Guns and Intent

[Led Zeppelin]

why not?

I think the law in the US expects one to avoid confrontation and to not start arguments while carrying a firearm . I never felt normal when I carried a firearm because I couldn't behave like my normal assholish self.

 

[Greg the Grouper]

I don't disagree with any of this. I do think, however, there's a balance. My personal view has always been that education is the shortest route to solving problems, and this is no exception.

The biggest problem is, I think, that your voting analogy goes both ways. There's an evil little part of me that thinks there are certain people who should never be allowed to vote.

Oh, there are certainly people that I would prefer to have no say whatsoever in politics. However, I see no feasible means by which such a thing could be achieved with any degree of precision.

 

[Deleted member 619]

You seem to have set your mind on victimizing me ... you know, the insults are starting to pile up by now.
But hey .. whos keeping track?

Honestly, it's tedious having to smack this idiocy out of the park time and again.

The victim here is your idiotic arguments. Your fee-fees might be slightly wounded, but that's not my responsibility. If this response to you talking illiterate bollocks and catastrophically failing to adequately support your contentions causes an issue for you, you're in the wrong place, because it will be subjected to exactly the same scrutiny as every other instance of illiterate bollocks and catastrophic failures in adequately supporting arguments since the inception of the forum. That's what we do here, and have done since the beginning of the forum's existence. How do I know? Because I was there. You're not being singled out, you're singling yourself out with your behaviour.

This has been explained to you one several occasions, more than once by me, yet you still insist on whipping out the victim card every time your flimsy, ill-supported arse-gravy buckles under the tiniest puff of logic and turning evisceration of your poorly-formulated bum-custard into some sort of attack on your person.

And I haven't insulted you at all. I've assessed your competence at various activities based on analysis of your discursive behaviour, and explained my conclusions. These aren't insults, they're statements of fact about your ability to engage thoughtfully and honestly. They're things you could improve, if you were so inclined, but I'm coming to the conclusion quite rapidly that all your inclinations and proclivities revolve around verbal autofellatio. That's only entertaining for others if you're good at the verbal part of it. The rest is just sucking your own dick in public.

 

[Deleted member 619]

Oh, there are certainly people that I would prefer to have no say whatsoever in politics. However, I see no feasible means by which such a thing could be achieved with any degree of precision.

I did say it belonged in the infantile thread.

 

[Deleted member 619]

By the way, there's nothing wrong with being wrong. I do it all the time. It's actually incredibly useful, and leads to better understanding every single time, but you have to take the first step, which is accepting the possibility of being wrong.

I do think it incumbent on us to own our arguments, which means being honest about when they've fallen apart. Just beyond denial lies knowledge.

 

[Deleted member 42253]

Honestly, it's tedious having to smack this idiocy out of the park time and again.

The victim here is your idiotic arguments. Your fee-fees might be slightly wounded, but that's not my responsibility. If this response to you talking illiterate bollocks and catastrophically failing to adequately support your contentions causes an issue for you, you're in the wrong place, because it will be subjected to exactly the same scrutiny as every other instance of illiterate bollocks and catastrophic failures in adequately supporting arguments since the inception of the forum. That's what we do here, and have done since the beginning of the forum's existence. How do I know? Because I was there. You're not being singled out, you're singling yourself out with your behaviour.

This has been explained to you one several occasions, more than once by me, yet you still insist on whipping out the victim card every time your flimsy, ill-supported arse-gravy buckles under the tiniest puff of logic and turning evisceration of your poorly-formulated bum-custard into some sort of attack on your person.

And I haven't insulted you at all. I've assessed your competence at various activities based on analysis of your discursive behaviour, and explained my conclusions. These aren't insults, they're statements of fact about your ability to engage thoughtfully and honestly. They're things you could improve, if you were so inclined, but I'm coming to the conclusion quite rapidly that all your inclinations and proclivities revolve around verbal autofellatio. That's only entertaining for others if you're good at the verbal part of it. The rest is just sucking your own dick in public.

Liar. You did literally call me a "twat" a couple of days ago.

 

[Deleted member 42253]

Someone is winning the lottery every year.
So I can win the lottery.
So I can buy myself a yacht.

Someone is getting killed every year.
So I can get killed.
So I need to buy myself a gun.

 

[Deleted member 619]

Liar. You did literally call me a "twat" a couple of days ago.

That's not an insult. You are a twat, and I stand by every word of what motivated, not least because here you are doing exactly the same thing again.

Honestly, you only make yourself look more of a cunt with every word. You're doing it entirely to yourself.

 

[Greg the Grouper]

Someone is winning the lottery every year.
So I can win the lottery.
So I can buy myself a yacht.

Someone is getting killed every year.
So I can get killed.
So I need to buy myself a gun.

1. None of this is technically wrong.

2. This is, again, irrelevant to your original contention. Even if I agree that it's asinine logic, that's besides the point, because that is nonetheless the reasoning behind the purchase, and you were (are? I frankly don't know) arguing about a person's intent.

 

[Sparhafoc]

Someone is winning the lottery every year.
So I can win the lottery.
So I can buy myself a yacht.

Someone is getting killed every year.
So I can get killed.
So I need to buy myself a gun.

Actual analogy:

Someone wins the lottery, therefore everyone can win the lottery.

Or conversely:

Someone wins the lottery, therefore you can't win the lottery.


That's the actual reduction to absurdity, and yet it's not needed when the original formulation you've tried (more than once) is patently absurd itself.

 

[Sparhafoc]

1. None of this is technically wrong.

2. This is, again, irrelevant to your original contention. Even if I agree that it's asinine logic, that's besides the point, because that is nonetheless the reasoning behind the purchase, and you were (are? I frankly don't know) arguing about a person's intent.

Oh it's worse than that now.

Now we have statistics meaning you're immune, and no threat of being killed or having your home burgled despite it occurring to thousands of people.

The original argument was bad, but it pales in significance now.

 

[Sparhafoc]

You're doing it entirely to yourself.

I'm not going to call you any nouns, 21st... but you absolutely are doing this to yourself. It's like poking yourself in the eye with a stick, then getting frustrated when people tell you it's stupid to poke yourself in the eye.

Even now, even after the farce, you can still acknowledge your mistakes, admit your reasoning was spurious and contrived, and rejoin the world of the rational - but I have to say that I see no indication of you even understanding why your arguments are so shit - it's everyone else, not you!

 

[*SD*]

It's like poking yourself in the eye with a stick, then getting frustrated when people tell you it's stupid to poke yourself in the eye.

But but but... the ONLY reason for having a stick would be to poke yourself in the eye, there are literally no other reasons to have a stick than to poke yourself in the eye with it.

Except for the myriad of other reasons someone might have a stick because a stick has only one function and that is to poke yourself in the eye with it apart from all the other reasons which both do and don't exist simultaneously.

 

[Deleted member 619]

Yes Hacken, exceptions exists and by no means invalidate the point.

This has been bugging me, so I decided to come back and expose it using real logic:

The statement that began this is as follows:

Guns have only one purpose

The atoms of this are the antecedent 'gun' and the consequent 'single purpose'. We can ignore any assertion about what that purpose is until we examine the logic. We can assume arguendo any purpose, such as:

and that is to kill human beings.

All well and good. So we have our antecedent and our consequent which, as any good logician knows, is sufficient to construct a premise. In this case, our premise would be:

P1. Gun implies single purpose.

Then we get:

There is no other use for a gun

Which is just riffing on P1, and then:

(Hunters being the exception here).

An exception to the statement in P1. In particular:

P2. Purpose excluded by , meaning, of course.


C: Therefore, not gun.

It looks odd, cast this way, but this is a valid argument (it's one of the two basic validating forms, in fact), and the only valid argument you could make given your first premise and the observation of examples that counter your assertion. This is known as modus tollens, and it's the only valid argument that can be made when coupling your first premise with observation. The English name for this validating form is 'denying the consequent', and you can't escape it without committing a basic formal fallacy.

To make your argument valid with that premise, you must conclude either that the gun is not a gun or the exception is not an exception. Either of these is a formal fallacy known as 'denying the antecedent' (for slightly complicated reasons, the latter does this by a reduction, because denying that the exception is not an exception is logically equivalent to denying the antecedent proposition 'gun'). And by 'formal fallacy', I mean a fallacy of form, a structural fallacy, which is the definition of 'invalid'.

So yes, an exception literally invalidates your point.

This is also what I'm talking about when referring to your competence to assess the status of something in terms of logic or rationality. You have none.

 

[Sparhafoc]

Exceptions always invalidate absolutes with absolutely no exceptions*.




*that I can think of

 

[Deleted member 619]

Exceptions always invalidate absolutes with absolutely no exceptions*.




*that I can think of

The LNC in a nutshell.

 

[*SD*]

No one is getting shot in Germany.

So yes, it is fact that no one is going to kill you, individually.

Bugger me, are we still making completely insane claims we can't support? The question is rhetorical, since the answer is bloody obvious.

 

[Deleted member 42253]

Honestly, you only make yourself look more of a cunt with every word. You're doing it entirely to yourself.

Let me guess .. thats also not an insult eh?

 

[Sparhafoc]

Bugger me, are we still making completely insane claims we can't support?

Aha but if they're insane claims we can't support then they must also be rational claims that we can support, and you can see this is true by the fact that I was able to write those words in that order to produce that sentence and the universe didn't shatter into pieces.

Also, I've been meaning to say this for a while but the time was not yet ripe.

Up is actually down, left is right, in is out, round in straight, dark is light, wet is dry, and irrationality is rational. I thank you.

 

[Sparhafoc]

Let me guess .. thats also not an insult eh?

You know... this is why I usually avoid calling people names - not because I have some moral compunction against it (some people really are twats etc.), but because people like you use it to avoid addressing the substantive criticism of your ideas.