Michael R. Barrick

...or any bulletin board that includes Americans for the most part!

After reading some of them (especially ones like Yahoo which gather a wide spectrum of readership), now I know why the United States is so fucked up - so many people there have their heads suck too far up their arse for their own good.

I stopped reading such message boards long, long ago - besides, if I find my intake of libertarian trash waning, then there's always Mediavictim's wity banter to suffice my fill :-)

From:

Glad I can help you feel superior...

Damn us libertarians and our ethos of personal freedom with personal responsibility... damn us all to hell

Taxes good
choice bad

Why learn to fish if you can just make the government force the
fisherman to give you one every day for life?

From:

Glad I can help you feel superior...

LOL! Admittedly, despite the vast chasm between our personal viewpoints, I do tip my hat towards many of your posts. I appreciate good sarcasm when I see it.

our ethos of personal freedom with personal responsibility

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of a few, ergo: social responsibility. My problem with libertarians is that they always go bonkers when they feel their privacy has been violated... which ALWAYS leads me to think: "So, exactly what are they hiding?"

From:

From:

seymour-glass.livejournal.com

maybe from time to time we have to gauge ourselves against the majority just to remind ourselves how messed up our society is...and to reinforce the path we have taken...it is strange that we read things we know will make us angry, but as with everyone else i can't help myself...i suppose you hope to see some reasoning and logic in their viewpoint so that at least you can understand how they developed their stand...but in most cases that is asking a lot...or maybe it is just to reinforce our views of the individuals writing those posts...it is no different in any of those forums, my friend often visits a golf forum and the posts in there are no more informed...in fact they posted about the war, the u.s. in the world, economies, and such stuff...hardly seems fitting for a forum about golf...

From:

One thing it does is validate why I don't allow such conversations on the lists I moderate.

From:

bitogoth.livejournal.com

i heard an advertisement on the radio this morning- apparently it's not a new campaign but it's the first i've heard of it. it endorsed vacation in canada and the catch phrase was "the queen is on our money but the american dollar is king" *shudder*

From:

That's just so wrong.

From:

valerian.livejournal.com

I guess they *have* to say that, since our dollar is rising and all that now... (shakes head)

From:

But I guess King is not Almighty anymore, having been usurped now by the even mightier Euro. (1€ = $1.17 US)

From:

urban-creature.livejournal.com

I'm the same way.

Someone who's points of views infuriate me added me to their friends list and I added them back. Same idea I guess. Why bother if I'm just going to wake up in the morning and get pissed off about it? I never respond to his posts nor he to mine. I guess, in the end, it's amusing watching someone make an ass out of themselves or better yet, watch others comment on his journal in agreement to his preposterous words....

Infuriating yet strangely entertaining. Like Maury or Jenny Jones

From:

Yes! Exactly.

I don't mind a contrary opinion from somebody who has used their head to get there and can hold and argument. It's passionate convictions based on faith (not necessarily a religious faith) that fly in the face of truth that annoy the crap out of me.

In my utopia everyone is taught the basics of logic and critical thinking in high-school. No passing without it.

From:

Peoples opinions are shaped by their environment and upbringing
and their personal experiences. I guess the problem with
message boards is that the "evidence" and arguements that people would use may be based on external factors that themselves might be wrong.

As far as giving evidence by linking to a website or quoteing from a book. Just because its written in a book or on a webpage doesn't make it the truth (KKK.org? Chick.com? Churchofscientolgy.org?) becuse the author him(herself) may be full of shit. History (books) are written by the victors who paint themselves as heroes. News articales are sensationalized to sell papers. There is no such thing as unbiased media.

therefore , as Hassan the old man of the mountain would say
Nothing is true everything is permitted

And so you really can't invalidate what they say without invalidating what you say UNLESS (In my opinion) you have personal first hand knowledge/experience regarding the situation

But also remeber that even if you both have the same level of
first hand knowlege - your experience on the matter will be influenced by your past experinces and knowlege to you may still have different opinions. Not wrong - just different.

From:

Congratulations. In my utopia (#t1041217), you just failed grade 10.

Definition: subjectivist fallacy (http://www.esgs.org/uk/loga3.htm).

From:

"but the view that a claim could be true for one person and false for another at the same time"

Why not , PEANUTS ARE GOOD FOR HEALTH , is a claim that is true for some while being the opposite for others

"Since these situations (1+1 being 23 and the earth being flat for Bill) are extremely strange, it certainly seems that truth is not relative to individuals (although beliefs are). "

"Welfare is a good thing" is true for the person receiving it - but not nessasarily true for the person who gets taxed to pay for it

The US shouldn't go to war - true for those who want peace and see the backlash of war, false to the oppressed people who diplomacy has failed.

So again I repeat the old man of the mountain
"Nothing is TRUE , everything is permitted"

From:

Back to grade 9 with you.

Sloppy language does not make truth any less objective.

If "Peanuts are good for health" means "Peanuts are good for everyone's health" the statement is false. If is means "Peanuts are good for some people's health" then it is true. If it means "Peanuts are good for person-A's health" where person-A has a peanut allergy the statement is false.

"Welfare is a good thing": define "good" in the context of the statement. Simply being ambiguous does not mean the truth itself is some fluid thing.

If you perceive a contradiction it is because one or more of your premises are false.

From:

If you perceive a contradiction it is because one or more of your premises are false."

Or perhaps not detailed or concrete enough- on a way that can be mis-interpreted.

"Hitler was good....."
if I say this I am a nazi

"Hitlers ideas were good"
same boat

"Hilters ideas were good for germany"
still scary but a little clearer

"Ths social changes that the Nazi party brought to improve an impoverashed germany were beneficial"
little clearer , less offensive truth

"social changes to improve the health and well being of a country are benificial to the citizensof that country"
More of a generic satement - in one way we got to the detail of the stament and cleared up the confusion - but yet we have made the satement too vague to apply. If you boil it down too much
you loose some of the flavor

If you say staement number one - you'll get lynched even if the intent is to praise the benefits of a social system. But if you say staement 5 - your statement is too generic - and unfocused Sure you have clearly stated your
'truth' but you've dissassociated it and made it applicaple to everything and thereby made it pointless to say anything at all. The staement becomes redunant unless applied to a more concrete example.

"stuff happens during time periods"

Wich means that staement number 4 may be the best one to use - detailed - yet not to the point of redundancy

So getting back to your YAHOO friends. Perhaps there is a deeper seated reason for them saying what they are saying. They may say number 1 but mean number 4

What I NEVER see you doing is ASKING people to elaborate so you have some understanding of where they are comming from and what experience they have had in wich they would formulate that opinion before you criticise what they say and tear them down.

I guess thats why you're a high school teacher in your Utpoia and not a university researcher.

From:

>What I NEVER see you doing is ASKING people to elaborate so you have some understanding of where they are comming from and what experience they have had in wich they would formulate that opinion before you criticise what they say and tear them down.

Because it is senseless to ask for an elaboration of a commonplace falsehood. Doing so invariably denegrates to tedious lessons in remedial philosophy. Those take a lot of energy and time. Time and energy that isn't well spent on Yahoo! message boards arguing over the semantics of "marriage" with bible-belt Americans.

Which brings me to another reason asking for elaboration on a commonplace falsehood is generally a waste of time. If, for example, someone is making claims like "Gay marriage is an aborration. The bible says 'thou shalt not lay with another man as thou would with a woman'. Allowing such a thing is a denegration of core American values. Canadians are evil." then I think you'll agree that sufficient background information is inherently included in the statement.

Likewise when the commonplace falsehood is some other oft-repeated dogmatic bit of non-sense that doesn't stand up to even the most superficial scrutiny there is usually no point taking on the same dead-boring lession in remedial logic. Unless, that is, the person repeating the sophistry is someone I already like who I see has the potential to learn, or I know dragging that person through a lession in remedial critial thinking might provide an example to others that sorely need the same lesson, or both.

Ryan, I like you, you obviously aren't witless because your sarcasm is often intensely witty. However, a lot of your positions are so unambigiously brilliant observations that you have overheard, taken at face value without the slightest bit of reflection, they are painful.

Here's the thing about truth. It is very difficult to make a true statement, philosophically speaking, because if the slightest bit of falseness makes the whole statement false. In colliquial terms this is what is meant by something being "more true" or "less true" - those don't mean that that there are shades of truth, but rather that more or less of everything implied by the statment are in fact true, or that the what is being said bears approaches the truth, while not in fact being true.

1+1=23 False
1+1=1.1 False, but closer to the truth.
1+1=1 True

"Hitler was good." False
"Hitler's ideas were good for Germany." False, but closer to the truth.
"Some of Hitler's policies, while detremential to Germany in the long run, did provide short-term improvement to the German economy at the time and were beneficial to a significant preferred subset of the German population before he pushed those policies too far." True.

From:

I should not post in a hurry. Apparently this morning 1+1=1.

What I ment to type was:
1+1=23 False
1+1=1.1 False, but closer to the truth
1+1=2 True.

Gah. That's what I get for trying to squeeze in a post when I should be getting ready for work...

From:

Just because its written in a book or on a webpage doesn't make it the truth (KKK.org? Chick.com? Churchofscientolgy.org?) becuse the author him(herself) may be full of shit.

EXACTLY! I tired this once with those door-to-door JW types; I said what's stopping me from writting my own gospel and claiming it to be part of the Bible?

I remember once saying during some door-to-door banter when Biblical passages were slung like mud going out of style; I said "Well, if you read Nimrod 4:78 and/or Clarence 1:34 in the Old Testament it says 'such and such'..." - the evangelist bozo at my door was so dogmatic that she had no clue whether or not there were actually passages in the Bible called The Book of Nimrod or John The Baptist's Second Letter to Clarence. Took my quote at face-value as she counter-attacked with her own passages...

From:

For both of you. As I said (#t1041217), "It's passionate convictions based on faith (not necessarily a religious faith) that fly in the face of truth that annoy the crap out of me." But that does not mean once is restricted from referencing material that shores up a premise in an argument - "Ex nihil nihilo fit" (Nothing comes from nothing). If, for example, I wish to discuss words that defy comprehensive definition I am going to point you toward Wittgenstein. It does not mean I take Wittgenstein as gospel truth and you should to, meerly that I am departing from his argument as a premise for my own, and if my argument is sound but you want to argue that it is false then you have to back up to faulting my premises, in this example, Wittgenstein, at which point you need to examine the soundness of his argument and the validity of his premises if you wish to falsify my use of his conclusion as my premise.

If you want a simpler example, both of you answer me this as a point of departure: which came first, the chicken or the egg?

From:

The giraffe took harmonica lessons...

No seriously - I would have to answer the chicken.

The assumption is that both the chicken and the egg would evolve simultaniously from the same departure point of The First Amino Acid Creature - which is essence would be the proto-pre-evolutionary chicken.

That and because in the Bible, the passage of Warren 8:21 says so...

From:

And there you go, you couldn't give a "why" without defining "chicken". The whole problem hinges around an accurate definitition of chicken. Agree on a definition of chicken and there is no paradox at all.

Virtually every annoying debate that crops up on message boards and elsewhere hinges happens because of a lack of logic and sloppy language.

From: