Vermont Legislature Legalizes Gay MarriageFollow

Actually, I wouldn't, because politics ultimately reduces to axiology; your values are just as good or bad as mine. However, I realize how utterly weak that sause of a rebuttal is and concede to you the point.

Anyways metaphysics, properly done, is timeless; it concerns subjectivity and the limits of cognition. That doesn't make it any better or worse of a pursuit than polisci, it just lays claim to certain areas of our thoughts, namely, the ones about which we can be certain are true and not vacuous. Definitions are things that are true but vacuous; you can't do anything with a tautology. It just sits there like some frog.

Well. On the broader issue of sites and sources, there's still a strong subjectivity in terms of what someone considers a "valid" source. If you agree with Global Warming, you're going to view the reports of the IPCC as effective gospel, and treat anyone who supports those reports as "experts" in the field and anyone who disagrees as some fringe nut and therefore not a valid source or cite. If you don't agree with Global warming, you'll view the legitimacy of any source or cite in the opposite light.


I think it's a somewhat useless exercise to argue with the equivalent of "dueling cites". It's why I prefer to construct my own arguments based on data and facts that are less clearly subjective in source. Of course, when I do that I'm attacked for making things up and ignoring facts. It's kind of a lose/lose situation. People will cling to their own opinions and beliefs most of the time no matter what you do or say...

Just add "Every time you rate me down a God discussion thread kills a kitten" to your Sig.

I promise it will help.

Why should it perplex you? It is completely in keeping with the expected summation of psychological responses.

No, that people like them.

Why else would they be used?

　

Honestly, it has a lot to do with credibility. You post a fair amount of stuff that's flat out factually inaccurate. You also tend to write with a false air of authority, using lots of words such as "absolutely", "certain", "obviously", etc. When someone continually asserts that they're "absolutely" correct and it turns out that they're wrong, it's pretty hard to take them seriously the next time around without some backing evidence.Agreed.

What conclusive evidence is that? I'm really curious.

Haha, I never even thought about Jesus' DNA before.

I dunno who doubts he existed. I just don't believe he did any of the things that posterity assumes he did.

No, he doesn't. He forms his opinions and tries to force the data to match his conclusions. Or makes the data up entirely. Which is why he can do silly shit like insisting that a study proved that abstinence education works when Gbaji doesn't actually have the study data in front of him and the guys who did the study (and had the data) used that data to show the opposite.This is because Gbaji tried to force authority onto the issue by typing out 10x more text than required to make the "central point". The hopes of making people say "I'm not reading all of that but he sure did type a lot so he must know what he's talking about" means that he fills his posts with any number of factually inaccurate tidbits. When he's called on them, he'll defend them for a while and then, when cornered, fall back on "How come you won't argue my REAL point, huh? HUH?" in lieu of admitting that he was just wrong. This problem could be solved with either more focus to his posts or else just admitting "Yeah, I was wrong but I think my main point remains valid." Gbaji would argue (he's done in the past) that he's "building his case" with all these datapoints and connecting the logic, yadda yadda. If this is true, his entire posts must be suspect because it's not hard to find inaccurate sections to his posts and if those are the bricks he's using to build his house, that's not a house I'd want to live in.Heh. I need to end all of my posts with a throw-away comment about circumcision or vaccinations or declawing cats or something just to ensure that people will be too busy having a tizzy about that to address my main post.

teehee

You can't say how I form my opinions Joph. You can only speak to how I argue in support of my opinions. And I'm pretty sure every single poster here is "guilty" of finding cites and sources which support his opinions when arguing on this forum. How those opinions formed in the first place is a completely different issue.

I will say that I'm one of the few posters on this forum who regularly explains the exact thought process behind many of my opinions, so let's not paint me as the poster child for being unable to back up his positions.



I do not "make up" data Joph. Just as everyone else does on this forum, I do refer to commonly known information, which you seem to delight in insisting I must find sources for. But that's not "data". If I state something like "gun control measures have been shown to be ineffective at reducing overall crime rate", that is a conclusion. It's based on data, but is not itself "data" in the context of something you can point to as an absolute hard fact.

I just think that if you applied the same burden of proof on your own arguments which you do on mine, you'd find them lacking as well. You've just defined your conclusions as "fact" and mine as "opinion" and bask in the safe knowledge that your ideas must be right.




Yup. Again with the whole confusing data and conclusions bit. Data is just data. It's raw bits of fact. Interpreting meaning out of that is always going to be subjective. I'll also point out that I didn't use that study to argue that abstinence only education "worked", but that it didn't "not work" any better or worse than the alternatives.

Your wording and your entire view of that issue is the result of the "spin" on the data. If you're looking for evidence that AO doesn't work, you found it. But if you were looking for evidence in that study that AO did just as good a job as contraceptive based education, you'd find that as well wouldn't you? That was the point which I kept trying to explain and you kept failing to grasp. I did not start a thread extolling the virtues of abstinence only education. Heck. I'm an avowed hedonist Joph. I'm of the opinion we should be teaching the teenage girls of today how to ride a stripper pole and providing them with real "sex eduction" so that there will be vastly more young adult women out there working in the adult industry and thus increase the odds of my harem plan coming to fruition. But that's just me...

I was only responding to the argument that AO didn't work or somehow was a disastrous and failed way to teach sex education. And guess what? Studies showing that kids taught AO versus contraceptive use didn't get pregnant or STDs at any higher rate proves that AO is "not" a failed way to do this.

Do you see how it wasn't me who was leading with his own assumptions Joph? I was merely pointing out that others were reading into the results of the study in question what they wanted to hear. I had no interest in that thread other than to point this out, yet you still seem to not get that it was *you* starting with an assumption and manipulating the data to match that assumption. Not me.

Again. I was not arguing that AO was "better" than contraceptive education. I just said that it was not any worse overall.




Because I believe that just saying "I'm right and your wrong" is somewhat pointless? We can all do that every single day and it accomplishes nothing.



Lol. Um... Whatever. From my point of view, I'll write my position. When asked to support it, I will provide a step by step argument justifying it. When pressed for "facts", I'll provide facts. But then, what inevitably happens is that someone will insert some alternative meaning or interpretation into a word or phrase I used and then insist I'm wrong because their meaning doesn't match my argument. Then, I end up having to argue 15 different tangents as I explain what I meant when I said that word or phrase and how the meaning I'm using is internally consistent with the argument I'm making.

And then someone will insist that I'm just backpedaling or (in some cases) spin right around to one of the first points I made and which no one challenged and insist that my whole argument is wrong because of this one thing. But they'll never clearly explain why, much less counter the painstaking amount of justification I made for that point.


I argue with logic. Most people argue with assumption and emotion. I don't just point to someone else's conclusions, declare them to be "fact" and claim victory. I question other people's conclusions. I want others to support the reasoning behind those conclusions, not just that they exist or even that they are popular. History is full of popular conclusions that turned out to be wrong.

Not surprisingly, very very few people are willing to do this and thus the arguments often just devolve into me going around and around in circles explaining the same justifications again and again to an audience who can't refute any single point but then just insists that the resulting conclusion can't be right anyway...




Funny how often your solution involves me "admitting I'm wrong". It's like a trend. Doubly silly when others insist that I must do this because they took a meaning for a word or phrase out of context in the first place.




To follow the home building analogy though, the flaws you're seeing are that you don't like the color of the bricks, or they don't double as floatation devices, and I must admit these faults before we can proceed. And when I insist that the color and floatation qualities of the bricks have nothing to do with the house I'm building I'm met with a chorus of "But why can't you just admit you're wrong...".


Spinning the argument into irrelevant details is what you do when you know your position is weak Joph. What does it say that this is done so often by those arguing against me?