It's Time to Boycott Arizona

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by DomnNC

Laughs, I was just pointing out that ALL countries engage in racial profiling. Is that such a hard concept to grasp? It has nothing to do with babies in Denmark for crying outloud.

Sigh, do I have to walk you through this? Really?

One more time:

And why is Canada any better? I just read an article where blacks are 3 times more prone to being pulled over as a result of racial profiling as the aborgines are. There is NO country that is immune to racial profiling.

Your argument is flawed because one can make a comparison between the social circumstances of any given number of nations--in this specific instance the United States and Canada--without making any *absolute* statement about those conditions. In other words, saying that racial profiling happens in the USA does NOT make any kind of statement about whether or not racial profiling happens in other countries. What's more, even if someone had said that racial profiling is MORE common in the United States than it is in Canada that does NOT change the statement to mean that racial profiling happens in the former but not the latter. It is merely to state that if, say, 1 in every thousand black Canadians is stopped for driving while black while 5 in every 1000 black Americans is stopped for the same thing that racial profiling is more common in the USA than it is in Canada.

Taking the words I quoted above to mean precisely what they appear to mean, you seem to believe that if I say X happens more in Oregon than it does in New York I am saying that X ONLY happens in New York. That is the argument I am making.

So, what do the relative fates of babies in Oregon and Denmark have to do with it? It's called an argument by analogy. What I was trying to get across and which you completely failed to grasp although I thought I'd made it clear was this:

One can make a comparison between any two nations without making ANY absolute statement about whether some phenomena occurs in some nation. So I can point out that a baby in Denmark will, on average, live longer than a baby born the same day in Oregon without being committed to the idea that because the baby born in Denmark will live longer it means that the baby in Oregon is already dead.

The logic you are deploying in the statement quoted above is that to say that the average lifespan of a Danish baby is longer than an American baby is to say that all babies in America are stillborn. I was pointing out, by way of analogy, that your logic is flawed. I'm absolutely mystified that you seemed to think that some point was being made about Danish babies.

I will freely admit that I am no Shakespeare but I think I'm a pretty decent writer and can make myself generally well understood so how you could miss the point I was making and think that somehow I was arguing something critical about Danish babies is beyond my comprehension.

Cheers
Aj