Thanks, that is good advice. Honestly hadn't thought of that - oh well. Errare humanum est and all that...

Hi everyone.

I've already posted a couple of pieces - probably should have visited this page first, especially before posting my last piece. Well, such is life.

I headed over to LessWrong because I was/am a bit burned out by the high-octane conversations that go on online. I've disagreed with some things I've read here, but never wanted to beat my head - or someone else's - against a wall. So, I'm here to learn. I like the sequences have picked up some good points already - especially about replacing the symbol with the substance.

Question - what's the ettiquette about linking stuff from one's own blog? I'm not trying to do self-promotion here, but there's one or two ideas I've developed elsewhere & would find it useful to refer to them.

I was wondering why it got downvoted so much. Did you mean the post over at my blog, or this post here? I'm really not sure what's so inflammatory about this post - I was just trying to explain an idea.

Yes, as a matter of fact. He often travelled in Kurdistan, had Kurdish "comrades" as he called them, and championed Jalal Talabani.

I should have made it clear - when I was referring to the articles on the Hitch, they were usually from respectable news organizations such as The Guardian or Salon - and so on.

In case it wasn't clear (reviewing the article) I was quoting Conservapedia as an example of this kind of bad arguing, bad reasoning.

Could be two different uses of the word rationality. There are certainly those who call themselves "reality based" or whatever and therefore assume that everything they assert is rational and scientific. But if you invest yourself in "doing rationality" rather than "being rational" you might do better.

Could you expand on that? I'm not sure I follow...

Thanks - you're quite right. That is the study I was thinking of, and 79% is still horrifyingly high - sorry for getting that wrong, and thanks for the correction!

Just to take your last point, my response is that this is both a strawman and an argument from intimidation. Take this:

"you make the claim Hitler's sole motivation was killing Jews"

Did I? Where? I said that Hitler's motivation was his fanatical racism and that the desire to murder the Jews was a large part of that - was, in fact, an inextricable part of that. His racism wasn't the result of the war, it was the cause of the war. As you admit towards the end.

"You know what would be even more effective for pursuing an overriding terminal goal of killing Jews and nothing else? Not starting that war in the first place."

Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary "The Führer recognizes the enormous opportunity that the war provides". Hitler needed the night and fog of war, not to mention the hysteria that war brings, to carry out his plans.

"What am I going to do, paste the whole book inline? "

Well, quote something from the book rather than just drop its title.

"he slave labor camps of millions of people (only some of which were Jews) were a late solution for acute labor shortages and the killings purely tangential. "

The mass murder of those considered racially inferior was purely tangential? Well, if that's the way you think, then that's the way you think. There is a simple answer to this: the Wahnsee decision was to exterminate the Jewish people, and then the Slavs (there is some evidence that Hitler wanted to depopulate Africa after Europe was conquered), and there were camps that were purely devoted to the business of mass murder, no slave labour involved - Sobibor, Chelmno, Treblinka. The Nazi camps were not like the labour camps of the Soviet Union, they were murder facilities. To argue that the mass murder in the east is tangential is completely ahistoric.

Since the civilized tone of debate has become strained here, I think I will leave it there.

You don't... but others do. Dinesh D'Souza has written a book detailing the "root causes" argument, but with a twist - the quotations and other evidence he amasses are from a socially conservative perspective. That is, he makes exactly the same, fully backed up "root causes" argument, but differs on the root causes in question.

Again, I am trying to make the point that what you find obvious isn't at all what others find obvious. People change radically across time and space.