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Showing content with the highest reputation on 07/22/13 in Posts

  1. Yes I would think Trayvon would probably not match an 11 year old girl. Please feel free to point out where I said otherwise so that we can make all the necessary corrections. In any event, either there is basis in reality for the proposition "there are instances of rapists following, stalking, watching their victims" or there isn't. It seems to me there is basis for it, and I would have thought that to be a common item of knowledge among most people. How it follows from that that Trayvon must be linked to the case of an 11 year old girl escapes me. You ask me what I think Trayvon might have been thinking. And I don't know, we only have Jeantel's cellphone conversation to indicate what he might have been thinking, wherein she replies (basically) that, hey, maybe it's some kind of rapist, you should be careful, which I think is a reasonable reaction. To wit, she also said that he didn't want a "creepy ass cracker" going to his father or girlfriend's house, where his little brother was. Other than that, I find your statement in #129 to be reasonable. If you want to summarize, here's what all I actually said instead of what you want to pretend/imagine/assume I said: 1. there are instances of rapists following, stalking, watching their victims, which is common knowledge to most people. (#136. #144) 2. if your friend calls you and tells you someone is following and watching you, a reasonable response might be, hey, maybe it's some kind of rapist, you should probably be careful, the basis of that being (1) (#127) 3. If we believe Jeantel's account of the cellphone conversation with Trayvon, it's reasonable to assume he was creeped out at being followed and thus confronted Zimmerman rather than allowing him to follow him to his father's home Here's a list of things I didn't say, just in case people were wondering: 1. Trayvon is the same as an 11 year old girl 2. Trayvon has anything to do with an 11 year old girl 3. Trayvon had a reason to believe he was going to be raped 4. Trayvon was justified in smashing Zimmerman's skull on the pavement 5. Zimmerman is a rapist 6. Zimmerman can likely rape Trayvon 7. Zimmerman was stalking Trayvon 8. Zimmerman was trying to rape Trayvon Did I miss anything? It seems to me that, contra the ethics of discourse, people want to treat discussion as if it were some kind of sport wherein one scores points, rather than a search for the truth. I think that reduces discussion to sophistry and argument from intimidation, which is all we see mainly out of some people. Representing what someone says accurately is an absolute necessity for responding to what someone actually said, and responding to only what someone actually says instead of pretending they said something else and responding to that is the only helpful way to proceed for participants seeking the truth, not to mention that such tactics are deductively invalid.
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  2. I have a thought about what you bring up about principles. You credit principles with unit-economy ("crow") and with being able to anticipate the long-range effects, though the latter is conditioned by your concern for unit-economy again. I would argue that their role in letting us know in advance what the character of possible effects would be is the primary use and value of principles. Aware of the fact that there are side-effects and future effects of our actions would leave us in a quandry if we had no guidelines to follow. How can we possibly know all of what will happen and/or be prevented from happening due to our choice? Scientific principles generalize our experience with some particulars of a sort to new particulars of that sort. All of our productive efforts depend on this sort of knowledge. Moral principles especially are immensely valuable (of course.) Moral principles recognize human priorities, so they can assure us we won't "shoot yourself in the foot," while being otherwise efficacious in our efforts. Mindy
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  3. Anything automated is, of course, a difficulty to change. Assuming "you" have an evasion as part of your make-up, you have gone to a lot of trouble, mostly below your own introspective awareness, to strengthen the defenses around that evasion. However, evasions do show up in one's feelings. They are an odd, nonsensical, exagerrated, etc. emotion or "sense of things," that occur whenever your defenses go into effect. They are an emotional or attitudinal bump in the road, and you can notice them if you spend some time trying. Once you begin to detect these, you must practice "tough-love" on yourself, looking for the meaning of the emotion, then, the source of that irrational meaning. It takes great courage to ferret out a mistake in your thinking about yourself, life, the world, people, etc. Anything automatic will require, I firmly believe, bringing the roots into the light. Convincing oneself of what is true and appropriate, in contrast to the "evasion" will not do the trick. You have to understand it in all its specific meaning to you, put it into the situation in which it developed, and thus learn specifically, as concretely as possible, that it is all an error. I realize I am talking about a somewhat different scenario than you described. I do so because I believe it is this sort of experience that affects one's psycho-epistemology. You know people who say, "Well, I'm certainly not going to argue the point," in a huffy voice, as if it were poor manners to discuss serious ideas. That attitude toward such discussions is defensive. That person (sounds like a woman to me) realizes, at some level, that she cannot defend her beliefs. She disdains arguments of any sort, they make her nervous and insecure, but not just because she's not good at arguing, but because such discussions would reveal her guilty secrets, her dogmatic beliefs, her pretenses, etc. The only alternative type of psycho-epistemological variable I know of is when one accepts a premise that makes "you" a rationalist, intrinsicist, Platonist, nominalist, etc. These determine a style of thought that has, of course, serious limitations. It should be very useful to study each of these and related theories and become well-versed in recognizing errors of each sort. If you understand them, and recognize their manifestations, you should have no problem avoiding them in your own thinking. I was a little reluctant to respond to this thread, as it was "cold." I'm glad it proved still of interest. Mindy
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