My responses to Michael Shermer

[CFLarsen]

That's an example of the sophistry I referred to earlier.

"Invisible Pink Unicorn" is a rhetorical device intended to show that any absurd claim can be made. Proving the claim is the burden of the claimant.

If you claim to see infrared, I would say, "Evidence, please." and "We can help devise a test to prove your claim."

Given what we know of the physiology of human vision, there's a very good chance you can't see in the infrared, but it's a testable claim. You'd have to prove it. I wouldn't have to disprove it.

If you claim to talk to the dead, I would say, "Evidence, please." and "We can help devise a test to prove your claim."

I can't prove that you don't have infrared vision. You can't prove that I don't have an Invisible Pink Unicorn in my garage.

It's not just a question of me being able to see in the infrared. It's also a question me perceiving it as pink. It's far from impossible, even: Eyes could be picking up infrared, and some people see some colors as something else.

Ergo, pink and invisible are not exclusive.

 

[RSLancastr]

It's very common on the Internet to see Americans being "patriotic" and making statements assuming all their readers live on the same bit of turf, and I don't know whether it's because they're the majority, but to my subjective eyes it appears that people of other nationalities don't have this tendency.

I'm an American, and I think this tendency may be at least in part due to the size of our country.

I live on the West Coast (of the USA), and can drive 3,000 miles due east, and never leave the country. It is not uncommon for people here to live their entire life without ever being outside our national borders.

In many other countries, this isn't the case. The fact that you may have several other countries within a day's drive, and that all those countries have immediate effects on each other, helps keep it firmly in a person's mind that theirs isn't the only country around.

Back in 1999, I spent a few weeks in Europe on business, and one thing I noticed when watching the nightly news was that things happening in neighboring countries were nearly as prominent in local news as were events in the country I was visiting. For example, there was a mad-cow scare in Belgium at the time, which of course had a direct and imediate effect on all of the other countries I was visiting (Netherlands, England and France).

Here, unless a person lives near the Mexican or Canadian border, that just isn't the case. And even then, it's just the one other country which has an immediate effect on the locals.

For me, having grown up in Los Angeles county, California, even other STATES in the USA seem distant. It's a four-hour drive to the nearest state, and I could drive for 12 freeway hours due north and still be in California.

People who grow up in New England, where there are several, smaller states grouped together, have a different way of thinking about "other states." A person can live in one of those states and drive to work two states away. Here in L.A., that's a very foreign concept!

Here in L.A., it is very easy to think of other states as something which don't have much effect on us (whether it is true or not). And it is very easy to think of other countries as almost being on another planet entirely.

This is also largely responsible for the fact that so many Americans speak only English. In Europe (for example), you can't travel far in any direction without being in a country where your native language is not spoken. Here, that's just not the case.

So, when you notice an American on the Internet writing in a way which makes it obvious he or she isn't taking readers from other countries into account, please know that it isn't necessarily due to some misguided, "patriotic" snub of you furriners.

Sometimes, it isn't patriotism. Its just geography.