What is Freedom Of Speech ?

[Rodion Romanovich]

Since it seems that you are misusing the term moral equilevency lets review what it really means. Like I stated very early on - I do not play moral equilevency games.

It also seems that you are not even following the proper meaning of the term.

A good written document on the subject

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/gaddis.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_equivalence

Then there is your use of moral relativism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism

Your arguement in attempting to compare my opinion to supporting dictatorship and nazism demonstrates these points very well. If your going to argue that my postion is wrong provide concrete evidence in the form of constitutions that state there exists a legal right to advocate the violent overthrow of the established authority.

Then I'm afraid you're abusing the word. That moral equivalency definition means that if you say x did y, but z did w, so x isn't better than y. Well, that's not the point of my examples. The point of my examples were that if you say a statement "y is true for all x", I point out different x for which y doesn't hold. When you make a generalized statement such as "all blue cars are dangerous" after seeing 5 blue cars which were dangerous, then you're not basing your generalized statement on causality, but on correlation. If a statement is based on correlation instead of causality it usually means that if you keep searching you usually find hordes of counter-examples - for instance if you look at more blue cars you see that there are thousands of secure blue cars. The same thing applies to this debate. You stated a moral and legal opinion, but when examples where brought up when that moral and legal principle would imply things you didn't really mean, you switched between defending the general principle you stated (which implied things you didn't mean) and saying that you didn't mean the things that statement implied. It's as if you were saying "all blue cars are dangerous", and then I show one blue car after another which is safe, upon which you say "yes, that car is safe", followed by me saying "so it's not correct to state that all blue cars are dangerous?" then you say "I don't play moral equivalency games, and all blue cars are dangerous".

So the correct term you're looking for isn't moral equivalency, it's synthesis. While analysis is the action of "taking something apart in order to study it", synthesis is putting together principles and seeing the consequences they imply in a practical situation. The analysis would be you looking at 5 unsecure cars and seeing that they were all blue, thus stating that "all blue cars are unsafe". Your synthesis, by looking at blue cars in reality, you find that there are blue cars which are safe, and that car color isn't causally related to safety properties of the car. That's the purpose of synthesis - trying as hard as you can to find counter-examples to whatever thesis you stated after an analysis, to see if the attempt at a general statement was good or not.