From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net)
Date: Mon Jan 03 2000 - 15:08:18 MST
> Many of you may consider that anyone daring to challenge
> the idea that the millennium begins today is only dragging
> out a completely trivial and "useless" argument.
...And they would be right. Definitions aren't knowledge,
and arguments about definitions are intellectual masturbation.
Feynmann makes a point of this eloquently when he talks about
people who can walk down a wooded trail and tell you the name
of every bird and every plant but don't actually know anything
about those birds or plants. Now if you knew, for example,
that this certain bird likes to eat this certain plant, but
you don't know the name of either one, you know more than the
person who can name both because you actually know a
substantive fact about nature, while ey knows nothing but
arbitrary names. "The Millennium" isn't a thing, it's just
the name of a thing. An arbitrary human convention utterly
without real substance, and beneath the dignity of rational
argument.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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