Recent Comments

1. about 14 hours ago on Pearls Before Swine

   I say that Trumptard ALWAYS intends to deceive. If he fails to lie it is only because he sometimes gets confused. His NDA’s, his shields of lawyers and friends to do his underhanded bidding, his careful concealment of any documentation of his past whether he has promised it or not, and his lies themselves are all constant indications of his absolute intent at all times to deceive.

   Your intent only means you intended to say what you said. Not that you intended to lie but you lied anyway.

   For mom, if you said, “My mother told me cats are dogs.”. There is no lie unless you were trying to convince me that cats were dogs and using your mother as your authority. Otherwise, you are telling me what your mother said.

   If you say, “I believe cats are dogs because my mother told me cats were dogs.” you are not lying if you really believe what your mother told you. Otherwise, you are lying. There is no way for me to know what you believe, as I have said many times with god/gods as the focus. You may or may not be lying but it doesn’t matter to me because what people believe doesn’t sway me in any way except to cause me to ask questions and check sources.

   If you hold your mother up as an authority or pretend that you are an authority because of what you were told by your mother then “Cats are dogs.” is a lie and it is your lie as well as your mother’s.

   We are walking the Nazi defense here of, “I was just following orders.”. When we fail to challenge authority we assume their responsibility willingly.

   I absolutely challenged my parents, my teachers, my preachers, and my peers on everything. I, as a child, was no different than I am now in this fashion. Yep, many of those authority figures in my life moaned when my hand went up as far back as I can remember. And since I spent my life from the age of maybe 8 on with my nose in books I had a lot of questions.

2. about 19 hours ago on Pearls Before Swine

   You are correct in assuming I have no respect for the intentionally ignorant.

3. about 19 hours ago on Pearls Before Swine

   A book signing tour?

4. about 23 hours ago on Pearls Before Swine

   What there is today is way, way, way more knowledge of the physical world and dedicated ignoramuses like yourself who can’t abide by the conflict said knowledge has with their desire to believe.

5. about 24 hours ago on Pearls Before Swine

   Trump’s intent would be to lie and he would be lying and if you did not validate his lie you would be a fool. Nice that you cannot find a single utterance of Trump having told a truth. There is some real confidence in your position there.

   For your cat and dog premise, you will have lied based on your words being a lie. Cats are not dogs.Pretending that your parents are responsible for your lie because you failed to challenge their lie before propagating it doesn’t make you not the person who lied, just a member of a group who lied. Having been corrected once or even challenged on the premise of cat being dog, if you fail to check and correct you are still a liar but one who does not care if what they tell others is a lie or not. If you check and correct, you were a liar but you have indicated that your intent was not to lie and you have integrity and no intent to lie.

6. 1 day ago on Pearls Before Swine

   Others are discussing God as an entity and how God does or does not impact the physical world.

   I am speaking about belief versus knowledge and how they cause grief when they are offered as refutations or supplementing arguments in the incorrect world. What we know is the physical world. What we believe is the subjective world.

   There is no difference in my expressions about those two terms, belief and knowledge, and where they have import whether we are talking about god, gods, Trump or Biden.

   As an agnostic, does your indecision apply to all gods or only the Christian god?

7. 1 day ago on Pearls Before Swine

   And I can’t help myself.

   One must prove a thing in the objective world. One need only believe a thing in the subjective world.

   No, we do not believe in gravity. We know the rules of gravity and have refined them, tested them, and proven them time and again, and can repeat those tests over and over again with the same results. The existence of gravity is a known. The cause of gravity is not…yet.

   One may choose to believe instead of know. See your Venn diagram again. That doesn’t move the known into the belief category. It just tells you who is too lazy to know. Me, always, until I have the time to spend finding out what is known, how it is known, and how that knowledge can be proven to the extent that I can understand the science.

   We don’t have a presumption of innocence. That is not in our constitution but it is a court precedence that applies to the legal proceedings and not to the world as a whole or to our democracy external to the court proceedings.

   Trump is a serial and easily exposed liar and, yes, that does imply that he is always lying.

   I spent a lot of time reconsidering my truth, lies and honesty definitions because of Trumps constant misinformation and lies and the effect it has on those who do and don’t follow him.

   I had to consider whether intent to misinform was a requirement or if repeating what someone else told you was your lie if you repeated it. Or if what you said was misinformation but an lie, should you consider the two different, when you were corrected but then insisted your misinformation is correct “because you believed it was true”.

   A liar is determined by an or logic function. If what the author intends is deceit, what the author states is a lie whether the utterance is factually correct or not. OR if the utterance is not factually correct, it the author is a liar regardless of intent.

   Trump is always a liar. Anyone who would accept anything he utters at face value is a fool and that isn’t a lie.

8. 1 day ago on Pearls Before Swine

   I have shown you the court findings in those cases and they do state that Trump raped E Jean Caroll and that both the judge and jury agreed that was the case.

   The law is distinctively variable by state and nation. The distinction in law within the context of the case is that of either the jurisdiction where the case is tried and/or the decision of the jury.

   Yes, you can. Even if none of the other contributing factors are available, if you get 100 women to accuse me of rape you can assume I am a rapist. If I know the 100 women, or one of them even, I will immediately question myself about whether I qualify as a rapist in some way in which I was unaware. Start your research now.

   Why do you go with “they could be mistaken” instead of “Trump could be mistaken”?

   Is it for the same reason that “I’m not claiming that the women are lying (although some may be).” is applied to the women by you and not to Trump? I mean, Trump lying as a constant and exposed as such so often, shouldn’t he be your first questioned resource?

9. 1 day ago on Pearls Before Swine

   Nope. Imagination is the list of possibilities that science will deny and confirm iteratively now and in the future. As knowledge grows, the pool of belief changes as does the character of what we know. I like to offer the discovery of the laws of gravity and their redefinition as an example of that.

   I need to make a statement here because I feel you deserve to know this of me. I am a great believer in the defining characteristic of humanity as our subjective worldview. We are who we are and know who we are only because of that subjective construct where belief reigns supreme, in our minds.

   The objective world has rules and patterns that are the same regardless of how we feel about them or whether we know them. We are not the objective world, we barely understand the objective world.

   My arguments here all have to do with science being specifically the ability to differentiate between our subjectivity and the objective. Without that, the real world, the world that is the same for all of us, is lost to the subjective world, the one that is unique to each of us.

   Individually, all beliefs are tenable. Communally, no belief is tenable.

10. 1 day ago on Pearls Before Swine

    No. m I have read those articles many times before. In fact, that article being 13 years old, I can assure you I read it when it first came out. Yep, I now verified I did.

    Absolutely inconclusive and with no follow-up in 13 years by an excited Graham Harris with a pocketful of “could haves”.

    Also, very excited about the sightings of the Tooth Fairy too.