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TWO TOUGH QUESTIONS

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Duane:
My father once told me about the "invincibleness" of the Titanic and how man claimed that "even God couldn't sink it and the people aboard partied with reckless abandon"  BUT then Dad asked if I knew what hymn the band played as the ship was sinking.  I didn't.  The answer: "Nearer My God to Thee".
My wife and I went and saw the movie.  Sure enough, the ship was sinking and the conductor knew they were doomed to die so he had the remainder of the orchestra play "Nearer My God to Thee"  but the impact was lost on tha audience, who didn't know the song
so it was "just music".  I felt like yelling out "doesn't ANYBODY know WHAT THEY ARE PLAYING??  (sometimes it feels nice to not be
"just the common folks"!)  ;D

Heidi:
Wow Samson you had me and my husband completely fooled.....we turned it into a discussion and were amazed at the answers.....very interesting. 

Heidi

Fester:
 
Snopes has a good writeup about this glurge:

Good advice, but unfortunately it's presented with some glurgiously bad examples.

We'll tackle the second half first. It has some good points, namely that by selectively choosing which facts to report, you can make just about anyone look good or bad. It also (perhaps unintentionally) provides an example demonstrating that facts offered out of context can be more misleading than no facts at all: Hitler's diet was primarily vegetarian throughout the latter part of his life; however, he didn't adopt a vegetarian diet for moral reasons, but because he suffered from gastric
problems.

Still, some of the semantic trickery used here makes this a rather poor example. Hitler had affairs with several women (some of whom died under mysterious circumstances), but they weren't technically "extramarital" affairs because he wasn't married. Playing games with language might also be part of the lesson here, but we suspect that whoever crafted this piece included some misinformation by mistake, not by design.

The Beethoven example is egregiously misleading. Beethoven was born well over two hundred years ago, in an era when the infant mortality was quite high by modern standards, and even infants who survived were often afflicted with serious health problems. Children didn't die or experience physical problems so frequently back then simply because they were all born to mothers who were themselves in poor health, as is implied here. Offering an 18th century example in a 20th century setting is a very poor way of making a serious point.

Also, Beethoven was not born to a woman who "had 8 kids already." Although his mother, Maria Magdalena Laym (nee Kewerich) gave birth a total of eight times during her lifetime, Ludwig was only her third child. (Her first two children, one from a previous marriage, both died in infancy.) Only two of Beethoven's five younger siblings survived beyond their first few years of their life.

Even if we take this example at face value, its message is still problematic. If the woman in the example had been advised to abort her pregnancy based on the (mis)information supplied here, the world would never have known the magic of Beethoven's music. But maybe a different woman who did opt to terminate her pregnancy might have spared the world another Stalin or Hitler. This is the sort of speculative "What if?" game that neither side can win, so it's best not to play at all.

Patrick:

--- Quote from: Fester ---

This is the sort of speculative "What if?" game that neither side can win, so it's best not to play at all.



--- End quote ---

Reminds me of a quote from the film "War Games";
Joshua: (speaking about the game of Global Thermonuclear War) "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"  :)

Duane:
What if there were no such things as hypothetical questions?? ;)

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