To: 
From: "Vern Humphrey" 
Reply-To: r_catholic-l{at}yahoogroups.com

To: Michael D Brazier [mailto:mdbrazier{at}juno.com]
> >
>
> But: you told the story, as I recall, to support the claim that persons'
> behavior can be predicted from a single incident.  And it's just there
> that the "reasonable assumption" can't be relied on, because persons
> have free will.  You, and the law, cannot _assume_ that, because a
> man has committed a crime in the past, an exactly similar crime was
> committed by him.  You have, in such a case, only good grounds to
> suspect him.

That's not the case at all -- we don't infer both sides of the sheep have
been shorn because we seen one side shorn.  We infer both sides are shorn
because sheep are routinely shorn, and no sheep is ever left with only one
side shorn -- and these sheep had been shorn on one side.

We bring ALL our knowledge and experience to bear to interpret actions and events.
>
> To take a topical example: a major executive at CNN recently told
> the world that the CNN bureau in Iraq had its news censored by the
> Ba'athist propagandists.  This confession gives reason to suspect
> that all the news bureaus in Saddam Hussein's Iraq were censored,
> and that other tyrannous regimes do the same to news bureaus in
> their territories -- which is to say, that any news coming from the
> news bureaus accredited by dictatorships in not trustworthy.  _But_:
> we cannot simply _assume_ that any particular reporters have agreed
> to such censorship, merely because they have visited a dictatorship
> and reported from its soil -- or even that particular reporters who
> filed stories from Iraq allowed the Ba'athists to edit them.  We should
> suspect them, and investigate them, but we may not presume guilt.
>
On the other hand, we CAN infer that the Iraqis went to enormous lengths to
influence and censor the media.  And since at least ONE media giant caved,
we ought to regard all reports from the same area and same time frame with
suspicion.

When the man in front of you steps on a mine, that doesn't PROVE there's a
minefield there -- but no sane man would go stomping forward, unconcerned
with what MIGHT be awaiting him.


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