It's a better way than basing your opinions on gut feeling, on political ideology or religious beliefs, or on what you want to be true.
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Fucking insane people
- Thread starter RODAN
- Start date
Which is still worse than not forming any opinion at all, and admitting that you don't know enough to make an informed decision.
It's actually exactly the same thing as basing your opinions on gut feeling, political ideology or religious beliefs since you're just believing what other people tell you instead of taking time to look behind the scenes at what is actually backing up what they're talking about.
It's made different because scientists publish their reasoning and it is based on observations. Even if you don't check it, the fact that anyone could means you can take it as more likely to be honest and correct. Anyone can in principle check the science, and attempt to reproduce it - and rival scientists do. That makes it much harder to hide dishonesty. You don't have to actually check the claims, the mere fact that the claimant has made their claims checkable gives them credibility.
It's the same as the reasoning that you can place greater trust in Free software than in proprietary software. Since anyone can check the Free program's source, it's unlikely to be doing dodgy stuff.
Of course, it's not 100%. There have been scientific frauds. Some have gone undetected for some time. But most get found out reasonably quickly. And in any case, it's only ever been a few fraudulent papers from one scientist or group, usually working in a field that few others are involved in.
But there must come a point where you have to use someone else's information, there must come a point when you have to believe what someone else says. You can check things to a degree, but no one person can ever do everything themselves. You either take no position on anything at all, or you choose your position based on what others have done.
There's a difference between looking a little into someones findings before basing your opinion on them, and just accepting what they tell you as true.
You seem to have taken what I was trying to say a little overboard. You don't have to go do these experiments for yourself in order to have a slightly educated opinion about your beliefs.
Yes, I feel very disturbed. Almost as if someone is doing the same thing to me. *Shudder*
That article popped up on a couple of MMA sites that I visit...it's quite gruesome. I hope some follow up stories come out because it sounds like the guy was on some way more powerful drugs than what the article initially states.
My god, the Lebanese people are regarded as weak people here in Jordan. Not anymore.
To anyone who has Facebook
The story is: the guy hanging like meat? He's an Egyptian who confessed to the murder of 2 elderly people and their grand-daughters. Motive was unknown. When the police arrived to arrest him, the residents of the village went to stop him. Now, usually the police are against the people, but in this case, they threw him out to the angry mob, beating him ever so brutally. After the beating, the hung him and started to take pictures, saying "ALLAHU AKBAR, WE HAVE KILLED THE TRAITOR!"
To me: fucking nomads. When will they ever get over their petty honor crimes? Revenge? That means lack of self-control. I mean, had you let him be, and let the case be solved by the police, you could have another outlook on this man. Fuck, there might be a hidden problem in your community and you just ruined the last attempt to fix it. BUT NOOOO, you had to go and add some more shit to our already shitted image of us. Now the whole world will refer to us as "barbaric Bedouins".
To anyone who has Facebook
The story is: the guy hanging like meat? He's an Egyptian who confessed to the murder of 2 elderly people and their grand-daughters. Motive was unknown. When the police arrived to arrest him, the residents of the village went to stop him. Now, usually the police are against the people, but in this case, they threw him out to the angry mob, beating him ever so brutally. After the beating, the hung him and started to take pictures, saying "ALLAHU AKBAR, WE HAVE KILLED THE TRAITOR!"
To me: fucking nomads. When will they ever get over their petty honor crimes? Revenge? That means lack of self-control. I mean, had you let him be, and let the case be solved by the police, you could have another outlook on this man. Fuck, there might be a hidden problem in your community and you just ruined the last attempt to fix it. BUT NOOOO, you had to go and add some more shit to our already shitted image of us. Now the whole world will refer to us as "barbaric Bedouins".
I'm from Jordan, so my English isn't perfect, if I have any grammar mistakes, feel free to fix them.
Nah, no one gives a shit about Jordan. I'd bet at least half of the world's population can't even locate Jordan on a map.
Besides, I doubt this made the headlines in any other country.
We've been capable of these kinds of acts for thousands of years, it's definitely not anything new or recent.
Dolphins will viciously attack baby dolphins for seemingly no reason.
Chimnpanzees also murder and eat each other. Recently, it's been shown that they can actually wage war.
But then, lions will often kill their own cubs.
There's plenty of savagery in nature, it's just that when humans do it, people (being humans themselves, and thus preferring to believe that humans are somehow better than the rest of nature) think it seems worse by comparison.
Yeah, it sounds like the sort of stuff that happens when people take Angel Dust.
I didn't hear about this until you told me. And yeah, 90% of high schoolers, at least, can't locate Jordan on a map. Hell, most college-educated people probably can't, Americans are surprisingly insular.
As for the part about honor killings, they're not unique to Islam, nomads, or whatever. Vigilantism has had a long history in America, dating back to "frontier justice" at its inception.
Given that it was a tea he was drinking, it was probably ayahuasca that triggered the attack.
As far as bringing up animal cruelty (as in, animals being cruel to other animals), I'm not really sure what the point of such an argument is. A dolphin being capable of committing infanticide doesn't make the human mother who kills her baby any less horrific, I hope. Unless you no longer want to consider a human a moral agent which, ultimately, has lead to the philosophies behind some of the most deplorable acts in recent history (all throughout history, in fact).
As far as bringing up animal cruelty (as in, animals being cruel to other animals), I'm not really sure what the point of such an argument is. A dolphin being capable of committing infanticide doesn't make the human mother who kills her baby any less horrific, I hope. Unless you no longer want to consider a human a moral agent which, ultimately, has lead to the philosophies behind some of the most deplorable acts in recent history (all throughout history, in fact).
I don't think anyone has argued that. I was simply correcting Lucalibur's faulty assumption that only humans are capable of killing for no reason, and that non-human animals only kill for territory/food.
