I rarely use that term but when someone comes into the thread and immediately turns the debate away from the subject at hand, to something completely irrelevant (in this case, the troll himself) it is beyond doubt what is going on.

I was responding to and elaborating upon futhark's post regarding the inability of Americans to think.

Go back and look for yourself if you do not believe me.

Could be that more and more people don't bother to read your posts. Which would, in turn, result in you getting fewer and fewer replies.

I gotta give you credit, at least you had the fortitude to use your own handle.

A lot of your own posts are pretty abusive, you sure didn't have much nice to say about bucky1 yesterday.

That would most likely be Justice Ruth "I dissent" Bader Ginsburg.

You're sowing dischord and irrelevancy and I'm calling you out on it. You're obviously doing it on purpose.

You have a firm grasp of the obvious.

I'm simply demonstrating that conservatives are not alone in willful blindness and the ability to ignore discomforting or inconvenient facts.

Liberals suffer from the same syndrome almost as badly.

To prove gays deserved equal rights one needed proof gays weren't aberrent. To do that, researchers needed money and time to do research into that, something that couldn't happen earlier for societal reasons.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but i seem to recall reading that it is impossible to prove a negative.

Why should it be incumbent upon any party to prove that they are not "aberrant"? How is it even possible to "prove" such a thing in the first place?

Your view is apparently that the judicial system works on a "guilty until proven innocent" basis when dealing with any party not totally mainstream.

Not that I disagree, but it's kind of unusual for someone to actually come out and say it.

Now my family members--all of them hovering around the edges of demented neo-conservatism--know better than to spout opinions without scrambling for references.

I can think of worse fates, but not by much.

You have my sympathies..

Yeah, right.

A nice little story that I've heard before.

If you don't mind, I'll continue waiting for someone to demonstrate how it is possible to prove that one is not an "aberrant".

Just pretend I'm from Missouri.

Kucinich lost.

That is exactly what makes me think that "the rule of law" is not all it is cracked up to be.

If two courts given the same laws and set of circumstances can come to two polar opposite decisions then we really have a rule of men, not of law.

I can't follow links that flow off into the ads on the right side of the screen.

Now that you have evaded my question once I shall simply restate it so you may evade it again.

How would you personally go about proving that you are not an "aberrant"?

Good.. Now answer the question.

How would *you* go about proving that you are not "aberrant"?

ondelette:

Only the tough and the smart will have any chance of surviving a full scale nuclear war.

Agree or disagree?

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/clinton-and-the-bankruptcy-law/

http://jinchi.blogspot.com/2007/03/hillary-clinton-and-bankruptcy-bill-of.html

There are legal arguments that have sound, logical reasoning on both sides that do require that men and women up to the highest court have to make a difficult decision about. It is usually not about politics and most often politics do not rule.

It's my experience that *everything* is politics. Humans are political animals, we eat, sleep and breathe politics. Those who are good at it usually go far, those who are not (raises hand) usually fall by the wayside.

Both sides cannot be correct, either the original court was in error or the higher court is in error.

Thus we have a government of men, not laws.

I'm just enough of a codemonkey to know that logic is inexorable. Computers don't do what you think you told them to do, they do what you actually did tell them to do. Debugging your own code is a humbling experience and a remarkably educational one too.

If programmers were as lousy at logic as a lot of judges then there would be no internet for us to be conversing on.

And let's face it, the legal profession has had a lot longer to get its act together than the codeslingers have.

geez...while i do not disagree with your sentiments, generally, your tone is in fact over the top and just a wee bit about your self...but hey i responded didn't ?

I'm not sure what prompted this, did I address you?

OTT is just my style, old habits are hard to break and I learned this one on usenet where one is either predator or prey.

I'll point out once again that the best way to get rid of trolls is to refrain from feeding them. After all, we are only attention seekers.

Ignore me and I'll go away.

Don't be taken in by their tough guy, man against the world rhetoric, authoritarians are the biggest collectivists on the planet.

How can one be an authoritarian without either a leader to follow or followers to lead?

The reason theories aren't laws is because they can not be proven definitively. That is to say, you can not prove something unless you have governed rules that say some things are possible and others are not.

But what if your rules are wrong in the first place?

Many things that were once considered totally impossible are mundane today.

In fact Clarke even has a law about it:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

When I read _Atlas Shrugged_..

I wasn't impressed enough to read more Rand and haven't bothered to read any since.

Needless to say I'm a trifle hazy on the details.