Either or or orr or them or Them

Mr Google calls hot headed: having an impetuous or quick-tempered nature. He calls impulsive: acting or done without forethought. Well maybe there is an inch of difference between the two.  Myself I would use the terms interchangeably, but then I am no hair-splitting scourge.  But there is something in that acting without forethought, maybe we could expand it into acting without having or getting enough information.  This whole conversation started with that Burns documentary that I don't think any of us is watching, but if you didn't know much about Vietnam and your first notice was the Bay of Tonkin incident well it looked like commies were rearing their ugly, world-conquering, domino-toppling, heads and they needed to be whipped like curs, but if you had, or obtained, knowledge of the history of the country, well you would have a nuanced view and you may well have come up with another reaction than sending close to a million US troops into that maw.

It would seem that with more available knowledge available these days that we would have more to consider before acting.  But of course much of that information is false (If data is false, is it still data?), and anymore people are more interested in promoting their point of view with slander and name-calling that they play very fast and loose with the truth, well they used to play fast and loose, anymore they make shit up out of whole cloth, and instead of debating the logic of their positions against the opposing sides (like we proper Beaglestonians do) they just call them liars so that nothing they say should be listened to.

So, now I have to rethink 'hothead,' which one definition states is "a person who is impetuous or who easily becomes angry and violent."

I'm not sure what Old Dog is saying here, but the definition of OR is worth discussing with a logical scourge.  In some computer languages there are two OR statements, maybe OR and ORR.  If A or B is true than do C means that if either A or B is true than C is done, but If A orr B is true than do C, C is done if either A or B is true, but not if both are true.


I do not follow what Beagles is saying at all. I think we need to distinguish between the two thems. Them is that vague group who Beagles thinks is playing some kind of chess game with the world for some unknowable purpose, except that he's pretty sure it is nefarious, so it is up to him, and him alone, (because how can he trust anybody else since they may well be Them?) to figure out what They are doing so that he can do the opposite to thwart it.  The other them is simply the third person plural. It seems to me that Beagles could make his arguments more cogently by referring to Them as the Illuminati or the Trilateral Commission like the more mainstream nutballs do.

We have had this conversation many times.  A couple posts ago Beagles declared:  I used to believe all that stuff in those days, nowadays I'm not so sure.  I had hoped we was speaking of his Them obsession, but apparently he was talking about something else.

I have two words that will obliterate that whole theory:  Occam's razor.

Let's have a good weekend guys, and let's be careful out there.