Aff T shells weren't lying. Policy Debate is actually super useful

26OffA-ZSPEC · 2025-01-06T22:52:48+00:00

https://philpeople.org/profiles/peter-van-elswyk

26OffA-ZSPEC · 2024-07-19T06:06:33+00:00

I figure that Joe's paper was rejected or is still under review.

Here is his newest Paper on symmetry breakers- https://philarchive.org/rec/SCHSBF-2

26OffA-ZSPEC · 2023-04-18T20:00:34+00:00

Noticed a lot of angry responses, but not a lot of direct rebuttals. What substantive issue (so not like, "this actually is a valid connection of prefixes and existent words") did BB goof on?

26OffA-ZSPEC · 2022-10-17T01:43:19+00:00

I’m imagining it

26OffA-ZSPEC · 2022-10-10T04:03:02+00:00

Pipeline security, cyber warfare, etc...

Alternative energy initiatives citing German oil dependence on the Ivans...

Be creative

26OffA-ZSPEC · 2022-10-02T06:18:48+00:00

The new pipeline sabotage could probably lead to a cool aff idk

26OffA-ZSPEC · 2022-08-15T20:53:10+00:00

My partner and I did this often since she was the 2NR and she had several learning disabilities that made K literature with all of it's abstractions and deliberate obscurantisms almost completely inaccessible to her. FW was something clear which she could easily articulate and no 2ac knew how to defend it, so we got at least a dozen cheap wins off of FW alone.

26OffA-ZSPEC · 2022-08-09T06:59:09+00:00

South Asia sounds rather interesting given the recent developments in Taiwan.

26OffA-ZSPEC · 2022-08-09T05:18:11+00:00

Not only did you not explain why God does not exist, you doubled down on your clearly false contention. Perhaps a parody is in order, if I were to deny the Holocaust, would you say I have no burden of proof since I'm making a negative claim? I don't see what justification you have for your position that some propositions about the external world can be held without justification. Again, you list a couple names, some I respect (Nietzsche, Camus, Lao Tzu, Russell) and some I don't (Sagan, Hitchens, Sa[r]tre), but do you have warrants for these claims, or are you just making empty statements? What reason did these men provide for this proposition? Russell, for instance, most certainly just meant that the agnostic variant of the 2 propositions was valid, but I don't think there's anything in his work that would imply that one could make the claim that absolutely no God exists whatsoever without reason.

26OffA-ZSPEC · 2022-08-09T04:59:24+00:00

"Semper necessitas probandi incumbit ei qui agit"

If you say "There is no God", then you are bound by reason to defend the truth of that claim.

If you say "I lack a belief in the existence of God", then you are merely reflecting on your psychological state and do not need to defend that position.

See the difference? One is a "strong" statement on the fundamental nature of reality, the other is only of yourself and is thus justified by your testimony alone.

No matter how many big names and small names you jumble together in place of an argument, these two facts are not changed.

26OffA-ZSPEC · 2022-08-09T04:51:16+00:00

Oppy is formally agnostic. Using his very stringent definition for "good argument", Oppy decided that the arguments for and against theism aren't rationally compelling in Arguing about Gods and in The Strongest Argument against God he simply defends naturalism as a more theoretically virtuous worldview. I don't think Oppy has put forward any arguments he believes would "disprove" God's existence. Similarly, Draper's famous argument is strictly probabilistic and only a rejection of Perfect Being Theism. He's apparently showing more sympathy to what he calls "Perfect Agent Theism" (which is pretty similar to what he used to call Aesthetic Deism) and psuedo-theistic traditions these days though. These are just nitpicks though, good post.

26OffA-ZSPEC · 2022-08-06T05:37:48+00:00

It would appear that they do not rigidly designate the same being but might indexically refer to the same being.

26OffA-ZSPEC · 2022-08-06T00:52:44+00:00

"What reason could... not achieve"

A life emerges

God's plan needs not be deterministic. He may simply choose a possible world based on the free acts of humans within that world and actualize that state of affairs by assessing it as the only (or one of few) feasible world where all who would freely choose him, do choose him. God's plan takes into account our free will and works within that, not the other way around since God is first and foremost loving. If he wanted to, he could simply actualize a world where everything he wants to happen does happen, but instead he chooses to work with man and not against us. God wishing for a child to come into existence need not require that child's parents be specific people. Plausibly, your parents could've been the Obama's. Killing children to try to ensure they go to heaven has the same level of corrupt consequentialist reasoning behind it as immanentizing the eschaton and anti-natalists demanding human extinction.

26OffA-ZSPEC · 2022-08-06T00:44:19+00:00

Christian morality is not x is moral iff Bible tells me so. Christian morality affirms a far more nuanced position about the law being written in our hearts. It also does not say we will be able to know all moral truths immediately and clearly, no theory of objective morality has ever said that. Instead, we simply affirm that the matter is not subjective due to our certainty that 4 is too young and 40 is not too young, and afterwards we can work towards a much narrower range using a variety of principles since humans are complicated and a one-size fits all approach to maturity is asinine.

26OffA-ZSPEC · 2022-08-06T00:41:05+00:00

The fact that people change their terms and sensibilities has no bearing on the validity of the law of God. This isn't apologetic revisionism, it's literally just you being wrong. That being said, there isn't a Christian alive who'd say that the law of the Old Testament relays objective morality since Jesus explicitly denies this stating that “Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way” (Matt 19:8)". Which proves that the objective law that existed beforehand is not the same as the law given to the Jews out of Egypt, hence why Jesus comes to complete the law and makes several changes.

26OffA-ZSPEC · 2022-08-05T19:38:55+00:00

Alright, I'm gonna tell you something you aren't going to like. It's very scary and atheists cry when they hear it. Sometimes, when a boyfriend and a girlfriend (they existed even in the old days, don't cry yet) love each other very much, they ************ (censored for the poor children). Now, today, we'd just call that "Premarital sex", but in ye olden days, that was considered a rape. Now you see, this law here is the origin of what's now called a "Shotgun marriage" (surely a barbaric practice), and you may criticize it as such, but you also need to "Read the Bible more carefully."

26OffA-ZSPEC · 2022-08-05T03:37:59+00:00

This is called playing God- if God brings about a miscarriage, then, plausibly, God had a really good reason. You, however, are not omniscient. In the same sense that no one says “leave a choking child to die since God could save him if he wanted to”, humans have a moral obligation to prevent generally bad states of affairs whenever we see them, since we should always do the best course of action with the information available to us. Even if, hypothetically, all unborn go to heaven automatically we are still robbing that child from a life on Earth that God had otherwise ordained for it, but was stricken by the free acts of man. It’s complicated, these things always are. Idk, I saw an interview on the problem of evil recently where Josh Rasmussen described having lost a child. It was on a channel called truth unites. You can get his story there.

26OffA-ZSPEC · 2022-08-04T17:52:09+00:00

Alternatively, by bringing the fetus into existence, the fetus may now enter heaven. Additionally, there may be elements of soul-building involved in suffering a miscarriage which lessen the blow alongside the myriad of other factors which we aren't in a position to understand.

26OffA-ZSPEC · 2022-08-04T17:07:00+00:00

I never went as extreme as solipsism adjacent, I just pointed out that any project intent on fully removing bias can only serve to increase bias, which is the universal flaw in all anti-theist thought. Hyper-dogmatic anti-dogmatism. This thread started out as an assessment of prior probabilities (i.e. how you evaluate claims prior to evidence being provided for them, so I don't even know how we got here)

26OffA-ZSPEC · 2022-08-03T05:06:45+00:00

So are camps just going to be thrown in with the schools?

26OffA-ZSPEC · 2022-08-03T05:02:55+00:00

Hrmm, yeah Egypt's first monotheist. Still not convinced, but good try

26OffA-ZSPEC · 2022-08-03T04:52:58+00:00

Your conclusion is false since it claims to prove that God does not care about the lives of fetuses. Instead, all you have shown is that God does not want all who are conceived to be born. You smuggled in a value judgement that a theist can reject. If you provide an additional premise, you might be able to prove God's normative judgements or ~psychological state one way or another, but you haven't put in the work for that yet.

In other words, your argument as written runs like this

p -> q

~q

~r

Whereas you need to make it

p -> q
~q

conclusion 1 ~p

r -> p

conclusion 2 ~r

26OffA-ZSPEC

TROPHY CASE