I wrote up a longer reply (which I still have, if necessary), but at this point the elephant in the room is the incoherent arguments and non-sequiturs, so I'm going to reply to those first, since I'm pretty sure they render everything else superfluous:
Another hole-ridden analogy. First, drug addicts have fundamentally impaired mental processes. Second, literally nothing about being a drug addict gives you insight into the chemical underpinnings of the condition, while on the other hand, people discussing their own motivations are not impaired, and are much better authorities on their own motives. And third, you're not someone who's "devoted their life" to studying abolitionists, so the comparison is wildly inapplicable.
This is what I was talking about when I said you should re-read things before you post them. You routinely toss out comparisons that don't stand up to even the slightest scrutiny. So either you're posting without thinking, or you are thinking and somehow can't see the problems with them. I'm not sure which is worse.
This is the problem, right here, dude. Please pay close attention:
You said that abolitionists didn't know the real reason they did things, and you made some general reference to the existence of social mirroring and body language. I said I trusted them over you. You said you trusted "the opinions of experts far more than I would someone to self-diagnose themselves." I pointed out (sarcastically) that no experts have done a study of the body language of 19th century abolitionists. So what do you do? You defend the mere existence of social mirroring and body language.
See the problem yet? Nobody disputed the existence of body language. What was disputed was the idea that you had any empirical evidence about these things relating specifically to 19th century abolitionists. Defending the concept in general is neither here nor there.
So there are two possibilities here. Either you realize this response is nonsense and you're hoping I won't notice, in which case you're a dishonest polemicist and nobody should listen to you. OR you don't even realize you're doing this, which means you are fundamentally confused about how science and evidence work and how deductions are formed, in which case people should also not listen to you.
This has been a hallmark throughout pretty much all of your arguments: take some general scientific fact and then pretend you can use it for highly specific judgments or dismissals, like in the example above, or by pretending every pet theory you have about evolution is synonymous with biology. It's just bluster wearing a lab coat.
Yes, but in your example you said "prior to the advent of democracies." Remember that? This is the kind of self-contradicting confusion that takes place when you don't stop to think about what you're saying.
This is really becoming a waste of time. You can't keep the arguments straight, your analogies are fundamentally broken, and you seem to think you can respond to fully-formed contentions by just randomly speculating that "hey, maybe something else was the reason." Get outta' here with that.
By your standard then, a drug addict is a "better authority" on what causes drug addiction than a person who's devoted their life to studying drug addiction and working with addicts. Sorry but that's just denialism.
This is what I was talking about when I said you should re-read things before you post them. You routinely toss out comparisons that don't stand up to even the slightest scrutiny. So either you're posting without thinking, or you are thinking and somehow can't see the problems with them. I'm not sure which is worse.
Body language has been found to be pretty much universal in the human species (as it is in other species) - even cultures completely isolated from other civilizations have pretty much identical means of communication.
You said that abolitionists didn't know the real reason they did things, and you made some general reference to the existence of social mirroring and body language. I said I trusted them over you. You said you trusted "the opinions of experts far more than I would someone to self-diagnose themselves." I pointed out (sarcastically) that no experts have done a study of the body language of 19th century abolitionists. So what do you do? You defend the mere existence of social mirroring and body language.
See the problem yet? Nobody disputed the existence of body language. What was disputed was the idea that you had any empirical evidence about these things relating specifically to 19th century abolitionists. Defending the concept in general is neither here nor there.
So there are two possibilities here. Either you realize this response is nonsense and you're hoping I won't notice, in which case you're a dishonest polemicist and nobody should listen to you. OR you don't even realize you're doing this, which means you are fundamentally confused about how science and evidence work and how deductions are formed, in which case people should also not listen to you.
This has been a hallmark throughout pretty much all of your arguments: take some general scientific fact and then pretend you can use it for highly specific judgments or dismissals, like in the example above, or by pretending every pet theory you have about evolution is synonymous with biology. It's just bluster wearing a lab coat.
Actually democratic forms of govt had arguably been tried in ancient Greece, and arguably "failed" (democratic Athens was conquered by authoritarian Sparta, for example).
This is really becoming a waste of time. You can't keep the arguments straight, your analogies are fundamentally broken, and you seem to think you can respond to fully-formed contentions by just randomly speculating that "hey, maybe something else was the reason." Get outta' here with that.