So far the comment section has not exploded into a flame war, which I'm very happy about =)

Just a quick comment on Mr. Polecat's line of thinking. I'd guess a discussion goes problematical if anyone throws in claims like "99% of single mothers are bad parents just leeching on tax-payer money!" or "anyone receiving any kind of state support is most likely about to become addicted to that support, and therefore we need to scrap all kinds of money hand-outs!". Claims like that would like lead to a fierce debate if it is 99%, or 60% or 6% of single mothers who are bad at parenting. And even if people would agree about something like 6%, they would still disagree if 6% is "a lot" or "such a small figure that there is no need to get worried about that". (Mr. Polecat wisely avoids that by explicating " I think that a good single parent can raise a child very well.", which makes it harder for anyone to start flaming at him for unfairly blaming all the single parents for the bad habits of only some single parents have. This is the classical "none / some / most / all" - stuff, which so often sparks misunderstanding among people.)

When we were discussing the climate change, Mr. Polecat mentioned politically motivated scrap science, and statistics which are biased because of a hidden political agenda. And I don't deny that such things exists. Philosophically speaking, I see this being in the core of the problems of mankind. Solutions are pretty easy to find out with logical reasoning, once we know the facts - but it all gets difficult when we disagree about the facts. We can only verify that much facts with the evidence we personally witness, so most of the time we also have to rely on reports and statistics given by other people. And then arises the question "whose reports we are going to trust, and which reports we are going to dismiss as non-reliable propaganda".

And after that point there is no return - the discussion dies, and all what is left is a war over "my dad has better facts than your dad!" =)

Ps. Again, for the sake of clarification, I'd like to stress the point that this comment is not directed against Mr. Polecat, nor against any other people commenting my blog. But this is loosely inspired by a certain thread about immigration we once had in UrW forums. That thread is a treasure vault when it comes to all the problems of discussion and thinking =) Sometimes I've been thinking that I'd like to comment some of the strangest phenomena in that very thread, but then I've been uninspired to mention the immigration question, because I have a feeling that merely mentioning that question is all too likely to get the discussion side-tracked into an endless jungle of miscommunication =)