On Fri, 2003-11-14 at 04:00, Tom wrote: > On Fri, Nov 14, 2003 at 03:49:48AM -0600, Alex Malinovich wrote: > > On Fri, 2003-11-14 at 02:19, Tom wrote: > > > On Fri, Nov 14, 2003 at 02:08:15AM -0600, Alex Malinovich wrote: > > > > On Thu, 2003-11-13 at 22:56, Ron Johnson wrote: > > > > --snip-- > > > > > It hasn't happened in the last 100k years, what makes you think > > > > > it will happen when there are 10x as many people now as there were > > > > > 100 years ago, and there will be another 6-9B people in the next > > > > > 45 years. > > > > > > > > Familiar with the theory of (I might be off on the numbers) a million > > > > monkeys, typing on a million typewriters for a million years? Maybe with > > > > enough people, there will be enough of us "maturing" to achieve critical > > > > mass? Or we're all completely off and have no idea what will actually > > > > happen. :) (I'd put my money on the latter. :) > > > > > > I recently discovered a couple of great sites: > > > > > > http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-tradition.html > > > http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/logic.html#antiquitatem > > > > > > This one sounds like "Argumentum ad antiquitatem", or the "that's the > > > way it's always been" fallacy. Or, as they say in the Stock Market: > > > "past performance does not predict future results" :-) > > > > Are you referring to my post or the one I was replying to? I checked the > > two links that you provided and, assuming you were, in fact, referring > > to my post, I don't quite follow the logic I'm afraid. If that was the > > case, could you elaborate please? > > The one you replying too, I'd already deleted Ron's post. Shoulda > snipped. > > All this talk about drugs has got me missing the good old days. I'm > reading Brave New World, which apparently came out this year on Project > Gutenburg. Good old Soma :-) > > I tell ya, if you've never had a dogbone or a football and a joint and a > cup of coffee on fine spring morning, you don't know what you're missing > :-) But now I've got to be all *good* Dammit
Actually, I haven't and I therefore don't. And thanks for those links. I just got done reading both. Some very interesting fallacies listed, especially on the Atheism Web one. And speaking of fallacies: You don't know what you're missing This carries the implication that the topic at hand is in some way good. But I could just as validly state that, "If you've never been shot in the head with a shotgun you don't know what you're missing!". Because, really, you wouldn't know what you were missing until after you'd experienced it. :) Or to go at it from a different angle, asserting that something is great while under the influence of something that makes EVERYTHING seem great tends to dilute the assertion. Now, if you can take an extremely potent downer; one that will make you suicidal and make everything around you seem terrible, and THEN still state that it's great, well THEN you're lending at least a bit of extra strength to your statement. :) As if we weren't OT enough to begin with, I come along and OT the OT thread. :) -- Alex Malinovich Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY! Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837
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