Considering the very small appetite I have for being perceived as hiding behind another’s response, nevertheless, I’m going to have to let Princhester’s speak for me.
With the added observation that Cheney’s history is a significant contributor to the sense I have that my suspicions as to his implications are at least educated (as opposed to pulled-out-of-my-ass) guesses. Vegas? Well, if I ever have a reliable reason to believe that a specific roulette wheel in a specific casino is rigged to always come up “00”, dam’ right I’ll check in for a couple of hours and pick up some free money…
I rather mangled my last para, sorry. Typing too fast.
What I meant to say was:
“One of the key messages you convey by what you say is not what you say about something, but that you have said something about it at all. The explicit message Cheney conveys is that evil terrorists are hypocrites in claiming the GC’s benefits. This suggests that the soldiers he is talking to will be fighting evil terrorists, which is very largely incorrect. What Cheney does not talk about (and therefore downplays the importance of) is that mostly the soldiers will not be fighting evil terrorists, and mostly the people they capture are not hypocritical in expecting to be treated well.”
I used to teach reading skills. Some of you seem to have forgotten that there is more to the meaning of words than just their literal definition.
Actually, that “trick” was one of the basic reading skills that was covered on the proficiency test that my students had to pass to graduate. Of course you are supposed to be able to catch it when someone is implying something! Orators don’t like to have to spell out everything word for word. They like to be able to presume upon your intelligence.
It’s a little perplexing to think that John Mace and Martin Hyde graduated from high school believing that Mark Anthony actually thought that “Brutus is an honorable man!” After all, that’s exactly what Anthony said repeatedly.
Could it be that the Romans were to leave that speech believing something else? Was he implying that Brutus was not an honorable man?
In this thread, my old friends duffer, Little Nemo, and Liberal have been real winners. :dubious: :rolleyes:
I disagree with that. Cheney could have said, for instance, that “the killers want to use the cursed and damnable Geneva Conventions against us”. It’s a matter of what modifies what. If you don’t believe it just because I say it, then post Cheney’s quote in General Questions, and ask the board’s grammarians whom or what he was criticizing.
All that you need is to look at whoever said something, and then assign whatever meaning to it you like. Saves a lot of time otherwise wasted actually reading.
When most of your argument consists of patting yourself on the back and ignoring the actual arguments made by others, perhaps its time to retire from posting.
Accept for Shodan, who would be nearly careerless without his drivebys and long diatribes about the bias of the boards. It’s sad too, because we was almost halfway to making at least an attempt to stay in an argument for more than a few sneers in the debate about morality.
Again: Cheney is a man who has spent the last couple of years beating his many wives. Now he stands up to give a speech about “those wives that deserve it” and making fun of all their whining about being beaten ya’ll think that’s a perfectly reasonable limitation of scope.
Sorry, but that’s all a bit too much.
The fact is, this is a man with an long track record of failing to properly identify who the “killers” are. He has labeled many hundreds of people “bloodthirsty killers” who were probably not, and fought to deny them any legal process, and here he is scoffing and ridiculing the idea that people we capture demand such rights.
There’s no issue of inflection there. There’s no missing words I’m reading into things. When a police chief has falsely imprisoned hundreds of people he accuses of drug possession and denied them their rights, and then gives a speech about how drug possessors are vile and stand for everything evil and then makes fun of them demanding fair hearings, that’s obscene. Period.
One needn’t read slowly to know that it was an asinine comparison. Shakespeare used literary and rhetorical techniques to express irony in Mark Antony’s speech that have nothing to do with Cheney’s speech. Just because something is a speech doesn’t mean it’s like all other speeches. Otherwise, we’d have to stipulate that Cheney has a dream about all God’s children.
Cheney’s comments about the unfair appeal of protections of the Geneva Convention is nonsensical, because it shouldn’t matter how other people apply our standards. They should be our standards because we believe in them ourselves. It’s childish and reflective of low levels of moral reasoning (actually, Stage 2) to apply the Golden Rule in reverse - saying or implying that we should do unto others what they do unto us.
I have much more problem, however, with Cheney’s extreme bullshit from a part of the speech just after (or just before, I don’t recall for sure) the part in question. Specifically, he says:
Look at the deft manipulation of concepts there, so that it is not clear how Iraq was not involved in 9/11, how Iraq was not meaningfully involved in terrorism before we completely destabalized it… Cheney is an evil, manipulative fuck, and this portion of the text of his speech demonstrates that fully. This was not a stock speech, nor a good speech. It was more Cheney shit, and America will be the better when he fucks off back to Texas or Wyoming or wherever the fuck he wants to claim to be from.
What do you think Cheney meant by “delicate sensibilities”, then? :dubious:
To you, perhaps that was the point. To a civilized human being, the point was the current administration’s contempt for the things that *make * us civilized.
Says the guy who doesn’t have a problem with torture.
Okay, “pseudonymous” then. But still just some ordinary guy. Like the rest of us here. Including you.
“Invented” ? Just how ignorant *are * you? :dubious: As ignorant as you want to be, it seems.
Exactly. BrainGlutton’s thread title is a bit hyperbolic, but he is clearly not the only one who read the general thrust of Cheney’s comments as being negative to the GC. Those who don’t want to discuss this but just want to bury it under a chorus of worked up indignation over the thread title are showing their true colours.
