I have never seen a hair split so fine.
That was astonishing.
Hair splitting?
The difference is
absolutely massive. Do you not realize that? It's not even related in any significant way!
I'm just happy you're not running the EPA. Absolutely no fines or criminal convictions would be handed out to any organization because it's made up of individuals you can't blame & the violation happened 2 decades ago while you swim in oil blackened oceans and breathe toxic emmisons.
That has nothing to do with whether it's massively different. I'm not sure why you would quote that reply of mine if you wanted to talk about something else. I will address your (very different) point in a later post, but since you reply here, in case there is a misunderstanding let me explain why I say there is a massive difference: Consider the following statements.
S1: Every Catholic wants everyone to convert to Catholicism.
S2: There is an entity with a mind, namely the RCC, who wants everyone to convert to Catholicism. This mind is not one of the minds of the Catholics, or any other human mind, but a mind beyond that.
Surely, S1 and S2 are massively different sorts of claims. S2 is a bigger confusion, as there is no such entity. S1 is just false, because not every Catholics wants that, but it's not the same sort of confusion.
Now, I definitely did not anything like S2. Did anyone here? I'm not sure. Two posters may have come close, though it is unclear whether they did that. What about S1? While I did not make a claim about the mind of every people in a group, that per se would not be confused in any of the ways I addressed in this thread. In fact, it might not be confused at all - it would depend on the claim.
Now let us consider another claim, of the sort I made in the other thread.
S3: Most Catholics believe that they are not going to end up in Hell.
That one is a claim about most individuals in the group "Catholic". There is nothing wrong per se by ascribing a mental property to most or even all individuals in a group. The issue is whether the claims are false. The type of claim I made in the other thread is of the type S3. We might debate whether it's true or false, but it is surely not of the S2 kind, or anything like that.
That aside, there is another kind of claim that my claims are not at all like. Consider:
S4: Some of the Jews who lived about 2000 years ago sold out Jesus, and for that reason, their present-day descendants are guilty.
S5: The ancestors of John Doe engaged in kidnapping, rape and murder, and John Doe is at fault for that.
This is another type of error: it consists in blaming a person for the actions of another (and regardless of whether the claims about those others are correct). Now, in this thread, the claims were usually not so obvious, but the demand of an apology implies it. Consider:
S6: Pope Pius XII behaved in a wrongful manner by remaining neutral in WW2. Pope Francis should apologize.
So, what is the error?
I explained that before, but we have the following:
1. If the demand were just that Francis acknowledge that Pious XII behaved wrongfully, that
would not be an apology, but an instance of Francis blaming Pius XII. So, we are not in this case, as an apology is demanded.
2. If the demand were that Francis relay an apology from Pius XII, the error would be that Pius XII did not apologize. If the person asserting S6 is aware of that (as in the similar cases in this thread), then we are not in this case.
3. If the demand involves Francis acknowledging guilt on his part - which is what a sincere apology involves -, then S6 is a confusion of the S4-S5 kind.
4. If the demand involves Francis speaking for an entity other than himself or any human, then the error either involves thinking there is a non-human entity with a mind involved here (as in S2), or believing that entities without a mind are the sort of thing that behaves immorally.
5. If S6 is a combination of the above (it can involve more than one thing), then it is still a confusion (or two).
There is no other realistic interpretation of S6 in a context similar to this thread. On the other hand, what I did in the other thread was, again, akin to S3. And even if my assessment were in error, it would not involve the sort of confusion that is involved here.