No, this does not follow from my logic, since I never said I agreed that a person should be allowed to keep all and only that wealth which he has earned. That was your claim, not mine.

But it's apparent that this is going nowhere. I just wanted to point out that a natural consequence of what you said was something that you likely did not intend or agree with. Seems to me the correct response is to admit that you misspoke and try to fix your claim so that it more accurately reflects your opinions, but instead you just want to pretend that this unfortunate consequence really doesn't follow from your clearly stated principle.

As far as my own opinion, I'm fairly sympathetic to Nozick's ideas on what constitutes a just distribution of wealth (more or less that the history consists entirely of just transactions from previously just states --- if it was given to you by someone who had a right to hold it, then you have a right to hold it, with no nonsense about whether you earned it or not).

But there's no need to go into Nozick's views nor continue this discussion. Either you didn't get my point about why your statement was evidently incorrect or you refuse to admit error, but in either case, we've reached an impasse.

I'm not twisting anything. You wrote, "conservatives believe that a person who has earned their wealth should keep it, those who haven't earned it should not."

Perhaps you didn't mean to say that those who have not earned their wealth should not keep it, but that's what you said. As an immediate consequence, no one should keep any (unearned) gifts, including inheritances.

This really is a perfectly obvious consequence of what you wrote.

Well, I generally agree, but you just said that a person should be able to keep wealth if and only if they've earned it. Now, we assume that you earned your wealth, but your heirs didn't earn the inheritance. This was a gift from you.

So, by your own terms, they should not be able to keep the inheritance because they didn't earn it.

(There may, of course, be certain cases in which one can be said to have "earned" an inheritance, but these are unusual and need not distract us here. If one should be able to keep only wealth which they have earned, then he should not be able to keep inheritances or other gifts, generally speaking. This strikes me as quite a silly principle.)

Oh. I didn't realize that conservatives think that only people who have "earned" their wealth should keep it. So, I suppose that conservatives would aim to abolish inheritance, because surely the heir doesn't (usually) do anything to earn wealth.

I have to say, though, that this entire thread is chock-full of arrogance on a grander scale than Zonk's. His fault was only minor oversight of the consequence of his claim, while we have folks claiming that voting for Bush is a greater sin than Zimmerman's apparent crime, or that anyone who understands conservatism would be a conservative.

I have no doubt that non-racists can dislike Obama, and I reckon the majority of Tea Party members are not racist.

Now, how about some evidence for your claims that:

(1) Some or many of the racist signs at Tea Party events were the product of liberals trying to discredit the movement and
(2) The media has removed black people from images of Tea Party rallies.

Just 'cause, you know, anyone can say anything.

It's not hard to come up with problems best solved by scripting.

I'm a teacher. Suppose I want to produce a letter for each student who is currently averaging below C. I want to include their names and current averages in the letter, and perhaps some text that depends on annotations in my roster.

It would be tedious and silly to do this by hand.

Now, as it happens, I'm not a word processor user, so I don't know whether Word can do what I need here. But in any case, this is an obvious use for scripting in a word processor.

Er. Ah. Oh, never mind.

No, that's not the underlying reason.

The various fallacies you mention (slippery slop, post hoc, etc.) are informal fallacies, that is, fallacies of informal reasoning. The fact that they are fallacies of inductive, not deductive, logic has not escaped logicians at all. They are nonetheless fallacies (though because they are informal, whether a fallacy has actually occurred is a bit more of a judgment call).

Honestly, the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning (the latter you mention as using "absolute formulas") is well-understood.

Finally! A technology where the benefits clearly outweigh any dangers!

Sure, that seems fair enough.

I reckon you'd be happy to do the same during your workday?

I'm not defending the police officer's claim, mind you. Merely casting doubt on the wisdom of treating police officers as if they were convicts.

It's a goddamned shame that this bigoted post is ranked insightful.

I'm not a Tea Party supporter. On the contrary, I dislike the movement quite a bit, and especially dislike their political leaders.

But to call a teapartier fascist, or to accuse the party of being dominated by -- not preferred by, but dominated by -- racists, etc., is shameful. Let's treat our political opponents with basic respect. Let's try to encourage frank but respectful discourse.

Indeed, this is one reason I dislike the right wing: they are loathe to treat their opponents with basic decency and respect. But the proper response is emphatically not to emulate them.

I know it's a desperate and silly thought, but wouldn't it be nice to return to disagreements over ideas rather than caricatures?

And you're an asshole who refuses to take a man at his word and instead accuses him of racism because of his self-declared political views.

Why not treat others with respect? Whether you agree with his take on affirmative action or not, there is no need to claim that the man is a racist. Well-meaning, enlightened persons of good will can disagree whether affirmative action is either fair or well-suited for its end. There is no reason to pretend that any such doubt is the sign of a closet racist.

Respect in political disagreements is a good thing.

I don't like the cavalier attitude of the statement either -- after all, this fella lost wages because he drives for a living.

That said, this has nothing at all to do with the principle that, in criminal cases, the prosecutor must prove guilt.

I'm visiting Shenzhen, a large city in the same province as ZengCheng. I hadn't heard anything about the protests (no surprise, since we're not keeping up with the news), so I thought I'd see what a search brought up.

I found a Wall Street Journal article as one of the first Google hits, no problems at all.

I'm often uncertain about the scope of the Great Firewall. I could read any online U.S. newspaper I tried thus far (this trip -- a previous year, the Washington Post was blocked while others were not). I could get to Usenet via Google Groups, Wikipedia, and pretty much every site I tried, except for Youtube (which seems to be redirected to a broken alternative) and Facebook (though Myspace is accessible). I can see why the great bulk of people are not terribly bothered by the firewall. I don't think they hit it all too often, unless they're exceptionally interested in politics.

In any case, I'm not saying the article is wrong, but I haven't seen the mentioned effects.

What a remarkably stupid opening.

Whether this is a good thing or not is certainly worth debate (and you provide some actual argument later in your post), but these silly examples of the genetic fallacy come off as nothing more than bigoted ignorance.