CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@evdelen @mayintoronto

Fair, yes, required, no. But it's entirely beside the point. If you seek to hold an opinion, (even if that opinion is "we should wait to decide") justifying that opinion by "the courts haven't decided", you are using a logical fallacy.

"I want to hear both sides of the argument" is a reasonable statement.

"The courts haven't adjudicated it so I am not allowed to have an opinion" isn't.

I recognize that you did add "(or at least until we see some evidence to back up the claims)" which is better than most people do, but it was still added as an aside, rather than the main point. You explicitly said you withhold your condemnation or moving instances until a finding of fact is made.

Frankly, I will admit that you're getting from me a lot of my frustration for frequently hearing this opinion regarding much worse and far clearer allegations, so maybe I'm a bit more frustrated by this, than is justified by the actual situation, but the fundamental point remains, this is a common logical fallacy that almost nobody recognizes.

@evdelen @mayintoronto

Are you his jailor?

I'm so tired of people pretending that "guilty in a court of law" is the only way we're allowed to have opinions about people's wrongdoing. Courts make findings about the guilt of someone in the eyes of the state justice system. I.e., the state and it's ability to imprison you is the ONLY entity that is bound to a court judgement.

So I'll say it clearly, it doesn't matter that a court hasn't made a finding yet, yes you're still allowed to have an opinion about someone's behaviour and have consequences for that.

To claim otherwise is nothing more than using a false claim (that ONLY a court can pass judgement) as justification for not having an opinion.

@jon I think they certainly do a very poor job of this, but I did hear somewhere that this train in particular is a challenge because it is the only train in the NS fleet which isn't straight sided.

@taylorlorenz Ultimately, you're not going to get everyone on board, no matter how you describe it. There are simply people, for whom a strongman authoritarian is the preferred form of governance (they believe it'll always be their strongman of course). These people will never prefer a distributed system.

But that's not such a helpful answer, hopefully there are good arguments for reading the remainder (majority) of people who prefer democratic governance and distributed power.