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  1. Effective punishment

    by , 09-10-2016 at 10:37 AM (Memories of the 28th Century)
    The purpose of jail is twofold: to try to convince people to not commit crime again and to keep the guilty away from society for a time. Jail certainly does sequester people, but for jail to be an effective training device, the recipient of the training has to understand and remember it afterward, and for some of the people jail is not training in the sense that I mean; although inmates may learn more criminal techniques, and they barely remember it afterwards. Jail time should be effective aversive ...
  2. Police, Guns, and Violence

    by , 09-05-2016 at 06:51 PM (Memories of the 28th Century)
    There have been too many examples of police killing too many innocent and unarmed people recently, and it is unacceptable that public employees, even police, should be targeted for assassination. How did we get to this horrible situation, and what can be done about it? One of the basic underlying problems is that police seem to regard themselves as being above the law, that laws do not apply to them. Together with this is the fact that many police are quite ignorant of the laws that relate to and ...
  3. Missing the Reality

    by , 09-01-2016 at 06:53 PM (Memories of the 28th Century)
    I have started to think that humans are opposed to rational thought. Simply starting for a reasonable premise (a premise based in reality) and accurate evidence, and then making logical deductions based on those leads to something reasonable. It was an excellent way to figure things out, but reasoning seems to have been abandoned by many people, perhaps even most people. People often start from bits of fiction and fantasize from that. It’s one thing to kid around, but I have heard or seen too many ...
  4. Rewriting the Social Contract

    by , 08-23-2016 at 02:16 PM (Memories of the 28th Century)
    “Social Contract theory, nearly as old as philosophy itself, is the view that persons' moral and/or political obligations are dependent upon a contract or agreement among them to form the society in which they live.” From the article on “Social Contract theory” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/soc-cont/


    The idea to Social Contract doesn’t often come to mind, but it’s there in the background most of the time, but it has come up a few times ...
  5. Let's Upgrade To Monarchy

    by , 08-18-2016 at 02:32 PM (Memories of the 28th Century)
    I was reminded recently that monarchy really is the best and most efficient form of government, and, if the monarch is reasonably intelligent, then it is the most humane form of government. But the best thing about monarchy is that it eliminates silly, wasteful, and unpleasant elections, and it makes it relatively unlikely that the dregs of society will end up involved in running a country.

    By dregs I mean people like Donald Trump. In my brief life we have had some amazingly incompetents ...