Pardon me if I’ve been ninja’d, but I had to jump in immediately upon reading that. You said that anyone who didn’t instantaneously see him as reprehensible for writing it is broken. Words to that effect.
I’m going to insist that there’s quite a bit of daylight between that and thinking that what he wrote is laudable and appropriate.
On preview, I see that I have been ninja’d. The hell with it. I’m posting it anyway, to point out the excluded middle. And, with the exception of reminding Scylla that I expect better of him, I’ll leave it at that.
All he has left to do is tell us that he’s not going to post in this thread anymore because he has “a life” and important things to do. Then come back and post some more.
Then he’s hit the Trifecta, and wins the Starving Artist “debate” award.
There was a time when i actually would have agreed with this sentiment.
I recognize that Scylla and i have vastly different politics, and that there are plenty of areas where we’re unlikely ever to see eye-to-eye, but there was a time when even when i was arguing ferociously with him, i tended to think of him as one of those who at least would play by the basic rules of good-faith, rational argument. Sure, he slipped occasionally, but we all do, and those slips were aberrations.
Unfortunately, the sort of bullshit that you pointed out has become, more and more, his standard modus operandi. While there was a time when i did, in fact, expect better of him, that time has passed.
Well, I don’t have any brief to bludgeon you guys out of your opinions on the matter; I seem to have gone a long time without catching any of Scylla’s activity, so perhaps my view of him is still unduly influenced by what I read in the halcyon past. I’ll stick with it for a while longer, nonetheless.
I have to admit that in the latter half of this thread, at least, he’s bearing an eerie resemblance to the late, lamented Dio. Especially with that reference to “The Scylla Show,” above.
My bad. I should have predicted that you would make an inane post that would totally miss the point that I was not predicting the future, but rather was directly insulting you by comparing you to a person whose posting/debate style is a joke.
You mean like Condoleeza “Smoking Mushroom” Rice. Well, I always thought the Red Skullette had a brain, if no morals, but if you say she’s just a big loser it must be so.
If I’ve given confusion concerning my thesis, I apologize. Allow me to restate. I think Krugmans piece is wildly over the top and innapropriate. I think there is something wrong with somebody who does not see that regardless of their politics.
This is not to say that you have to like Bush and support the war to not be broken.
Or to restate another way, if Krugman’s piece resonates in your soul, Than you are a just another partisan nutjob.
I actually contemplated making exactly that comparison in my previous post. It was the first one that came to mind. In both cases, i see an obvious and steady decline in the person’s willingness to see reason and to debate in good faith.
In Dio’s case, i happened to agree with much of his politics; in Scylla’s case i don’t. And Dio tended to be more abrupt and abrasive, whereas Scylla tends toward the hand-waving and dismissive. But the results aren’t that different.
O no, I got it. I just thought it was funny how poorly you did it. Saying that sometime if I did x than I might be comparable to y is really low quality as far as insults go.
Hector and Elvis are like total morons because in order to insult you they have to make up a stance and pretend you think it (the mindreading.). They lack the horsepower to criticize what is actually said.
Similarly, you lack the creativity to compare something I actually in order to ridicule me. Instead you have to make up something you think I might do in the future and ridicule me based on that.
There was another term I used to use in reference to the pursuit of Scylla’s tortured logic, but I’m sparing everyone. Let’s just go with the Scylla Show.
Well, it doesn’t resonate in my soul on account of how he opened by saying that people were subdued during the commemorations because they felt guilty about the bad things that the Bush Administration and its supporters did. That’s a bit of loopy stuff there.
I won’t pretend that I don’t agree with his thesis that they were in fact, bad things. Just that I don’t think feeling guilty about them was what kept people from buying fancy new hats and having cookouts on 09-11-11.
The problem is folks remember him for his non-political posts, mentally categorize him as “worthwhile poster,” then are surprised when they encounter him in a political thread.
What’s up with this deal of talking about the poster instead of the post?
Didn’t somebody say great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and mediocre minds discuss people?
Xeno made a great post. I thought it and my reply were worthy of discussion. Its really a fascinating comparison the more you think about it, and there’s room for some fruitful and heated discussion.
But no, you are bunch of ten year old girls incapable of discussing something beyond the level of whether you not find somebody “icky.”
There was a time when Scylla was an honest debater in GD. Maybe it was back in 2000 and 2001, before Hentor joined the board, but there was such a time. Honest.
Yeah, the Dio comparison came to my mind too, but I’m thinking more along the lines of Dennis Miller or James Lileks.
Actually, i don’t think you used to be a nice guy. And that wasn’t my argument.
My point was that i remember a time when, despite our political differences, we actually had productive debates in which there was, on both sides, an honest attempt to deal with the substantive issues rather than palming them off or pretending they don’t matter.
And i’ve always thought your stories were overrated. Happy now?
