDIT: What part of this is getting downvotes? I'm honestly curious for a distinction here.
