Wednesday, January 9, 2019

Catspaw

















Most of you have probably moved on, as I have, from the vain attempts to introduce the Libertardians to the benefits of facts and reasoning in making more intelligent arguments regarding drugs and legalization. I haven't done double-blind testing, but I'm also 99% sure that Ayn Rand is the gateway drug to stupidity. (But I digress.)

But after six attempts with nominally the same commenter, and running the gamut of dealing with nearly every entry in The Dictionary Of Logical Fallacies, and pages of responses, it's time to point and laugh. Or at least get a post out of it.

Start here if you're interested or curious.
If not, move along; nothing much to see there.

But in passing, I also note to everyone, as to the earnest but hopelessly misguided respondent,
Suffering cats, man, Silicon Graybeard is arguing that even radiation can be beneficial (in small doses), and I have zip to say in rebuttal, because he's sciencing the shit out of that argument. 
 Win any argument with this one weird trick: use facts and evidence in support of the proposition!

Go over there and take notes. If only to stop shooting yourself in both feet.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

The google social credit scoring system serves the same function as having Schumer and Pelosi rebut Trump after he calls for border security. Invite the enemy to confess their crimes as clearly and plainly and widely and loudly as they can. The enemy, of course, is every prohibitionist of any flavor. Consider how this confession simplifies OODA, then judging what is the moral high ground, then ROE.

Want to start from facts? Report what the addiction statistics were before the Harrison Narcotics Act was passed. Don't guess; don't wish; don't speculate; report. Here is what I believe to be historical fact: http://web.archive.org/web/20040204234656/http://adrugwarcarol.com:80/index.html

Ayn Rand needed an editor.

Objects like drugs and guns are not evil; only humans can be evil. Evil is a desire of a human personality. Objects can be hazardous, but most things outside a nursery crib are hazardous.

Do women of your acquaintance have intact sexual organs? Because millions of people who are majorities of voters in geographic areas believe those organs should be rendered dysfunctional. How do you discriminate between policies which are good or evil? Majority-approved comes down on both sides, so that's a weak predictor. Germany was a first-world European nation, so "first world good" or "Western enlightenment" doesn't work either.

Like reading a newspaper: If you won't apply logic about drugs, why should we believe you applied logic to Ebola? This is your professional credibility we're talking about. The last few predictions about epidemics in North America didn't turn out to be true.

AB.Prosper said...

Radiation might be good for you, the so called hormesis theory is far from proven and on par than colloidal silver . We can't test it or falsify or repeat it.

The problem Aesop is the slope is always slippery as gun laws drug laws and a hundred other laws have shown

Its made much worse by the fact there is no victory condition for a War on Drugs and its costly and outright harmful to fight a war without a way to win and end it

Now I'm an authoritarian to more than a small degree and I'd prefer a nation without H, PCP or Crank but I think flaws in the people in charge simply make this a non starter

It can't work without a strong society to back it and the US has no such thing.

I'll make a caveat, if big if we actual wrest our system back from the people in charge and manage to close the borders and get things working? That is a different animal.

Also facts are for fellow Conservatives and maybe some Libertardians , maybe

Leftism is about feels, rhetoric over dialectic if you will

No sense wasting time reasoning with them

Anonymous said...

(sorry all, couldn't resist)

only outside genius?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/infant-deaths-from-crib-bumpers-on-the-rise/

They just keep spewing out tar babies.

MF

A got the Trivium, Quad and even the Sciencia. Thanks, your professional credibility is at least intact here in the dirt.

John Wilder said...

Libertarianism is a wonderful concept. A wonderful, impractical concept that completely ignores every hard fought lesson of human civilization. I almost went to a meeting once. The state committee met (I swear) in the SE corner booth of a McDonalds.

Master Baldrick Blaster said...

Libertarianism is like socialism - it sounds REALLY good on paper (libertarianism moreso). They both completely discount actual human nature. (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080423121430.htm)

Like I try to explain to every new little made communist, in every country that has communism, from the start, there's still been an established hierarchy, and it's pretty much feudalism on steroids. Not an impossible reach considering that Marx wrote his works at the height of the industrial revolution, and like a lot of people of his time, he was scared spitless of progress. Castro's grandson is a great example of this: (https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/cuba/article223928565.html)

Even our founders understood this - the original constitution had senators appointed, not voted for by the public.

Unless we change our actual brains physically, we will always live in a system where there is state control over something. That or we'll have mob rule, which never works out well (Feudalism on PCP).

You should have at lest stayed for some french fries at the meeting though.. say you at least had french fries ;)

Aesop said...

Sweet suffering Shiva, it's like playing poker with my sister's kids...

The google social credit scoring system serves the same function as having Schumer and Pelosi rebut Trump after he calls for border security.
I'm sure that made sense to you, somehow, somewhere.
Invite the enemy to confess their crimes as clearly and plainly and widely and loudly as they can. The enemy, of course, is every prohibitionist of any flavor. Consider how this confession simplifies OODA, then judging what is the moral high ground, then ROE.
Like most English language, those words all have individual meaning, but strung together like that they're just logorrhea.

Want to start from facts? Report what the addiction statistics were before the Harrison Narcotics Act was passed. Don't guess; don't wish; don't speculate; report. Here is what I believe to be historical fact: http://web.archive.org/web/20040204234656/http://adrugwarcarol.com:80/index.html
Your religious beliefs are noted, but irrelevant.
So are comic book "sources", and "I read this on the internet" claims, which you're sure must be true. if you want to start with facts, start with facts.
When you find a relevant actual valid statistic, feel free to publish the link.
In the mean time, pro-drug comic books are not authoritative.
If THC Comix wants to give DC and Marvel a run for their money, that's fine.
That does not, however, bootstrap them from low-level Wikipedia-lite to being the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Ayn Rand needed an editor.
Ayn Rand needed a pillow over her face, held there until she stopped kicking.
An editor doing that would have sufficed as well as anyone else, butcher, baker, or candlestick maker, doing the same thing.

Objects like drugs and guns are not evil; only humans can be evil.
Guilt by association; conflation of disparate items.
While you're up, make the case for biological weapons.

Evil is a desire of a human personality.
Evil is a desire of all human personality.
Objects can be hazardous, but most things outside a nursery crib are hazardous.
Only if by hazardous, you render the language worthless, by including such things as are instantly lethal. Hazards are found on golf courses. You are not penalized with death by landing your ball in a sand trap or pond. Words mean things, and their shades of meaning are there for a reason.
No points.

Do women of your acquaintance have intact sexual organs? Because millions of people who are majorities of voters in geographic areas believe those organs should be rendered dysfunctional. How do you discriminate between policies which are good or evil? Majority-approved comes down on both sides, so that's a weak predictor. Germany was a first-world European nation, so "first world good" or "Western enlightenment" doesn't work either.
Which is nice, but wholly irrelevant to the discussion already underway.
(cont.)

Aesop said...

(cont.)
Like reading a newspaper: If you won't apply logic about drugs,
Assumes facts not in evidence.
why should we believe you applied logic to Ebola?
I dunno, maybe by using your head for more than a hat rack, but I'm sometimes overly optimistic about some people's capacity for that. Like now.
This is your professional credibility we're talking about. The last few predictions about epidemics in North America didn't turn out to be true.
0% reading comprehension.
Contrary to the CDC and TPTB, I predicted Ebola would get here. It did.
I predicted further that we couldn't handle it. We didn't.
I predicted that it would spread here due to that exact incompetence. It did, at an exact r-naught of 2, within exactly 21 days.
We then decided the CDC was full of shit, shipped the first two entirely domestic Ebola infectees straight to BL-IV containment, and miraculously, none of the other 5000 contacts being traced after contact with Duncan (Patient Zero in N.A.) were subsequently infected. As far as we know. (Because some small number may actually have been infected without showing the disease, yet still carrying it, something we know happens statistically on an infinitesimal but non-zero scale. So what's 1%,or a fractional percent, of 5000?
None of them were ever tested subsequently, because that costs money.
You're betting the whole country on a roll of the dice. Brilliant!)

I predicted no epidemic for North America. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
You could look it up; everything I wrote in 2014 is still posted.
I gave you conditional if-then statements.
The "ifs" were short-circuited when, belatedly, we treated EVD as a problem, rather than no big deal.
So no "then" occured.
By sheer dumb luck.
You were exactly two patients away from the epidemic turning the US into West Africa that year. If, meet then.
(We have 11 BL-IV staffed beds; we had 10 EVD patients, at the peak of the epidemic.)

Sorry if that sort of thing baffles the shit out of you, but there it is.

Anonymous said...

Ebola related OT.

Scientists discovered a bat species with a virus similar to Ebola in Chinese bats.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190107131214.htm

My biggest fear is Ebola escapes Central Africa and finds a reservoir species in the US, Europe, or now, Asia.
Imagine endemic Ebola flaring up every two or three years in America?
Although endemic US Ebola would even put the fear of God in the most atheist progressive democrat, and hopefully everyone will support finding and producing enough vaccine to stop it.

RF

Anonymous said...

With radioactive hormesis, I think we need to separate external radiation exposure from internal uptake and internal exposure.

IMO External exposure is less dangerous, but internal exposure is very dangerous because it is continuous and localized. One example would be how dangerous plutonium is. A tiny speck in the lung, and you die, even though it is primarily an alpha emitter. (Alpha is very short range, and can be stopped by a single sheet of paper.) External exposure is usually broad based exposure, so the whole body is fighting back against the radiation.

My personal opinion.

RF

Aesop said...

Opinions are nice.
Now go read SiG's article.
Count the number of times in it he says "Eat plutonium. It's good for you."

CW Buff said...

"Eat plutonium. It's good for you." That may be sound advice for the progressive/SJW crowd...

CW Buff out...

Anonymous said...

"Imagine endemic Ebola flaring up every two or three years in America? "

We don't anoint ourselves with the soiled infectious wash water after bathing the body of someone who just shit and bled themselves to death.... so we've got that working against the spread.

We don't generally handle our own dead at all for that matter, and while the pro's certainly make mistakes, if they know going it that it's an ebola death, they'll take some pretty extreme precautions vs. previously mentioned "traditional burial practices."

Flu and bird related illnesses have done for many more people than ebola, but we're used to that, so it's ok I guess... and they do flare up in the USA every couple of years.

Given the numbers on medical malpractice deaths, I'd bet that more people die of complications from unneeded plastic surgery than Ebola every year. I get that there is a difference, but in terms of raw numbers...

Aesop's coverage of Ebola the last time, and how close we came, literally changed aspects of my life and what I'm doing to prep. It was only a 30 minute plane ride, or 6 hours by car from me, and guys were spraying the effluvia around in the air with a freaking pressure washer.

Still, what does it hurt to be able to isolate yourself for 45 days? Nothing.

What does it hurt to take the risks seriously? Much less than not doing so.

nick

Jonathan H said...

As far as drugs go, one reason I haven't commented on your articles is that as far as I'm concerned, there is no good data to say whether the War on Drugs OR Legalization is a good idea or a bad idea. One thing I would support is changing federal law so that more research can be conducted to better quantify the effect of drugs and their constituent compounds on the human body. For example, what does Marijuana do to the body? Do any of its touted effects actually exist? Which of the many compounds in are toxic or beneficial?

Conservative Wolf said...

Aesop,

Your response to the first poster is good. People need to read your posts more carefully.

I like what you write.

Dad29 said...

And then there's the guy who drank DDT

Not afraid to put his mouth where his moxie was, Edwards took to swallowing a tablespoon of DDT on stage before every lecture on the subject. In September 1971, Esquire magazine pictured Edwards doing just that. The accompanying text explained that Edwards had “eaten 200 times the normal human intake of DDT.”

He served in WWII....but that DDT finally caught up with him; he died of a heart attack while climbing mountains at 84 years of age.

Yes to irradiation!! Yes to DDT!!! NO TO DOPE!!!!!