Saw it coming a mile off.

That was it? Did the image feed on this report get mixed up with another one? This is "very sexual undertones"? It's just a coupling freaking mannakins posed with gowns! Oooh, so they prop one knee up and it's BARE MANNAKIN LEGS; how racy!

post hoc ergo propter hoc

>> ^gwiz665:
"Truth is never black and white."
Truth is always black and white. Either something is true or not.


Well then there are very few things in reality that can be defined as something.

Invariably, there always ends up being comments saying that "it was both their faults" or "they were both stupid". Are we forgetting about the concept of responsibility here? They were both "stupid", sure. She was stupid in that she could have prevented it. He was stupid in that he caused it.

She may have not gotten out of the way, but he was the one who pulled the trigger. That does not bestow equal resonsibility or blame.

>> ^oscarillo:
they are saying the same thing "Spreed the word because this is the truth", and one of the phrases that I hate the most "If you dont belive as I" and they just change the end from "youre going to hell" to "youre stupid"
I think we need to find the right balance because for either fanatics "you're goint to hell" or "you're stupid"


Saying the same thing doesn't mean they have similar merit. The underlying arguments are completely different.

Behind the atheist argument is empiricism - your beliefs are derived from evidence, gathered through your senses (science is a refinement of this; a methodology to minimise error, uncertainty, cognitive biases, etc).

Behind the typical religous argument is innate belief. Belief that comes from what you internally decided, rather than what the world shows to your senses. Otherwise known as faith: The bible is true and god does exist. It doesn't matter how much reality shows to be the contrary, faith means you still go on believing that there is such a god in this reality anyway. The quickest to explain of one of the severe problems with this is the way in which faith contradicts itself. By faith's defintition, there is no way of telling which of two faiths is right. And there are an infinite number of possible faiths.

It's the merit of reason/empiricism vs faith you should be paying attention to, not the superficial similarities between two sentences. Of course, if that one sentence is all they say, then yes, there is no argument there at all.

This visual phenomenon is not that a lot of changes at once will mask another change. On the contrary, our brains will efficiently pick many visual changes up.

What the study showed was that the visual mechanism which allows us to do easily detect those changes can be "broken" by a disruption in the image. If you put two images back-to-back we easily detect the differences. Put just a short flash of grey between the two images and we have huge difficulty in finding the changes (any disruption that prevents the images being back-to-back work, like looking away for a moment). The mechanism that usually makes it so easy for us doesn't work and so we have to fall back on searching every object in the image manually.

So the analogy doesn't really hold up. He's saying a lot of changes mask another change. What the visual phenomenon is saying is that we can detect (visual) changes easily but by a special mechanism - a mechanism that completely breaks with a certain type of disruption.

>> ^MarineGunrock:
Clearly the handgun ban in England is effective.


Because if it's not effective in one individual case then it has had zero effect overall.

To propose going to the "bullet box" after the ballet box fails is to say if you don't get your way through democracy, then get your way through violence instead.

That is not accepting democracy. Now, I wonder what she would say if you asked her if she accepted democracy...

>> ^Dranzerk:
So I use reason and common sense. If that makes a person a internet expert then im a freakin god. The situation you posed still comes down to the same simple fact. They knew a hurricane was coming, they stayed.


And people regularly weather hurricanes. Whether it's a hurricane or typhoon, there are populations who know how to deal with it, except this time was different.

If anything it was an engineering disaster because floodwalls and levees broke below design specifications.

>> ^burdturgler:
And people are telling me I'm wrong for not wanting kids exposed to sex for money on the street .. yeah .. I'm just done.

And there's the problem. You start with a premise and assume it to be true. People question it, try to debate the concept, but you dismiss it. It is the definition of self-righteous. People are criticising your position of making such a moral assumption. There is a discussion to be had but you arrived with your conclusion already set.

So, someone looking in on your words sees the same self-righteousness as a number of other groups you are offended by being compared to. Forget your "self-evident" truths for a moment and be open to discussion of ideas.


I have no friends here. Oh well.


Arguing is not a personal attack. In fact, most people here have gone out of their way to word things very carefully, even when you began insulting. You are being offended here when the only thing going on is a debate.

>> ^Enzoblue:
>> ^Bidouleroux:
This is pretty much exactly like religion vs. atheism, with religion being of course smoking.

Anti-smoking is by far the more religious. Smoking is blamed for a host of sundry afflictions with scientific support that no one has the courage to challenge. People want it to be evil and that's what they get. No serious scientist would do any unbiased research, because if he found anything remotely pro-smoking the political fallout would ruin his career overnight.
Our surgeon general states that 70% of lung cancer victims got it from smoking, but lung cancer continues to rise with nary a blip - even though smokers per capita have fallen under 25% and have been there for a decade. If you want me to support this claim with data, sorry I can't. Neither the CDC or the ALA, or any other site I could find, will release any data cross referencing lung cancer victims and smokers. You can easily find how much carcinogens a black single mother of 2 will inhale in a 12x12 room with one smoker, but a table lookup of smokers v lung cancer victims will get you a 404 error. Try it.
That's religion. People needing an evil, ignoring the facts, suppressing the research of facts, all holding hands and attacking with fervor.
P.S.
My lungs get a clean bill of health every year, even though I've been smoking for over 20 years, simply because I've never tell the doctors I smoke. Ask your smoking friends to try that, it'll give them a chuckle.


You obviously didn't look very hard for data then. With almost zero effort I just came accross this in a high-profile peer-reviewed medical journal. There are hundreds of studies comparing mortality rates between smokers and non-smokers with data going back 100 years. I just want to point out the data in that study was from 1951-2001. In "survival rates from age 35" the difference in survival rates between smokers and non-smokers increases to about 20% difference by age 70. That is, you are looking at about 20% of all non-smokers being dead and 40% of all smokers dead. You can always look at the graphs for much more information than I can type here, but it's all very damning.

"But cancer continues to rise!" I hear in a myriad of different "X does or doesn't cause cancer" topics. What you mean to say is cancer diagnoses have continued to rise. 50 years ago we knew a fraction of what we know now about cancer. This is just one example of why statistics is a profession. There's so much to it I can't begin to describe it here.

Appeal to nature

Nature is just a bunch of chemicals. Everything is chemicals.

Organic on principle is not the way to go. You choose the best physical product, and organic methods are limiting your options of how to produce said product based on the afforementioned appeal to nature, rather than what is actually shown to be harmful through physical evidence.

Autism has not become ten times more common in the last decade as the reporter states. We have diagnosed it ten times more - that is, we now regard things as autism that we didn't previously. As he actually states, autism is now very complex and broadly defined.

Same thing with the occurance of cancer increasing in all the statistics. We have just found more cancer.

>> ^Shepppard:

Dude, give it up. you can't prove the cat died of hypothermia, but you also can't prove it didn't, either.


The "you can't disprove it" argument? Give me a break.


The only thing the guy has to go on is that it was sent to a vet that he doesn't know, who said the most likely cause of death was uterine toxity. Now, many things could've happened there.
We don't know what made the kittens die, maybe it was complications, maybe it had something to do with why the cat froze to death, too.


No, we go with whatever explanation is more likely based on the evidence and keep it in context of the situation. And you are weighting the autopsy far, far down in reliability while simultaneously taking the "clean bill of health" the morning before as completely accurate. It's the pet equivalent of a doctor's checkup - it's not going to predict a stroke the next day or a thousand other serious conditions.


The ONLY thing's we know about this video, guy sends a healthy pregnant kitty to someone else on a plane. Cat gets put on plane. Cat is dead and frozen (Twice) upon arrival. There's no middle ground there, we have no information on what happened while it was in the cargo hold of the plane, so for all we know, the landing gear didn't fully close and caused a small draft, at that altitude, the temperature would already be incredibly low, not to mention that it's winter.

We don't need that information, but it would be helpful. Also, have you noticed that most of your argument is actually speculation? What we know is:

1. Pregnant cat gets a checkup and deemed healthy
2. Dies during air travel
3. Described as frozen on arrival
4. Vetinarian's autopsy says the cat died of uterine toxicity from dead kittens.

What's more likely, the checkup couldn't catch that sort of death impending and "frozen" was rigor mortis plus a cooled body, OR, there was some sort of major mechanical failure in the aircraft AND the autopsy was wildy innacurate. Given the available information, it's much more likely to be uterine toxicity.



Now, if it was ME in this situation, and I not only sold a cat to someone for $2500, but one that I'd loved and had for years, I'd probably be pretty pissed off too. And being as the cat was healthy THAT MORNING, the only logical explanation is that something happened to it, more then likely while it was in the planes care. And if they can't prove misconduct on the airlines part, I believe they forfeit any rights to sue for the loss of not only his money, but his pet.


And you complained at me for attempting to "prove" it one way or another? I refuse to ever make a claim of absolute certainty and you just said that literally the only logical explanation was something happened to it.


So, yeah. I'd want my own autopsy on it, too.

The airline offered the cat so he could get his own autopsy but he declined.