Sayonara

Do you mean "everywhere else I've taken this it met with resistance, because people tried to make me explain myself there too, so they're too stupid to understand my magnificent brainal invention and obviously you guys are too", or do you mean "am I doing a bad job of explaining my point?" ? The only reason that is significant is because you say the number 11 is significant. So am I right in thinking you either believe that Al Qaeda know something we do about the power of 11, or the universe somehow enforces elevenness onto our decisions?

Thankfully, the majority of pseudos who publish do it via vanity publishers, so they don't make much profit even if they get volume.

If recycling was more energy-intensive than fabricating, nobody would do it. They also fail to account for what happens after you "just throw it away". Land-fills, oceanic dumps and incineration aren't exactly environmentally friendly.

Apparently so. This site is not as historically inclusive as I'd like but it gives good explanations: http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ [edit] The site seems to be down, but here is the Google cache of the a.h. page. The example is not very good. http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cache:wVWXOABNB2AJ:www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ad-hominem.html+nizkor+fallacies&hl=en

Offset? -1 plus -1 does not equal zero. [edit] Given that there are plenty of fates worse than death, if one accepts that killing someone requires equal punishment it is perfectly possible to put together such a punishment without depriving that person of their life. The punishment does not have to fit the crime. This is, in fact, the norm in most justice systems. Personally, I would consider being incarcerated for my entire natural life, deprived of my position in society, and forced to perform labour I have no interest in to be a pretty grim sentence.

The first rule of rich web content is "never turn up your speakers when instructed to do so".

Now add in all the historical global (by which I do actually mean global) events that don't involve the number 11.

Pseudoscience != marketing.

So, in fact, human life is invaluable unless it's not?

But surely with those provisions, the punishment of death is also unjust. It might be "warranted" or "appropriate", but we're still left with the fact that we are defining life as invaluable, then striking it down.

Weird.

You haven't actually said why the death penalty is a just sentence.

I don't think you actually are in breach of copyright by taking a copyrighted work for your own private use. Under the terms of the Berne Convention, one could argue that P2P downloaders are not actually theives, but uploaders are.

By rich I mean rich, not temporarily advantaged by a windfall.

Styrofoam props and a big fan. Uh-huh.

Yes, that does seem a bit silly. Blike, does that count as a double murder?

The best (well, funniest) illustration of the American fear was that thing by Matt Stone and Trey Parker in Bowling for Columbine.

Perhaps by "real" he means tangible. The hoverboards being real but 'too dangerous to sell' was something I heard repeated in the playground a good few times while I was at school, but something tells me we'd see the technology being applied everywhere if it were easy and cheap enough to replace conventional camera tricks.

That's a topic for another thread (and would complicate this thread, as there is no analogous form in the justice system for private and state healthcare). In fact I have a vague recollection of that very discussion going on in another thread some time ago. On a related note, once we have actually conquered Mars by going there we probably won't have much use for it. Plus it looks a bit like Australia.

And yet you never see a rich pseudoscientist. What a confusing world we live in.

You don't need to be shouting "yeehaa, eat lead daddy-o" while you're actually killing them - the reaction of wanting to kill someone in response to their own murder is necessarily an emotive one. Regardless, the point of the law being "reason free from passion" is to deduce the true standing of people's rights relative to each other without the burden of mob rule, and while you might make the claim that you can dispense justice without passion you cannot make that same claim for the eleven peers you'll be working with. I see a problem with that. If you do not establish somebody's guilt, how can you place a value on their life? What gives you that right even if you could? If Mother Teresa had stabbed someone in the chest in a moment of passion I can imagine a good few people would have given her side the benefit of the doubt.

Any chance of a reply to post #12 then?

I'm taking some time off in Jan by the way to get some headway on a couple of projects, so I will set aside a morning to document the crazy in my head on this topic Better late than never.

That's the simple version, yeah. Kudos. People tend to try and process the sequence of events in some kind of logical order, which usually ends up being "the order in which the traveller commits actions", rather than the order in which the actual events occur. They then find that logic falls apart and they can't resolve the problem, so they slap a paradox label on it (instead of realising that linear logic won't account for things like effect preceding cause, et cetera.)

Which is fair enough, as you'd have to be some kind of blind deaf mute to mix them up.