Here. The thread is about children accidentally being left in hot cars and dieing. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=567702&page=3
Overall, the guy aint stupid, but when it comes to kids and parenting he probably becomes one of the most stupid, back pedaling, goal post moving, obtuse, ignorant, illogical, pendantic, irrational, crazy posters here. And THATS saying something.
After his rantings in the guys with underage girls thread awhile back…well, I don’t find ANYBODY else here worse than him when he goes on these rants.
His main point seems to be that, accident or not, leaving a baby in a car to die is negligent homicide.
He might go a bit far with this post, but I don’t see how he’s wrong with the general point that you are going to have a very hard time discerning intent of the maybe-negligent-maybe-not parent in these cases.
Dio’s main point that he came blazing in with was that it was IMPOSSIBLE for it to happen to HIM because he’s SPECIAL*, which is how he usually comes blazing into threads.
You’re right, but probably not in the way that Dio wants it to be right. He’s just like most parents, who say it can’t happen to them. Unfortunately for Dio and “most parents”, a belief isn’t correct just because it’s widely held.
I think it’s more a matter of philosophy than of statistics. I’m a parent just like Dio, and I also believe that a complete, catastrophic failure of one’s most basic parental duty - keeping your kid alive - doesn’t just “happen”. Saying it “happens” is an excuse. **Dio **is ex-military, and a basic element of the military outlook is that shit doesn’t just happen. If you fall asleep on guard duty, you didn’t just doze off by chance; if you accidentally discharge your weapon at a friend, you can’t claim that it was an accident. You’re responsible, period. The fact that shit *does *happen - that accidents can happen to anyone - doesn’t factor into this.
Well, the evidence does support him. Most parents don’t forget their kid’s in the car. Some do, and those were the ones who were wrong–doesn’t mean he, or the other ones are.
Because this campaign against Diogenes almsot always ends in “Yeah, well he may be right but he’s not nice enough about it” then I think you’re going to have a hard time getting many adherents billfish. Keep trying though. You may find some more emotionally wounded nutless monkeys to rally to your cause.
I have to admit, in that thread, it was fairly amusing when he leapt from “if you don’t think that every parent who accidentally killed their kid should be thrown in to jail for the rest of their lives” to “you clearly think child murder should be legal”.
That’s a bit like saying “I dealt 50 cards out of this deck, and none of them were the ace of spades, so statistically speaking the ace of spades must be missing from this deck.” The fact that most parents don’t leave their kids in the car doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of doing so. What Dio fails to ken is that some parents who claimed just the same as him–that they were incapable of leaving their kids in the car–have done just that.
I realize that there may be differences between those parents and Dio, but Dio hasn’t exactly been forthcoming on what those differences might be. Perhaps if he didn’t get so uber-defensive about his logical inconsistencies, we might find out what those are.
In addition to this, I think another of Dio’s peculiarities is his complete inability to take intent into account. He sees a series of actions and thinks he knows all that is necessary to fully determine the situation. Ergo, all actions that lead to a dead kid are murder, all actions that lead to sex with an underage girl are equally bad, etc.
Both of those things feed into his political philosophy. When he thinks society would be better with a particular result, then he thinks the government should force that result to be the case. He doesn’t consider such things as the propriety of the policy for other reasons, possible unintended consequences, or the incentives it will create.
Dio is one of my favorite posters. But then again, I don’t frequent MPSIMS.
His rhetoric tends to be blunt, and he usually leaves clarification for a later post. I typically shrug and simply fill in the blanks in his initial presentation myself. And yeah, I usually find his basic point to be plausible, however starkly expressed.
