posted 12-04-2001 23:20         

quote:

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Originally posted by KetchupRAT:

And, yes, you could use thermal imaging and temperature sensors to prove that while we do not know what the sun is entirely made up of, we know that it is for a fact it is not made up of anything that could not withstand temperatures of a certain range. What this temperature range is, I am not certain of, however I will assume (however, I have no sources to prove) that oranges do not fall into this category.

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this is the reducio ad absurdum argument; you can't prove that it isn't X, but you can prove that it has properties that X does not, or that in addition to other properties of X, it has properties hithertofore not associated with X. You can't logically prove a negative because you're negating your own proposition.
read up on logical fallacies.

quote:

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[stupid mental masturbation about the oceans' non-bloodiness]

Care to get more off topic?

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no, but if you're going to pretend that you're using logic for your anti-abortion stance, at least use proper logic.

posted 12-05-2001 00:40            

quote:

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Originally posted by Der Senfmeister:
Well just let me say this. Since thinking is legal as of now, a person is free to do so but also at the same time a person is not punished for not doing so. But if thinking were illegal a person that thought would be punished. So doesn't that prove its own point. You have to look at things on both sides of the fence. No matter what, not thinking is legal , but thinking can be illegal. That just makes it obvious that thinking is wrong.

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How about you respond with something of relevance.

posted 12-05-2001 01:21            

The point is that laws don't necessarily reflect right/wrong.

(edatid fur spelang)

posted 12-05-2001 01:21            

quote:

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Originally posted by Dave:
read up on logical fallacies

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Theorum: Negative claims can be proven.
Proof:
1. Suppose the inverse, that (A) negative claims cannot be proven.
2. If this is true, then the statement, (B) "There is no negative statement that can be proven" must be proveable.
3. If statement B is proven, then supposition A is violated.

In other words, your claim (A negative argument cannot be proven) is itself a negative argument.

BTW, It's somewhat ironic that your claim, though unrelated to the specific category of logical fallacy given in your second link as Proving a Negative, actually falls into that specific category (a broad negative statement which includes the statement itself).

But just in case, here are a couple of proveable negative statements:
I'm not nine feet tall.
Keanu Reeves never portrayed Othello.
England is not Spain.

Unless, of course, when you said "negative arguments" you meant exclusively arguments of the form "xx does not exist", which is the form most of your examples took. However, it's important for you to realize that that sort of statement, though unprovable, is not unprovable because it is negative, it is unprovable because the requirement of its proof is omniscience.

posted 12-05-2001 01:59         

quote:

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Originally posted by fenomas:

Unless, of course, when you said "negative arguments" you meant exclusively arguments of the form "xx does not exist", which is the form most of your examples took. However, it's important for you to realize that that sort of statement, though unprovable, is not unprovable because it is negative, it is unprovable because the requirement of its proof is omniscience.

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That is exactly what I meant, I just couldn't put it quite that succintly. The particular negative statement that Krat was talking about was (I think, I'm fuxord on painkillers now, sorry, can't remember details) about the personhood (or individualness or something) of fetuses (fetii?) -- not exactly something you can prove or disprove via close analysis of facts (like whether or not you're 9 feet tall,) I was just trying to use something silly for my example.

[edited for spelling]

posted 12-05-2001 16:49            

quote:

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Originally posted by Dave:
That is exactly what I meant, I just couldn't put it quite that succintly. The particular negative statement that Krat was talking about was (I think, I'm fuxord on painkillers now, sorry, can't remember details) about the personhood (or individualness or something) of fetuses (fetii?)

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Alright, but that has nothing to do with logical fallacies, or in particular the one about proving negatives. So why keep telling people to read up on it?

posted 12-05-2001 21:04            

(This post brought to you by the American Citrus Council and Linus Torvalds.)

posted 12-07-2001 18:40            

quote:

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Originally posted by fenomas:
You might as well argue the provability of "Linux is like an orange."

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:: looks pissed ::

You trying to say it's not?

posted 12-08-2001 09:48            

quote:

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Originally posted by LonMabonJovi:
Ahhhhhhh yeah, dammit I saw blazing saddles and young frankenstein in the last week ... dammit to hell now all the other geeks are gonna laugh at me.

feck

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'Sokay, Lon... Young Frankenstein (That's Frahnken-steen)is one of my most favorite movies.
(Frau Bloocha--- NEIGH!) (Yeah, I spelled that wrong.)

posted 12-09-2001 17:54            

quote:

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Originally posted by Jimbo:
:: looks pissed ::
You trying to say it's not?

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posted 12-11-2001 01:09            

Anyhoo, I just dropped by to correctly define reductio ad absurdum, since Dave has fucked it up twice now (and both in messages that scoffed at others' deficient logic skills). It means "reduction to the absurd" and it's a valid way of contradicting something.

Here's a good example:
Fool: I'm going to write a new compression algorhythm that's even better than .zip, because it'll work on any file!
Sage: If it can shrink any file, that must include files that it's already compressed. Run iteratively, it would compress every file to zero bytes.
Fool: Why, that would be absurd!

I know most of you know what reductio ad absurdum means, I hope I didn't sound condescending. Except to Dave. And anyone else who seriously thinks that, 100 messages into a debate on abortion, they (or anyone else) is more interested in reading than in typing.

Oh yeah, and to whoever posted that sublime bit of trollery about "Having an abortion is sometimes illegal, but not having an abortion is always legal" oughta think about what kind of laws we'll be passing when the Earth's population hits 10B... or 15B... or 25B...

posted 12-11-2001 11:41            

Hey Weis, thanks for the game, but dood... nobody seems to admit it. All species increase exponentially to a point - then they level off. All species in the biological history of the united states have worked this way; fill up the world until you reach a level that supports the populations.

Humans have not reached that, and trust me, when we hit the ceiling we're not gonna need any god damn scientists telling us that we've hit the ceilings.

So just let shit hit the fan. If and when the Earth does hit max capacity, there will be bigger problems than abortion.

Humans are a lot more bound to the earth than people think - despite whatever you all think about the world's current "overpopulation" you're wrong. If people didn't have the means to recreate, they wouldn't. If animals [we're animals..] do not have enough food to provide energy for them, they do not procreate, and the death rate levels out with the birth rate. That's what happens with species (yes, humans have interefered with a lot of them).

posted 12-11-2001 15:50            

quote:

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Originally posted by KetchupRAT:
If animals [we're animals..] do not have enough food to provide energy for them, they do not procreate, and the death rate levels out with the birth rate. That's what happens with species (yes, humans have interefered with a lot of them).

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Well, if you leave out the inconvenient parts like the mass starvation, plagues due to the droves of dead bodies littering the landscape, massive deforestation and subsequent erosion, fouling of the water tables, etc then what you said about populations "leveling off" is essentially sorta correct, in an odd sort of way.

Animals don't just "quit reproducing" when they overpopulate an area. They keep overbreeding until there are WAY too many of them to support, then they strip the environment bare, then they start dying off in droves and there are MASSIVE secondary environmental effects... "secondary environmental effects" being a polite euphemism for "seriously, seriously fucked-up nasty shit."

With that said,

posted 12-12-2001 07:00            

quote:

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Originally posted by Jimbo:
Well, if you leave out the inconvenient parts like the mass starvation, plagues due to the droves of dead bodies littering the landscape, massive deforestation and subsequent erosion, fouling of the water tables, etc then what you said about populations "leveling off" is essentially sorta correct, in an odd sort of way.

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I never said how it would happen, I said that it would, and nobody here is qualified to say when it will happen (or if it already has started....). Nobody on earth is qualified to say that.. I think that we'll hit the next ice age (500 years away or something) before overpopulation is a real worry, and that'll take care of our population quite nicely.

quote:

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Animals don't just "quit reproducing" when they overpopulate an area. They keep overbreeding until there are WAY too many of them to support, then they strip the environment bare, then they start dying off in droves and there are MASSIVE secondary environmental effects... "secondary environmental effects" being a polite euphemism for "seriously, seriously fucked-up nasty shit."

With that said,

1. I don't want to get to that point, I'd prefer to AVOID getting there instead
2. Abortion isn't the answer to the problem - it's essentially an entirely separate problem of its own that ties in only tangentially in that every abortion DOES reduce the potential population by one
3. But contraceptives are sure as hell required as a part of any possible solution.

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Well, yes, animals do stop reproducing. That's one of the major problems of deforestation [I'm a republican against deforestation, live with it...], I dunno blah blah blah, you probably won't read this anyway, tigers wont fuck unless they don't have a goat to chew on or something. It's 10 AM and I got class.

OK It is no longer 10 AM so here is post: you are correct in saying that they don't quit reproducing; however, for a period of time the rate of death outnumbers the rate of birth... and then, the rate of birth evens out. In terms of biological correctness, yes, you are right, an abortion does equal one less number added to the population. But you also must realize that this number is in fact too small to do any real damage to the population, thus not being a reasonable alternative to overpopulation. I acknowledge that you acknowledge this fact. Or something.

Other animals have, how you said gone out in a seriously, seriously fucked up fashion... how are we any different? Why do we need some guy in a lab coat to tell us when this place is too full of humans? They don't know any more than we do - true, they might have insights which might be more accurate than any other predictions... but seriously... people said we couldn't make it to 6 billion. The earth would collapse in on itself, they said. It's not up to us - I don't want to sound like a fucking twisted environmentalist, but you know as well as I do... when the time comes, the earth will say "that's enough."

And I agree with you... contraception is a much better alternative to abortion, although contraception is not fool proof.

posted 12-12-2001 16:09            

quote:

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Originally posted by KetchupRAT:
Well, yes, animals do stop reproducing. That's one of the major problems of deforestation [I'm a republican against deforestation, live with it...], I dunno blah blah blah, you probably won't read this anyway, tigers wont fuck unless they don't have a goat to chew on or something. It's 10 AM and I got class.

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You apparently don't live near any regions with large deer or wolf populations. Either will cheerfully breed themselves into SEVERE ecological problems - generally solved by issuing temporary unlimited species-specific hunting permits, and occasionally even bounties - if given half a chance.

quote:

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Other animals have, how you said gone out in a seriously, seriously fucked up fashion... how are we any different? Why do we need some guy in a lab coat to tell us when this place is too full of humans?

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Because it's HIGHLY preferable to "finding out" by exterminating every non-directly-productive species, irreparably damaging and altering ecosystems, and generally fucking up the whole planet beyond repair?