Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2002 12:11:14 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: George Barnett <george@alink.co.za> Cc: bastill@sa.apana.org.au, Sanjay Bhattacharya <sanbh@gmx.net>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Everybody's right, nobody's wrong (was Re: blah blah blah) Message-ID: <3D1B6352.26F669BE@mindspring.com> References: <24620.1025143730@www7.gmx.net> <200206270730.g5R7UFf13214@tierzero.apana.org.au> <010801c21dc7$08892be0$c74608c3@spoem>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
George Barnett wrote: > At some stage, you will all realise that none of you are right, and none of > you are wrong. > > You all have the same motive, but because you see it from different > situations and different perspectives, you express it differently. > > What has been perfectly displayed here is the ability of most people > involved to *not* listen, or to hear what they want. One aspect of public philosophy that has always struck me as being uniquely American is the idea that the other person's point of view has equal validity to your own, regardless of how ridiculous that point of view may be. This absurd notion permits the peaceful coexistance of athiests, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Shintoists, Moonies, Hare Krisna, Democrats, Republicans, and any other otherwise fundamentally opposed and intolerant groups. It has also led to ideas such as Creationism, "medical magnets", "New Math", and the idea that taxation *with* representation is somehow better than taxation *without* representation, and other ideas that clearly defy both logic and common sense. Like the idea that all opposed parties in a discussion can somehow still be simultaneously correct, merely because the viewpoints are held by individuals, and therefore must be reconcilable, even if it is possible to empirically verify that one is right, and all the others are wrong. Socrates once concluded that the human mouth contains 36 teeth through deductive reasoning alone, when he could have counted them and arrived at the non-relativistically correct number of 32. In today's America, we would probably license him as a dentist. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?3D1B6352.26F669BE>