Of course, what makes it worse, is that they usually don't understand how fallacies work - especially ad hominem.
It seriously looks as if the vast majority of people thing an ad hominem means "you insulted me". No, it doesn't, an argument could contain an insult on every line and STILL not be an ad hominem fallacy. The ad hominem fallacy is attacking the arguer instead of the argument. It is not a fallacy to attack the arguer AS WELL as the argument. Insulting somebody doesn't make your response invalid, failing to actually address his arguments do.
It gets worse. I was in a discussion online not long ago where the following happened: Me: well reasoned argument. Idiot: You are a *list of insults* Me: You have nothing to offer but a long ad hominem, that kind of makes you an idiot. Proceeds with a solid, logical argument supported by significant physical and documentary evidence. Idiot: You accuse me of ad hominem, then call me an idiot. Irony much ?
Seriously, this person couldn't figure out that sentence one was ad hominem but my response was not - I didn't play the man instead of the ball. I played the man who had no ball, he hadn't made any argument at all - and then continued playing my ball.
Well, we have proof that quite a lot of the supporters at his announcement were, in fact, paid actors. I wouldn't be surprized if the same is true at his Rallys. What ? You think Trump would NOT spent a hundred grand on an ego stroking excercise ? That's enough to hire a 20-thousand people at 50 dollars a pop.
Politics not a huge deal in SF ? Politics has been the foundation of great SF for more than a century. It is politics that lie at the heart of "20-thousand leagues under the sea" - a famous work by perhaps the first true SF writer. Politics gave us Star Trek - and everything Philip K. Dick wrote. Heinlein's works are filled with political messages.
In fact, you would be hard pressed to find a single good SF novel that isn't political. They are from all sides of the political spectrum and quite frequently the same novels are read as defending entirely opposing political messages. Many libertarians despise Star Trek as "statist and socialist" but Ayn Rand was a huge fan of it and considered Roddenberry a personal hero. Snowcrash by Neil Stephenson is set in a libertarian "paradise" but is he celebrating it as a dream come true or calling it a dystopian nightmare ? Which way you read it depends more on you than on what he intended. Now think about Diamond Age?
Why is it that those who have the loudest opinions so rarely know what they are talking about ?
On the contrary, the reason SF is so much more worthy of literary attention than it normally receives is actually BECAUSE of it's power for political messaging. SF is the ultimate exploration of "what if" - it allows authors to explore the outcomes of ideas, and political ideas are as important a part of that as technology. Every good SF author has realized that a world is more than the machines it contains - it's the people using them, and the society in which they live - that shapes them, without comment on that society, you would have no story to tell at all.
So wait... your way of attacking the "SJWs" would be to vote WITH them and against their homophobic, white supremacist opponents ? Whose side are you on here ? That's like if Sauron tried to stop Frodo by destroying the ring himself !
As an aside, you guys really need to find a better insult for people like me than "social justice warrior", which as Will Wheaton so elloquently put it "is not the insult you think it is". Seriously - you are not doing yourselves any favors by giving the people you claim to be fighting a name that sounds like a particularly awesome superhero team !
Actually we do. Basic income has more solid scientiffic realworld research data around it than any other idea in economic history. Trials like the one coming up in utrecht has been done in ten year and longer experiments in cities in many countries for decades and we have absolutely conclusive experimental proof that it costs nothing. It makes money. It increases employment levels. It boosts entrepeneurship. It boosts education levels. It increases productivity in all sectors. The new taxes generated from new jobs it creates are by themselves able to pay for it three times over. Nixon proved it in his trial. Canada's mincome proved it. The list goes on. Every experiment has been a resounding success everywhere one was done. The only reason it isnt standard practise everywhere is dumb rightwingers who ideologically oppose "hand outs" while ignoring the data. There is an exception to the last sentence. I the US its incredible success had seen a law to make it federal being written and passed by congress. It got killed in the senate after somebody noticed a huge increase in divorce rates among the results and the social conservatives freaked out. To make it worse there was no increase in divorce rates at all. The outrage causing figure was a typo in the report.
I did not posit anything of the kind. I merely pointed out that your impossible consequence has happened a bunch of times. I didn't say it happened because of what you described... but when your argument for something being wrong is that it would lead to x that argument only works if x is impossible or at least highly unlikely. It doesn't work when x is common. It's as if I claimed "blah blah can't be true because if it was lots of people would die in car crashes all the time"
It has, numerous times. On one occasion the evidence suggests the polar ice caps actually met at the equator. A snowball earth. And what ends these glacial periods is probably mostly co2.
This argument of yours have been completely debunked by science over and over. The main thing you're ignoring is how long things stay in the atmosphere. If your reasoning was correct we would already be boiling because water vapor leads to greenhouse, leads to more evaporation leads to more greenhouse etc. etc.
We aren't because there is a massive negative feedback system that counter-acts the effect of water vapor as a greenhouse gas almost entirely. That system is called "rain". Water has a relatively high boiling point and returns to liquid form fairly easily, so water doesn't stay in the atmosphere for very long before it rains (or snows) down again. The average time a water molecule spends in the atmosphere is only about 11 days.
On the other hand CO2 has a much lower boiling point - it does not return to liquid form in the atmosphere, it doesn't rain down - and the average lifetime of a CO2 particle in the atmosphere is decades - but centuries are not at all unknown.
A small effect over a very long time will always have a bigger total impact than a large effect over a very short time. Of course, just to throw your argument into even further debunked teritory - CO2 warming increases evaporation as well as increasing the lifetime of water in the atmosphere (hotter air means it takes longer before it rains down again) - so the impact of water vapor on temperature is aggravated by CO2 - not independent there-off.
Actually it's simpler. A corporation is made up of people but those people only agreed to share an investment. They never authorised the executives to make political speech in their name and with their money. Since a corporation is made up of all shareholders simply pass a law that a corporation can only engage in political speech or donations on presentation of a letter signed by all shareholders authorising the specific donation. I would argue that employees are also part of a corporation and you need their consent as well. I worked for Oracle but I sure didn't approve of the same political speech as Larry Ellison. And that would require a way the ensure there can't be retribution against employees who refuse to sign. Perhaps an anonymized authorization system that let's them review the proposed donation and yay or nay without revealing who voted what.
ORACLE is in the news they confirm yet again that quitting was the single best career decision I ever made. The greatest thing about being an ex-oracle engineer is not working for Oracle anymore. I very much doubt anybody who has ever resigned from Oracle regrets it.
Worst company I've ever had the misery to work for.
That was quite a brief departure for a concept that's nearly 3000 years old. Universities for almost the entirety of that period were utterly divorced from the private sector. University education was only job training for those jobs that required research skills like Doctors and lawyers. For everybody else there were training colleges (often created and run by unions to help workers advance into management ) but universities were about producing knowledge. Everything else was secondary at best. It was only in the latter half of the 20th century that this was changed and it was a mistake to change it. We've changed it a dozen different ways since but they've all been disastrous. Let's not lose tge last bit of research focus left. Product research is for the private sector. University research should be about studying the universe in it's entirety not just the parts we can see profit in.
Research is the purpose of universities. Teaching is a secondary activity which is fully satisfied if it provides the next generation of researchers. Training for jobs should never have been done by universities but since it has it sure as he'll must not become the core focus.
There is no research without value. Knowledge is the most valuable asset there is and it is all practical. But sometimes you need to wait 200 years to be able to use the value.
Tenure is the single most important aspect of universities. Academic freedom cannot exist unless it is absolute. That includes freedom from market forces.
People like you are the result of the dumbing down of humanity but don't try to now dumb down the last bastions of intellectualism as well.
You must have never actually experienced Clippy whose full names were, I believe, Lucifer Satan Beelzebub Clippy o'Doom.
To be fair though. Clippy was not the main thing we saw him as evil for, in the grand scheme of things it's probably his least significant crime (which is a bit like saying Hannibal Lector's least brutal slaying but nevermind). What we saw him as evil for were the EULAs and the false marketing and the embrace-and-extinguish approach and trying to claim patent ownership over the kernel etc. etc.
Microsoft still does most of that stuff, the difference is they lost the power for it to matter as much as it once did - Apple is the bigger evil today.
Legal and illegal are not synonyms for good and evil. In secular, free countries - quite deliberately so.
Legal and illegal exist to maintain social order and allow society to continue to function. Good and evil are measurements of behavior based, primarily, on the consequences of that behavior.
There can be overlap between the two, but they are not the same.
While there can be a lot of philosophical debate about this (and how ideas of good and evil differ between different subgroups in society) there is a fundamental difference in design: good and evil considerations try to prohibit behavior of one kind while mandating other behavior. Legal and illegal only prohibits behavior of one kind, it does mandate what you do instead.
In tribalist societies all that is not forbidden is mandated, they have turned good/evil into synonyms for legal/illegal but in free societies this is not true, we only prohibit evil - we do not MANDATE good. You're allowed to follow any alternative you desire.
10 million US ? You realize that's our entire military budhet ? And we have the biggest and best equipped military on the continent. Not everybody is as rich as America. Yes our cops have partners but we basically don't even have beat cops anymore. Those cops we're mostly killed in their cars. While knife killings happen its more common that they are shot though. A good shot can get turn one gun into three for the price of two bullets if he isn't afraid to kill cops.
That said things have gotten much better over the last few years. Crime rates are going down every year and that includes cop killing. Last year the murder rate was about 15% of what it was 20 years ago. That's quite a drop even if its still too high. And it's lower than in America (but not by much).
And how does it change your figures if I tell you that it's beeb more than 2 years since tge last time a cop killed a citizen in the UK? Gaps that long and longer are not uncommon at all. Cops without guns are not able to shoot people.
Oh and they disarmed the police decades before they instituted gun control. Turns out most criminals are reticent to shoot unarmed cops. Why risk life in prison for murder when you can try to avoid arrest risking only resisting charges ? But an armed cop invites gun fire just by being armed.
You are relying on your intuition. I stated facts. Science beats intuition. Reality is usually counterintuitive. Giving cops guns increase the odds of them dying because of escalation. He'll here in my country the number one reason criminals kill cops is not to avoid arrest: it's to steal the cop's guns. That's what happens when you disarm the people but arm the cops: they get their throats slit from behind to steal their guns for robbing banks with. He'll we have actually had people robbing police stations to raid the armories !
As it happens there is a well documented pattern that police seems to have forgotten in the past few years and which almost certainly is at play here - and could turn your conclusion on it's head. That pattern is called "escalation'. If the cops start carrying shotcuns, criminals start carrying machine guns. If the cops start driving tanks, the criminals will get bazookas.
So it's quite possible that the causality was the other way around. Racist cops in black neighborhoods started carrying heavier arms - so the criminals there upped-their-game... and a cycle of escalation ensued, which basically means that now, the vast majority of innocent people in those neighborhoods have no chance whatsoever since criminals and cops alike are going in with a shoot-first mindset and the tools to take that approach.
One interesting piece of corroboration is the the correlation between police arms and crime rates is an INVERSE correlation. In countries where most street cops mostly carry non-lethal ordinance (like nightsticks) only, and the guns only come out when you ALREADY CONFIRMED the suspect you're about to go after is likely to be armed - police hardly ever get shot, crime rates are low and hardly anybody gets shot by the cops either. The UK averages less cop shootings in a decade than the US does in a year, and the vast majority of UK cops are not armed. They also don't GET shot. Iceland has had only one person shot by police in their ENTIRE HISTORY ! The police in Iceland are unarmed in general, they can be issued weapons if needed for specific operations - but they don't carry them around. Police getting shot in Iceland are unheard off.
You REALLY want to get rid of crime and make serving police officers safer than they've ever been ? All the evidence suggests your first step should be to disarm the street cops. Let SWAT be the only ones who get to carry guns and while you're at it, make them need a warrant before they can carry those guns out of the station.
Probably because they are confusing "fuel" for "energy". Nobody claims it doesn't need energy. It does. It just doesn't need liquid fuel. That means you can use energy sources that weigh a lot less. Solar panels for example. Converting electricity to thrust is not exactly new. Hell we have built solar cars on earth. This is just a way of doing the same thing without a road. But out there it's a lot more valuable to do.
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Of course, what makes it worse, is that they usually don't understand how fallacies work - especially ad hominem.
It seriously looks as if the vast majority of people thing an ad hominem means "you insulted me". No, it doesn't, an argument could contain an insult on every line and STILL not be an ad hominem fallacy. The ad hominem fallacy is attacking the arguer instead of the argument. It is not a fallacy to attack the arguer AS WELL as the argument. Insulting somebody doesn't make your response invalid, failing to actually address his arguments do.
It gets worse. I was in a discussion online not long ago where the following happened:
Me: well reasoned argument.
Idiot: You are a *list of insults*
Me: You have nothing to offer but a long ad hominem, that kind of makes you an idiot. Proceeds with a solid, logical argument supported by significant physical and documentary evidence.
Idiot: You accuse me of ad hominem, then call me an idiot. Irony much ?
Seriously, this person couldn't figure out that sentence one was ad hominem but my response was not - I didn't play the man instead of the ball. I played the man who had no ball, he hadn't made any argument at all - and then continued playing my ball.
I think it would actually have been simpler to just copy-and-paste the definition of the fallacy fallacy.
Well, we have proof that quite a lot of the supporters at his announcement were, in fact, paid actors.
I wouldn't be surprized if the same is true at his Rallys. What ? You think Trump would NOT spent a hundred grand on an ego stroking excercise ? That's enough to hire a 20-thousand people at 50 dollars a pop.
Politics not a huge deal in SF ? Politics has been the foundation of great SF for more than a century.
It is politics that lie at the heart of "20-thousand leagues under the sea" - a famous work by perhaps the first true SF writer. Politics gave us Star Trek - and everything Philip K. Dick wrote. Heinlein's works are filled with political messages.
In fact, you would be hard pressed to find a single good SF novel that isn't political. They are from all sides of the political spectrum and quite frequently the same novels are read as defending entirely opposing political messages. Many libertarians despise Star Trek as "statist and socialist" but Ayn Rand was a huge fan of it and considered Roddenberry a personal hero. Snowcrash by Neil Stephenson is set in a libertarian "paradise" but is he celebrating it as a dream come true or calling it a dystopian nightmare ? Which way you read it depends more on you than on what he intended. Now think about Diamond Age?
Why is it that those who have the loudest opinions so rarely know what they are talking about ?
On the contrary, the reason SF is so much more worthy of literary attention than it normally receives is actually BECAUSE of it's power for political messaging. SF is the ultimate exploration of "what if" - it allows authors to explore the outcomes of ideas, and political ideas are as important a part of that as technology. Every good SF author has realized that a world is more than the machines it contains - it's the people using them, and the society in which they live - that shapes them, without comment on that society, you would have no story to tell at all.
So wait... your way of attacking the "SJWs" would be to vote WITH them and against their homophobic, white supremacist opponents ?
Whose side are you on here ? That's like if Sauron tried to stop Frodo by destroying the ring himself !
As an aside, you guys really need to find a better insult for people like me than "social justice warrior", which as Will Wheaton so elloquently put it "is not the insult you think it is".
Seriously - you are not doing yourselves any favors by giving the people you claim to be fighting a name that sounds like a particularly awesome superhero team !
Actually we do. Basic income has more solid scientiffic realworld research data around it than any other idea in economic history. Trials like the one coming up in utrecht has been done in ten year and longer experiments in cities in many countries for decades and we have absolutely conclusive experimental proof that it costs nothing. It makes money. It increases employment levels. It boosts entrepeneurship. It boosts education levels. It increases productivity in all sectors. The new taxes generated from new jobs it creates are by themselves able to pay for it three times over.
Nixon proved it in his trial. Canada's mincome proved it. The list goes on. Every experiment has been a resounding success everywhere one was done.
The only reason it isnt standard practise everywhere is dumb rightwingers who ideologically oppose "hand outs" while ignoring the data.
There is an exception to the last sentence. I the US its incredible success had seen a law to make it federal being written and passed by congress. It got killed in the senate after somebody noticed a huge increase in divorce rates among the results and the social conservatives freaked out. To make it worse there was no increase in divorce rates at all. The outrage causing figure was a typo in the report.
I live on the African Savannah. But I do know what a dessert is...
I did not posit anything of the kind. I merely pointed out that your impossible consequence has happened a bunch of times. I didn't say it happened because of what you described... but when your argument for something being wrong is that it would lead to x that argument only works if x is impossible or at least highly unlikely. It doesn't work when x is common.
It's as if I claimed "blah blah can't be true because if it was lots of people would die in car crashes all the time"
It has, numerous times. On one occasion the evidence suggests the polar ice caps actually met at the equator. A snowball earth. And what ends these glacial periods is probably mostly co2.
This argument of yours have been completely debunked by science over and over. The main thing you're ignoring is how long things stay in the atmosphere. If your reasoning was correct we would already be boiling because water vapor leads to greenhouse, leads to more evaporation leads to more greenhouse etc. etc.
We aren't because there is a massive negative feedback system that counter-acts the effect of water vapor as a greenhouse gas almost entirely. That system is called "rain". Water has a relatively high boiling point and returns to liquid form fairly easily, so water doesn't stay in the atmosphere for very long before it rains (or snows) down again. The average time a water molecule spends in the atmosphere is only about 11 days.
On the other hand CO2 has a much lower boiling point - it does not return to liquid form in the atmosphere, it doesn't rain down - and the average lifetime of a CO2 particle in the atmosphere is decades - but centuries are not at all unknown.
A small effect over a very long time will always have a bigger total impact than a large effect over a very short time.
Of course, just to throw your argument into even further debunked teritory - CO2 warming increases evaporation as well as increasing the lifetime of water in the atmosphere (hotter air means it takes longer before it rains down again) - so the impact of water vapor on temperature is aggravated by CO2 - not independent there-off.
Source:
http://scholarsandrogues.com/2...
Actually it's simpler. A corporation is made up of people but those people only agreed to share an investment. They never authorised the executives to make political speech in their name and with their money. Since a corporation is made up of all shareholders simply pass a law that a corporation can only engage in political speech or donations on presentation of a letter signed by all shareholders authorising the specific donation. I would argue that employees are also part of a corporation and you need their consent as well. I worked for Oracle but I sure didn't approve of the same political speech as Larry Ellison. And that would require a way the ensure there can't be retribution against employees who refuse to sign. Perhaps an anonymized authorization system that let's them review the proposed donation and yay or nay without revealing who voted what.
Oh no. I was merely pointing out how widespread this misconception is. Even the last republican candidate for president beliefs it.
Why ? Mit Romney doesn't.
ORACLE is in the news they confirm yet again that quitting was the single best career decision I ever made.
The greatest thing about being an ex-oracle engineer is not working for Oracle anymore. I very much doubt anybody who has ever resigned from Oracle regrets it.
Worst company I've ever had the misery to work for.
That was quite a brief departure for a concept that's nearly 3000 years old. Universities for almost the entirety of that period were utterly divorced from the private sector.
University education was only job training for those jobs that required research skills like Doctors and lawyers. For everybody else there were training colleges (often created and run by unions to help workers advance into management ) but universities were about producing knowledge. Everything else was secondary at best.
It was only in the latter half of the 20th century that this was changed and it was a mistake to change it. We've changed it a dozen different ways since but they've all been disastrous.
Let's not lose tge last bit of research focus left. Product research is for the private sector. University research should be about studying the universe in it's entirety not just the parts we can see profit in.
Research is the purpose of universities. Teaching is a secondary activity which is fully satisfied if it provides the next generation of researchers. Training for jobs should never have been done by universities but since it has it sure as he'll must not become the core focus.
There is no research without value. Knowledge is the most valuable asset there is and it is all practical. But sometimes you need to wait 200 years to be able to use the value.
Tenure is the single most important aspect of universities. Academic freedom cannot exist unless it is absolute. That includes freedom from market forces.
People like you are the result of the dumbing down of humanity but don't try to now dumb down the last bastions of intellectualism as well.
You must have never actually experienced Clippy whose full names were, I believe, Lucifer Satan Beelzebub Clippy o'Doom.
To be fair though. Clippy was not the main thing we saw him as evil for, in the grand scheme of things it's probably his least significant crime (which is a bit like saying Hannibal Lector's least brutal slaying but nevermind). What we saw him as evil for were the EULAs and the false marketing and the embrace-and-extinguish approach and trying to claim patent ownership over the kernel etc. etc.
Microsoft still does most of that stuff, the difference is they lost the power for it to matter as much as it once did - Apple is the bigger evil today.
I'm not so sure. Her last big idea was Microsoft Bob after all...
Legal and illegal are not synonyms for good and evil.
In secular, free countries - quite deliberately so.
Legal and illegal exist to maintain social order and allow society to continue to function.
Good and evil are measurements of behavior based, primarily, on the consequences of that behavior.
There can be overlap between the two, but they are not the same.
While there can be a lot of philosophical debate about this (and how ideas of good and evil differ between different subgroups in society) there is a fundamental difference in design: good and evil considerations try to prohibit behavior of one kind while mandating other behavior.
Legal and illegal only prohibits behavior of one kind, it does mandate what you do instead.
In tribalist societies all that is not forbidden is mandated, they have turned good/evil into synonyms for legal/illegal but in free societies this is not true, we only prohibit evil - we do not MANDATE good. You're allowed to follow any alternative you desire.
Want to guess what the most common motivation for home robberies here is ? To steal guns.
10 million US ? You realize that's our entire military budhet ? And we have the biggest and best equipped military on the continent. Not everybody is as rich as America.
Yes our cops have partners but we basically don't even have beat cops anymore. Those cops we're mostly killed in their cars.
While knife killings happen its more common that they are shot though. A good shot can get turn one gun into three for the price of two bullets if he isn't afraid to kill cops.
That said things have gotten much better over the last few years. Crime rates are going down every year and that includes cop killing.
Last year the murder rate was about 15% of what it was 20 years ago. That's quite a drop even if its still too high.
And it's lower than in America (but not by much).
And how does it change your figures if I tell you that it's beeb more than 2 years since tge last time a cop killed a citizen in the UK? Gaps that long and longer are not uncommon at all. Cops without guns are not able to shoot people.
Oh and they disarmed the police decades before they instituted gun control. Turns out most criminals are reticent to shoot unarmed cops. Why risk life in prison for murder when you can try to avoid arrest risking only resisting charges ? But an armed cop invites gun fire just by being armed.
You are relying on your intuition. I stated facts. Science beats intuition. Reality is usually counterintuitive.
Giving cops guns increase the odds of them dying because of escalation.
He'll here in my country the number one reason criminals kill cops is not to avoid arrest: it's to steal the cop's guns. That's what happens when you disarm the people but arm the cops: they get their throats slit from behind to steal their guns for robbing banks with.
He'll we have actually had people robbing police stations to raid the armories !
Correlation does not imply causation.
As it happens there is a well documented pattern that police seems to have forgotten in the past few years and which almost certainly is at play here - and could turn your conclusion on it's head.
That pattern is called "escalation'. If the cops start carrying shotcuns, criminals start carrying machine guns.
If the cops start driving tanks, the criminals will get bazookas.
So it's quite possible that the causality was the other way around. Racist cops in black neighborhoods started carrying heavier arms - so the criminals there upped-their-game ... and a cycle of escalation ensued, which basically means that now, the vast majority of innocent people in those neighborhoods have no chance whatsoever since criminals and cops alike are going in with a shoot-first mindset and the tools to take that approach.
One interesting piece of corroboration is the the correlation between police arms and crime rates is an INVERSE correlation. In countries where most street cops mostly carry non-lethal ordinance (like nightsticks) only, and the guns only come out when you ALREADY CONFIRMED the suspect you're about to go after is likely to be armed - police hardly ever get shot, crime rates are low and hardly anybody gets shot by the cops either.
The UK averages less cop shootings in a decade than the US does in a year, and the vast majority of UK cops are not armed. They also don't GET shot.
Iceland has had only one person shot by police in their ENTIRE HISTORY !
The police in Iceland are unarmed in general, they can be issued weapons if needed for specific operations - but they don't carry them around.
Police getting shot in Iceland are unheard off.
You REALLY want to get rid of crime and make serving police officers safer than they've ever been ? All the evidence suggests your first step should be to disarm the street cops.
Let SWAT be the only ones who get to carry guns and while you're at it, make them need a warrant before they can carry those guns out of the station.
Probably because they are confusing "fuel" for "energy". Nobody claims it doesn't need energy. It does. It just doesn't need liquid fuel. That means you can use energy sources that weigh a lot less. Solar panels for example. Converting electricity to thrust is not exactly new. Hell we have built solar cars on earth. This is just a way of doing the same thing without a road.
But out there it's a lot more valuable to do.