It's not hypothetical enough.

Today's Dilbert blog had a question about Kirk and hypotheticals. Apparently Scott Adams is publicly irked that his readers are still morons. Any online forum open to the public is going to devolve until there are only morons remaining. Any public forum where the content is pulled in order to be sold in book form isn't going to be somewhere I hang out. But the RSS feed is still sometimes interesting.

The previous hypothetical question was about whether you would kill someone now if you knew they were going to kill you in the next year. What about if there was a 5% chance they were going to kill you? 99%? Where is the cut-off where it becomes morally right.

My answer is that we do not prosecute people for thought crimes. It is not illegal to want someone dead. It isn't even illegal to make preparations (provided those preparations do not include inherently illegal actions--- so you could buy plane tickets to be in the city where the want-him-dead guy lives, but you couldn't buy ricin) to kill someone. So even if there is a 99% chance someone is going to [try to] kill you, you cannot do anything beyond the defensive. You could hire a body guard. You could stay within a crowd of people. You can wear Kevlar or drive an armored vehicle. Because until someone actually makes an attempt on your life, killing them back is not self-defense. You might die from some completely unrelated thing, like flu or anaphalacic shock.

Not to say that I believe killing is wrong. Far from it. But I don't think you need to anticipate the justification.

Ticky? ticky!

I just realized something. I have a paid account. I can put a poll on anything.

That means I could live the dream of having a ticky box at the bottom of every story. The text would say, "I read this, you don't suck." with the second option being "ticky box" or something so in case I really do suck, there could be an indication.

I never leave comments for people because I hate everything and no one really cares. We all post to collect praise and positive pointers about what we've done right. (Not that "Haven't you read a grammar book in your entire life?" wasn't useful, but the solid explanation about how to use quotation marks was much moreso--- back in 2004.) I wonder if other people would like to have bland "I read this." comments on their stuff. Maybe "I read this. Thanks for sharing." ( Poll: thanks for sharing )