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From: mrh@cybvax0.UUCP (Mike Huybensz)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Equality through Reaganomics ?
Message-ID: <834@cybvax0.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 23-Nov-85 22:22:41 EST
Article-I.D.: cybvax0.834
Posted: Sat Nov 23 22:22:41 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 29-Nov-85 21:04:40 EST
References: <7800672@inmet.UUCP> <7800697@inmet.UUCP>
Reply-To: mrh@cybvax0.UUCP (Mike Huybensz)
Organization: Cybermation, Inc., Cambridge, MA
Lines: 54

In article <7800697@inmet.UUCP> janw@inmet.UUCP writes (> and > >>):
> >> "Since the dreaded Mr. Reagan came to power in 1980, the country
> >> has created 7,067,000 jobs, and women took 5,540,000, or
> >> 78.4 per cent.
> >> ... about 65 per cent of all the wage and salary growth since
> >> 1980 has gone to women, not men."
> 
> >Good 'ol Jan, ever-ready with the suggested non-sequitur (not-so-cleverly
> >hidden in the title.  Perhaps you'd be good enough to share with us your
> >reasoned conclusion from this quotation.
> 
> Glad to; I thought it was obvious. My apologies. *Business deregu-
> lation may be better for equal opportunity than affirmative action*.

Fortunately, others have adequately rebutted the original "conclusion", and
their rebuttals serve equally well for this one.  Though of course you still
provide no reasoning.

> Of course there are other factors involved than govt  policy,  so
> the  conclusion  is merely an inductive conjecture. That is why I
> added the (?).  But if you wished to accuse me of a logical  fal-
> lacy, it should've been "post hoc, ergo propter hoc", rather than
> "non-sequitur".

Sorry, but your argument wasn't even complete enough to be of the fallacious
form "correlation implies cause".  Because you didn't establish that your
statistics had anything to do with equality (as other rebuttals have shown.)
Without a base of reference, you might just as well be saying that women
are getting further ahead of men, which certainly wouldn't be equality.
But I don't want to put words in your mouth.  (They'd hardly fit past your
feet.... :-)

> Instead, you interpreted my note as a blanket endorsement of  the
> present  administration.  To dispel that impression (and I really
> should not have to) let me list a few areas where I disapprove of
> its  policies:  MX  ; abortion; death penalty; school prayer; re-
> vival of detente; choice of welfare cuts; incoherent  mixture  of
> monetarism and supply-side'ism; indiscriminate DoD funding; empty
> rhetoric on terrorism. I could name many, many more.

We share almost all of those (though we might prefer different alternatives.)

> Now please re-read your response calmly - and I know you can be
> logical when you try. What do GI casualties have to do with
> the text *or* the title of my note ? Watch that knee, Mike:
> it jerked in mid-word! Right between Reagan- and -omics.

Gosh, I guess it's my turn now to dispell your impression that I dislike
everything the present administration does.  I can list a few things too:
Supreme Court Justice O'Conner, (it's getting harder to think of anything
else...) firing Burford and Watt, keeping Bush silent, embarrasing itself, etc.
-- 

Mike Huybensz		...decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!cybvax0!mrh