About 5yr. log retention

[Tom Vogt]

"James A. Donald" wrote:
> At 11:44 AM 12/27/2000 +0100, Tom Vogt wrote:
>  > *IF* killing people (this way) is the definition of evil, and there
>  > is no other way to be evil but by being a murderer, *THEN* you are
>  > perfectly right.
> 
> I am merely using murder as the most extreme and unambiguous form of
> harm.  

no, you are not. you are using a very specific form of murder as your
"objective fact" which determines evil. how many more are there, for
other forms of murder, for other forms of harm? for evil without
suffering?


> The word "evil" has two senses.  Harm suffered (morally neutral
> sense of the word "evil") and harm unjustifiably and willfully done, or the
> danger of such harm.  (Moral sense of the word "evil")

moral, by definition, is a function of culture. and the first case has
already been kicked out dozens of times (because it includes accidents).
besides, it's not at all neutral - some cultures consider certain forms
of suffering as good (including some xian sects).


> Situations often arise where it is not obvious what is "unjustifiable" and
> "willful", where such judgments are necessarily subjective, but in most of
> the cases that we care about, most of the time, it is perfectly
> objective.  Someone is going about his own business, and out of the blue,
> someone robs him, assaults him, or someone denounces him as a class enemy,
> race enemy, class traitor, race traitor, etc.

in the extreme cases, things are obvious, which is NOT the same thing as
being objective. just because the sky is obviously blue doesn't mean
it's an objective fact. in fact, "the sky" doesn't even exist.


now, to drag this thing a little bit closer to the topic, the
interesting cases are those which are NOT extreme. what about the
movie/record mafia and other control freaks? are they "evil"? they're
not (yet) killing anyone, but they're surely doing harm (ask the people
involved in the DeCSS case who've spent a couple thousand bucks on
defending themselves). and more specifically: where is the line where
they've become or will become "evil"?
a good point was made by bruce perens on a /. forum: we cry murder when
someone attacks the tools (decss, peacefire, napster, ...) instead of
those who abuse them to do bad things (pirates etc). on the other hand,
we are outraged about stuff like the recent IBM plans to encrypt
harddrives - i.e. the tool, even before anyone has done anything bad
with it.
we're all a little israeli/arab. calling our opponents "evil" is just a
tool of psychological warfare.