bascule

Hmmm

I went on to say that I always allow exceptions if someone can make a good enough argument... or I'll change my mind entirely.

I don't say life should be guarded at all costs, and I don't believe that an unborn fetus has morally relevant properties, or if it does, they surely are fewer than that of any adult mammal, particularly simians. There's nothing wrong with exceptions so long as you have reasons for them. My question is what is the moral justification for killing them? Does the sense of relief it provides in their victims outweigh the moral relevancy of their properties as human beings? How does more killing make things better?

http://www.physorg.com/news64765284.html Someone drag Mokele back in here!

I'm curious to know... how exactly do you justify that position logically? Does the harm they have caused somehow override their moral attributes of being (in this hypothetical situation) healthy, adult human beings?

I don't know, perhaps I'm letting my frustrations regarding the Kennedy assassination and all the yokels I've talked to regarding that get to me. That's what this feels like all over again: a national tragedy that some people feel, for whatever reason, like blaming on the government. Oliver Stone laid out quite a bit of "evidence" on the table, all of which I watched get systematically deconstructed. I really dislike it when people start arguing in unevidenced hypotheticals spun in such a way as to predefine your expectations. For example, from Oliver Stone's JFK: Q: How could Lee Harvey Oswald get down six flights of stairs, grab his lunch, sit down in the lunch room in 45 seconds in time for a cop to see him casually eating his lunch, not winded and apparently unaware of what had just gone on outside? A: The incinuation here (that he should've been winded after running down 6 flights of stairs) is incorrect. The answer is simple: he walked. 45 seconds provides more than ample time to descend the 6 flights of stairs. This was proven empirically by a Discovery Channel special in which they went to the Texas Schoolbook Depository and timed how long it took someone to descend the 6 flights of stairs at a walking pace. It took a little over 30 seconds. Really, it's the same approach: an argument in which the validity of an entirely questionable assumption is incinuated throughout. I merely look for and question these assumptions, and very rarely do I get any corroboration of their validity, and when I do it's usually speculative in nature as well. Conspiracy theroists love to present evidence, but the real failure is in the arguments they construct from the evidence. I suppose you've seen that given some of your responses pointing out the fallacies he's been using.

Duh? Spin spin spin. Two of the biggest buildings in the world unexpectedly collapsed. Of course that's going to create an earthquake. Okay, and we aren't expecting this why? Let's ask the 9/11 commission report: http://www.insightful.com/infact/911/corpus/report_472_462.html Looking for patterns in a data set with high S/N? That's an interesting dropoff curve on your graphs, but you aren't evidencing the correlation you're describing whatsoever, nor are you showing us how data are inconsistent with expectations. The data are clearly inconsistent with your expectations, but you're not justifying in fact why your expectations should be the case and why the data are allegedly inconsistent. It's a lot of "It should be this way, but it's not. Why should it be that way? I don't know, it's just common sense, right?" When exactly was it that you became a seismologist?

Necormancer has a supernatural ability to bring long-dead forum discussion threads back to life. After having been flogged to death the thread may have been deceased for many years, and bringing it back may have scant relevance to the current topic, yet Necromancer will unexpectedly exhume the thread’s rotting corpse, and strike horror in the forum as its grotesque form lurches into the discussion. The monster, instantly recognized by all who knew it in life, seems at first to breathe and have a pulse, but, alas, it is beyond Necromancer’s skill to fully restore the thread’s original vitality. The hideous apparition may frighten away some of the weaker Warriors or Warriors badly wounded in former battles, but the thread is only a shadow of its former self and very quickly expires.

I bet you loved the PETA episode (although it has perhaps one of the morally egregious things I've ever heard them say... "Teller and I would personally strangle every chimpanzee on earth with our bare hands to save one street junkie with AIDS." Can I kill the street junkie if it would keep P&T from strangling all those chimps?) Penn and Teller certainly carries the mark of your typical CATO Institute member/capital L Libertarian, but as a social libertarian, I tend to agree with them on most issues.

Sexual selection has already been offered as an (or perhaps part of a multifaced) explanation Welcome, creationists, to Science Forums and Debate

The Pythonistas sure seem to be doing a bang up job of recruiting people to learn Python as their first language. I wouldn't ever recommend it as such, especially considering its syntax is completely different from any other language on earth, but I guess that's because I'm a Rails zealot who doesn't know Python and I really get a kick out of how much time the Pythonistas spent trying to abstract away common patterns in web development only to get thoroughly shown up by Rails. So I enjoy mocking Python in total ignorance, knowing that deep down Ruby and Python are basically the same... Anyway, sorry for this totally uninformative contribution to your thread there IMM... I guess all I can say is that Python isn't that bad of a language to start out with; there are plenty that are much much worse. I'm certainly not going to be an authoritative source on any of this, but I think you can safely assume the answers to all these questions (save for the first) is "Yes"

I remain unilaterally opposed to the death penalty, primarily due to the (scientifically-derived) concept of potential falsifiability. I believe that, no matter how much of an open and shut case a particular murder/rape/what have you may be, that the charges should always be considered potentially falsifiable, and therefore do not provide a sufficient justification for taking life. Penn and Teller did an awesome Bullshit on the death penalty... more innocent people have been put to death in the last 30 years than have been killed by inmates who received a deferred life sentence or for whom the death penalty was considered as a potential punishment. There is no correlation between the implementation of the death penalty and the murder rate: it does not act as a deterrent. And finally, it costs substantially more to execute an inmate (due to legal fees) than it does to keep them in jail for life. So what's the point? I think it's to feed some carnal desire humans have for brutal revenge upon the wicked. The death penalty is bullshit.

http://www.centralohio.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/B8/20060320/NEWS01/603200302/1002&template=B8 Doesn't this, I dunno, violate the Constitution in some way? Can one state really criminalize an activity you participated in in another state?

http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/6845.html *boggle*

Iran only needs low enriched uranium for nuclear power, yet they're enriching it to weapons grade. And they bought the equipment to do so from the former head of the nuclear black market. What does that tell you? Oh, and did I mention they're building ICBMs?

Collections have properties which do not exist in the union of the properties of their component parts

I like how all the 9/11 conspiracy theorist threads so far have been framed in the context of "truth"

Wrong. The 9/11 Commission is a bipartisan comission created by Congress, not some administration lackeys. For the love of God stop getting your information solely from conspiracy theorist web sites. There's plenty of 757 debris at the crash site. It's extensively documented here: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/pages/911_pentagon_757_plane_evidence.html The 757's fuselage has approximately a 13 foot diameter, and the hole is reported to be 16 to 20 feet wide. So, no, sorry, this claim is simply incorrect. You're making me want to stab myself in the eyes right now. Of course, all the debris there were planted after the fact as part of the conspiracy! What a great way to explain away evidence... Of course, metal cannot POSSIBLY BEND OUTWARDS (provided this claim is true) except from the blast of a bomb! It makes perfect sense. Oh wait, fallacy: non sequitur And yet not a single person, even throughout the course of being systematically hunted down by the US, ever blabbed about the conspiracy. They all went along with it, I guess. Just like every single person who must've been involved in staging something as elaborate as 9/11 and keeping it covered up. Bush couldn't keep the illegal wiretapping program under wraps and you're saying he could keep something of this magnitude secret from the American public? Please... Why don't you examine the evidence to the contrary before you make such retarded assertions...

Wow, case in point, thanks for illustrating for everyone that you are completely incapible of logically coherent thought. I already posted my reaction to that piece of sh*t. Why don't you bother reading what the army of real experts assembled by the 9/11 Commission had to say, rather than the unsubstantiated ranting and raving of some conspiracy theorist nut? Oh, I know why, because the 9/11 Commission is in on the conspiracy just like the Warren Comission was in on the Kennedy Assassination, and all their evidence is therefore forfeit, right? Something tells me that you've never even bothered to look at the 9/11 Comission report, have you?

Fallacy: Appeal to Authority. Does the concept of "logic" escape you entirely?

Fallacy: Red herring. Conspiracy theorists sure like to dish out the logical fallacies, don't they? That's nice, now how much evidence do you have to support that statement compared to the amount of evidence in the official report? I'm going to go with "jack sh*t" Well that settles it, all of the evidence in the official report must be wrong.

Oh for the love of god... READ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_replication If you're going to bother posting on a science forum, could you actually take 5 minutes to research what you're about to post before instead posting your own completely warped view of reality? I mean, this is why we have science, so we can understand the workings of the world empirically and not have to venture thoroughly unempirical, retarded guesses which will undoubtably be wrong.

By "facts" do you mean "crazy conspiracy theorist crap"? My thoughts are I'm really starting to hate people who circulate these bullshit pathological memes. "See that weird blur on the bottom of the plane in this low quality, high motion footage? It's a missile launcher, I say! There is no other reasonable explanation. Shadows? BAH! I laugh at the suggestion. It's a missle launcher, plain and simple" "Look at that explosion when the second plane hits the building. If that were caused by the plane hitting the building it wouldn't look like that. What proof do I have? Well, none, but my gut tells me it looks wrong because, uhh, well I don't really have any reasons at all actually, it just looks wrong to me for some reason." SERIOUSLY. WHAT THE F**K. That video doesn't construct an argument. Beyond being an enormous non-sequitur (I say all these things are inconsistent with the official account, therefore it's obviously a coverup by Bush!) It's just a bunch of completely unsubstantiated conspiracy theorist crap, with non-experts alleging knowledge of things they have absolutely no credentials for even beginning to provide an opinion on. All of you 9/11 conspiracy theorists need to stop reading/watching/listening to this bullshit and check out the official report of the 9/11 comission which has an overwhelming amount of testimony by actual experts in fields relevant to what they're giving an opinion on. Why are you letting laymen fill your head with total junk? These people are in no position to have a relevant opinion on anything related to 9/11, they're just trying to spread their idiotic conspiracy theories. Seriously people, start using your brains and start asking yourself SIMPLE QUESTIONS about the possibility that 9/11 was actually a conspiracy theory. Try this on for size: 9/11 resulted in the United States going to war with Afghanistan. If 9/11 was a giant conspiracy perpetrated by the United States, why didn't ANYONE in the Afghani government allege innocence? Why did they claim responsibility?

Well, indeed, but we probably have one of the most painful birth processes of any animal, and the crazy skull plating system so our heads will fit through the birth canal