Posts by BenWilson
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I've often thought I've become a political junkie who should cut back, or even go cold turkey. But just as recovering alcoholics find it really hard around Christmas, I've fallen off the wagon approaching the election, when Rawshark hit me with the good shit. I even managed to resist Hager, and was feeling so proud that I actually wrote myself a little certificate saying "28 days AFK", and showed it to friends.
Now I feel terrible, that burned out husky feeling that you just blew a little bit more of your life away for nothing, that hungover feeling of the utter, utter worthlessness of it all. This will be my last, last post.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to UglyTruth,
So in what way do you think that this response of mine does not address the meaning of Steve Park’s post?
Yes, that is what I think. Since Steve Park's post covers your entire comeback before it even happened. 10 hours before it happened. You cherry picked a piece of what he said, and didn't respond to the whole answer. He showed that your argument only works to say you're agnostic, queried whether you are, and covered the other possibly by referring to Moz's prior post.
To Moz' post you just said:
Understanding the connection between theism and English democracy involves going back the the advent of kings in the Judaic tradition. If it hadn’t been a popular idea at the time then kingship would never have been implemented.
Which is simply a restatement of your point. It is not a reason, it is not an argument, it is just coming back to your assertion about our beliefs now being somehow dependent upon their ancient origins. Moz was challenging the rationality of basing your beliefs on cherry picked witnesses from the ancient world. You had no answer for his very, very substantive comeback, that a small bunch of witnesses claiming to have seen evidence of the Christian God are very much counterbalanced by the far, far greater number that have claimed to see all kinds of deities even if you think that believing witnesses who claim to see miracles is a good idea. It shows that even on its own standards your position is entirely illogical, and that's just the start of the problems.
And Moz was not the first one to raise this. It was one of the first things I raised with my challenge to you that just because your God can't be logically disproven, and probably can't even be empirically disproven (since the free-will arguments weaken the meaning of the God down so much as to be as much of a ghost as your arguments are), doesn't give us any sound reason to believe that he does exist. Bare possibility is not a particularly high standard for belief in something - it applies to pretty much anything at all which is not logically self contradictory. Every fiction you care to mention is possible. Every crazed witnesses mad idea could be true. Every hallucination, every dream, every nasty thought.
On this point you have had no answer whatsoever.
And even then, it's all a non-sequitur, since what you were actually trying to do was link it to our laws. In that, Steve already gave you the obvious first comeback, poignantly raised 400 years before Christ, that the connection between morality and Gods is very weak. This was pointed out by the Platonic Socrates, who was, incidentally, basically a monotheist. Even if God does exist, your first point, which kickstarted this debate, is broken. God likes moral things, he doesn't make them moral. Their morality is the cause of God's love for them, not the other way around. Our laws are moral entirely independently of God's love for them, even if there is a God and he does love what is moral.
In other words, no, you did not engage. You just handed out another pamphlet.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
right now we’ve decided that it’s people who have the right to live here without any expiry date, and who have been here some time in the last 3 years. I’m arguing that we’ve got that line wrong.
I get that, and I'm arguing that too. But possibly in the opposite direction to you. My argument is that one's right to vote is not automatically extinguished by a lengthy physical absence. Otherwise people who fought for NZ during the entirety of WW2 should be considered aliens by the time they'd fought their way back to El Alamein. Your connection to your home is not just a function of your presence in it.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to UglyTruth,
All of it, barring the insults.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to UglyTruth,
I don't expect you to even be touched at all. You're an intellectual ghost, blows pass right through you, and your blows pass through others. You don't engage in a meaningful way with any criticism, you just reiterate your points. And your points are all the words of dead people.
The ghost of Blackstone past haunts the invisible web, the substrate of our thought! All shiver! Brrrr! Then as you were, because it signifies nothing, has no practical outcome at all. You're not saying anything that would actually in any way affect the way anyone would come to a decision about something in the law, except maybe you. It's all mystical connections, sound and fury.
It stops at monotheism for some unknown reason, possibly because the more you delve into antiquity the more ridiculous it gets, to the point that even you can see it. The roots of our legal system pass right through the polytheistic Romans into a world beyond, when worshipping animals and fertility symbols was normal. Possibly even further, before we could even meaningfully talk to the concerns of more primitive animal ancestors. Maybe we should consider just what the first invertebrates thought about law. They are, after all, subject to the Law of Nature. Must-Eat-Squid! Mmmmm! Squid!! But why stop there! Think on the quark soup, from thence came all.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Stephen R,
Yes, that prisoners can't vote seems incredibly unfair to me. They can't leave the country even if they wanted to. Their right to a say in its government would seem to be one of the strongest of all.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
I do mean to be dismissive of it giving people the right to vote. If that’s the extent of the time someone’s spent here in the last 3 years, they don’t live here, so why should they be allowed to vote here? It’s not like the outcome of the election affects their day to day life.
No, but it might affect their future, and their families and people they care about - all the reasons that people are often giving as why I should vote despite it not being like my vote will affect my day to day life. They might still care quite deeply about their home country, and intend to return one day. This is really, really common for NZers. Furthermore, you can't claim that the government doesn't affect the foreign dwellers at all. They might still have a student loan that the government could do something fucked with. Or the government could pass laws, as they have in the US, that demand that they file a tax return to NZ, or pay a new tax. Their passport could be revoked. They could be called up for conscription, or have their assets confiscated. There's many ways in which the NZ government could fuck with them and theirs so I think their right to vote is not something to take away lightly.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to WH,
I think that your emphasis on the link between religious belief and the legal system is a kind of genetic fallacy
I think his/her whole line of reasoning is a more general kind of fallacy, the non sequitur. There’s no need to put a deeper or more specific name on reasoning that is so broken, disconnected and unengaged.
I think I fell into a fallacy earlier. UT did not walk into this dojo and claim his Fu is strong so that he could then do a Bruce Lee and beat up everyone. It wasn’t even really of interest to him/her whether the first white belt beat them half to death in seconds. The main purpose of entering the Dojo was to deliver pamphlets, and every beating endured only increases the number of pamplets delivered, and perhaps inspires people who are inclined to believe people they feel sorry for (prime targets for Christians), to pick up one of those pamphlets. They might even think “Wow, how do they take such a beating? There must be something in what they say!!”.
The fallacy I fell into is “don’t compare a forum to a dojo, because some people are completely immune to all intellectual influence, and may not even be there for the martial arts”. Also known as the fallacy of feeding the troll.
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to Dismal Soyanz,
There are a lot of people out there who can see no further than that, who cannot see the housing market is already too bubbly, or who cannot mentally treat their house as if it were a place to live rather than an asset to be valued in dollar terms only.
Well, and there's a lot of people who can't see that their house won't be subject to CGT. They think it's something they have to pay. It's not. So to that end I don't think it's likely to really make much of a dent in prices.
What it does do is make something fair which currently isn't, that people making capital gains don't pay tax on them. Considering that capital gains can be massive sources of growth in one's own wealth, and that this is very much disproportionately so the richer you get, it's unfair as hell that it's not even taxed at all, when the paper boy has to pay tax on his puny wages.
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Hard News: But seriously, drug policy, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Most of the non-gourmet supermarket dried varieties of those four are imported.
Yeah I guess in something low volume and light, where most of the cost wasn't in the growing but in the harvesting, processing, packaging and shipping, storing and selling, it would hardly matter where it hailed from. Probably people would want their cannabis in the most convenient form eventually - either rolled up like cigarettes, or in bags like loose tobacco, or in powder or liquid form if they're taking it in a more modern way like a vaporizer, or in a pill. I'd think a pill the safest and most convenient way if pain relief is the whole point, with maybe a backup inhaler for sudden bouts of pain. If it's to get high, a disposable inhaler is probably still the easiest.
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