Bullshit we can’t you dimwitted liar. All the polls you love when they say something good about Bush are invalid when they are polling Arab’s? Why would that be? Why wouldn’t the increased amount of anti-american protests during and after the war do be measurable. I guess all those huge protests were CGI’ed by the liberal media. I guess all of those polls don’t count because they were not taken from the “right” people.
The amusing thing, is you are too stupid to even realize that your position on quantification of policy issues is directly opposite that of Bush. Cost-benefit analysis is one of the cornerstones of Bush’s policy making arguments. Yes, using “measurements” to determine policy. Stunning I know. Look if you going to be a toady, at least do your homework. That way your pathetic attempts to spin control your despicable use of terrorism victims for partisen hatred doesn’t conflict with a basic tenet of the man whose ass you are so willing to kiss no matter what.
No need to wait, Demostylus. I stayed away from this thread because it was more dishonest December bullshit. I’m of two minds about the banning, and look forward to hearing what exactly happened. I’d guess he didn’t pay attention to Lynn’s(?) warning last week that he was skating on thin ice.
The december of this year deserved banning. When he made the choice to actively lie in a GD OP and started 2 threads like this, the new and much worse december got what he had coming.
I just hope he stays Banned. Every “unbanning” has turned into a trainwreck.
Well I truly believe that you truly believe that. Not much in that. Perhaps you should try to think things through a bit more cautiously instead of starting with the assumption that the other person doesn’t get it.
In general, your posts to this thread have been short on substance. Despite your haranguing about proof and evidence, your own posts have consisted primarily of your opinions, but vehemently expressed. In my previous post I specifically asked to you direct me to your alleged posts in which you claim to have explained why my position is wrong. Strangely you’ve ignored this. Hmm…
This is completely silly - obviously you’ve completely misunderstood the issue. You are offering reasons to believe that punching someone in the nose will make them angry. They are good reasons. I am convinced. Good job there. But that is not what we are discussing. Pay attention now and try to follow along.
Supposing you are having an argument with some guy on the internet over whether in fact punching someone in the nose makes them angry. You say it will. You are 100% right, because of the very reasons you’ve given above. But the other guy disagrees. I’ll even tell you why. He is biased because the idea happens to have uncomfortable implications with regards to some ideological position of his. But that makes no difference. Bottom line is that the guy insists that it is not in fact reasonable to assume that causing pain, invading personal space and insulting them makes them angry. And he claims that there will not be an immediate angry reaction.
Where does that leave you? In your own mind you feel that your position is “provable” but this is because you’ve accepted certain concepts as “reasonable” or obvious. To the extent that someone is willing to deny these concepts, you are left with nothing more than a difference of opinion. You are not actually going to find a double-blind study comparing the feelings of people who have been punched to people who have not.
I didn’t bring up the punching in the nose analogy because I want to sit around arguing about the details of that scenario. I brought it up to illustrate the general concept that there is no proof that does not rest ultimately on opinion. This is not a revolutionary concept. It is well known that any logical system must ultimately rest on unprovable axioms. To the extent that someone is willing to deny those axioms, nothing can be proven.
The following are reasonable (IMHO) and consistent with my observations and experience:
If there are two opposing camps, one which is united and in internal agreement has an advantage over one which is afflicted with internal dissention.
Members of one opposing camp tend to be encouraged and emboldened by the perception of weakness in the opposing camp.
People who are encouraged and emboldened are more likely to take aggressive action than people who are not.
From the above 3 points follows that creating publicized dissent in your camp increases the likelihood of aggressive action from your opposers.
There is nothing to prove or disprove about any of the above, unless you have some studies or data that has a bearing on these assumptions or conclusions. Otherwise you may disagree with the reasoning but it remains your opinion (as my position is my opinion) no matter how loudly you shout about it.
Thanks for the offer, but assuming that Reeder and december are roughly equivalent -
Which one got banned?
Even paranoids have enemies. And, all other things being equal, it isn’t going to be the liberals who will notice a push to enforce lockstep liberalism.
As far as I can tell, december’s last post appears above. If it had come from elucidator, Stoid, Demostyles, Binarydrone, RedFury, or from you, would you expect it to bring about a banning?
If there are two opposing camps, the one which makes an apparently legitimate claim to the moral high ground has an easier time attracting support than the camp that makes no such legitimate claim.
A camp which appears to be making unfair and unprovoked attacks on its enemies has a harder time drawing support than a camp that does not do so.
If the leadership of a camp appears to be making unfair and unprovoked attacks on its enemies, the enemy camp will appear to have a legitimate claim to the moral high ground, and will have an easier time attracting members.
If members of the attacking camp oppose the leadership and make it clear that not all members of the attacking camp agree with the unfair, unprovoked attacks, they can lessen the degree to which their enemies appear to have the moral high ground, thereby lessening the degree to which their enemies can attract new members.
There is nothing to prove or disprove about any of the above, unless you have some studies or data that has a bearing on these assumptions or conclusions.
Ultimately I’ve seen no proof or convincing arguments of EITHER viewpoint. Terrorists might attack the US more because of peace protests, because they view protests as a sign of their success; contrarywise, terrorists might attack the US less because of peace protests, because the peace protests humanize Americans and make it more difficult for terrorists to recruit people to murder Americans.
Given that, it’s foolish to talk about terrorism as an “unintended consequence” of peace protests; we might equally talk about a lack of terrorism as a “unintended consequence” (albeit a more welcome consequence) of peace protests. We simply don’t know which dynamic is stronger.
Since we don’t know, of course we cannot factor such dynamics into our decisions. Unintended consequences are one thing; unknowable consequences are quite another. We therefore must act according to our principles of right and wrong, according to our understanding of justice, compassion, and clear-eyed pragmatism.
If it makes you feel better, though, I’ll quit suggesting that you, by virtue of not protesting the war, are responsible for the Bali bombing.
Except december has several warnings and quite a history. He was just wasting bandwith here and I hope he stays away. His threads were utterly stupid and he ruined many threads for me. For the last few months I just stayed away from any thread where he was the main poster because it was not worth the effort. I hope I can participate in more threads now.
Respectfully, what are you on about and why are you dragging me in to this? I admit that I am not quite outside of my first cup of coffee yet, but this sounds as if you are trying to say that I am basically a Liberal december. What have I done to deserve that? That is at least how I read it.
Also, while I hopefully have your attention, can you please answer the question that I posed to you earlier? Where do you get this “the SDMB is Liberal” notion? Again, my experience of this board is that there is a diverse range of opinion and politics. I would not be here if such were not the case, and so am very interested to know why it is that your experience differs so greatly from mine.
FWIW, I think your line of reasoning is a wash. It is probably true, as you say, that to some extent “peace protests humanize Americans”, but I think they have the opposite effect as well, in that they reinforce the notion that the “leadership of a camp appears to be making unfair and unprovoked attacks on its enemies”, because “even some of their own people agree with us”. So the protests would have the effect of showing that not all Americans are monsters, but that the majority of Americans (the non-protesters) are even bigger monsters then they might have otherwise thought.
The fact that something is dependent on opinion and judgment does not mean that it is unknowable. Frankly net effect of Bush invading Iraq is “unknowable” by your standards - as noted above there are many possible effects which work in different directions. Nonetheless, I don’t see many people hesitant to express an opinion on what the impact will be - people make their own judgments and act (or mouth off) accordingly. The same goes for any number of other issues. The impact of demonstrators is no different.