In article ,
 "the Danimal"  wrote:

> mark_sobolewski{at}yahoo.com wrote:
> > Hello Dan,
> >
> > Even if I hypothetically did toss Sharon out of a lifeboat, it would
> > (hopefully) be a one time situation not warrenting future
> > intervention to save lives.
>
> "Just this one time."
>
> Do you mean a one time situation of tossing Sharon herself out of
> a lifeboat, or a one time situation of tossing any member of a
> category of people out of a lifeboat?

I think it's clear it's the former. :-)

The way you phrase the latter, it can be used to justify
a number of situations: Tossing out a member of
a "catagory" of people who:

1) Represent an extreme threat to the remaining
residents of the lifeboat.
2) Represent a class of people who are secondary.
(For example: men sneaking onto a boat before all the
women have had a chance to board or a black sneaking onto
a whites only boat.)

> Do you think the invasion of Iraq was a one time situation?
> "Just this one evildoer."

I guess I jumped into the thread not knowing it was more
than about me tossing people out of lifeboats. :-)

In the case of world and US history for the past century,
it's not uncommon for the US to invade or intervene
in conflicts for ideological purposes.  (I find it pretty
funny that people often object to GW waging a war
for cheap oil (now hovering at 50 bucks a barrel) and
at the same time saying he's doing so for an overambitious
ideological agenda.  Make up your minds! :-)

I'm sure this won't be the last since if there's any
serious conflict to be waged in the future the US
is largely considered the sole remaining superpower
to do it.  France has a single aircraft carrier.
Everyone else (the good guys) has largely defensive capabilities.
I think the British still maintain a pretty sizable fleet.

> > Consider OJ Simpson: Despite it being likely that he killed his
> former
> > wife, he
> > is unlikely to be a future threat to society because the situation
> > under which it occurred was unique.
>
> Every situation is unique, so that fact by itself is meaningless.

Am I speaking with one of your literal thinking sexbots? :-)

"Unique" in this context means that the situation was not
part of a pattern or environment that implied he was likely
to repeat the behaviour.

> There might be other situations in which O.J. could kill.

But couldn't that be said for most anyone?

> Or there
> might not. All we know is that O.J. is capable of killing in one
> situation that most people could have tolerated without resorting
> to killing.

Actually, we don't know.

The FACT is that he was found innocent in a court of law
and is viewed as innocent by such.

> What is less likely is that O.J. could escape a murder conviction
> using the same methods that worked once.

True.  But then again, for the sake of argument assuming
he committed the crime as a legal fact, he wouldn't
necessarily use the same methods that tripped him up
before either.  I don't think he would drop gloves,
run into air conditioners, and use overly small swiss
folding swiss army knives a second time.

> If the O.J. murder trial were held today, with the same physical
> evidence, it would be harder for a high-priced legal team to
> bamboozle a jury about the DNA evidence, because more people
> are familiar with the concept now thanks to all the crime drama
> television shows, and the routine use of DNA evidence which
> has established it now.

You didn't follow the case very well, did you?

The jury largely aquitted him (and I have this
on authority of lawyers who are speaking terms
with the judge and prosecutor AND defense attorney
involved) because:

1) The jury noticed that the police searched the Simpson
home without a warrant under the suspect reason that
they were concerned about the residents' personal
safety.  Juries will sometimes question the introduction
of evidence introduced under such circumstances even the
judge gives his standard "I'm the judge and you do
what I say" lecture.

2) The "N word" was used.  This jaded the jury against
the police and even a white woman on the jury who
wanted to convict Simpson gave up because she felt
that this tainted the credibility of the police.

3) The DNA evidence WAS collected poorly.  Even the
prosector admitted this in her book.

> During the O.J. trial, many of the jurors were hearing about
> DNA evidence for the first time, as in the concept of it.
> Bearing in mind that these were people who lacked the
> intelligence to get out of jury duty.
>
> The prosecution also got a bad break in that the photos of O.J.
> wearing the Bruno Magli shoes he denied owning and which were
> tied to the crime scene only surfaced in time for the subsequent
> wrongful-death trial. With those photos, the wrongful-death verdict
> was a slam-dunk.

So if I have a pair of such shoes, does that make me guilty
of killing Nicole Simpson? :-)

The second jury probably found for the defense because
the issue of the questionable search by the police
wasn't as relevent (since this was a civil matter
brought by the families) and more of the jurors were
less predisposed to be sympathetic to OJ from the beginning.
Also, the burden of proof is much lower for civil cases.
It was a slam dunk because it was an easier shot to
begin with.

Speaking of idiots: Marcia Clark didn't come across
as all that smart in her book.  My friends tell me that
prosecutors are often over arrogant because they have
such incredible resources at their disposal.  Everything
is done for them before they even open up the case.
All the labwork is done for them, experts are given
to them by the FBI, etc.  The defense attorney has to hustle.
If someone in law school is aspiring to be a prosecutor,
chalk it up to them most likely not wanting a serious challenge
and a cushy, safe job.

> > Nonetheless, I imagine Sharon would be polite to him if he posted
> > an opinion she disliked...
>
> Perhaps.
>
> Frightening people with the threat of physical violence requires
> little intelligence. A large animal can do that. So can a natural
> hazard with no intelligence at all, such as an avalanche or a
> tornado.

This is a great opportunity to repeat my lecture
about the difference between will and intelligence!

What frightens people is whether there's any merit to the threat.
Sharon didn't take my threat to toss her out of a lifeboat
very seriously of course because she knows I didn't have
any "will" behind the statement.  If I was stupid
and had will, she might be a bit more worried.  But a
combination of will and intelligence in any endeavor
causes people to think twice!

Many men in our modern society certainly possess great
intelligence.  But since many of them lack will their
overall treatment from women is little different than
that of the most poor SOB's in other countries.
If you can't imagine yourself tossing Sharon out of
the lifeboat, it's not going to happen even if you
have the upper body strength. :-)

> To be really impressive, you would need to silence Sharon with
> nothing more than the overwhelming force of logic, as I recently
> did to Sharon in response to her theistic potshot at Nietszche.
> I so thoroughly exposed the utter illogic of Sharon's insistence
> on believing in just one particular possibility for the afterlife
> out of the infinitely many equally probable possibilities that
> Sharon wisely decided to refrain from further discussing her
> religious fantasies on Usenet.

I'll take a potshot.

The theistic response to this argument, I might imagine
(off the top of my head, I'm sure Jesuits after centuries
have come up with something better) is that a "correct"
faithful belief will "seem" right based upon it's divine
nature as compared to less likely possibilities (less likely
because they are false by divine definition.)

> It's too bad Sharon chooses to run away from the interesting
> questions I raise.

Or perhaps she got bored or you beat her (pardon the pun)
into submission.  I'm pretty strong willed and you can
challenge me sometimes too.  She's only a woman you know!

> For example, what about all those murder victims whose killers
> remain at large? If those people are still alive "in some form"
> right now, why don't they somehow get a message back to us about
> who killed them? I am genuinely curious about this paradox.

Perhaps because they have better things to do.

If you were up in heaven with a 79 virgin Halle Barre's
attending to your every need, would you be as motivated
to get even with the guy who sent you there ahead of schedule?

> So many people take it pretty much for granted that our "souls"
> will live on, and they will know who they are and presumably
> retain their personalities in the afterlife, and yet we don't
> get the most useful kinds of messages that could only come
> from dead people.
>
> O.J.'s dead wife for example---if she is alive "in some form"
> somewhere, wouldn't we expect her to share the burning desire of
> all her surviving family members to see the real killer brought
> to justice? Presumably she died with information that would have
> been critical to breaking the case. Maybe she was able to see
> things after she died, such as what O.J. did with the knife.

I lived close to that area and was thinking of going on a hunt
for that knife with a metal detector.  I suspect it was
in that mystery bag at the airport he took with him and tossed
later for unknown reasons.

> Because police commonly run down hundreds of leads while
> investigating a big case, all they needed was an anonymous
> tip with the precise location of the murder weapon, and they
> would have found it easily. When you call in with an anonymous
> tip that is easy for the police to check, they don't require
> proof in advance---they just go out and check.

Think: If the dead were able to express themselves so easily
we wouldn't be able to get anything done with all the chatter.
Imagine if Sharon was able to haunt all of us with usenet posts
she could type at infinite speed...

> Surely, given all the millions of people who claim to communicate
> with spirits, and are certainly listening for any messages they
> might get, it should not be impossible for a murder victim who
> remains alive "in some form" to get a message back somehow.
> After all, this inward "spiritual sense" is what leads people to
> believe they will remain alive "in some form" after they die.

Agreed.  But this only raises a question over the credibility
of the psychics.  Not necessarily the existance of the spirits.
Did all the fake weathermen of ancient times necessarily
prove the impossibility of weather prediction?

> This leads to an obvious quandary: if we have these internal
> feelings that indicate there is some form of life after death,
> what are we actually sensing? Obviously we cannot be sensing
> anything that amounts to an actual communication channel for
> receiving useful information from dead people. If we were
> sensing such a channel, people would routinely get valuable
> messages from their dead friends: who killed them, where they
> hid their money, and other useful posthumous secrets revealed
> that could only have come from the dead person. We know the
> dead and their loved ones cannot lack for motivation to communicate
> in this way. Why are there, then, so many unsolved murders in
> which the victims almost certainly died with information that
> could help solve the crimes? Why is it so important to set your
> affairs in order BEFORE you die? Why is killing someone such an
> effective way to shut them up?
>
> The idea that there could be "some form" of life after death
> does not square with our demonstrated inability to get information
> from the dead. If information goes one way, as in the memories
> you supposedly take with you when you die, why can't it also go
> the other way? How can the physical world influence the spiritual
> world this way, while the spiritual world is not able to influence
> the physical world? That is unintuitive. In the reality we can
> observe, there are no entirely one-way information channels.

The ancient greeks postulated about the existance of
atomic particles long before they had a means of detecting
them.

> We have to imagine that when people die, their
> souls go into some kind of maximum-security prison from which
> they can never write back. It must also be utterly impossible
> for the living to directly sense the souls of the dead, because
> if it were possible, the dead would have some way to
> encode messages on whatever the living can sense.

When you graduated from elementary school, was it a form
of prison that kept you from hanging out with younger friends
that were still in elementary school?  Or did you just
not want to hang out with anymore?

> During the Vietnam Conflict, American P.O.W.s at the "Hanoi Hilton"
> were famously able to set up a communication network by tapping
> softly on their cell walls late at night. Their captors isolated
> them to individual cells and beat any prisoner who attempted to
> communicate with another. And yet the P.O.W.s were able to
> communicate, because they had some ability to sense each other.
> Namely, they could hear the nonverbal tapping sounds coming
> from the adjoining cell. They were clever enough to do this right
> under the noses of their guards.

I've read theories that the guards easily knew what was going
on but kept quiet about it precisely to pick up
intelligence.  If you were a smart guard, would you let on?

> If people can sense some sort of spiritual "realm," inhabited
> by the souls of people who have died, why don't those people
> who have died, ARMED WITH THEIR PRIOR KNOWLEDGE OF EXACTLY WHAT
> LIVING PEOPLE CAN SENSE, find a way to modulate that spiritual
> signal to send messages back? Especially when you consider the
> elaborate detail religions build up in their descriptions of the
> afterlife. If they can know so many things about what lies beyond,
> there would have to be a high-quality communication channel
> informing them. This channel would require a vigorous form of
> divine censorship to eliminate all the billions of useful messages
> dead people must be eager to send back. Which raises the question
> of why God acts as a jailkeeper.

Religions have an answer for that: The point of the game
is religious faith and beliefs based upon incomplete knowledge.
If it was all spelled out as easily as getting around
and airport, then everyone would be a goodie two shoes.

> There is also the question of when the soul originates. If people
> believe the soul lives on after the body, would it not also follow
> that the soul lived before the body? In the natural world, everything
> we can observe that has a beginning also has an end. And yet some
> people claim their immortal souls did not exist before their bodies.
> I am curious to know how they "sense" this.
>
> -- the Danimal

Perhaps God has a way around these limitations.  He is all
powerful by definition you know.  Yes, that seems
rather unfair to point out in debate but who said
he had to play by your rules? :-)

Also, Dan, you have a hard time understanding and extrapolating
cultural trends that go beyond 50 years ago in your narrow
view of American culture.  It's difficult to imagine you can
slam dunk describe the mechanics of the divine and unknowable
secrets of the universe.

regards,
Mark Sobolewski


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