Reason vs. Emotion.

[chrismb]

On that subject, here in the UK there is a 'sex offenders' register, where they have to sign on and keep the police informed of their whereabouts and activities. We've fallen short of the 'Megan's Law' so far, but I understand a trail ('Sarah's law) of a similar arrangement to make the register public is to be coming in to force next year.

So I mention this because, to my understanding, to date there have been two individuals added for having sex with inanimate objects. Do such people really need to be added to a sex offenders register? In one case, a man was resident in a hostel. Cleaners heard 'strange noises' from his locked room, made their entry, and found him having sex with his pedal-bicycle. They called the Police who prosecuted him for some reason or another.

Now if that had been a female with a 'toy' and the cleaners were male, they'd have been the ones on the sex offenders register, presumably!!!

The only other man to have been added to the UK sex offenders register without it involving someone else was a man who had a passion for having sex with holes in the pavement. I guess I can see a logical reason for trying to stop that behaviour.

In one case [again, not unreasonably in the circumstances!!] a Court order was made out to a man in his 60's who liked to dress up as a school girl and stand outside school gates waiting for school to start. The Court, [very reasonably, I thought] made out an order that prevented him doing so before 10.30AM. Unfortunately, the urge to get to school was, clearly, too great for him and he broke the order.

There was a documentary some time back that followed this elderly coloured chap who kept saying he was related to the Queen. He did nothing else, made no threats, did nothing else particularly unusual, but he was 'sectioned'; forcibly taken in for psychiatric treatment and given drugs to 'fix' his view that he was related to the Queen.

Does society act act out of reason or emotion when it deals with such people? They may be beyond reason, but why does the State have to act beyond reason as well? I am now completely confused by the behaviour of both the majority of the world's people and also the world's State Authorities, and I reckon that means the majority act out of emotion because I can see no reason to most of it.

[GIThruster]

There was a documentary some time back that followed this elderly coloured chap who kept saying he was related to the Queen. He did nothing else, made no threats, did nothing else particularly unusual, but he was 'sectioned'; forcibly taken in for psychiatric treatment and given drugs to 'fix' his view that he was related to the Queen.

Does society act act out of reason or emotion when it deals with such people?

People who have these kinds of delusions often also have hallucinations and because these are both so unpredictable, they need treatment. Generally such things have one of two causes: either the issue is morphological, in which case it can be seen with a scan--too many connections between the left and right hemispheres of the brain cause these things, or the cause is toxilogical--the person was poisoned with an hallucinogen. Either way, when someone is so separated from reality, helping them back with lithium or some such really is an example of paternalistic behavior that is warranted. Such a person can't ask for help because they don't know they're sick.

[MSimon]

There was a documentary some time back that followed this elderly coloured chap who kept saying he was related to the Queen. He did nothing else, made no threats, did nothing else particularly unusual, but he was 'sectioned'; forcibly taken in for psychiatric treatment and given drugs to 'fix' his view that he was related to the Queen.

Does society act act out of reason or emotion when it deals with such people?

People who have these kinds of delusions often also have hallucinations and because these are both so unpredictable, they need treatment. Generally such things have one of two causes: either the issue is morphological, in which case it can be seen with a scan--too many connections between the left and right hemispheres of the brain cause these things, or the cause is toxilogical--the person was poisoned with an hallucinogen. Either way, when someone is so separated from reality, helping them back with lithium or some such really is an example of paternalistic behavior that is warranted. Such a person can't ask for help because they don't know they're sick.

We need to do something about mothers milk which contains significant amounts of endocannabinoids. Mothers who start their kids on breast milk are poisoning them with marijuana analogs.

There ought to be a law.

[Diogenes]

The point is reason wouldn't have worked.

Again you only say this, not showing evidence either in principle or practice; it's at best an appeal to authority. You don't tie this in to the main arc of debate: that a free people minimally governed could or couldn't flourish, with COMPREHENSIVELY regulated but generally legalized (not blindly prohibited, no "war on drugs") chemical compounds as a characteristic instance.

I "say" this, because from my perspective it is axiomatic. The woman was guilty. The jury, all male, most likely married, churchified, and upstanding citizens, as was the common practice of the day, (The saloon prostituting types wouldn't have been on the jury) would have held with the law under the facts of the case. It is only the appeal to emotion that swayed them. The woman was guilty of the crime she was accused. No amount of reasoning was going to change that.

You are basically arguing that people don't and can't mature emotionally (asking oneself what the premises are for one's emotions, and checking them against reality), beyond some helpless level where they can't function in an environment full of liberty's pros and cons: both opportunity and hazard, but all predictable because bound to the laws of causality. You're setting the stage for a stagnating country, at the very least a country that's not true to the USA's founding principles.

I am simply pointing out that people are what they are, not what I wish them to be. There are reasons why emotional appeals work. It has to do with characteristics of human nature. Stuff i've discussed before, but that get into too much detail to go over again here. I recommend the book "The Lucifer Principle". It covers a lot of reasons why people do what they do. It has a few flaws in it, but a clever person can see past those.

Refusing reason as the fundamental element of policy is a divider not a uniter.
It leaves no common ground to resolve disputes because it takes all differences of opinion that are "bourne from emotion" as inherently unreconcilable. .

I didn't say reason couldn't work. I just said emotion (if you can find a way to apply it.) works better for most people. Even "reasonable" ones.

It's the basis for perpetual polarization and entrenchment (and what's worse not limited to only a few factions, i.e. fractal splintering into fundie groups none sensible to reason) that's dividing the USA not in the manner of healthy debate, of reasonable checks and balances, but of fundamental theology with no room for rational resolution.

Now you are describing how Politics in America works nowadays.
Don't you think Nanzi Pelosi is batshit crazy? So are her voters.

Someone who refuses to hear reason that shows his emotional basis as incorrect in whatever way, is someone who is wrong. Period. You can't polish a turd and you can't absolve people from the responsibility of knowingly and willfully drugging themselves to ruin.

You can freeze it in liquid nitrogen, and then use a diamond abrasive.

Saying that people act stupid and thus both govt policy and public culture should conform to this trend while doing nothing to resolve it is stupid. Like saying your car just lost a wheel, and therefore the solution is that you should drive in such a way as to keep the car balanced so the bare axle-end doesn't touch the ground; not that you should replace the wheel.

I look at drug usages the same way I look at the spread of disease. It follows a pattern. If you can get ahead of it and interdict the spread, you can contain it. If you isolate the infected till they are either cured or die, you can eventually wipe out the disease.

Who else could do this? Can you argue that a disease (such as bubonic plague) should not require governmental capabilities to fight it? The word Quarantine comes from Italy. It is derived from quaranta, which means forty. It was the number of days that ships had to wait to come into harbor to insure that they were free of plague.

It is the rightful place of the government to stop disease from spreading because no one else can do it. Drugs are exactly like a disease.

if there were a disease that gave you euphoria before it killed you, people would be demanding their right to get infected, just like they are demanding a right to get infected with the drug meme.

[Diogenes]

Reason vs emotion is a red herring. People without emotion can't reason. There are numerous studies and I will let you look for them.

I want to go into why - we are not intrinsically reasoners. We are pattern recognition systems. Emotion is a signal of pattern recognition. If you have trained your pattern recognition system well you can do a tolerable job of reasoning.

======

BTW another big defection from the drug war. In case you don't read the article McKay was a top prosecutor in the Seattle area who just finished a high profile case against a Canadian seed exporter:

Our marijuana policy is dangerous and wrong and should be changed through the legislative process to better protect the public safety," he wrote.

Marijuana prohibition "has utterly failed," McKay concluded. "The demand for marijuana in this country has for decades outpaced the ability of law enforcement to eliminate it," he declared, ready to throw in the towel.

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/201 ... ction.html

You will note that he did not speak out until after he was retired. So much for integrity. Or as I would rather put it - the Drug War is a jobs program. And you can't keep your job if you tell the truth. Nice set of incentives we have.

So D is it possible you are being lied to by people who just want to keep their phony baloney jobs? How is this any different from Barney Frank and Chris Dodd lying about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack?

=====


I am not a searcher of internet archives for information regarding drugs, or the governments pronouncements thereof. I don't care if they are lying to me because i'm not listening to them anyway. My own experiences are the basis of my abhorrence towards hard drugs, and unless the government hired all those people to pose as actors to the point of severely injuring and killing themselves, then I will have to conclude that it's not a government conspiracy, and drugs really are bad for anyone who comes in contact with them.

So what is the pattern evidenced here? Government will lie to keep the money coming. Or as I like to put it: a wallet extraction scheme.

Yeah, I never understood this allegation. I don't see how the "government" makes a profit on pursuing the drug war. Apart from that, the government doesn't really care about money.
You would have a better argument if you said that those people in power in the government want to command as many people as they can, and have control over as many people as possible, because that is a status thing, and "status" is one of those things that individuals care greatly about.

They can hire more police (who work for them.) they can hire more guards (who work for them) they can hire more architects to build prisons (who work for them) and they can strut around fulfilling their own sense of self importance. THAT I can understand.

That they are making a profit for the Government? THAT I don't get.

[Diogenes]

It's a red herring but the pattern those words refer to do exist. Hadn't you said that emotionless people can reason, only not make choices hinged on personal import? E.G. can figure out how socks are woven, but not which ones they want to wear.

Either way, appeal to emotion is fallacious.

Fallacy has nothing to do with it. Fallacy, in many cases, is actually a feature, not a bug.

[Diogenes]

So where does D go wrong in his pattern recognizing:

There is no problem so complex that it can't be solved by putting a gun to people's heads.

If you are drilling a hole in the boat i'm riding in, I feel obligated to put a gun to your head if that's what it takes to make you stop doing it.

Ultima Ratio Regis.

1. Not true - excesses in that direction lead to revolutions.
2. If there is not excess you merely get black markets.

It is an anti-liberty stance to be sure. Liberals of course take the same stance (that should be a clue right there of the inherent defect of the position). The objects of their desire for power and control are just different from the conservatives. The impulse is the same. (I see a pattern).

Do you see the pattern of drugs bringing a dictator? I do, but I think i'm looking deeper than you are.

So let us look at the not excess case further. Opiates.

At the time before the Harrison Narcotics Act when the drugs were over the counter, opiate use in America was 1.3%. After nearly 100 years of opiates being outlawed in America opiate use in America is 1.3%.

In other words several trillions of dollars have been spent to no effect.

Several thousands of gallons of water have been sprayed on the fire, but it is still burning. If only we could extinguish some of the burning pieces, we might be able to put out the fire.

And yet our D who claims to be no supporter of government programs now thinks that the waste has some good effects. Like keeping some people who would be harmed away from opiates.

Yeah, like the 90% who were addicted to opium in China! They are HARMLESS when they are on drugs. They were ESPECIALLY HARMLESS to the Japanese, and later Mao Tse Tung.

Well the evidence is in: prohibition doesn't matter when it comes to affecting opiate use. Those who want them get them. Those who don't want them don't get them. The big con is that by enacting a prohibition law some people actually fooled by words believe that prohibited means: unavailable. When what it actually means is available outside legal commercial channels. Wm. Burroughs calls this effect of words: "the word virus". The scary part? Liberals AND Conservatives are addicted to the word virus. The evidence is in: no matter how many times their plans fail those addicted to the word virus press on. Liberals can't learn from the failures of socialism and conservatives fail to heed the lessons of the USSR (where many items of commerce were prohibited) and alcohol prohibition.

The evidence IS in. China's 90% addiction to opium likely contributed to it's fall to the Japanese, and it's fall to Mao Tse Tung. People who want to learn the wrong lessons from history, want to repeat the experiment.

I wrote about it:

Heroin Has Been Destroying America For 100 Years

You can check on the source I cite and look at how good his stats are.

Boeing says their plane is better than the one Lockheed Martin makes.

[Diogenes]

I've walked past a number of Marc Emory's protests and demonstrations on the street while on business. As with all protest groups on Vancouver streets, I play a game of trying to pick out which member of the group is the VPD infiltrator and which one is the CSIS infiltrator, the two aren't aware of each other.

If the guy was moving over 5 tons of cocaine or over 40 pounds of heroin through the right airport in the US, and had the right connections, and got caught, he would be a free man with his drugs returned to him by the authorities to dispense with as he pleased.

http://madcowprod.com/

There was a documentary on the tube, a training film for police from the late 40's, early 50's. The claim was make that pot was being sold by organized crime at very low profit or no profit in relation to the jail time risked. The motivation was that people who experimented with pot would be more willing to experiment with harder drugs with the aim of experiencing different or more potent types of high. That would be where the profit kicked in. So in theory Marc could be stuck with more time that his business was worth.

It's like seed corn. You plant it and it eventually turns into something you can use.

[Diogenes]

If the prosecutors of the woman whom you are trying had brought her before the Savior, they would have accepted His challenge and each one gathered a rock and stoned her, in the twinkling of an eye. No, Gentlemen, do as your Master did twice under the same circumstances that surround you. Tell her to go in peace.

The Jury acquitted her immediately.

A prostitute, in 1899 small-town Oklahoma?

Of course this defence would work. The all-male jury had probably already known her!? "Cast, ye, the first stone who is free of guilt!" There could be no better defence!

That plea is considered by many attorneys to be an example of a perfect closing argument.

...providing the jury [feel that they] have participated in the same nature of the crime themselves. If someone were to have been shown to do dastardly deeds to a small child before slaying it, then I hardly thing the "hey, my client may be guilty - but aren't we all guilty of something?" approach would go down very well as a 'perfect defence'.

I postulate that the Jury was of Married, Upstanding, Churcified men of the community, and not the dregs of the saloon gutter trash that frequented prostitutes. If you want to get deeper into it, we can do some research and see if we can glean which of us was right, but that's my take on it.

[Betruger]

It's a red herring but the pattern those words refer to do exist. Hadn't you said that emotionless people can reason, only not make choices hinged on personal import? E.G. can figure out how socks are woven, but not which ones they want to wear.

Either way, appeal to emotion is fallacious.

Fallacy has nothing to do with it. Fallacy, in many cases, is actually a feature, not a bug.

You just don't get it. Again you just say something and show no evidence or explanation. What evidence is there that "fallacy has nothing to do with it"? Why is appeal to emotion a fallacy, by anyone's but your standard, then?
Next, whether an argument is fallacious purposefully or not, it's fallacious.

Why am I wasting my time debating this or anything with someone who can't even tell the difference between correct and flawed reasoning?

Govt...

What it sounds like is that you'll take any halfway good opportunity to bloat govt some more, and elsewhere in your arguments simply don't see the USA's founding values as essential. What people like you ought to do is take your govt way of life and start a new country.

[zDarby]

1) On Logic vs Emotion.

Evolutionary processes allow for things that make no sense as long as they do no damage. (Consider the duck's penis.) However, they do not allow for things which get in the way of survival. To my mind this would include most emotional behaviors. Which is to say that most (though not all) emotions must have a logic behind them which favors (or, at least, does not get in the way of) the survival of the genes they are attached to. They are, therefor, logical and rational in and of themselves.

However, an emotional response has a place. It is logical, for example, to feel scared while standing next to a cliff. But it is not logical to feel scared of the outdoors in general. The emotion is the same but the circumstance is not. And, in general, when an emotion emerges in inappropriate circumstances, it is considered a crazy or sick response. "That's what shrinks are for."

I submit that a healthy, correctly working mind will have the correct (IE logical) emotional response for any given circumstance if the circumstance is one in which humans evolved for. And that this *must* be true because the evolutionary processes will follow the path of reason and logic if given enough time for those algorithms to work out what that path is.

It is therefor not emotion that causes people to make incorrect (illogical) decisions but the lack of time for human emotions to have evolved the proper responses to human society. Which is to say, it's not that emotions are illogical it's that they are not evolved for the environment in which they find themselves.

One need no more example for the evolution of emotion over time and its inability to cope to human society than one's own visceral reaction to the following sentences:

"He was killed with a club."
"He was killed with an ax."
"He was killed with a sword."
"He was killed with a boomerang."
"He was killed with a pistol."
"He was killed in an explosion."

Notice in yourself that the more ancient the weapon, the more emotional the reaction to those statements. Why? Because emotional evolution has had long enough to learn what a club, ax and (to an extent) a sword is. But boomerangs, pistols and explosions really haven't been around long enough for that emotional knowledge to be wired in. Indeed, english has specific words to use with the more ancient of weapons: bludgeoned, hacked, sliced. Have we verbs specifically for the other three? I can't think of them. Maybe they're exist. But I doubt they have the same deep emotional reaction the other three have.

It is directly because emotional reactions have been around so long and done such a service to the genes of our ancestors that they are more persuasive than the (relatively) new method of rational thought. Your brain and nervous system has evolved to trust the emotional algorithms for much longer than they have evolved to trust the rational algorithms.

It is possible to overcome these predilections, but it takes training that is beyond the capabilities of our current educational system.

2) On the War On Drugs.

I live in the "Emerald Triangle" of Northern California. This is an area well known for its growing of high quality Marijuana. I have experienced the loss of friends and loved ones, young and old, to the addictions of various drugs, from meth and cocaine, to alcohol and tobacco. If there's anything I've learned from these experiences its that a person will either survive these trials by fire or they will not and nothing can be done from the outside to help. No program, no loved one, no nothing. If the addicted person does not want quit or is unwilling to spend the effort necessary to quit, they will die of their addiction. "Being there for someone" and/or drug programs are only for those who have already decided to climb their way out of their addiction. And for those who have made that decision, friends and programs are extremely helpful. Yet utterly useless for those who have not.

I have also experienced, first and third hand, what happens to law officers who are inducted into drug enforcement: They quickly learn how much money is involved on both sides, that these amounts have corrupted their superiors and they can either be corrupted as well or quit. Those that quit have a conscience. Those that don't do not. I have yet to see a counter example. Drug enforcement is corrupt from top to bottom. They steal it, use it and deal it.

Furthermore, my experiences, and those of this area in general, are that those of drug enforcement who last any length of time are steely eyed monsters of no conscience. In one well publicized incident, a helicopter landed in a private grassy field, the dog shot and the owners of the property --mother, father and children-- held at gunpoint for hours while the neighbors pot-garden was raided. Why? Because it was the only grassy field near the intended raid. When the raid was done, the enforcers got back in their 'copter and left. The owners sued the agency in question (CAMP) to no avail. Bureaucratic tape kept anything from happening for years. And when it looked like they were finally going to have their day in court, they (the owners) dropped the suit. Exactly why has never been publicized but it's widely assumed they were "convinced" to drop the suit by less than honorable means.

And why should any of this be a surprise when it's exactly what happened in the prohibition era. Regular police became corrupt or turned a blind eye. And prohibition enforcers became either corrupt or monsters.

The abuse of drugs is a medical issue, not a civil or legal one. Those who have addictive genomes get addicted. Those that don't, don't. Those that are addicted will do whatever it takes to get more. It is my opinion that the creation or use of narcotics should not be legislated in any way. But its sale should be exceedingly illegal. You want to grow/create it? You want to use it? You want to give it away? Not our problem. You want to stop using? Here's a program to help. You want to sell it, goto jail. Remove the money and the criminals will gravitate to other crimes. (Same thing for prostitution: decriminalize prostitutes completely. Make Johns and Pimps illegal. IE, You want to hawk your own body? Not our problem. You want to buy or sell someone else's body, goto jail.)

3) Rant.

I do not expect any one here to agree with me. And I don't expect to change anyone's mind. That's fine. I don't mind. I've made my statement. I'll read the responses but, as seems to be true of most who reply to this thread, I've made up my mind already and I don't expect y'all can change it.

That's right. I said it. My mind is made up and I doubt there's an argument that will change it. I understand this is to be expected of someone older than 35, even if it's only a year older, as I am.

To those who read this post, thank you for your time.
To those who wish to reply, ditto.
To those who wish to change my opinion, good luck. I hope you succeed.

[choff]

On reason vs emotion, reason is based on logic, but it can be proven that logic can't explain everything. Consider this following sentence:

"This statement is unproveable."

This is used to demonstrate the limitations of Boolean logic. Another example, science can explain how the universe was created from the big bang, but it can't explain the why of the universe. Before the universe we start delving into metaphysics.

On the drug issue, its a moot point whether you consider the war over or not, the damage from the corrupting influence might be too great. I've noticed that no one wants to go near what I consider the elephant in the room full of blind men. As indicated, for over 50 years the Venice Beach Airport has been crawling with spooks, drug runners, and within recent memory, 911 terrorists. To attempt to eliminate the corruption could cause another civil war, and I don't think the good guys have much of a chance.

[Betruger]

In so many words, emotional thinking is just another way of connecting the dots. What you think, rationally or emotionally motivated, is accurate if it matches reality. If you wake up tomorrow and punch someone because in the previous night's dream he punched you, it's not a well-founded motivation. Replace dream punch with something personal and intensely visceral, and still the emotional reaction on first sight of that someone the next day is not founded on reality.

The OP came about because appeal to emotion is considered by Diogenes to not be a fallacious appeal. Because crying children and relatives of drug junkies overrule, he argues, the plain truth of personal responsibility. The kind of plain truth that the USA was meant to foster and epitomize.

I submit that a healthy, correctly working mind will have the correct (IE logical) emotional response for any given circumstance if the circumstance is one in which humans evolved for. And that this *must* be true because the evolutionary processes will follow the path of reason and logic if given enough time for those algorithms to work out what that path is.

I submit that emotional maturity is in learning to weed out emotion when it gets in the way of your interests. I happen to have a fear of heights, but only when they're above me. Standing above a chasm is no problem, but the sight of immense things over and around me makes me nervous. I've learned to keep this feeling (it hasn't gone away) under control, because I also happen to love the sight of those immense things towering above and around.

Rinse & repeat with any other emotion of various degrees, (e.g. pain, fear, panic, etc) where they just get in the way; where they're nothing but a handicap.
Topical E.G. Mothers who fret about kids getting sick because they went out without their coat on a cold day. In fact to catch a cold you must contact with the cold virus.

[MSimon]

There are reasons why emotional appeals work.

Not so well with a gang of engineers.

Let me say this: when I blog for a general audience I use the appeal to emotion ALL the time (well most of the time - it makes the writing more interesting). But I never use such appeals until I have THOUROUGHLY reasoned through the subject with supporting evidence.

I consider the naked appeal to emotion without the intellectual support to back it up to be wrong. And I will NEVER do it. For one thing it weakens your argument because when it gets challenged you have nothing.

So far in many of your arguments all you have to fall back on is: "it is how I feel". And you have (to your credit) so stated. But you weaken your position if that is all you have and the other side has facts and figures.

==

One of the reasons we have juries is so that injustice is prevented. No law or set of laws can be mechanically applied without producing injustice. i.e. Goedel in a legal framework.

The most pernicious thing going in American Justice is the plea bargain. i.e. the situation where the prosecution throws everything at the defendant in the hopes that the defendant will plead guilty to avoid the chance of a long jail term. It is a perversion of justice. Which in theory is the desired outcome for our legal system.

In the 1991 book Presumed Guilty: When Innocent People Are Wrongly Convicted, author Martin Yant discusses the use of coercion in plea bargaining. (p. 172)

Even when the charges are more serious, prosecutors often can still bluff defense attorneys and their clients into pleading guilty to a lesser offense. As a result, people who might have been acquitted because of lack of evidence, but also who are in fact truly innocent, will often plead guilty to the charge. Why? In a word, fear. And the more numerous and serious the charges, studies have shown, the greater the fear. That explains why prosecutors sometimes seem to file every charge imaginable against defendants.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plea_bargain

[Betruger]

There are reasons why emotional appeals work.

Not so well with a gang of engineers.

Let me say this: when I blog for a general audience I use the appeal to emotion ALL the time (well most of the time - it makes the writing more interesting). But I never use such appeals until I have THOUROUGHLY reasoned through the subject with supporting evidence.

A plain question: Why do you appeal to emotion as described above?