>I think you think that label is a slur. Yep, the very concept is a self-chosen insult. Conservative by definition is committing the call-to-tradition fallacy - it is quite literally what the word means: a philosophy of conserving the status quo. The entire concept is an insult to critical thinking. I know liberals and progressives have some concerning faults in their philosophy (I am something else entirely myself - something I won't bother to name as somebody with your obvious bias wouldn't even be able to understand how it is possible - simply by being utterly ignorant of the history and meaning of words like 'libertarian') - but at least they don't construct the very basis of that philosophy on excluding the very possibility that anybody smart has been born recently.
>A fool and his money don't stay together very long Lie.
>Power to make yourself useful... because that is what it means to make more money Self-aggrandizing denial of privilege and it's role in society - frequently cited by free market fundamentalist easily proven to be factually false. The vast majority of poor people are poor due to circumstances they have never had any choice or control over, and which those who are rich actively and by violent coercion maintain to ensure that poverty. To those who are wealthy, the poor is a resource, and it's in their own interest to keep the supply higher than the demand.
> When people pay you the money, they direct you to act. If more money flows your way, then more people have directed you to do something they need done.
Simplistic theory, devoid of any consideration of practical reality on an individual level. In fact sufficiently oversimplified as to be outright deceptive.
>Not sure who this "we" is Clearly stated in context to refer to society as a whole and the kind of priorities which history has proven to create the most progressive societies that actually ADVANCE and UPLIFT themselves to better qualities of life for all members over time.
>But I personally would rather have those who try to make themselves useful have every opportunity to do so. Fallacy built on a deceptive argument, already disproven - even if it was true the conclusion remains morally indefensible. Numerous systems of partial suffrage was tried over many centuries - all were abandoned in favor of universal suffrage because they were all found to be fundamentally at odds with liberty and progress. Without equality there can be no liberty.
>In some case it does benefit society to act in that way
Yes it's a generalization, the rare exceptions are not worthy of consideration on the kind of abstract level we are talking. They are indeed very, very rare but they do exist (for example if a welfare system is badly structured then it could become a reward for not-working as opposed to a system to help the destitute improve their conditions and BECOME productive workers). But those are practical considerations of implementation, irelevent to the theoretical consideration of what societies priorities ought to be. Even then you CANNOT consider both the needs of society AND call yourself a conservative as a fundamental conservative value is that only the needs of the individual should have any merit - indeed that any consideration of the needs of society is an intrusion on the right of the individual not to participate. History however shows that by uplifting it's destitute a society uplifts itself as a whole, it gains a larger and more productive work-force that also make technological and scientific breakthroughs and becomes a more enlightened society.
>But adapting that as a rule of thumb is plainly self-destructive. It states that resources must go toward those who make themselves least useful to others.
Humans formed societies in the first place to benefit from cooperation. That is the only legitimate reason for societies to exist and it's only morally defensible priority. It is then obvious that the greatest gains of progress in this reg
How about - all things considered it's not an unreasonable assumption that only a tiny minority of the corporations that break the law will ever get caught. Indeed if they didn't consider the risk low enough - none ever would.
Therefore - if the number in the news is as high as it is, it is a perfectly reasonable assumption that the real number is much, much higher.
A favorite line of conservatives - which is easy to refute: the more money you have therefore, the more voting power you have.
That's exactly the OPPOSITE of what we need. It's exactly the people with the LEAST resources that need societies MOST attention - and the idea of "market voting" makes them even MORE voiceless than they already were.
>As far as owners of small corporations, they are eligible for the corporate liability shield just as much as any other owner of a corporation. You can't sue them any more than you can sue CALPERS.
The GP clearly said small BUSINESS not small CORPORATIONS. Crucial difference there. The vast majority of small business are NOT corporations. They are private companies.
> and it's actually pretty clear that the vast majority of corporations - both publicly and privately held - act in a law-abiding fashion...you don't read the news very often, do you ?
This is true but less severe than among amateurs. A much bigger issue is that brands tend to require sticking to. Nikon lenses don't fit on Canon bodies - so once you choose one or the other you have to keep buying that brand. This makes the initial decision much more import. In all cases there are various considerations that professionals look at. A good example: there is a huge load of amateurs in my country who all buy canon's and always buy the very latest model. The result is a huge and thriving second hand market for Canon products- as a professional nearly all my studio equipment was bought second hand (since I know that age of tool and quality of tool are not the same thing). That saved me a fortune. I couldn't have done that if I went nikon.
Technically the two are virtually on par (though Nikon's lens sensor technology is inferior - Canon took the hit of adding more sensors a few years ago which made previous lenses incompatible with new bodies and made them lose a lot of sales but they have the benefit now of more powerful sensoring. Nikon stuck with their old three-prong connectors and now their censors and auto-adjusters aren't as powerful - but it's a small difference to studio photographers who mostly do manual settings anyway). The technical differences are really tiny either way - so the real professionals tend to care more about the economic differences, and those are much more determined by where you live than anything else.
I will politely not agree with you. Must be a matter of taste but I consider Stephenson to be one of the greatest writers of our generation - and certainly my favorite (by far) cyberpunk writer.
>maybe they didn't have any C4s on hand. I broke my iPad (my fault) and they gave me a refurbished one for free. Not the newest model, but not too shabby nonetheless.
Years ago, I bought a celeron 333 CPU (then a fairly common budget CPU for desktops) which failed after about 6 months. I had bought them just as the last of the 333's were being sold off cheaply to make stock room for the newere 366's and when I took it back under warrantee I got a 366 instead.
>Are Shipping Operations Managers hired from the driver pool or the mechanic pool? Are CFOs hired from tellers or account clerks? Are hospital administrators selected from the best nursing staff or even the interns?
Once upon a time they were. Back in those days you could actually WORK your way to the top of a firm. Loyalty and effort were rewarded.
Nowadays, if you didn't choose to study MBA kiss any hope of ever earning an executive salary goodbye... and that is a big part of why business is in the fuckup it's in. Why be loyal in an age of "headcount reduction" ? Why work hard for a company if your continued employment from one month to the next is mostly a lottery thing. In fact... you're better off NOT working too hard. If you work the least, you'll be out of there - but if you're the best you also get fired because you're the most expensive.
Once a company goes public - quality of work loses all value to those who really run it (people who own shares - and their goal is to sell them for a profit THIS quarter). So what happens ? Nobody cares if the business is bankrupt in a year. What matters is maxing out the profits right now - and you do that by firing all the talent (and selling all the useful assets).
About the same time companies started calling people "resources" they started treating them with the same respect they give other resources... like staplers, so of course the people responded by treating the companies with that same (lack of) respect... voila - economic collapse.
>Being that you "went to university" and studied "maths", I assume you were not in the U.S. Most of this discussion has been around how broken the American system is.
Fair point, no I wasn't in America, though I honestly thought this concept at least was pretty much universal.
I'm surprised to hear that comment about tertiary education. My experience of university was of a place where rote memorization was a guaranteed way to fail. I could see it being of some use in the undergrad versions of the hard sciences, maths or engineering courses since those do involve a lot of facts you need to learn. You could probably manage a pass on those facts without being all the good at actually applying them.
But the real test - that which made up the bulk of your score wasn't your knowledge of the facts (indeed in the humanities in particular there are often very, very little facts to go on) but your ability to construct an argument based on those facts. Doing an assignment or a test was a case of coming up with a theory (bonus points if it was a new theory and then supporting that theory with the available facts. Do that well and you had at least a C. Do it great and you had a B or an A. And if you wanted to increase your chances of that B then you chose a theory you knew your lecturer didn't agree with, if it directly contradicted her favorite theory then all-the-better. The lecturer would see this as genuine independent thought - and if you could solidly defend a theory they didn't like with the facts available to you, every lecturer I ever had would be hugely impressed and mark it very highly. They wouldn't agree with a single word of your conclusion - but if it was a logically supported conclusion they would mark you HIGHER for NOT agreeing with them than if you did.
Now the latter part was just human psychology - when you disagree with somebody they are more critical of your arguments and if you argue well then they are more aware of it. So if arguing well is the scoring system, this bit of psychology got me some slightly higher marks (perhaps at the expense of the student who argued just as well but by coincidence agreed with the lecturer's conclusion). But there was no authoritivity there. Nobody ever said "because I said so" or "I have the experience here"... that was a school thing (and the major reason I suffered in school - because that think-this-way thing never worked for me). At university I excelled because the emphasis was in fact the exact opposite. We were encouraged - and more importantly TAUGHT - to think critically for ourselves - and do so logically, effectively and soundly. And above all - our ability to do so was rewarded.
So reading your words I find myself wondering if I just went to a very, very good University... well I did... but it never occurred to me that the difference would be on this issue. I could see a difference in the budgets and the research projects you could do post-grad and such... but actual universities where logic and critical thinking was NOT the cornerstone of absolutely EVERY class ?
So your answer on point 3 is basically the biology version of "not invented here" syndrome ?
I mean I know every mammal has an instinctive desire to spread their genes but humans are also capable of rational thought so in theory at least we shouldn't be bound by those instincts. That doesn't mean listening to our instincts is always wrong, but it isn't always right either. Our primitive fight/flight instincts want us to associate threats with a particular pattern which is why we invented ideas like racism: we find it calming to imagine that we know what danger looks like. It worked well for our ancestors - recognize the lion, get the hell out of dodge. It doesn't work so well for us because in reality the predators we face look exactly like the rest of our pack (can even be PART of our pack). All those times we imagine differently - we end up doing something atrocious to some group of people who haven't as individuals done anything to deserve our fear and hatred. That is why, since we have the ability to, we have a moral obligation to be rational rather than instinctive in our actions.
So does that mean I think you can't have kids ? No, I think there is too many variables that these simplistic answers ignore. You cannot draw a hard and fast rule here because the complexities are too great - and I think each person and couple need to work out what makes most sense for them. Perhaps one day we'll have the kind of mathematical models to draw up an absolute right answer (everyone in this generation ought to adopt, then the next one can breed again or something) but even if we could get a definitive answer here anything more than suggestion would be tyranny with major unintended consequences (how many baby girls have been murdered or abandoned due to China's one-child policy ? That was certainly not it's intention was it ?)
So I think your argument is just plain wrong, so is the argument of the person you're responding to. He is trying to be rational but ignoring too many details to be right, you are ignoring all rationality to feed your instinctive desires.
As for me ? I made my own choice which tried to strike a middle ground between the two. Me and my fiance want kids - our decision was that we'll have one (or maybe two) of our own, and adopt another.
That's the nature of science. Nobody pursues a research project if it doesn't have promising results early on. A lot of times those results won't pan out. But over time a few of them will. Those few add up - and that's why modern medicine is so much more advanced than it was even a hundred years ago.
Oh come off it. There are serious scientific doubt if free will is even physically possible. The universe is a predictable system of cause and effect, all matter follows fixed paths through time and space right back to the moment of the big bang. There is absolutely no proof that the matter in our brains behave any differently - indeed free will may well be simply an illusion - what it feels like have a brain despite the fact that what you will end up deciding is always predetermined by the laws of physics.
This isn't proven (or perhaps even provable) but the evidence is very much that free will doesn't really exist. Does that mean we should just assume there's no such thing and do away with freedom (no freedom makes sense without free will). No. It means whether or not we do that is not actually something we can decide. Can we actually judge a criminal for his crimes if there is no free will ? Actually if there's no free will - we can't NOT judge him.
That said - there may be such a thing after all, we have no idea. If nothing else the sheer complexity of an advanced brain makes the results so unpredictable that from the outside the results of it existing or not are completely indistinguishable. If free will exists at all - it exists because our brains are so damn complex that despite being predetermined their outcomes are completely unpredictable.
So to suggest that the far simpler brain of a rat has free will still makes absolutely no sense. It's simply not possible. Besides which - many of those tests you so hate actually proved that they don't. Human brains are complex - they may have something like free will as an emergent phenomenon but rat brains are (by comparison) much, much simpler - and there's just not enough of them to produce anything that even remotely resembles free will. We've proven that.
I don't think the emergent property we call free will only applies to humans, some other intelligent creatures probably have variations on it (domestic docs and cats - because of the stimulation of human interaction probably develop it, their wild counterparts probably do not), elephants, dolphins and octopi probably have something close... but rats and mice ?
And there, ladies and gentlemen, is the problem with vegans: they never bother to learn any science and apply as much cognitive dissonance as they can to exclude everything that doesn't make them feel good. Humans are not herbivores, we are omnivores and like every other primate meat is a natural and needed part of our diet. Chimps love baby monkeys... for dinner (nice and tender meat). Baboons regularly hunt antelope (I've watched them do it).
Primates are omnivores. That's science, and a vegetarian or vegan diet can NEVER be completely healthy (though if well planned it can come close - see I actually do care about science so I don't discount the real reality even if it doesn't suit my position).
Basically dude... in the end every species is in it for themselves, that's exactly how nature intended it, that's how species progress. If it's a choice between a family member dying of HIV or a million dead mice... I choose my family member, and there is nothing wrong with, it's exactly how nature wants us to act (and the fact that we as a whole constantly do is another argument against the traditional view of free will)
It takes a very long time and a lot of money to go from concept to cure. Generally many, many years of testing and research. Often research that shows promise early on fades out later as it's found to have bad side-effects or be less effective in primates - so not everything pans out. Many times if more than one vector is followed then a good approach may simply be finished too late and another (that isn't better - just as good) is ready sooner. The process takes long with very good reason - all that testing is there to ensure that the medicines we produce are safe to use. There's no point in a medicine that cures a disease perfectly if 80% of the patients get killed by the treatment. Sometimes bad side effects are still acceptable if they offer a cure or an improved quality of life while dying (chemo for cancer patients for example) but if chemo killed 50% of it's takers in a day it wouldn't seem a worthwhile trade-off anymore now would it ?
Slashdot by nature of it's audience reports the research as it happens - often years (perhaps decades) from a commercial cure being available. That doesn't mean this work is something shrug off. The fact that we have so many different avenues for attacking HIV and cancer being researched right now is a good thing. It means if any one of them is going to pay off we'll get the results. Less research funds would mean that less ideas can be tested. It could take a while before any of these researchers get results - but that doesn't mean it isn't good that they are doing research, and that we shouldn't be aware of it. Not all of it will pay off - but history suggests that some of it will.
Basically what all this means is that we will probably see cures for two of the biggest killers in the world today within our lifetimes. Perhaps not in time to save our parents, but certainly in time to save our children.
Provided you follow the rules of writing and use the SAME value of 1 both times - yes. For a value of 2 which correlates to your chosen value of one anyway.
>What we think of as western science, founded on empiricism and the scientific method, began with Newton and his peers. We call that time the Age of Enlightenment because they invented science. If you want your own private definition of "science" that excludes the beginnings, fine, whatever makes you happy, but again, don't be surprised when everyone is confused by what you're saying.
Empiricism is just one tiny bit of the scientific method. More-over the enlightenment had nothing to do with science - though it coincided with the period when the groundwork for science was being laid. There is nothing PRIVATE about my definition of science, it's the one agreed upon by the philosophers of science who actually IDENTIFIED the scientific method and told scientists what works and what doesn't. Science had converged onto that method over several hundred years of gradual improvement. Newton lies right at the start of that process. It didn't reach it's current form until the mid 1800's - which is the point where we can legitimately begin to call things science rather than natural philosophy because the scientific method as we know it actually exists. There are parts of it that existed before but as a complete entity it did not exist before that point and nobody followed *all* of it prior to that time because nobody had yet done the philosophical research of actually studying what makes science yet.
And since you seem convinced that your high-school history lessons are reality.. I majored in philosophy of science. You're arguing with me in my field of professional expertise.
>. As science progresses, the models get better, the predicions more accurate, the boundary conditions wider. But nothing is ever "proven true" - that's the real of mathematics.
Yeah, I know that. It has nothing to do with what I was saying. Unless of course you are being deliberately obtuse. When you have a better model - it's better because it's more true than the old model. That's the point. It's why science uses this thing called "evidence". The philosophical point you made is often quoted and usually misunderstood anyway. It's a reminder to scientists to always improve, not a statement that they are chasing a worthless dream. We do get to understand better, we do get to build models that are more true than before.
Even then - none of this has anything to do with the topic at hand.
I say it again - I don't give a flying fuck right now if Newton's laws were found inscribed in 10 foot high letters of Fire by God himself. The point isn't how good they were. The point is they weren't SCIENCE - because they were written before science EXISTED.
>If a model makes falsifiable predictions based on observations of our universe, it's science.
Let me be more accurate then so you can have your pendantry settled. Newton acted like a scientist some of the time, in some of his work and in some of the ways he did that work. He didn't follow the scientific method all the time or properly because it didn't EXIST yet. But much of what he did is close enough to be useful to people who DO follow the scientific method. Nonetheless anything done before about 1800 is not science. It can be quite close. Aristotle was pretty close to a scientist sometimes, but it's not science. Newton's natural philosophy was much closer - it was a direct ancestor to modern science, but it still wasn't science. We didn't just change the name ad hoc. We changed it to reflect the change in approach that we now call the "the scientific method".
>but people like you ignore the good that we do for foreign nations, such as provide aid after a natural disaster
And of course, the massive amounts of aid you yourself receive after disasters from other nations don't count ? Do you even know how much aid the USA received after Katrina ? Not just money but many other types of aid - for example the Dutch sent you a whole bunch of engineers with the kind of particular expertise in water and flood management that their dyke system requires and you didn't have to help fix things.
Sorry, if the best thing you can say in your favor is something every other not-ruled-by-an-evil-dictator country on earth does then you're really nothing special.
On the other hand, after the Japan quake facebook and twitter were filled with Americans complaining about your government sending aid to the Pearl Harbour guilty. Conveniently forgetting that: 1) Japan has been a US ally for decades now 2) A nuclear bomb is probably more than adequate justice for a harbor- you gave them two 3) After Katrina Japan was the single largest monetary benefactor giving aid to YOU in YOUR hour of need.
I don't hate Americans - hell I've been to America, I loved San Francisco. There's a lot of things wrong with your culture and your country but there's a lot of things wrong with all the others too. I don't think you deserve all the hate you get, but you certainly don't deserve the adoration you want either.
>Even if this is true* it is simply against the 'rules' of argument to claim that because someone has a psychological reason for a belief then that belief is incorrect and any arguments they make for it can be disregarded
But I never made such a claim. Even so - a psychological reason is ipso facto not a rational one. Irrational positions are by definition weak arguments. Or to put it otherwise - they are not evidence in favor of the position at all - and claiming they are is a fallacy. The believe may still be valid, but it would have to be proven based on other, empirical, premises. In the case of bigotry attempts to do so have invariably failed due to a complete absence of evidence or evidence that is easily refutable.
>Using loaded terms in an attempt to belittle a position is simply newspeak and does nothing to convince your opponent.
All terms are loaded. There is nothing belittling about calling something what it really is. You are not belittling homophobes by calling them that. Unless you are deluded enough to think anybody on the planet isn't phobic about something. For starters most homosexuals are rather phobic about violence from homophobes (their phobia is far more justified of course - as such violence does occur far too often).
>Plus, if an argument is the result of fear then chances are it can be easily refuted without resorting to name-calling.
There is no name-calling involved here. At least, not in the sense you use the phrase. It's pretty much impossible to describe anything without giving it a name. If a simple descriptive name for your position feels insulting to you - that suggests a flawed position not a flawed named.
> For example "racist" is preferable to "xenophobe"
Those are two completely different concepts. Xenophobia often happens within the same race (some of the worst xenophobic violence of the past few years happened in South Africa in 2007 and was black-on-black xenophobia) They can overlap but they are not the same thing so you cannot call one an improvement over the other as they describe entirely different problems.
> A genuine (self-conscious) racist is likely to accept that term, then you can move on to debate them instead of discussing the insult.
And why would a genuine xenophobe be any less likely to accept that he is one ? You make a statement while offering absolutely no supporting evidence - your judgement however is clouded by the fact that you think racism and xenophobia are synonyms, which is just blatantly ignorant to the point of stupid (now THAT is an insult, or would be if it wasn't a simple statement of provable fact).
> You could phrase all political positions as phobia: socialism is the fear of capitalists leaving you poor, libertarians fear the government etc. etc. Technically a phobia is irrational fear but simply claiming something is a phobia is begging the question.
It's only a fear if it is irrational. So homosexual who fear gaybashing are not phobic, but heterosexual who fear they may be gay are being irrational. I would say you could label all political positions as fears (though this would only rarely offer useful political discourse) but not that you could label them all phobias. Some of those fears are entirely rational and backed up by strong evidence (how strong that evidence is perceived to be is more personal). Holding a political position out of fear without having looked for evidence is however always a phobia as any unsubstantiated fear is irrational.
I stand by the belief that any group of people who denies the equality of any other group is guilty of bigotry and by definition not being rational. It is not the psychological cause that's the problem, it's the absence of any rational thought to temper those psychological effects that make it irrational. If one thinks rationally one must accept that the actions of an individual cannot with any reliability whatsoever be predicted based on any group classification that may apply to him - for classifications that are born-in rather than chosen the reliability of such predictions are even lower.
It is no more rational to fear gay marriage than it is to assume that *every* black man in America likes KFC.
>What a load of crap. Newtons laws are very close to true
Very close to true is STILL a lie. But you would make a great politician.
>When we landed a man on the moon and brough him back safely, all that was done with Newton's laws,
Yes, putting a man on the moon is a challenge of engineering not science. The two are related but they are not the same. They have different core goals and because their purposes are so different what's useful to them is just as different.
>They're correct enough for almost everything we'll encounter in daily life That has even LESS to do with science. This discussion is about whether Newton can give authoritive statements about science and religion - he can do neither.
I am not trying to denigrate what Newton did. In many ways he laid the foundations of modern physics, but he wasn't a scientist.
>And that's why they're not taught anymore in physics classes! Wait, actually they are.
True, meaningless but true.
>Because they're still effective for situations not involving quantum scales, relativistic speeds, or extreme gravitational fields.
Except that, now you're talking about engineering - not science. Science is about understanding things not about making them work - engineering is about making things work, not about understanding them. Newton's laws today is to theoretical physics as Ohm's law is to quantum mechanics - silly.
Let's use that example to illustrate. Electrical engineers use Ohm's law all the time. It's a brilliantly useful tool for designing circuits with. But it completely glosses over what actually happens when electrons move. It doesn't care about the quantum particles involved and in fact what really happens in an electric circuit is far, far more complicated than anything you can express in three variables -none of which actually relate to reality. But as an approximation it gives values which, while utterly untrue, are very useful for engineers. In the same way an engineer designing a rocketship may choose Newtonian laws of motion because they are much easier maths and the values are close enough not to matter for his job. They aren't right. If you aim your rocket with Newtonian physics it won't be accurate, but inaccuracy is small enough that it's not worth the far more complicated maths in the real world.
However that is NOT science - the moment you start caring about achieving *any* goal except "understanding the universe" - what you're doing isn't science anymore. That's what science is - that's what it does.
Newton says: Momentum = Mass * Acceleration We know: Photons have zero mass. So according to Newton, the momentum of a photon must be zero. But we know photons do have momentum, solar power couldn't work without it.
That's the real reason Newton is still actively used, but it's not the reason you still learn it in (school) physics. That's actually much simpler: it's because of how human brains learn. Most of what we learn in highschool science is that everything we learned in primary school were lies-to-children. Oversimplified stories we could understand. Once we understood them, we could learn high-school stories. Those were still lies though, just slightly more sophisticated lies. They made us ready to learn undergrad physics. Except if you go postgrad they tell you "everything you learned so far have been lies as well - but now that you know those lies, you are ready for the next level" - and maybe if you actively stay in the field after you get your phd you'll start to learn what people are really thinking is true now - and start contributing to that.
But until that moment - all you've learned is a long series of ever more sophisticated lies to children. Newton is still taught in physics class because it's a very useful lie. It teaches that the universe follows mathematical rules, and does so with maths that are easy to learn and understand and replicate. This doesn't make it even CLOSE to true, but it creates a foundation - that prepares us for the next level of more sophisticated lie.
Sorry - but that's the reality. Indeed Stephen Hawking has said "The biggest problem with modern science is that it has become so complex that only a specialist can actually understand even one part of it, which has made it impossible for philosophers to usefully comment on it anymore as they simply do not have sufficiently advanced knowledge to even understand it. A relevant PHD and several years of study there-after are needed just to grasp current research. Science is poorer for not having the insight of philosophers anymore."*
Hawking did not, however, propose any kind of solution to this problem - and I'm as stumped as he is about how one may solve it.
Anyway, this is just getting boring now - you're original post was a fallacy - and ever since then you've been nitpicking about thing
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>I think you think that label is a slur.
Yep, the very concept is a self-chosen insult. Conservative by definition is committing the call-to-tradition fallacy - it is quite literally what the word means: a philosophy of conserving the status quo. The entire concept is an insult to critical thinking. I know liberals and progressives have some concerning faults in their philosophy (I am something else entirely myself - something I won't bother to name as somebody with your obvious bias wouldn't even be able to understand how it is possible - simply by being utterly ignorant of the history and meaning of words like 'libertarian') - but at least they don't construct the very basis of that philosophy on excluding the very possibility that anybody smart has been born recently.
>A fool and his money don't stay together very long
Lie.
>Power to make yourself useful... because that is what it means to make more money
Self-aggrandizing denial of privilege and it's role in society - frequently cited by free market fundamentalist easily proven to be factually false. The vast majority of poor people are poor due to circumstances they have never had any choice or control over, and which those who are rich actively and by violent coercion maintain to ensure that poverty. To those who are wealthy, the poor is a resource, and it's in their own interest to keep the supply higher than the demand.
> When people pay you the money, they direct you to act. If more money flows your way, then more people have directed you to do something they need done.
Simplistic theory, devoid of any consideration of practical reality on an individual level. In fact sufficiently oversimplified as to be outright deceptive.
>Not sure who this "we" is
Clearly stated in context to refer to society as a whole and the kind of priorities which history has proven to create the most progressive societies that actually ADVANCE and UPLIFT themselves to better qualities of life for all members over time.
>But I personally would rather have those who try to make themselves useful have every opportunity to do so.
Fallacy built on a deceptive argument, already disproven - even if it was true the conclusion remains morally indefensible. Numerous systems of partial suffrage was tried over many centuries - all were abandoned in favor of universal suffrage because they were all found to be fundamentally at odds with liberty and progress. Without equality there can be no liberty.
>In some case it does benefit society to act in that way
Yes it's a generalization, the rare exceptions are not worthy of consideration on the kind of abstract level we are talking. They are indeed very, very rare but they do exist (for example if a welfare system is badly structured then it could become a reward for not-working as opposed to a system to help the destitute improve their conditions and BECOME productive workers). But those are practical considerations of implementation, irelevent to the theoretical consideration of what societies priorities ought to be.
Even then you CANNOT consider both the needs of society AND call yourself a conservative as a fundamental conservative value is that only the needs of the individual should have any merit - indeed that any consideration of the needs of society is an intrusion on the right of the individual not to participate.
History however shows that by uplifting it's destitute a society uplifts itself as a whole, it gains a larger and more productive work-force that also make technological and scientific breakthroughs and becomes a more enlightened society.
>But adapting that as a rule of thumb is plainly self-destructive. It states that resources must go toward those who make themselves least useful to others.
Humans formed societies in the first place to benefit from cooperation. That is the only legitimate reason for societies to exist and it's only morally defensible priority. It is then obvious that the greatest gains of progress in this reg
How about - all things considered it's not an unreasonable assumption that only a tiny minority of the corporations that break the law will ever get caught. Indeed if they didn't consider the risk low enough - none ever would.
Therefore - if the number in the news is as high as it is, it is a perfectly reasonable assumption that the real number is much, much higher.
A favorite line of conservatives - which is easy to refute: the more money you have therefore, the more voting power you have.
That's exactly the OPPOSITE of what we need. It's exactly the people with the LEAST resources that need societies MOST attention - and the idea of "market voting" makes them even MORE voiceless than they already were.
>As far as owners of small corporations, they are eligible for the corporate liability shield just as much as any other owner of a corporation. You can't sue them any more than you can sue CALPERS.
The GP clearly said small BUSINESS not small CORPORATIONS. Crucial difference there. The vast majority of small business are NOT corporations. They are private companies.
> and it's actually pretty clear that the vast majority of corporations - both publicly and privately held - act in a law-abiding fashion ...you don't read the news very often, do you ?
> kindly start by explaining where the slightly off white not-quite-being-a-saint point lies.
Having a threesome. It would be cheating but your girlfriend can't exactly be jealous because she fucked the same girl you did.
>They have preferences for one brand or another.
This is true but less severe than among amateurs. A much bigger issue is that brands tend to require sticking to. Nikon lenses don't fit on Canon bodies - so once you choose one or the other you have to keep buying that brand.
This makes the initial decision much more import. In all cases there are various considerations that professionals look at.
A good example: there is a huge load of amateurs in my country who all buy canon's and always buy the very latest model. The result is a huge and thriving second hand market for Canon products- as a professional nearly all my studio equipment was bought second hand (since I know that age of tool and quality of tool are not the same thing). That saved me a fortune. I couldn't have done that if I went nikon.
Technically the two are virtually on par (though Nikon's lens sensor technology is inferior - Canon took the hit of adding more sensors a few years ago which made previous lenses incompatible with new bodies and made them lose a lot of sales but they have the benefit now of more powerful sensoring. Nikon stuck with their old three-prong connectors and now their censors and auto-adjusters aren't as powerful - but it's a small difference to studio photographers who mostly do manual settings anyway).
The technical differences are really tiny either way - so the real professionals tend to care more about the economic differences, and those are much more determined by where you live than anything else.
I will politely not agree with you. Must be a matter of taste but I consider Stephenson to be one of the greatest writers of our generation - and certainly my favorite (by far) cyberpunk writer.
>maybe they didn't have any C4s on hand. I broke my iPad (my fault) and they gave me a refurbished one for free. Not the newest model, but not too shabby nonetheless.
Years ago, I bought a celeron 333 CPU (then a fairly common budget CPU for desktops) which failed after about 6 months. I had bought them just as the last of the 333's were being sold off cheaply to make stock room for the newere 366's and when I took it back under warrantee I got a 366 instead.
>Are Shipping Operations Managers hired from the driver pool or the mechanic pool?
Are CFOs hired from tellers or account clerks?
Are hospital administrators selected from the best nursing staff or even the interns?
Once upon a time they were. Back in those days you could actually WORK your way to the top of a firm. Loyalty and effort were rewarded.
Nowadays, if you didn't choose to study MBA kiss any hope of ever earning an executive salary goodbye... and that is a big part of why business is in the fuckup it's in.
Why be loyal in an age of "headcount reduction" ? Why work hard for a company if your continued employment from one month to the next is mostly a lottery thing.
In fact... you're better off NOT working too hard. If you work the least, you'll be out of there - but if you're the best you also get fired because you're the most expensive.
Once a company goes public - quality of work loses all value to those who really run it (people who own shares - and their goal is to sell them for a profit THIS quarter). So what happens ? Nobody cares if the business is bankrupt in a year. What matters is maxing out the profits right now - and you do that by firing all the talent (and selling all the useful assets).
About the same time companies started calling people "resources" they started treating them with the same respect they give other resources... like staplers, so of course the people responded by treating the companies with that same (lack of) respect... voila - economic collapse.
>Being that you "went to university" and studied "maths", I assume you were not in the U.S. Most of this discussion has been around how broken the American system is.
Fair point, no I wasn't in America, though I honestly thought this concept at least was pretty much universal.
I'm surprised to hear that comment about tertiary education. My experience of university was of a place where rote memorization was a guaranteed way to fail. I could see it being of some use in the undergrad versions of the hard sciences, maths or engineering courses since those do involve a lot of facts you need to learn. You could probably manage a pass on those facts without being all the good at actually applying them.
But the real test - that which made up the bulk of your score wasn't your knowledge of the facts (indeed in the humanities in particular there are often very, very little facts to go on) but your ability to construct an argument based on those facts. Doing an assignment or a test was a case of coming up with a theory (bonus points if it was a new theory and then supporting that theory with the available facts.
Do that well and you had at least a C. Do it great and you had a B or an A.
And if you wanted to increase your chances of that B then you chose a theory you knew your lecturer didn't agree with, if it directly contradicted her favorite theory then all-the-better. The lecturer would see this as genuine independent thought - and if you could solidly defend a theory they didn't like with the facts available to you, every lecturer I ever had would be hugely impressed and mark it very highly.
They wouldn't agree with a single word of your conclusion - but if it was a logically supported conclusion they would mark you HIGHER for NOT agreeing with them than if you did.
Now the latter part was just human psychology - when you disagree with somebody they are more critical of your arguments and if you argue well then they are more aware of it. So if arguing well is the scoring system, this bit of psychology got me some slightly higher marks (perhaps at the expense of the student who argued just as well but by coincidence agreed with the lecturer's conclusion).
But there was no authoritivity there. Nobody ever said "because I said so" or "I have the experience here"... that was a school thing (and the major reason I suffered in school - because that think-this-way thing never worked for me). At university I excelled because the emphasis was in fact the exact opposite.
We were encouraged - and more importantly TAUGHT - to think critically for ourselves - and do so logically, effectively and soundly. And above all - our ability to do so was rewarded.
So reading your words I find myself wondering if I just went to a very, very good University... well I did... but it never occurred to me that the difference would be on this issue. I could see a difference in the budgets and the research projects you could do post-grad and such... but actual universities where logic and critical thinking was NOT the cornerstone of absolutely EVERY class ?
So your answer on point 3 is basically the biology version of "not invented here" syndrome ?
I mean I know every mammal has an instinctive desire to spread their genes but humans are also capable of rational thought so in theory at least we shouldn't be bound by those instincts. That doesn't mean listening to our instincts is always wrong, but it isn't always right either. Our primitive fight/flight instincts want us to associate threats with a particular pattern which is why we invented ideas like racism: we find it calming to imagine that we know what danger looks like. It worked well for our ancestors - recognize the lion, get the hell out of dodge. It doesn't work so well for us because in reality the predators we face look exactly like the rest of our pack (can even be PART of our pack). All those times we imagine differently - we end up doing something atrocious to some group of people who haven't as individuals done anything to deserve our fear and hatred.
That is why, since we have the ability to, we have a moral obligation to be rational rather than instinctive in our actions.
So does that mean I think you can't have kids ? No, I think there is too many variables that these simplistic answers ignore. You cannot draw a hard and fast rule here because the complexities are too great - and I think each person and couple need to work out what makes most sense for them. Perhaps one day we'll have the kind of mathematical models to draw up an absolute right answer (everyone in this generation ought to adopt, then the next one can breed again or something) but even if we could get a definitive answer here anything more than suggestion would be tyranny with major unintended consequences (how many baby girls have been murdered or abandoned due to China's one-child policy ? That was certainly not it's intention was it ?)
So I think your argument is just plain wrong, so is the argument of the person you're responding to. He is trying to be rational but ignoring too many details to be right, you are ignoring all rationality to feed your instinctive desires.
As for me ? I made my own choice which tried to strike a middle ground between the two. Me and my fiance want kids - our decision was that we'll have one (or maybe two) of our own, and adopt another.
That's the nature of science. Nobody pursues a research project if it doesn't have promising results early on. A lot of times those results won't pan out. But over time a few of them will. Those few add up - and that's why modern medicine is so much more advanced than it was even a hundred years ago.
>stealing away their free will
Oh come off it. There are serious scientific doubt if free will is even physically possible. The universe is a predictable system of cause and effect, all matter follows fixed paths through time and space right back to the moment of the big bang. There is absolutely no proof that the matter in our brains behave any differently - indeed free will may well be simply an illusion - what it feels like have a brain despite the fact that what you will end up deciding is always predetermined by the laws of physics.
This isn't proven (or perhaps even provable) but the evidence is very much that free will doesn't really exist. Does that mean we should just assume there's no such thing and do away with freedom (no freedom makes sense without free will). No. It means whether or not we do that is not actually something we can decide. Can we actually judge a criminal for his crimes if there is no free will ? Actually if there's no free will - we can't NOT judge him.
That said - there may be such a thing after all, we have no idea. If nothing else the sheer complexity of an advanced brain makes the results so unpredictable that from the outside the results of it existing or not are completely indistinguishable. If free will exists at all - it exists because our brains are so damn complex that despite being predetermined their outcomes are completely unpredictable.
So to suggest that the far simpler brain of a rat has free will still makes absolutely no sense. It's simply not possible. Besides which - many of those tests you so hate actually proved that they don't. Human brains are complex - they may have something like free will as an emergent phenomenon but rat brains are (by comparison) much, much simpler - and there's just not enough of them to produce anything that even remotely resembles free will. We've proven that.
I don't think the emergent property we call free will only applies to humans, some other intelligent creatures probably have variations on it (domestic docs and cats - because of the stimulation of human interaction probably develop it, their wild counterparts probably do not), elephants, dolphins and octopi probably have something close... but rats and mice ?
And there, ladies and gentlemen, is the problem with vegans: they never bother to learn any science and apply as much cognitive dissonance as they can to exclude everything that doesn't make them feel good.
Humans are not herbivores, we are omnivores and like every other primate meat is a natural and needed part of our diet. Chimps love baby monkeys... for dinner (nice and tender meat). Baboons regularly hunt antelope (I've watched them do it).
Primates are omnivores. That's science, and a vegetarian or vegan diet can NEVER be completely healthy (though if well planned it can come close - see I actually do care about science so I don't discount the real reality even if it doesn't suit my position).
Basically dude... in the end every species is in it for themselves, that's exactly how nature intended it, that's how species progress. If it's a choice between a family member dying of HIV or a million dead mice... I choose my family member, and there is nothing wrong with, it's exactly how nature wants us to act (and the fact that we as a whole constantly do is another argument against the traditional view of free will)
It takes a very long time and a lot of money to go from concept to cure. Generally many, many years of testing and research. Often research that shows promise early on fades out later as it's found to have bad side-effects or be less effective in primates - so not everything pans out. Many times if more than one vector is followed then a good approach may simply be finished too late and another (that isn't better - just as good) is ready sooner.
The process takes long with very good reason - all that testing is there to ensure that the medicines we produce are safe to use. There's no point in a medicine that cures a disease perfectly if 80% of the patients get killed by the treatment. Sometimes bad side effects are still acceptable if they offer a cure or an improved quality of life while dying (chemo for cancer patients for example) but if chemo killed 50% of it's takers in a day it wouldn't seem a worthwhile trade-off anymore now would it ?
Slashdot by nature of it's audience reports the research as it happens - often years (perhaps decades) from a commercial cure being available. That doesn't mean this work is something shrug off. The fact that we have so many different avenues for attacking HIV and cancer being researched right now is a good thing. It means if any one of them is going to pay off we'll get the results. Less research funds would mean that less ideas can be tested.
It could take a while before any of these researchers get results - but that doesn't mean it isn't good that they are doing research, and that we shouldn't be aware of it.
Not all of it will pay off - but history suggests that some of it will.
Basically what all this means is that we will probably see cures for two of the biggest killers in the world today within our lifetimes. Perhaps not in time to save our parents, but certainly in time to save our children.
Provided you follow the rules of writing and use the SAME value of 1 both times - yes. For a value of 2 which correlates to your chosen value of one anyway.
>What we think of as western science, founded on empiricism and the scientific method, began with Newton and his peers. We call that time the Age of Enlightenment because they invented science. If you want your own private definition of "science" that excludes the beginnings, fine, whatever makes you happy, but again, don't be surprised when everyone is confused by what you're saying.
Empiricism is just one tiny bit of the scientific method. More-over the enlightenment had nothing to do with science - though it coincided with the period when the groundwork for science was being laid.
There is nothing PRIVATE about my definition of science, it's the one agreed upon by the philosophers of science who actually IDENTIFIED the scientific method and told scientists what works and what doesn't. Science had converged onto that method over several hundred years of gradual improvement. Newton lies right at the start of that process. It didn't reach it's current form until the mid 1800's - which is the point where we can legitimately begin to call things science rather than natural philosophy because the scientific method as we know it actually exists. There are parts of it that existed before but as a complete entity it did not exist before that point and nobody followed *all* of it prior to that time because nobody had yet done the philosophical research of actually studying what makes science yet.
And since you seem convinced that your high-school history lessons are reality.. I majored in philosophy of science. You're arguing with me in my field of professional expertise.
Well I'll grant you this much - America certainly doesn't have a monopoly on idiots.
Though in the rest of the world we tend to think that having the village idiot double as the mayor may be a bad idea.
>. As science progresses, the models get better, the predicions more accurate, the boundary conditions wider. But nothing is ever "proven true" - that's the real of mathematics.
Yeah, I know that. It has nothing to do with what I was saying. Unless of course you are being deliberately obtuse. When you have a better model - it's better because it's more true than the old model. That's the point. It's why science uses this thing called "evidence".
The philosophical point you made is often quoted and usually misunderstood anyway. It's a reminder to scientists to always improve, not a statement that they are chasing a worthless dream. We do get to understand better, we do get to build models that are more true than before.
Even then - none of this has anything to do with the topic at hand.
I say it again - I don't give a flying fuck right now if Newton's laws were found inscribed in 10 foot high letters of Fire by God himself. The point isn't how good they were. The point is they weren't SCIENCE - because they were written before science EXISTED.
>If a model makes falsifiable predictions based on observations of our universe, it's science.
Let me be more accurate then so you can have your pendantry settled. Newton acted like a scientist some of the time, in some of his work and in some of the ways he did that work. He didn't follow the scientific method all the time or properly because it didn't EXIST yet. But much of what he did is close enough to be useful to people who DO follow the scientific method.
Nonetheless anything done before about 1800 is not science. It can be quite close. Aristotle was pretty close to a scientist sometimes, but it's not science.
Newton's natural philosophy was much closer - it was a direct ancestor to modern science, but it still wasn't science. We didn't just change the name ad hoc. We changed it to reflect the change in approach that we now call the "the scientific method".
>but people like you ignore the good that we do for foreign nations, such as provide aid after a natural disaster
And of course, the massive amounts of aid you yourself receive after disasters from other nations don't count ?
Do you even know how much aid the USA received after Katrina ? Not just money but many other types of aid - for example the Dutch sent you a whole bunch of engineers with the kind of particular expertise in water and flood management that their dyke system requires and you didn't have to help fix things.
Sorry, if the best thing you can say in your favor is something every other not-ruled-by-an-evil-dictator country on earth does then you're really nothing special.
On the other hand, after the Japan quake facebook and twitter were filled with Americans complaining about your government sending aid to the Pearl Harbour guilty. Conveniently forgetting that:
1) Japan has been a US ally for decades now
2) A nuclear bomb is probably more than adequate justice for a harbor- you gave them two
3) After Katrina Japan was the single largest monetary benefactor giving aid to YOU in YOUR hour of need.
I don't hate Americans - hell I've been to America, I loved San Francisco. There's a lot of things wrong with your culture and your country but there's a lot of things wrong with all the others too.
I don't think you deserve all the hate you get, but you certainly don't deserve the adoration you want either.
>Even if this is true* it is simply against the 'rules' of argument to claim that because someone has a psychological reason for a belief then that belief is incorrect and any arguments they make for it can be disregarded
But I never made such a claim. Even so - a psychological reason is ipso facto not a rational one. Irrational positions are by definition weak arguments. Or to put it otherwise - they are not evidence in favor of the position at all - and claiming they are is a fallacy. The believe may still be valid, but it would have to be proven based on other, empirical, premises.
In the case of bigotry attempts to do so have invariably failed due to a complete absence of evidence or evidence that is easily refutable.
>Using loaded terms in an attempt to belittle a position is simply newspeak and does nothing to convince your opponent.
All terms are loaded. There is nothing belittling about calling something what it really is. You are not belittling homophobes by calling them that. Unless you are deluded enough to think anybody on the planet isn't phobic about something. For starters most homosexuals are rather phobic about violence from homophobes (their phobia is far more justified of course - as such violence does occur far too often).
>Plus, if an argument is the result of fear then chances are it can be easily refuted without resorting to name-calling.
There is no name-calling involved here. At least, not in the sense you use the phrase. It's pretty much impossible to describe anything without giving it a name. If a simple descriptive name for your position feels insulting to you - that suggests a flawed position not a flawed named.
> For example "racist" is preferable to "xenophobe"
Those are two completely different concepts. Xenophobia often happens within the same race (some of the worst xenophobic violence of the past few years happened in South Africa in 2007 and was black-on-black xenophobia) They can overlap but they are not the same thing so you cannot call one an improvement over the other as they describe entirely different problems.
> A genuine (self-conscious) racist is likely to accept that term, then you can move on to debate them instead of discussing the insult.
And why would a genuine xenophobe be any less likely to accept that he is one ? You make a statement while offering absolutely no supporting evidence - your judgement however is clouded by the fact that you think racism and xenophobia are synonyms, which is just blatantly ignorant to the point of stupid (now THAT is an insult, or would be if it wasn't a simple statement of provable fact).
> You could phrase all political positions as phobia: socialism is the fear of capitalists leaving you poor, libertarians fear the government etc. etc. Technically a phobia is irrational fear but simply claiming something is a phobia is begging the question.
It's only a fear if it is irrational. So homosexual who fear gaybashing are not phobic, but heterosexual who fear they may be gay are being irrational.
I would say you could label all political positions as fears (though this would only rarely offer useful political discourse) but not that you could label them all phobias. Some of those fears are entirely rational and backed up by strong evidence (how strong that evidence is perceived to be is more personal).
Holding a political position out of fear without having looked for evidence is however always a phobia as any unsubstantiated fear is irrational.
I stand by the belief that any group of people who denies the equality of any other group is guilty of bigotry and by definition not being rational. It is not the psychological cause that's the problem, it's the absence of any rational thought to temper those psychological effects that make it irrational.
If one thinks rationally one must accept that the actions of an individual cannot with any reliability whatsoever be predicted based on any group classification that may apply to him - for classifications that are born-in rather than chosen the reliability of such predictions are even lower.
It is no more rational to fear gay marriage than it is to assume that *every* black man in America likes KFC.
>What a load of crap. Newtons laws are very close to true
Very close to true is STILL a lie. But you would make a great politician.
>When we landed a man on the moon and brough him back safely, all that was done with Newton's laws,
Yes, putting a man on the moon is a challenge of engineering not science. The two are related but they are not the same. They have different core goals and because their purposes are so different what's useful to them is just as different.
>They're correct enough for almost everything we'll encounter in daily life
That has even LESS to do with science. This discussion is about whether Newton can give authoritive statements about science and religion - he can do neither.
I am not trying to denigrate what Newton did. In many ways he laid the foundations of modern physics, but he wasn't a scientist.
Or perhaps you don't understand the concept of a useful lie ?
Hint: useful has absolutely nothing to do with truth.
If you want to get pedantic, the only absolute truth we know is that 1+1=2
>And that's why they're not taught anymore in physics classes! Wait, actually they are.
True, meaningless but true.
>Because they're still effective for situations not involving quantum scales, relativistic speeds, or extreme gravitational fields.
Except that, now you're talking about engineering - not science. Science is about understanding things not about making them work - engineering is about making things work, not about understanding them.
Newton's laws today is to theoretical physics as Ohm's law is to quantum mechanics - silly.
Let's use that example to illustrate. Electrical engineers use Ohm's law all the time. It's a brilliantly useful tool for designing circuits with. But it completely glosses over what actually happens when electrons move. It doesn't care about the quantum particles involved and in fact what really happens in an electric circuit is far, far more complicated than anything you can express in three variables -none of which actually relate to reality.
But as an approximation it gives values which, while utterly untrue, are very useful for engineers.
In the same way an engineer designing a rocketship may choose Newtonian laws of motion because they are much easier maths and the values are close enough not to matter for his job.
They aren't right. If you aim your rocket with Newtonian physics it won't be accurate, but inaccuracy is small enough that it's not worth the far more complicated maths in the real world.
However that is NOT science - the moment you start caring about achieving *any* goal except "understanding the universe" - what you're doing isn't science anymore.
That's what science is - that's what it does.
Newton says:
Momentum = Mass * Acceleration
We know:
Photons have zero mass.
So according to Newton, the momentum of a photon must be zero. But we know photons do have momentum, solar power couldn't work without it.
That's the real reason Newton is still actively used, but it's not the reason you still learn it in (school) physics. That's actually much simpler: it's because of how human brains learn.
Most of what we learn in highschool science is that everything we learned in primary school were lies-to-children. Oversimplified stories we could understand. Once we understood them, we could learn high-school stories. Those were still lies though, just slightly more sophisticated lies. They made us ready to learn undergrad physics. Except if you go postgrad they tell you "everything you learned so far have been lies as well - but now that you know those lies, you are ready for the next level" - and maybe if you actively stay in the field after you get your phd you'll start to learn what people are really thinking is true now - and start contributing to that.
But until that moment - all you've learned is a long series of ever more sophisticated lies to children. Newton is still taught in physics class because it's a very useful lie. It teaches that the universe follows mathematical rules, and does so with maths that are easy to learn and understand and replicate. This doesn't make it even CLOSE to true, but it creates a foundation - that prepares us for the next level of more sophisticated lie.
Sorry - but that's the reality. Indeed Stephen Hawking has said "The biggest problem with modern science is that it has become so complex that only a specialist can actually understand even one part of it, which has made it impossible for philosophers to usefully comment on it anymore as they simply do not have sufficiently advanced knowledge to even understand it. A relevant PHD and several years of study there-after are needed just to grasp current research. Science is poorer for not having the insight of philosophers anymore."*
Hawking did not, however, propose any kind of solution to this problem - and I'm as stumped as he is about how one may solve it.
Anyway, this is just getting boring now - you're original post was a fallacy - and ever since then you've been nitpicking about thing