Scheme as a virtual machine?

namekuseijin namekuseijin at gmail.com
Thu Nov 25 13:39:24 EST 2010


On 25 nov, 14:30, m_mom... at yahoo.com (Mario S. Mommer) wrote:
> Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavall... at pas.despam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com>
> writes:
>
> > On 2010-11-24 16:19:49 -0500, toby said:
>
> >> And furthermore, he has cooties.
>
> > Once again, not all ad hominem arguments are ad hominem
> > fallacies. Financial conflict of interest is a prime example of a
> > perfectly valid ad hominem argument.
>
> It has limited validity. People are way more complicated than the
> simplistic "follow your own selfish egoistic interests to the letter
> without taking prisoners" model of human behavior that seems
> (unfortunately) so prevalent nowadays.
>
> > People who parse patterns but not semantics are apt to fall into the
> > error of believing that "ad hominem" automatically means "logically
> > invalid." This is not the case.
>
> In the realm of pure logic, ad hominems are logically invalid,
> period. However, if the question cannot be resolved by its own merits,
> simple logic has little to say, and you may include additional
> information in a sort-of Bayesian fashion.
>
> Saying that a conflict of interest means that nothing this person says
> makes any sense at all is in a way an admission that the subject of
> discussion is not very amenable to rational argument.

I have to say I'm always amazed how ad hominens can generate quite
strong responses to the point of making a lot of new faces (or mail
accounts) suddenly appear... ;)



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