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I'm not a math guy, but if you divide by a decimal/fraction isn't the result multiplication? I mean it's deep into semantics at that point, but we're dealing with email forwards here, not scholarly works. It's a stupid response but that forward makes me angry (like many, I suppose). (It's not necessary to point out how easy this is to rebut)
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Oct 12, 2012 20:50
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Thanks for all the replies, I wasn't intending to respond to the post, since we only bowled together in the same league a few years ago. I just wanted to pinpoint all the fallacies that were staring me in my face.
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Oct 12, 2012 20:52
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Garanimals4Seniors posted:Thanks for all the replies, I wasn't intending to respond to the post, since we only bowled together in the same league a few years ago. I just wanted to pinpoint all the fallacies that were staring me in my face. They're mostly all strawmen. They're either responding to things no one is doing (#1/#5) or over simplifying it (#2/#4). Number 3 is basically built on trying to imply that the government has no right to tax us. Not really a strawman, but completely lacks any real understand of why and how society works. I got into a similar argument earlier this week in which the guy's argument was: social contract is bullshit, the government has to take my tax money by force, it's stealing.
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Oct 12, 2012 21:00
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constantIllusion posted:Why don't people who forward/post anti-abortion e-mails/status updates ever realize that any fetus their efforts save still has to be raised into adulthood and that unwanted babies-> unloved/abused/neglected children-> adults with issues so severe they find it difficult to even keep a crappy minimum wage job? well, the woman whose facebook wall i got that off of is a 22 year old divorced mother of a 3 year old. sooooo...
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Oct 12, 2012 21:08
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Facebook posted:The soldiers murdered at Ft. Hood by a Muslim terrorist will receive no Purple Heart, their families receive no pay, the Muslim terrorist still receives pay. All this because the President will not call this what it was: a terrorist attack. Will we really reelect this man? This is treasonous behavior!" "Muslim" and "treasonous behavior" comments aside, I have to say that I am curious as why this wasn't considered an act of domestic terrorism and why the soldiers would not receive a Purple Heart or pay for their families. I'm not having too much luck finding commentary on this issue that isn't from right-wing blogs.
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Oct 12, 2012 21:42
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Sarion posted:They're mostly all strawmen. They're either responding to things no one is doing (#1/#5) or over simplifying it (#2/#4). Number 3 is basically built on trying to imply that the government has no right to tax us. Not really a strawman, but completely lacks any real understand of why and how society works. I had a friend telling me last night that all taxation was theft, and was only justifiable if for the public good. I pointed to economic studies which show that the higher the lowest level of a society then the better the QoL of that society tends to be. He asked if it was CAUSED by that. I said, no, but they are correlated. His argument was that all taxation must show causation. I pointed out that with that ideology we wouldn't have the interstate system, modern infrastructure, space exploration, or any huge number of things. It got me thinking... how much in Economics shows direct causation versus the overwhelming number of things which show correlation. Eventually he ceded the point and we just agreed to disagree that increasing the welfare of the poor was to the benefit of the welfare of the entire populace.
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Oct 12, 2012 21:52
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Theli posted:"Muslim" and "treasonous behavior" comments aside, I have to say that I am curious as why this wasn't considered an act of domestic terrorism and why the soldiers would not receive a Purple Heart or pay for their families. I'm not having too much luck finding commentary on this issue that isn't from right-wing blogs. Well wasn't the guy who did the shooting IN the army? Maybe it's treated like a "workplace shooting"? I think a lot of their motivation for wanting it called "terrorism" is because Muslim bad. Though truthfully I have no idea what the criteria for a purple heart are.
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Oct 12, 2012 21:58
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Where are you finding these people? I don't even know how I would start with a person who denies the truth of the statement "the government should tax society for use to improve that society."
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Oct 12, 2012 22:00
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Theli posted:"Muslim" and "treasonous behavior" comments aside, I have to say that I am curious as why this wasn't considered an act of domestic terrorism and why the soldiers would not receive a Purple Heart or pay for their families. I'm not having too much luck finding commentary on this issue that isn't from right-wing blogs. First, I wouldn't take for granted the facts presented in a Facebook post. It may be true, but be sure to double-check. Second, "terrorism" implies certain political motivations behind the actions of the accused, and it also tends to imply some degree of collaboration with others that may be directly or indirectly involved. It is not enough to say that the action was scary, therefore it was terrorism. As far as I'm aware, the guy who shot up the movie theater a few months back had no apparent political agenda, so that probably shouldn't be labelled as terrorism. I haven't followed that case too closely, so I may be wrong, but I think you get the idea.
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Oct 12, 2012 22:45
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myron cope posted:Well wasn't the guy who did the shooting IN the army? Maybe it's treated like a "workplace shooting"? I think a lot of their motivation for wanting it called "terrorism" is because Muslim bad. Though truthfully I have no idea what the criteria for a purple heart are. I believe they are right in that those people don't qualify for the purple heart, but that determination is not made by the president. It's usually a judgement call made by the military officers. http://www.americanwarlibrary.com/theheart.htm (This site looks horrible but has this factoid) quote:Commanders (officer or enlisted) that are wounded or injured by subordinates or superiors (whether or not military weapons are used) in incidents commonly referred to as "fragging" are eligible for the PH. Looks to be that this is why they do not qualify. It is considered a criminal act, not an act of war. Anubis fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Oct 12, 2012 |
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Oct 12, 2012 22:46
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myron cope posted:I'm not a math guy, but if you divide by a decimal/fraction isn't the result multiplication? Literally all multiplication is division, and vice versa, by definition.
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Oct 12, 2012 23:32
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Boxman posted:Where are you finding these people? I don't even know how I would start with a person who denies the truth of the statement "the government should tax society for use to improve that society." I once got in a Facebook argument with some 50 year old Dadfriend who literally posted "Where's this social contract you speak of? I don't remember signing it." I responded that he needed to move to the desert and starve to death. Then I called his generation (baby booomers) the lazy parasites that they always accused my generation (gen X) of being; they get all the good social security, education, and pensions and leave the rest of us with reduced benefits while chanting how lazy we are. Then I told him that I hoped he got testicular cancer at 60, before Medicare coverage, so he could have the fun of being an old man dying of cancer in the private health industry (which I worked in at the time). I took it really badly and acted like a child, is what I'm saying. But still.  "Social contract?" STILL kind of pisses me off.
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Oct 12, 2012 23:48
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myron cope posted:Well wasn't the guy who did the shooting IN the army? Maybe it's treated like a "workplace shooting"? I think a lot of their motivation for wanting it called "terrorism" is because Muslim bad. Though truthfully I have no idea what the criteria for a purple heart are. Like said, friendly fire is not a purple heart, it's 'victim of assault/murder', there is a benefits program for those people and it has nothing to do with if it's given a magic 'terrorism' label or not. Also it's not terrorism because it's one man having a violent mental break, he had no goals other than harming people and did not act for any group or ideal.
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Oct 12, 2012 23:56
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Boxman posted:Where are you finding these people? I don't even know how I would start with a person who denies the truth of the statement "the government should tax society for use to improve that society." We've actually had a few such threads here in D&D; at a certain point the question boils down to "do individuals have responsibilities that stem from arrangements beyond their individual choices". Do we have duties that stem from something other than explicit contractual arrangements between individuals? It gets abstracted down to that level of discourse because the very first thing people bring up is that the Constitution says the government can levy taxes; the retort is then that this individual never signed the Constitution. The retort to that is that you implicitly agree to it by not revoking citizenship and leaving the country, to which many object is unfair because it ignores the coercive factors of economic and cultural pressure (at this point the irony makes my brain explode). Eventually it gets down to whether or not the person views taxation as a responsibility that an individual has that they didn't explicitly agree to but nonetheless are duty bound to follow. If two people are drowning, a stranger or your mother, who would you save? Most people would save their mother, because they acknowledge that they have a duty to their family before a stranger, but that's not an explicitly agreed upon duty. No one chooses the family they are born into. Hopefully I'm not strawmanning the arguments as they progress here too much in keeping things simple. This is usually 60 pages in and the whole thing has become such a convoluted mess that the process starts over because the point about taxation being a societal responsibility has been completely lost in the morass of explicit and implicit arrangements. 
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Oct 13, 2012 00:43
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I got some handwritten craziness in my mailbox. My camera batteries are dead but it simply sayscode:
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Oct 13, 2012 01:43
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Did they actually misspell Israel? E: Awww. Too bad. XyloJW fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Oct 13, 2012 |
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Oct 13, 2012 01:45
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XyloJW posted:Did they actually misspell Israel? No, that was my gently caress up.
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Oct 13, 2012 01:46
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Debt is bad. We need to cut taxes, spend less on infrastructure, and stop anything that benefits to the poor. Also let's send literally billions of dollars in aid to an industrialized first world state.
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Oct 13, 2012 03:33
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sicarius posted:I had a friend telling me last night that all taxation was theft, and was only justifiable if for the public good. Taxation for the public good is acceptable and taxation not in the public interest is basically theft, I don't know why you two are disagreeing here
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Oct 13, 2012 07:00
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ModernMajorGeneral posted:Taxation for the public good is acceptable and taxation not in the public interest is basically theft, I don't know why you two are disagreeing here Using tax dollars to build a road between my house and my job - acceptable Using tax dollars to build a road between my neighbour's house and their job - theft I mean, c'mon, there's nowhere I want to go down that road so why build it
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Oct 13, 2012 07:14
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I've been thinking about getting some Obama-Biden signs, even though I'm only begrudgingly voting for them, just to see if I get a repeat of what happened last election. In 2008, someone stole our Obama-Biden signs a few days after we put them up but then signs were mysteriously reappeared laying on our front lawn a day or two after the election. There were lots of McCain-Palin signs in our neighborhood in 2008 and there are quite a few Romney-Ryan signs now, so I'm wondering which of my neighbors is a douchebag thief and some new Obama-Biden signs would help. Anyone else with douchebag neighbors?
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Oct 14, 2012 07:28
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Bruce Leroy posted:I've been thinking about getting some Obama-Biden signs, even though I'm only begrudgingly voting for them, just to see if I get a repeat of what happened last election. In 2008, someone stole our Obama-Biden signs a few days after we put them up but then signs were mysteriously reappeared laying on our front lawn a day or two after the election. There were lots of McCain-Palin signs in our neighborhood in 2008 and there are quite a few Romney-Ryan signs now, so I'm wondering which of my neighbors is a douchebag thief and some new Obama-Biden signs would help. Republicans are douchebags. I know if I brought my Obama birth certificate mug to work it'd probably be stolen or abused, but if I did the same to the opposition they'd freak out.
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Oct 14, 2012 07:48
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Bruce Leroy posted:some new Obama-Biden signs would help. Cameras and criminal charges would help.
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Oct 14, 2012 08:00
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Pro-strat: get a wildlife camera with a motion trigger and near-infrared flash. Set that bad boy up unobtrusively observing your signs/mugs/bumper stickers/life sized Obama lawn jockey.
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Oct 14, 2012 09:51
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So my dad has been ranting and raving that Obama is a secret Muslim because he wears some sort of ring that has Arabic writing on it. Does anyone know where this "talking point" comes from? I figured this would be the best place to ask since it seems like the type of thing that would come out of a fwd fwd fwd email.
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Oct 14, 2012 11:59
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SpRahl posted:So my dad has been ranting and raving that Obama is a secret Muslim because he wears some sort of ring that has Arabic writing on it. Does anyone know where this "talking point" comes from? I figured this would be the best place to ask since it seems like the type of thing that would come out of a fwd fwd fwd email. Snopes is on it. Basically, people thing curves + jpg artifacts = arabic writing. Of course, the fact that he is wearing gold should be enough to put an end to it, but the people behind this sort of crap are nothing if not ignorant. Abu Dawud Book 027, Hadith Number 4046 posted:The Prophet of Allah (praise be unto him) took silk and held it in his right hand, and took gold and held it in his left hand and said: both of these are prohibited to the males of my community.
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Oct 14, 2012 12:06
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mandrake776 posted:This just popped up on my facebook feed: http://www.reagancoalition.com/articles/2012/20121010005-obama-ring.html This is the forward that has your dad thinking he's a secret muslim because of Arabic writing on his ring. As you can see, it requires looking at the ring from a specific angle to cause the design to look like a bunch of scribbles and when you compare those scribbles to the real Arabic script... it looks nothing like it at all. Obama: busted!
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Oct 14, 2012 14:03
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Bruce Leroy posted:I've been thinking about getting some Obama-Biden signs, even though I'm only begrudgingly voting for them, just to see if I get a repeat of what happened last election. In 2008, someone stole our Obama-Biden signs a few days after we put them up but then signs were mysteriously reappeared laying on our front lawn a day or two after the election. There were lots of McCain-Palin signs in our neighborhood in 2008 and there are quite a few Romney-Ryan signs now, so I'm wondering which of my neighbors is a douchebag thief and some new Obama-Biden signs would help. 5 years ago, I kicked over my friend's Ron Paul yard sign and told him the invisible hand of the free market must've done it. Immature, I know, but at the time, it seemed pretty funny.
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Oct 14, 2012 14:30
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The best thing about this is that truth number 2 is basically describing the concept of surplus value. The Marxist concept of surplus value.
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Oct 14, 2012 17:35
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I found this lovely bit of stupidity on my Facebook this morning. I somehow doubt that the person posting it would care about bird deaths if it wasn't for "drat libruls." And after some checking, it seems that it's 85 protected birds versus some 400,000 birds total. I'll have to do some more checking, though. King Dopplepopolos fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Oct 14, 2012 |
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Oct 14, 2012 18:32
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Bruce Leroy posted:I've been thinking about getting some Obama-Biden signs, even though I'm only begrudgingly voting for them, just to see if I get a repeat of what happened last election. In 2008, someone stole our Obama-Biden signs a few days after we put them up but then signs were mysteriously reappeared laying on our front lawn a day or two after the election. There were lots of McCain-Palin signs in our neighborhood in 2008 and there are quite a few Romney-Ryan signs now, so I'm wondering which of my neighbors is a douchebag thief and some new Obama-Biden signs would help. Do you live in Texas? Buy some big Obama signs, and then camp out and shoot anyone that tries to tamper with them. Not only with this deal with the immediate issue, it will force the other neighbors into brainlock when they have to pick between backing an Obama supporter or their precious gun rights. If you don't live in Texas, maybe see if you can rig a sign to some sort of paint bomb. Or some sort of ink that won't wash off immediately.
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Oct 14, 2012 19:11
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King Dopplepopolos posted:I found this lovely bit of stupidity on my Facebook this morning. 85? Eighty loving five? You have to be kidding me. Try and count all bird deaths due to just oil spills or water contamination.
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Oct 14, 2012 19:19
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King Dopplepopolos posted:I found this lovely bit of stupidity on my Facebook this morning. Now do people killed by every wind tower ever vs people killed in the Deepwater horizon explosion.
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Oct 14, 2012 19:35
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Of course, there's the fact that for every 1 bird a windmill kills, over 5,000 of them die from flying into buildings. And the number one killer of birds would be cats.
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Oct 14, 2012 19:37
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Point out to the person that tall buildings, moving vehicles, and power lines account for 3 billion bird deaths a year. See if they realize that there's a difference between that and BP negligently spilling oil all over a protected endangered species.
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Oct 14, 2012 19:40
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King Dopplepopolos posted:I found this lovely bit of stupidity on my Facebook this morning. For actual help: http://www.apimages.com/Search.aspx?st=k&remem=x&entity=&kw=dead+bird+and+oil&intv=None&shgroup=-10&sh=10 Here's 2,040 pictures of dead oiled birds just on AP.
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Oct 14, 2012 20:00
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Bruce Leroy posted:I've been thinking about getting some Obama-Biden signs, even though I'm only begrudgingly voting for them, just to see if I get a repeat of what happened last election. In 2008, someone stole our Obama-Biden signs a few days after we put them up but then signs were mysteriously reappeared laying on our front lawn a day or two after the election. There were lots of McCain-Palin signs in our neighborhood in 2008 and there are quite a few Romney-Ryan signs now, so I'm wondering which of my neighbors is a douchebag thief and some new Obama-Biden signs would help. Get some signs. Hook them up to a car battery and bury it underground.
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Oct 14, 2012 20:57
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Rigged Death Trap posted:85? I can't believe that even a global warming denialist could look at that and say, "yes, 85 birds killed by the oil industry in the entirety of its existence seems like a reasonable and realistic estimate." poo poo, tanker trucks on the highway probably kill that many in any given week
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Oct 14, 2012 20:58
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Oct 14, 2012 21:04
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Yeah, that seems to be the scope of the understanding. Nice.
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Oct 14, 2012 21:07
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