Saturday, July 27, 2013

More on self defense



'nuff said.

23 comments:

  1. The image is true but for only ONE reason. If the shooter can show that he received the assault as stated and she is DEAD.
    We are at the 'no witnesses' to say different.
    The way is should have been done is the girl to be aware that she is being stalked and run to a public place. If this is impossible then turn and shot the stalker in the face(too many wear kevlar). Then take a can of pepper spray put in your own eyes and put the can in the dead stalker's hand.
    Then you have 2 choices, 1) no witnesses and evidence in your favor so call the cops. 2) no witnesses so just walk away.

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  2. Moron self-defense:

    1) Pick a fight.
    2) Get your ass handed to you.
    3) Kill the person you picked the fight with.
    4) In Florida, get away with murder.

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    Replies
    1. This works only if you kill a black person. It helps if you're not black yourself.

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    2. He did not get away with murder.
      It was self defense. I know this because the surviving witness said it was and we know they never lie about such.
      And he did not pick a fight because the surviving witness said that he was just walking down the street, and again we know he would not lie.
      So he was acquitted.

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    3. If I didn't know better, I'd think you were being a tad sarcastic. ;-)

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    4. There are time when I really try but just cant make the irony sound as bad as the situation is.

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  3. I'm surprised at you Larry. Surely you don't need me to point out the disanalogy here.

    First, is it reasonable for a woman to pepper spray a strange man who has been following her? Yes, I think so---although it is still an overreaction, at least it is understandable. In contrast, is it reasonable for a man to attack another man and bang his head repeatedly into the pavement for the same offense? Hardly.

    And so given this disparity, we may ask if it is reasonable for the pepper-sprayed man to react by shooting the woman dead. Obviously not. But is it reasonable for the man who is having his head pounded repeatedly into the pavement by this other unknown man to react by shooting his assailant? Indeed that seems to me quite reasonable. Heck, it's even more reasonable than the woman's reaction in your little graphic!

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  4. I'm surprised at you, Ben. Surely you don't need me to point out that you're being a racist asshole.

    In contrast, is it reasonable for a man to attack another man and bang his head repeatedly into the pavement for the same offense? Hardly.

    Have you been even fucking reading the blog?

    First, the only evidence that we have for anything that Trayvon Martin actually did, or for any reason he might have done something, are Zimmerman's obviously self-serving testimony.

    Just the fact that you accept Zimmerman's story as the truth is enough to convince me that you're a racist scumbag who is no longer welcome to comment on my blog.

    Fuck off, asshole.

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    Replies
    1. There are more issues here, but they've already been discussed, and I dislike repeating myself, especially to racist idiots.

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    2. I didn't say I accepted Zimmerman's story as truth. Maybe instead of tossing out ridiculous insults you should actually read my comments.

      But of course there shall be no more of those on this blog. After all, if you're going to act like this then obviously I don't want to comment here anymore anyway. Good riddance.

      Delete
  5. I am afraid this is off-topic (forgive me), but do you know at all:

    (1) what is the best refutation of the kalaam cosmological argument?

    (2) have you heard of Edward Feser, a Classical theist using Thomist Aristotelism?
    Do you know what is a good critique of Aristotelian metaphysics?

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    Replies
    1. No need to apologize, LK; it's a pleasure and an honor to have you here.

      (1) I don't know what the "best" refutation is, but the Secular Web has a good round-up of the contenders: The Kalam Cosmological Argument.

      Kalam mostly entails just the rejection of one prong, the infinitely existing universe, of the dilemma of the standard cosmological argument; the most obvious refutation is that there's no good scientific reason to consider infinity to be a particularly weird concept; physics not only requires infinities all over the place, but also handles them with relative mathematical ease.

      (2) and (3): No idea, sorry. I'm only an amateur philosopher, and although I talked about EoG a lot when I posted at IIDB, lo, these many years ago, I'm mostly interested in ethical and political philosophy.

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    2. Sigh...
      http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theism/cosmological.html#kalam

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    3. (1) Thank you very much for this!

      I am asking because I have a philosophical blog myself (link below) and now and again post on philosophy of religion and arguments against theism, and I am planning a post in coming days debunking the kalam argument.

      My other blog:
      http://thoughtsphilosophyculture.blogspot.com/

      (2) Just quickly as well, if you have any thoughts: is there any actual example of a physical instantiation of infinity in our material universe?
      --------

      regards -- and you have a great and thought-provoking blog.

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    4. Thank you very much for this!

      Always at your service, mon frere. I'll check out your other blog too.

      Just quickly as well, if you have any thoughts: is there any actual example of a physical instantiation of infinity in our material universe?

      miller goes into more detail on his blog, Skeptic's Play. (You'll have to dig a bit.) He's an actual physics grad student. It's my understanding that most field theories (electromagnetic, gravitational, and other fields) use infinities.

      Delete
  6. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  7. The one I don't hear is the 1st line...
    1--everything that exists has a cause...
    WHO SAYS SO???
    Just cuz I know of no instance that is different does not make that so. Has anyone gone beyond this space/time to see the conditions that led to our start??? No??? Then they don't know if statement 1 is correct. And all the rest of the KA comes from 1.

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    Replies
    1. That's a common rebuttal against both the standard and the Kalam cosmological arguments.

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    2. Yes, Hume's doubts about whether events always require causes seems a good reply.

      I notice that the findings of quantum mechanics (QM) are often invoked now to say that physics teaches us that, yes, some events can be uncaused. But then the theists respond that these events aren't literally "uncaused", and since my knowledge of QM is limited I cannot decide who is right.

      Recently, a fellow called Edward Feser -- an annoying Aristotelian theist -- had a post challenging the claim by some scientists that in quantum vacuums something can in fact come out of nothing:

      http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2013/07/fifty-shades-of-nothing.html

      Feser's counter argument is that the quantum vacuum is not nothing in hard philosophical sense.

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    3. Thanks as I heard a couple of discussions on this and did not hear that rebuttal.

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    4. Feser's counter argument is that the quantum vacuum is not nothing in hard philosophical sense.

      Actually, I would agree with Feser's argument in this sense; Krause, for example, is not really talking about the same sort of "nothing" that philosophers talk about. However, the claim that quantum events are uncaused is different than the claim that the a quantum vacuum really is nothing. The quantum vacuum (or at least our quantum vacuum) is atemporal and acausal, so it may be an example of a timeless "precursor" to, or substrate of, a temporal universe.

      Remember, how we think about physics is not the same as what physics "actually is," and what nonphysicists such as philosophers think about physics is even less so.

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  8. Yes the 'nothing' problem is interesting as well.
    Its another example of what is a 'theory', defining words between talkers is hard enough, without each holding a definition to suit their agendas.
    I grin when people say 'space has nothing, so you can't breath', when space is full of stuff. It's like saying the ocean has nothing in it cuz you can't breath.
    Religious love saying that evilutionist think the world came from nothing, which is the one thing we don't say and the creationist does say and at the same time there is no definition of nothing.

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  9. Stephen Law and Edward Feser crossed swords a few times over atheism and issues like the problem of evil [link]

    Feser is one of those guys who converted to the metaphysics of Aquinas and Aristotle, and then made a name for himself by annoying naturalists with generally useless concepts long consigned to the dust bin of history.

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