"Anton van Uitert" <AntonEnCaroline@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:<cmr11t$kq5$1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>...
> Independent minded thinker? Please allow me to doubt either
> qualification.
>
> Anton,
Fully recognizing that "Stupid... Stupid... STUPID" describes me for
getting involved in this thread, I would like to say something in our
(Americans') defense.
We have plenty of independent-minded thinkers here, and we have plenty
of people who aren't, and probably the vast majority of us are IMT's
some of the time and less so at other times. We base our decisions on
our worldviews, on our own experiences, on information we get from
friends, family, and those around us, and on information we get from
our news sources, which may sometimes be inaccurate, incomplete, or
biased. I seriously doubt that it's different anywhere else in the
world---I don't think there are Knowledge Fairies in either the
Netherlands or anywhere else that allow people some magical access to
information that they don't get from the same kinds of sources I
described.
However, I do believe that one of the hallmarks of being an IMT is
acknowledging that someone else can be an IMT and come to a completely
different conclusion or world view than another. Thus, you cannot
tell whether someone is an IMT by looking at *what* they believe or
what they think; you have to know *how* they arrived at that
conclusion, and I don't think most of us really even know that much
about how our neighbors do their thinking, much less large groups of
people a whole ocean away.
Just my US$0.02. Yeah, I know this is going to have about as much
affect as trying to explain the correct application of combinatorial
theory to a fish.
-- Adam
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