murder is wrong

The shift key is the large one at each end of the bottom row. I just noticed: "Category: Entertainment." You assert therefore that Cain did not commit murder since there were no (earthly) laws. A better solution would be to remove the qualification "unlawful" from our definition of murder. Murder laws vary from state to state and country to country. Morality does not suddenly change when you cross a man-made boundary. While I do not wish to immediately claim a forfeit, it does appear worth noting that therefore there seems to exists a meaning of the predicate "is" which when applied to your statement causes your statement to be false. Another problem is that of determining state of mind. There shouldn't be any laws about what you are thinking. And one cannot ignore our insane punishment mentality. The people we seek to punish are the ones who can tell us how to solve the problem. But no, they must be punished. Our discussion, ostensibly about murder, is raising such questions about other things that rather than let a computer decide what we can talk about, and since we have already trashed the debate format anyway lets use this opportunity to see if we can't improve our debating and communication techniques, especially since so many murders are simply a result of worldview collision and lack of communication anyway. We need first of all a forum for discussing these issues, a more precise language for framing issues, and a better evaluation system. Not a landed gentry system where only those with brainless phones can vote. When we are finished people will still say that murder is wrong. This cannot be good for me. But how shall we communicate while we are discussing comminication? http://www.finitesite.com... or worldview collision http://www.finitesite.com... We have created, and I hate the word blogosphere, let's call it cyberland, where we are all novices. Nobody has any idea what is going on and if they did yesterday that was yesterday. They are all saying, and gooble this if you don't believe me, that Twitter is the new magic fairy dust. I mean gooble "Twitter," not "magic fairy dust." Twitter is great for entrepreneurs to sell each other marketing schemes and so it is experiencing growth right now but try and use it for communicating, in 140-character gasps that appear and then go their different ways. Yahoo! groups is probably most people's first experience with onlne communities. But the entire community of Yahoo! groups consists of a lot of little groups with little means of communicating among them. As with Twitter, there is no global community that embraces everyone. Facebook has good connectivity within the community. And so it goes. Every system has strengths and weaknesses. The mathematics of computer networks is being used to study people networks but people are not computers. Each person has many interests and may use a combination of online communities for each one. But someone else will use a different selection. I am in a debating community because it seems to address the global connectivity issue, that is connentivity within the community; but there are other issues that arise within a debating community that cannot best be solved by debating. Apparently in seeking a discussion of the issue you instead signed a contract to defend the idea that murder is wrong. In a "debate," as defined at debate.org, two participants take opposing views and attempt to defend them. A "winner" is picked. What you want is a forum for discussion of old times etc such as a Yahoo! group where any number of people can participate and you don't have to prove anything if you don't want to. When you issue the debate challenge you also frame the question, pick which side you will take and post your opening argument. I did not manipulate these factors to your disadvantage and in fact had nothing to do with their formulation. My action in this matter consisted entirely in accepting the challenge and posting an argument that your contention that "murder is wrong" is ambiguous, vague or meaningless, and in order to make sense it would have to be clear as to exactly what it was saying, based on the supposition that it is your responsibility to clear up these matters. This would require an examination of the words "murder," "is," and "wrong". My examination of the meanings of the word "murder" to that end apparently vexed you since you wanted to talk about something else. Well then talk about it. The debate moderator, a computer program, believes that you are defending the supposition that murder is wrong in other words (and I am paraphrasing) that the legal definition of murder coincides exactly with our morality, and that I am defending a conflicting point of view, the object being to pick a winner between these two based on the arguments presented, and that we are concerned with the issue, for example, that laws vary from state to state. The fact is, however, that the situation is quite different. We are desperately trying to communicate with one another and with the computer program that moderates that communication, and not haveing much luck. Well there are humans around somewhere aren't there? Whatever happened to "Contact Us?" "The only question, girls, boys and neuters: Are we compos mentis enough for computers?" --Brian Aldiss in "The Eighty Minute Hour"