Comment by Maursault | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Maursault | Hacker News Reader

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FWIW, your entire comment is an ad hominem fallacy. You must ignore the person and focus on their argument in order to argue rationally.

> doesn't affect you in the scheme of things.

I have subsonic hearing and I live in a rural area, not particularly near any small or large airport. What drives me nuts are diesel school buses (something about the low frequencies) and those really slow single prop planes that seem to want to linger around my airspace, sound-polluting the entire area with harmful low frequencies. And for what? Entertainment and entitlement. We need diesel school buses right now and until electric buses become available to school districts, so I'll just deal with that. A vehicle gets you from point A to point B. Most of these planes and flights, nearly all of them, leave and return to the same airport a few hours later. They're not traveling anywhere, they're just bored. While I can empathize with boredom, I really don't tolerate being victimized by the bored. It isn't just me. Wildlife and Mother Nature and gravitational potential hates small engine planes.

For one thing, for remote communities, small planes are an absolute necessity, not simply for recreation. You've lumped together all small aircraft with hobby flying.

That aside, I think your environmental argument against hobby flying is interesting, but this other chip you have on your shoulder regarding "entitlement" and "the elderly" and "entertainment" people isn't very persuasive.

Dismissing something as "just entertainment for entitled people" is silly. Hobby flying is far from the only environmentally damaging thing that humans do only for entertainment.

> for remote communities, small planes are an absolute necessity

No problems there, so long as remote means not here, except lack of specifics. What remote communities have an absolute necessity for small planes?

> Hobby flying is far from the only environmentally damaging thing that humans do only for entertainment.

This is Whataboutism, a variant of the tu quoque fallacy, but it also has maybe a bit of Bandwagon fallacy as well. In any event, this is a fallacious argument.

>No problems there, so long as remote means not here, except lack of specifics. What remote communities have an absolute necessity for small planes?

There are plenty in Northern Canada [1]. That is the only area I've been personally, but I imagine there are similar areas around the world. Possibly also of interest is bush flying in general [2].

> This is Whataboutism, a variant of the tu quoque fallacy, but it also has maybe a bit of Bandwagon fallacy as well. In any event, this is a fallacious argument.

The habit of name-dropping logically fallacies and thinking it is some kind of slam dunk is so cliche that it needs it's own name.

I was not saying that we should ignore the impact of hobby flying because something else was worse (whataboutism), nor that you cannot criticise hobby flying because you do other things that are comparable (tu quoque), nor that hobby flying is good because it is popular (bandwagon).

My point was simply that doing something "only for entertainment" is not in itself a bad thing! Most of what people do, besides surviving, is essentially for pleasure. In fact, that people enjoy doing it is a point in favour of hobby flying!

The question is whether the benefits of allowing it (pleasure, availability of trained pilots, freedom) outweigh the costs (environmental, noise, danger).

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/transport-canada/news/2020/08/new-m...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_flying

> There are plenty in Northern Canada

     Thanks. I love that because I live in Virginia. Let Northern Canada have all the small planes they can eat.

> The habit of name-dropping logically fallacies and thinking it is some kind, of slam dunk is so cliche that it needs it's own name.

     Oh, we have a had a name for it for millennia. It's called logical argument, aka rational discourse.

> My point was simply that doing something "only for entertainment" is not in itself a bad thing!

     But one can't entirely isolate the right of entertainment here as the only concern. No one's right to entertain themselves supersedes the rights of everyone else not to be disturbed by harmful loud sounds, or their right not to be lead poisoned, or their right of safety from falling aircraft. You are correct that there is absolutely nothing wrong with someone entertaining themselves... except when it violates the rights of everyone else.

> The habit of name-dropping logically fallacies and thinking it is some kind of slam dunk is so cliche that it needs it's own name.

It's sometimes called the 'fallacy fallacy': the assertion that because the argument is fallacious the conclusions are also necessarily false (as opposed to potentially true but infelicitously argued).

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