Peterkin

Yes! I've been watching a documentary on the Euro crisis in 2010. Just how insane are we???

Oh, what the hell, I have some time to kill. Cons: 1. It's wrong. 2. It's abhorrent. 3. It's illegal. 4. Scripted fantasy notwithstanding, I cannot realistically be sure I have the right suspect. 5. There has not been time to do correct procedure or even begin. The avenues of investigation that can be exhausted in the time-frame are pathetically few and necessarily incomplete. That's where a conscientious officer would dirct his energies and resources. 6. High failure rate. If it doesn't work, I will have wasted valuable time. 7. I will feel like something less than worm-shit and might become ineffective. 8. I will lose the respect of good officers who might then also be less effective under my direction. 9. Odds are, I'll go up on charges and 9.a. possibly take other officers into trouble with me. 10. The evidence will almost certainly be inadmissible, and the perp - if guilty will go free. 11. If innocent, I will have scarred another person for life, and possibly turned him into a criminal. 12. The police force will be tainted, lose its good reputation and the trust of the populations we're meant to protect, and incidentally 12a. attract people of the wrong character as recruits and 12b. go slowly to hell in a black Maria. 12c. like the police forces of China, Turkey, Syria, et al. 13. Citizens will be too afraid to come forward with needed information. 13.a. Violent criminals will be more likely to shoot police, rather than risk arrest. 14. I may go to jail, with a lot of people I had earlier put there. 14a. I may become a prison bully; go all the way over to the dark side.

OK, I'll try. (Not that I really enjoy the dunking-chair, but just so long as it's for the children....) I tried. Looking at even a partial list of the cons, I decided not to post. Too much contention for no gain. Here is my list of pros : 1. It might work; the potential victim might be saved. 2. If the captive survives; if the evidence is admitted in court, and he is incarcerated, he might serve as an example to deter others from doing whatever he did.

Cybermen are incapable of happiness. They think only about destruction. They take orders from evil megalomaniacs. The icecaps are melting; the coastlines are eroding; islands are submerging; forests and grasslands are burning. Previously arable lands are becoming deserts or swamps; villages and mansions are crumbling off the edge of cliffs. The seventh wave of a pandemic against which even three vaccines are only partly effective is on its way across a world in which conservative governments demand an end to all restrictions and their crazy supporters pelt nurses with bottles; health-care workers who have not yet died or burned out are quitting - which is okay, since the hospitals are running out of beds, equipment and supplies. Half the nations in the world are facing economic crises - and the only way to escape it is to ramp up industry with all its toxic waste, which will make a lot more people sick and exacerbate the climate problem. There are 26.4 million refugees, 48.0 million internally displaced people and 4.1 million asylum-seekers - whom many of the so-far stable nations are interning or turning away - and that's just the humans. Flying insects, including most pollinators, have declined by 76+%, and thousands of other species are going extincts every week. In case it's not burning fast enough enough by itself, humans are destroying the Amazon rainforest. A weak and poorly supported president is holding the world's most powerful country together with scotch tape and prayer and a mad Russian who may already be poisoned by his friends and thus have nothing to lose is contemplating the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to win an argument. Aside from that, everything is hunky-dory and we're on track to a brilliant future.

10-4

They don't look happy. It does. Maybe you just haven't looked far enough.

Of course it can. My laptop could probably do it. As soon as someone defines "energy crisis" in quantitative terms. However, breaking down into mathematical formulae what specific functions constitute the energy crisis - or a crisis of any kind, or even the concept of crisis is beyond the reach of computational skill.

Sure. But what's a superhuman?

Because I don't want to be upgraded. Look north! look south! look east! Look west!

If there's enough time, probably cybermen. Though that's not strictly an evolutionary process so much as an upgrade. The good news is, there probably isn't enough time left.

or birds, for that matter

Completely. Small children, soldiers and prisoners do it all the time. Insect bites are common and rarely fatal or even particularly harmful. I doubt bids would go out of their way to bite a sleeping human. I'd say, on the whole, not very dangerous at all.

Okay, now I'm officially lost. Have no idea how any of this is supposed to work, or what it has to do with reality.

In what frame of reference, with what value system, according to what basic assumptions? As per the OP, I think they have already been exhausted. In several alternative scenarios, they have already been outlined. Judge Posner has pronounced. The US supreme court says it's okay, for government agents, private contractors and offshore facilities in the interest of 'national security' - kidnap victims, not so much. The UK supreme court ruled against it, even by government. The EU is flat-out against it. Even the Vatican has renounced the inquisition.

An observed resemblance is not an absolute correlation. From the linked article: How? By what route and mechanism? For that matter, what do you mean? That people with the genetic predisposition are more likely to develop schizophrenia in adult if they have spiritual influences than those not exposed to spirituality? Or less likely? What is 'spirituality', exactly? Again, how? When? What percent, and what kind of "reality" is actual, physical, objective, and what % is subject to interpretation? How much is each individual influenced in their interpretation of their own physical sensations by other people? Autistic children are presumably less subject to interpreting according to the democratic standard than children who appear normal, even though they have the same gene deletion, but it's the ones who did not exhibit the symptoms of autism in early childhood, and were therefore more receptive to the societal interpretation of phenomena who later develop schizophrenia. So how does that work? I'm finding it increasingly difficult to follow the reasoning, and even the vocabulary.

POV is relevant to every decision, and to the valuation of every situation. No. I won't choose from two sets of other people's assumptions; I reject both, as well as a number of others not currently in play. I already stated what I do believe.

No! Survive and preserve life are not a this/that. They are most frequently diametric opposites. We have an instinct to kill for food, self-defence, protection of our young, maintenance of territory, property, hierarchy and order within the group. Are the Russians and Ukrainians really engaged in preserving the life of their lineage/species?

About 23 times, to date, on this thread alone.

Not to me.

So... Moving on? No response on the shared/democratic belief thingie? Or schizophrenia? OK

Within that particular value system, on that particular set of assumptions, yes.

I never lie, except for right now. Once communication grows sophisticated beyond sounding alarms and directing one another to food sources, it can be used to mislead. Even body language can be used in this way: a grouse pretends to be injured in order to lure the fox away from its chicks; a beta wolf rolls over on its back like a puppy in order to avoid a beating by the alpha. Falsehood exists in the under the sea, among insects and even in the plant world. With verbal language, we are capable of using inaccuracy for embellishment, amusement, self-aggrandizement and ingratiation. Also for status and social advancement and mating of course - extensively. What's for breakfast?

No. I said your toe is not relevant to any of those things. And no to the second statement, as well. I am arguing that by your logic the worst thing is the right thing, if a certain set of assumptions is accepted. That's one of the assumptions. That's another of the assumptions. The third is that torturing the prisoner will save the innocents.

It's not relevant! Neither is how little or much pain is acceptable. It wouldn't be in the scenario in which it is assumed that the suspect you're torturing is not an innocent, that your hurting him is sensible and that you stop before killing him. But it would be the worst crime in your book, if you had the wrong man [an innocent] and the torture got out of control [took his life] before yielding results [senseless]. So putting the same method on the other side of a legal line makes the worst thing the right thing, based on those assumptions.

"Right" is defined by the value system in which it is applied. Logic works within a defined set of acceptable limits; based on a mutually agreed set of assumptions. If you assume that there are different categories of human: for example, guilty and innocent ones, and also assume that human lives are valuable, and also assume that the innocent ones are more valuable than the guilty ones, and also assume that each innocent is worth the same, so that the value of innocents depends on their number, rather than their degree of innocence and the value of guilty perpetrators is nullified by their placement in the 'presumed guilty' category, rather than their number or degree of guilt, then the logic of [slowly and horribly] smashing a guilty one in order to [hopefully] save one or more innocents is perfectly sound. On another set of assumption, it isn't. If your justification is accepted in a system, then the the answer is Yes. If your justification is rejected in the system, the answer is No.