Mitt Romney tells West Philly schools that small class sizes are a teachers' union "ploy" and don't improve education. What does? "Having families where there's a mom and a dad together."

jleonardbc · 2012-05-26T17:04:47.774548+00:00

Almost as ridiculous as stating an absolute position in an argument without putting any limits on what context the position is or isn't valid.

jleonardbc · 2012-05-26T17:01:19.870246+00:00

He specifically mentioned "a man and a woman" when he didn't need to. He's obviously playing to the bigot brigade.

coooolbeans · 3 days

At the point where you were attempting suicide, if someone had asked you why you weren't pursuing an alternative solution, would you have been able to rationally respond?

ReligiousFreedomDude · 6 days

Because, unlike Greece, the US can always print enough money to meet all debt obligations. The money might not be worth much by then, but it will technically prevent any defaults from occurring.

Hi5sAllAround · 9 days

A good hoaxer is probably also going to be at least somewhat of an expert in the arena that they are trying to perpetrate the hoax. They will know exactly which sources that the "experts" think are difficult to fake, and will try and figure out ways to fake it.

In many ways, the experts can be more vulnerable to misinformation since they will have confidence in their sources (since they have used them so many times before without problems), and will not think that they have to verify that those sources have not been compromised.

If your "crowd" is big enough, you will have both people who are relatively expert in the subject doing THEIR fact-checking, and you will also have additional non-traditional people doing checking from different viewpoints (which might simply be tracking down who has been introducing the information & whether they seem trustworthy). In almost all reasonably-sized-crowd cases, the fact-checking of the crowd will be superior to that of any individual experts.

The value of the crowd is only in how many people it produces who do deep digging.

It's statistical in nature - the larger the crowd, the more likely there are people who can and will do deep digging. Once they have reported their results to the crowd, it is much easier for the rest of the crowd to verify & cross-reference those results with others (both shallow and deep diggers, and those digging from different viewpoints). The verification will reveal whether the "deep diggers" actually knew what they were talking about.

In almost all cases, the final results will be superior to fact-checking done by a small number of "experts".

Hi5sAllAround · 9 days

To me, it seems like crowd-sources fact checking would be more likely to catch a well-constructed hoax than an authoritative fact-checker. A good hoaxer is going to know exactly what a authority is going to look for, and will make sure that the authority finds exactly what they need to see to believe the hoax. The hoaxer is going to have a much more difficult time anticipating every avenue of investigation that a crowd is going to follow.

Tiger337 · 10 days

The guy will have nothing to lose if he's re-elected in the sense that he's NEVER gonna run for office again, and will be able to push whatever political agenda he wants.

Unfortunately, that doesn't hold true for the Congresscritters that he will have to work with.

EthicalReasoning · 10 days

What a perfectly awful way to ruin a country.

The GOP is perfectly fine with this, as long as it ends up with Obama out of the White House.

ummm_what · 10 days

I don't.

Well, okay, I did - but I've forgotten the password.

cooltom2006 · 10 days

It's done nothing, but hurt our image.

No it hasn't.

Fundies regard tolerance and open-mindedness as weaknesses that they can exploit in their opponents.

When you're in an argument, you do NOT win the argument solely by staying on the defensive. You've got to both attack AND defend at the same time.

And you don't do it half-assed by hoping that if you're such a nice person, your opponents will be so impressed by your niceness that they won't eat you alive.

Since this subreddit has pretty much ended up being a forum where frustrated atheists can vent to each other, it's not really a good example of how one would go about convincing a larger population of the tenets of atheism - but anyone who doesn't think militant atheism hasn't helped the overall cause is either fooling themselves or trying to fool others.

cooltom2006 · 10 days

No, militant atheism was a part of it. When fundies aren't allowed to spout their irrationality without being challenged with aggressive and logical arguments, then it becomes more difficult for their irrationality to diffuse through the general population & to be considered an acceptable way to "think".

Now, I will agree that for a subset of the population, such attacks make them harden their positions and less likely to budge on anything. For such people, "soft" forms of persuasion would definitely be more effective. But I strongly disagree with the contention that the more militant form of atheism hasn't proven to be very helpful at improving the general public attitude to secularism.

cooltom2006 · 12 days

Because being a douchebag about it has given atheism far better results in terms of public acceptance than trying to be nice. Fundies treat politeness and openmindeness as weakness. It's only because there were a few militant high-profile atheists that have been repeatedly making fundies look like idiots that atheism has made any progress at all at being publicly acceptable.

divester · 15 days

You have to qualify the "sociopathy". It seems like a lot of sociopathic behavior could also be called "tribal", where people have little or no empathy for people considered to be outside of their "tribe", but they would still have empathy for members of their own tribe. A full sociopath won't have empathy for anyone except themselves.

workroom · 15 days

Electric guitar?

Dizzy_Slip · 15 days

In case you're not joking, I suggest looking up the percentage of who are the largest purchasers of U.S. Bonds. Hint: it's not the Chinese, not even by a longshot.

rev_bird · 15 days

Probably good for the woman's post-pregnancy weight loss as well - have to transfer lots of calories to feed a growing kid.

rev_bird · 15 days

Healthiest thing you can ever give a child.

Assuming you haven't accumulated too many fire retardants, pesticides, heavy-metals & other fat-soluble pollutants...

Dizzy_Slip · 16 days

If taxes are regarded as "stealing" from taxpayers, then bonds are simply stealing from future taxpayers.

mike8787 · 16 days

and conservative vote he just lost

I sincerely doubt that there were many of these left - the be-against-Obama-uber-alles ideology has been like cancer in the GOP ever since Obama got elected.

Hansaman · 16 days

With a skilled torturer, you could be easily made to "confess" that you helped with 9/11. That's one of the reasons why testimony derived via torture is not considered to be useful evidence in a court of law.

The_Breakfast_Don · 17 days

Argument from authority is a logical fallacy only when the authority is not an expert in the subject.

To be fair, this can be extended to the scenario where the subject matter is so complex that no one could be considered an expert in the subject, even if they claim to be so (and economics would probably be right up there as one of those subjects), but if the so-called expert has any sort of predictive credibility whatsoever, then you'll have to prove that your expert knowledge is more credible than theirs before your arguments will be taken seriously.

nappyheadedho · 19 days

Heaven for climate, Hell for company.

trot-trot · 19 days

"Investment" into a system where demand is not present, can more properly be called a stimulus, and its effectiveness will be determined more by how widespread its networked effect is.

Giving "stimulus" to people who already have lots of money and who don't have much of a reason to spend more of it, doesn't seem like a productive way of allocating stimulus.

NicknameAvailable · 19 days

you'd be surprised how far even mediocre levels of strategy and organization can go.

Especially when backed up by gobs of money...

trot-trot · 20 days

that makes it easier for that company to raise capital through both debt and equity.

Which is pretty irrelevant for the economy if the company doesn't have anything to spend that extra capital on (due to low economic demand for their product or service) except for executive compensation and/or playing security games in the financial markets.

mOdQuArK

TROPHY CASE

mOdQuArK

TROPHY CASE

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