(h/t Mark Shea)
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TOF once wrote an article entitled "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown and Down 'n Dirty Mud-Wrassle" which described the century-l...
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Hello family, friends and fans of Michael F. Flynn. It is with sorrow and regret that I inform you that my father passed away yesterday,... -
1. The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown 2. The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown: Down for the Count 3. The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown: The Great Gali...
ohh its just a tweet ..thats what twitter for right?
ReplyDeleteCheers ..
Surely TOF jests. Ideological dissonance does not logically or de necessitate entail armed conflict. Two parties can disagree without dropping bombs on one another.
ReplyDeleteBut Dr. Tyson was not saying All X results in Y. He was saying that all Y stems from X.
DeleteTOF, this is Anonymous 2. I understood Dr. Tyson to say "almost," so his proposition is not technically universal. Ergo, he is not (methinks) claiming that all Y stems from X. Yet even if he claims that all Y stems from X, that would be akin to the claim, all oak trees (Y) stem from acorns (X). But in this case, one might say almost all.
DeleteTrue, you can grow oak trees from cuttings, too.
DeletePeople really seem to struggle with the difference between "x is usually y" and "y usually results in x". The obvious example being the difference between "white supremacists supported Trump" and "Trump supporters are white supremacists". Or one of my encounters with Will le Fey, AKA Clamps, Andrew Marston, etc., where he took issue with my saying sapient alien species would probably be apex predators, because so few apex predators are sapient (which ignores the fact 100% of all known sapient species are apex predators).
DeleteThe trouble with Tyson's tweet, Anon, is that it is a truism, not that it obtains usually or always. I recently read a BBC article that 'explains' the origin of the phrase *like herding cats* by noting that cats are typically solitary hunters. That's right: cats cannot be herded because they are not typically herders. (Though to be fair, the article was at its center about cat ethology; the title, opening and closing tags were clumsy attempts to make it relevant, perhaps because nobody is expected to be interested in cats for their own sake. Heh.)
Deletenobody is expected to be interested in cats for their own sake
DeleteNew to the Internet? Or being sarcastic?
Worse, I was being pedantic *and* ponderous about it.
Delete