I don’t know what Hine meant, and neither do you. The difference is you like to pretend that you do.
Ah, now you want us to believe that you are the illegitimate love child of Socrates and Sgt Schultz. Now you can explain why you keep arguing over something that you consider unknowable.
Iacoletti: It’s not a change of subject. The “did any other witness say..” counterargument is fallacious.
MT: Asserting that Hines meant that the building power went out creates a prediction, in a classic Karl Popper vein: everyone else in the building would have also seen the power go out. In turn, we should then expect at least one of these other unenlightened people to have spoken up about a the the remarkable coincidence of the lights mysteriously going out at a most interesting time. Dodging the issue trying to assert a non-existent fallacy isn't going to help you with anything other than looking like an ever bigger dork, kid.
You can “expect” what you like. That doesn’t prove anything.
I'm sorry if you don't like the scientific method. The rest of us will go on without you. But we will think of you as we always have, Kid: as an ever bigger dork.
Yes, it would be so much more convenient if everybody would just accept your omniscience.
I don't know about the omniscience part, but it seems like everyone else around here actually does accept with my position. Even the usual nay-sayer's choir isn't stepping up to defend your position. All I can say is that you've picked one heck of a molehill to die on.
You don’t know what Hine’s phone looked like. Stop pretending you do.
Like I said, I know what multiline phones were like back in those days. You don't, but it doesn't seem to bother you as you lash out in gross ignorance. I guess I don't know what color the thing was, but I know it had little lights that lit up to show which lines were in use and blinked on and off to indicate a line that was ringing an incoming call.
Now you’re pretending to know that Hine had a car too.
The car is rhetorical, which seems to have escaped you. The underlying point is real enough, though. If we want to talk about Hine's car (or anyone else's, since you want to object to her having one), we would normally assume that it had a steering wheel, since they all seem to be built with them nowadays. And yes, there are some exceptional cases where a car might not have a steering wheel. Maybe the driver is "special needs" (as we say now) and needs some novel, specialized alternative control device to steer the vehicle. Or, maybe the steering wheel was stolen, for some reason. Maybe it was faulty, fell off, and rolled down the 405 on it's own, last seen 10 miles out of Ventura, headed North. Shinola happens. But no one is going to look at a car and think, "gee, I wonder if there's a steering wheel inside? I mean, no one has ever proven that there is a steering wheel inside this particular car!" Steering wheels are ubiquitous enough in automobiles that any assertion that a car lacks a steering will will need at least some explanation, if not outright proof, of it's exceptional nature. If you want to assert that the phone system that Hine was [wo]manning, then you need to explain why you think it would have been an exception to the rule.
You’re reading it and pretending that your interpretation of it is the correct one. She said the lights went out. She didn’t say the lights on the phone went out. Get over it.
I'm saying is that my interpretation is the best explanation of the available evidence, no pretense necessary. In fact, it is far and away the best explanation of the evidence. If you think you have a better explanation, you are free to explicate. Anything else is a pile of sour grapes wielded by a man who desperately wishes to be counted among the biggest dorks in history.
