Same difference.
“He used to be a nice guy.” “He used to debate honestly, now he’s a troll,” etc. etc. various variations on the "he used to be theme,"all issued in that smug “tsk tsk” passive aggressive way, that really only slightly built, bearded, horrendously insecure left-leaning males have truly mastered.
I been hearing it forever. Y’all do it to me, Bricker, every other conservative on the board in basically every thread.
It’s like background noise.
A bit like your constant whining about Democrats who have the gall to pull the same shit as Republicans.
For the record, if you look at your posts in this thread, you haven’t actually attempted to debate anything. You’ve just been riffing on my personality.
So, you can hardly lament the lack of honest and substantive debate, when you haven’t been offering any.
If you truly valued honest debate on substantive issues than one would have assumed you would have made an attempt in that regard.
WTF are you referring to.
Ok, here it is:
Say something intelligent or be ignored.
Are you under the impression that you’ve offered anything of substance here?
What a joke.
For the record, I’ve always known you were an asshole. There’s no reason to imagine you’ll change. Douchebags gotta douche. It’s what they do.
I haven’t offered a specific opinion on your Krugman assertion because there were plenty of other people in the thread making similar points to the ones i would have made. I was following the conversation, but wasn’t weighing in precisely because my points had already been made. That’s something i do sometimes.
I finally entered the thread because i felt that your response to Miller was, as i suggested, intellectually unsustainable. You complained about him “psychoanalyzing” you, that he was engaging in “deconstruction” of your post, and that this was some form of “ad hominem” attack. But all he was doing was analyzing the words you used, and the context in which you used them; exactly the same sort of thing as you were doing to Krugman.
You act as if attacking your argument is the same thing as attacking you personally. You said, specifically:
But if the argument itself is, in fact, weak or hypocritical or inconsistent, then pointing that out is a perfectly reasonable and valid thing to do. You asserting that it’s “ad hominem” or somehow beside the point doesn’t make it so.
You do whatever you think you need to do. But if there’s a lack of intelligent debate in this thread, it’s because the material offered in the OP is such weak sauce. When you start things out so badly, some of the blame for the level of subsequent discussion has to rest with you.
Of course, you won’t see it like that. As i said, most of the arguments i might make to rebut the preposterous claims in your OP were made back on the first page of this thread. They were like water off a duck’s back to you, so i’m under no illusion that rephrasing them and trying again will accomplish very much.
I’ll leave you to it.
Debate is for the Great Debates forum. This is the pit. Those who have found in the past that debate with you is pointless are simply taking advantage of the fact that here we can call you a giant douche.
You didn’t want the thread to become personal and ugly? That’s more than a little facetious, isn’t it? You’re pitting a person for taking a relatively mainstream position, one that you know for a fact is held by a substantial portion of the posters to this board, and calling anyone who agrees with it “broken.” But you don’t want the thread to be personal! And to top it off, if someone actually tries to engage your argument on its merits, you write it off as “boring” and “not worth going there.”
Look, you started a thread about the moral worthiness of a public figure. There aren’t a lot of ways to debunk a moral argument. The only truly effective way of doing it is to find an instance of the person making the complaint, engaging unrepentantly in the behavior he’s complaining about. In this thread, you made that easy for us, by engaging in the “immoral behavior” at the same time as you criticize it. You seem to think that pointing that out is somehow out of bounds. I am at a utter loss to understand how you figure that to be the case.
What I think is the most ironic quibbling and denial about this whole thread, is the whole “invasion” question… do the people here not know the definition of offensive invasion? was Bush so ignorant that invading a sanctioned and compliant and complicated, nationalsit, U.N. country, was thought to be collateral free? He knew He was Killing defenders of all stripes there. His was a total complicit and knowing invasion.
Well, sure they were defending their country! But they weren’t defending our country! So it doesn’t count!
We all should lament that.
Please instruct your executor to invite me to yours.