My defense of the first point was raised elsewhere in the thread, before I saw this post.
I said:
Now, of course, since all you said in your post was that this was an admonition to “Please make sure you stay on the right side of the line here,” and there does not appear to be a warning issued.
So infer from this that while you believe I was on the right side of the line, you thought my position vis-a-vis the line was tenuously close. And that’s all. Yes?
The second point is a bit more troubling.
I don’t want to sound like a “He started it,” schoolkid, but in my view, Hamlet digs at me were sharper (and more frequent) than what I said to him, which was simply that he was taking personal swipes at me.
If you see it differently, I’d appreciate the chance to discuss it.
I was not simply taking personal swipes at you. I explained, in detail, why the position you took was patently wrong and bordering on the absurb. I thought a textualist like yourself would be the first to point out the flaws in your thinking and said so. If you want to take it as a personal attack in GD, I’d be more than happy to have the moderators delete the sentence you snipped from my post (leaving the rest unchallenged).
ETA: Excepting the complete lack of a substantive response, I had no problem with you comparing me to a junkie. I have a thick enough skin that it didn’t bother me in the least.
He made some personal comments, but that wasn’t how I saw it. The worst he said, as I saw it, was that you had chosen the wrong side in this debate and that (in his view) you knew the law did not support your opinion. I thought the ‘heroin addict’ post was going to cause things to escalate further, so I commented on that.
Fair enough. I was trying to come up with an analogy for an extremely difficult habit to break. Seldom are such habits positive traits: I could have said an alcoholic thirsting for a drink or a smoker on nicotine withdrawal, I suppose, but we think of sober alcoholics and folks successful at quitting smoking much more readily than we think of someone kicking heroin. But I withdraw the comment, and simply say that this isn’t the first post, nor the first thread, in which a subtle, not-so–subtle, or overt dig has come at me from Hamlet-town.
I saw Marley’s post in that thread and was taken aback. It seemed to come out of the blue and was totally unnecessary. Perhaps he was just trying to put a little pressure on Bricker to make that debate a little less lopsided.
I wasn’t posting in that thread and I didn’t read any of it until some posts were reported. I had no interest in putting pressure on anybody. I responded because Bricker comes close to taunting people with that post and I thought the thread needed a nudge back on track.