Comments on: A philosopher discusses Lance Armstrong and the culture of lying

By: Stan

Stan — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 22:04:54 +0000

And what gets me? Your friend is in a level 1 country where white people run everything…and he’s STILL NOT HAPPY?.

By: Stan

Stan — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 20:58:22 +0000

And he avoids me..who pinned him to the ground. Sorry,but I do dose people with reality. It might not fit your rules of debate. But being right with the facts isn’t something to ignore.

By: William Gairdner

William Gairdner — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 17:08:14 +0000

Hello “Really” (again) –
Thank you for your reasoned response to my arguments. I have always operated in the conviction that people with opposing views ought to be able to debate each other down to their fundamental differences and then if these are irreconcilable simply agree they have had a good go at it, and agree to disgree. But KauaiRobert is right. This sort of debate does not belong on Lowell’s site because it is not about Lance and drugs. In any event, if you want to engage further, which I welcome, just go to my website from where you can send an email and I will respond (Just so you don’t leave thinking your last points were winners!

By: Stan

Stan — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 01:30:21 +0000

I care. Doesn’t mean he can’t be a good friend..just puts a different light on his opinions.
If you can’t get Evolution right..

By: KauaiRobert

KauaiRobert — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 22:37:13 +0000

Even if there was two different sports catagories (A and B), there would still be cheaters in catagory A.
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Cheating is reality that will never go away no matter how hard we try to rid ourselves of it.
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Human nature.
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And just for the record, I’m a staunch liberal who doesn’t care one bit about Mr. Gairdner’s somewhat right-leaning views.
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I mean…the subject is steroid use, not global warming and AIDS, right???
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Stick to the topic at hand people.
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~ALOHA~

By: really?

really? — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 22:28:42 +0000

Hello William,
While I may have spoken too quickly about you explicitly stating that condoms cause HIV/AIDS, in your essay “Condom’s (sic) and HIV” you definitely make a very (deliberately?) misleading analogy between giving today’s youth condoms and giving them alcohol, heroin and tobacco. Given that these substances are known to be the CAUSES of multiple harms, it would definitely be a common inference to assume that the condoms are themselves playing a causal role in the harmful conditions of HIV and AIDS.
The closing sentence of “Darwin’s monkey-business”: “By now, Darwin’s theory sounds like monkey-business,” is surely an expression of your opinion. While there are of course “experts in the field” that argue that neo-Darwinism is false, given that there are so many people working in this field, the vast majority still see some version of evolution by natural selection as the most plausible explanation of the current state of affairs. I am very much aware of Nagel’s most recent book, and I am also, unlike you it seems, aware of the almost universal panning it received at the hands of scientists and philosophers (in a similar vein to the near-universal panning of the book by Michael Denton you quote).
The analogy between slavery and abortion is ludicrous. There is no such thing as the “abortion regime.” The debate over abortion is exactly the question whether fetuses should be counted as persons, and to assume that they are so is simply question-begging (as a self-proclaimed philosopher should know). While racist slave owners may have made claims as to the non-personhood of blacks, Jews etc. there was no philosophical basis here, simply racism and bad science. However, the personhood of fetuses is very much an open debate, given that fetuses lack many of the properties we see as essential to persons, such as rationality, the capacity to feel pain (at least early on in the pregnancy) and the ability to have goals and projects they care about.
As for global warming, the science is very much not up in the air. For a brief stint I worked at the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research at the Met office (the primary meteorological center for the UK), and the climate scientists there were responsible for a report in which they claimed that warming of the climate was “unequivocal” and that this was as a result of human action was “very likely.” The complexity of the system makes accurate quantitative predictions very difficult, but qualitative predictions are much less difficult and are in many cases confirmed by the science.

By: Stan

Stan — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 22:07:20 +0000

Btw a good chunk of “2/3″ word for such low wages..THAT’S why they don’t pay income tax. BUT,they DO pay payroll taxes.
And I can tell you the next level? pay income tax and don’t have enough returned to buy much more then a nice dinner. And I mean nice,not luxurious.

By: Stan

Stan — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 21:28:11 +0000

Evolution is NOT wrong. Its NOT debated by real scientists. Its a fundamental fact of biology. Its only questioned by quacks.
If one science Professor at UC Berkeley or Stanford doesn’t agree with me,I challenge them to say it. None will. Its called “Theory” not in laymen’s terms,but in a science FACT sense.
I can’t believe anybody in the 21ft century still pushes questioning the TOE. Ditto for Global Warming.
The rest..we could argue. Its not democracy that creates slaves…its unfettered capitalism.
Its proves once again that you can educate people,but you can’t make them smart.

By: William Gairdner

William Gairdner — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 19:43:10 +0000

Hello “Really” –
I did not write that birth control causes AIDS. I wrote that according to a US Navy expert on rubber technology, the AIDS virus is small enough to pass through the natural holes in latex like a bullet through a tennis net.
I did not express my own opinion that Evolution theory is false; I am not an expert in evolution theory. So I cited experts in the field who sincerely question the theory. Incidentally, Thomas Nagel, a renowned analytical philosopher and an atheist himself has just published Mind and Cosmos, in which he argues that Darwinian naturalism “is almost certainly false.”
And … I argue that the abortion regimes of the Western democracies are equivalent to slave regimes because they rely on the same technique as have all slave regimes: they create special laws that turn a certain class of human beings (blacks, Jews, Untouchables, the unborn, etc.) into non-persons or non-human beings so that they can own them, work them, or kill them, with impunity.
As for global warming? I argue that the “science” is still very much up in the (warming or cooling) air, as any honest investigation will soon reveal, because there are simply too many variables to make reliable analysis or prediction.

By: Stan

Stan — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 19:39:38 +0000

OMG..he is a right wing kook. I take back any connection. It looks like “Athletes took steroids long ago too” is all I agree with him.
You like THAT GUY? gun lover,2/3 of our people don’t pay taxes crap philosopher?