From owner-freebsd-chat Thu Jun 27 19:45: 1 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from hawk.mail.pas.earthlink.net (hawk.mail.pas.earthlink.net [207.217.120.22]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C59E937B406 for ; Thu, 27 Jun 2002 19:44:51 -0700 (PDT) Received: from user-2iniv66.dialup.mindspring.com ([165.121.124.198] helo=earthlink.net) by hawk.mail.pas.earthlink.net with esmtp (Exim 3.33 #2) id 17Nlk2-0001lg-00; Thu, 27 Jun 2002 19:44:10 -0700 Message-ID: <3D1BCD79.20203@earthlink.net> Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2002 19:44:09 -0700 From: Lawrence Sica User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020529 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Terry Lambert Cc: George Barnett , bastill@sa.apana.org.au, Sanjay Bhattacharya , freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Everybody's right, nobody's wrong (was Re: blah blah blah) References: <24620.1025143730@www7.gmx.net> <200206270730.g5R7UFf13214@tierzero.apana.org.au> <010801c21dc7$08892be0$c74608c3@spoem> <3D1B6352.26F669BE@mindspring.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Terry Lambert wrote: > George Barnett wrote: > > > 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. > Don't forget what opnions are like...that is also an american truism... ;) > 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. > And sometimes this notion allows all these groups to act as one whole for very important reasons. Take the post 9/11 stuff, the muslim blacklash aside. Also take the recent fiasco with the Pledge of Allegiance. It has gone beyond party or creed or race, and is pretty much considered a stupid decision by the judges to say it can't be said in schools because it endorses a "god" > 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. > The idea is to find a common ground and go from there. I'd say it has worked more than not. > 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. > Hey maybe they had 36 back then ;) --Larry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message