This was not seletive morality. This was a realization that my original morality was illdefined and ultimately not a morality at all but a form of glorified selfishness. I did not claim that any of those things that I did were moral. Only that I did them. You can still choose to do immoral things in your life. You cannot call yourself a moral person at that time, but you can still choose to do them.
When I chose to lie steal and cheat from every one at any time during those years of my life I was operating under the assumption that my 'morality' only applied to me. That I could define 'morality' however I felt like it and that the impact was only on me. I did not take into consideration the peoples lives that I was hurting physically and emotionally (including my family, friends, co-workers, fellow students, teachers, professors and ultimately God.) I simply operated under a specialized and perfected view of my own selfishness. One in which it was completely 'moral' to do anything and everything. And that so long as I called it moral it was by definition moral and anybody who disagreed with me was immoral or acting under their own definition of moral which had nothing to do with mine. I later learned through my 'conversion' (as I believe someone referenced already though it was not my intent originally to turn this into a preaching session) that that 'morality' that I defined for myself was simply a deception. It was a bunch of lies that I believed because it felt good to believe them and because it was easier then facing the truth of the impact of my life on other people. The part of those parts of my life that you haven't read about are the parts where I was hooked on drugs, self destructive and suicidal. I also went psychotic and ended up in a psychiatric ward because of it. It wasn't until the fog cleared and I regained reality did it finally occur to me that there is such a thing as objective morality, and that it is possible to know that morality on a personal level and live by it. Someone called my refernce to a crack house a 'cheap appeal to drama'. Have you ever been to a crack house? I have. They are not pretty sights. And the people that live there are in the deepest darkest days of their lives and may not live to survive out of them. Though I never personally did crack I have done cocaine and a large number of other drugs in my lifetime and been horribly addicted to them. I was DEAD serious when I was making the comparison. I was speaking from EXPERIENCE not from a high and lofty position of my life in which everything was rose petals and peachy clean. I feel genuine pain for the people that get sucked into the underground illegal anything, drugs, porn, software and hardware piracy, you name it. I feel that pain because I know what its like to have lived there. I also know that though its not always the case, I am now a living example of how one thing can lead to another and you can ultimately destroy your life from something as simple as believing that there is no such thing as intellectual property rights. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David A. Desrosiers Sent: Monday, October 13, 2003 5:39 PM To: Plucker General List Subject: RE: bittorrent/mirrors > I thought you said it was immoral to charge for your software? Are you > changing your mind? Or is this that new and improved 'selective > morality' I keep hearing about? Not at all. You seem to have the only 'selective morality' I've seen here yet. Shall I quote you some examples? "We transferred easily over a million dollars worth of stolen software in the time that I ran it give or take a couple hundred thousand." "I even ran a porn site for a length of time and let me tell you that it was getting increasingly harder and hard to find ANYWHERE to host porn (as of about 3 or 4 years ago) where you didn't pay and arm and a leg up front for bandwidth." "Open source may be a great idea, and I agree with it when its voluntary. But open source does not mean steal everything in sight, and that is what bittorrent and napster and so forth are used for." The software is free, the distribution on CD to -you-, is not. You have some choices here: 1.) Use it. 2.) Don't use it. Without contributing much in terms of help, support, or other means, complaining that what WE do for FREE, doesn't suit your needs, falls on deaf ears. This discussion is pointless, because you do not understand the base technology behind the protocol, and the reason it was developed, and why we are using it. Until you learn enough about that to have a healthy, non-abusive discussion about the merits of it, my involvement in your replies is over. d. _______________________________________________ plucker-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.rubberchicken.org/mailman/listinfo/plucker-list _______________________________________________ plucker-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.rubberchicken.org/mailman/listinfo/plucker-list
