On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 2:31 PM, Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote: > "The former South African apartheid government did not respect the > Universal Human Rights of blacks." > > Under your strict interpretation, we would have to say that even a single > example of the apartheid government respecting even a single human rights > of a single black person would be sufficient to disprove the claim.
Right. A common interpretation of that statement would be that, by and large, one can see a parallel between "people whose rights are not respected" and "people with black skin". The existence of a single black person whose rights are respected, or a single non-black person whose rights are not respected, doesn't change that; if there are X million black people whose rights are not respected, and Y million white people who are treated like people, and the converses are measured in thousands, then the statement would be considered valid. (That said, though, if there *were* a black person whose rights were respected, then it would be highly notable. I don't know if there had been such a case with .za, but there were - if you'll forgive me for Godwinning - a very VERY small number of Jews who held high position in Nazi Germany, and who were not harmed because they were of too great value to lose. It's notable because respecting a single person of a category of people considered "sub-human" effectively disproves the notion that "all X are less than people". (If one Jew is worth keeping around, how can you say that Jews are, by definition, subhuman? If one black woman can hold a highly respected position in a university, doesn't that prove that black people and women are just as intelligent as white males?) But, notable or not, it doesn't change the fact that Nazi Germany *as a whole* considered Jews *as a group* to be insignificant, and that the apartheid .za govt treated black-skinned people *as a group* to be insignificant.) So where does that leave computers and reals? Well, it comes down to descriptors. Suppose there were a place where all people are treated perfectly fairly, UNLESS a white-skinned person is male and aged between 13 and 20, in which case he is considered guilty until proven innocent. Does this place treat males and females equally? Not really. But it's also not really accurate to say that "men are mistreated by the law", any more than it's accurate to say that "IEEE floating point handles real numbers". I certainly would not say that an integer type "works with real numbers", simply because it's almost completely useless to say that - since it's such a tight subset of them. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list