Let me clarify this for the mentally-challenged among you. This is called hyperbole. (The imbeciles among you may want to consult a dictionary.) In fact, I’m happy to concede that there might be one or two Republicans who are neither racist nor imbeciles. (Perhaps one can even find such specima pictured on Endangered Species serach sites.)
Shut up you fucking troll.
Regards,
Shodan
Mmmmmm, Endangered Specieis Sriracha…
You have a raw talent for responding pertinently to posts, indicating you’ve read and understood them syntactically, while missing the point of them entirely. I don’t think I’ll continue this directly with you, as I’ve either persuaded others or I haven’t.
The only relevant circumstance being offered for evaluation of your “standard” is that of a person having been shot to death after resisting arrest. Whatever hypothetical act of resistance may have hypothetically caused the hypothetical shooting does not matter to the question. There is no significant difference between corpses, but your so-called standard assigns societal value to a person based on the one brief series of decisions and actions they made just before being killed.
I take it your standing proudly behind that paradigm.
There’s the Super Bowl, the Hyperbole, and where septimus competes, the Toilet Bowl.
By the way…
You are incorrect, and you might not have a firm grasp of the rhetorical and literary usages of analogy.
I wasn’t implying anything about your consistency of application. In fact, I took it on faith that you were entirely sincere in your point of view. I was trying to persuade you that your “standard” is poorly considered and itself inconsistent with the other values you’ve claimed or exhibited in your posts. Obviously I failed in that as far as you are concerned, but you might want to get that chip off your shoulder. It’s blocking your view.
Max, even when you are critiquing what other posters have done, you reply to me, not to the poster in question. I love you, too, but I’m not jealous. You can talk to other people.
Here is the post which started this hijack:
I asked for a cite. Richard Parker offered up the quote from Matt Wills. I said:
And we were off and running.
You use hyperbole to create inaccurate impressions.
When you do, I’m happy to call you on it.
Odd that I was able to read MaxTheVool’s post and it wasn’t even addressed to me?!
I agree with Max’s post, and did at the time I snarked at Bricker’s response to septimus and/or to Richard’s citation. But at the same time I hold that the Sr. Director’s attitude toward voter registration is not aberrant in GOP circles, but is rather representative of the party as a whole. This is based on their long history, well prior to the bogus “Pimp video”, of antagonism toward ACORN and similar non-partisan voting drives and voter rights organizations, and their state level Republican led legislative and executive actions against expanded voting times and places, and the Republican led voter roll purges.
I’m well aware. I would think conservatives would be reluctant to embrace politifact given that it identifies approximately nine times more conservative lies. In my view, their methods are often hackish and uncharitable and must be evaluated case-by-case instead of relying on their reputation as a non-partisan referee.
What is the charitable version for Wills, exactly? Was he not 100% unambigiously condemning using this tragedy as an impetus for registering black voters at the memorial site? Do you really think a charitable reading is that he would have been fine if they were 50 ft. down the street? I just don’t get the wiggle room there.
As to the overall point, I think the statement of a high-level (but not top, as you helpfully clarified) party official in a state on a matter of state issues is reasonably strong evidence that his co-partisans agree in the absence of other evidence. I’m fine with holding myself to that standard. On issues for which I consider myself left-wing, high-level Democratic spokesman roughly sum up my position more often than not. I think that’s enough to put the burden on you to show that the particular opinion is unorthodox within the party. Indeed, the view that the House has failed to “pass a jobs bill” is very widespread among Democrats–I think the real debate there is whether it is knowingly false or not.
There may well be nine times as many conservative lies out there.
A large problem with the conservative movement is its embrace of idiocy. We’ve seen this here when trying to identify liberal idiots and positions. There are fewer positions that liberals embrace that are unambiguous foolish or unsupportable – apart from nukes and GM food, there’s really not nearly as much that liberals are embracing that’s factually, demonstrably wrong as compared to the obstinate denial of evolution, global warming, the geologic age of the earth, and frankly the general distrust of science that seems to permeate a certain sub-strata of enthusiastic conservative politicians and voters.
I think his point was that the concept of voter registration tied to the event was unseemly. “Come for the protest, stay for the registration!” or “Hands up! Don’t shoot! Sign here!” seems to politicize the death in a very Rahm Emmanual “don’t waste a crisis” kind of way.
I don’t think it’s fairly expanded to read as opposition for black voter registration per se.
Now that you’re aware of the House’s actual actions, how would you phrase the claim?
You flatter yourself.
You might think or claim there’s no difference, but you were addressing my position, and my position rests on this difference. So it was inappropriate.
This is a specious distinction in context. These are flip sides of the same coin.
If you can’t keep up, please wait quietly.
You could make a pretty good case for Barack Obama… not in the sense that if Obama said something it would prove I believed it, but in the sense that if Obama said something I would then find it likely that other people might think I believed it, and might go out of my way to point out if I disagreed.
Anyhow, the reason I responded to your post earlier was because, amazingly enough, I was agreeing with you.
That’s an interesting question, and probably worth a thread of its own, but… I think in this case it’s an overreach to jump from “MO state executive director said…” to “the believe of > 50% of Republicans is…”. Clearly less of an overreach than jumping from “a single random Republican said…”, but still an overreach. The problem I have with that kind of statement is similar to when Shodan talks about “The Usual Suspects”, because it allows you to have it both ways. Your statement is, if not impossible to falsify, at least difficult to falsify. It SOUNDS like you’re making a statement about every, or most, Republicans. But if some particular Republican objects that it doesn’t apply to him, well, then you weren’t talking about him, SPECIFICALLY, so why is he objecting, yada yada yada.
I don’t think it’s a very big deal, and as I said earlier I don’t think there’s any reason to think you were deliberately choosing that phrasing in order to be deceptive or anything, but I do think Bricker was acting reasonably when he called you on it.
I think that’s the most likely explanation for the message he thought he was conveying. Which I think is a terrible message not for particularly partisan reasons, but because voter registration is, to me, in a very real sense, the MOST CORRECT AND PRODUCTIVE RESPONSE.
You’re 67% of the population in a town but none of the cops or city elected officials share your skin color? THEN GET OUT AND VOTE! You think the town is run in a way which is stacked against you? THEN GET OUT AND VOTE!
I think a more pernicious implication of Willis’s statement is not so much the “oh, we don’t want blacks to register” implication, but the “hey, you know how those activists are saying that the correct response to societal injustice is to WORK WITHIN THE SYSTEM to change the system, to make sure that you EXERCISE YOUR FRANCHISE so that your voice is heard, etc? well, those activists are WRONG. You should NOT do that…”, which in a twisted way almost condones rioting.
Not per se, but as a response to this incident. Tied to the event, as you put it. Which I think is what both septimus and Wills said.
I would say that the House has not made a serious effort to get jobs legislation enacted.
Meaning that they have not made an effort to find common ground with the Senate and President to propose and pass a bill with the intended effect of making a substantial difference in the jobs situation. But I would never use a sentence like that in a political communication. Indeed, I would think twice before saying my proposed sentence above instead of the simpler, if arguably imprecise, “failed to pass a jobs bill.” That’s the nature of the medium. It’s not legal brief.
This is slightly off topic in context of the issue being discussed, but I would guess the reason for this discrepancy is largely due to the rapid demographic turnaround in that town. As recently as the 1990 census, Ferguson was about 74% white. What happens in such cases is that you get incumbents or guys already connected to the political leadership who tend to hang on a while, and it takes time for the leadership to change colors. (Of course, an increase in racial tension can speed up that process.)
I’m sure there’s some truth to that.
You are absolutely correct. If you check some of my posts on science, history, etc. you will see that I am usually careful to mince my words, to introduce qualifiers that make my comments correct even if subjected to scrutiny.
But I don’t apologize for exaggerating or losing my temper when addressing idiots and liars.
The fact is that I detest the modern U.S. Republican Party and make no attempt to be civil when I discuss it. Frankly, I should stop using the word “right wingers” since to compare a normal “right wing” to the present Republican Party is an insult to the right wing. The present Democratic Party is farther right of center than old-time Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller who were worthy of respect and votes. The present Republican Party doesn’t even fit on a left-right axis; one needs a separate sane-insane axis to describe it.
Am American commentator has a good description:
[QUOTE=Garrison Keillor, circa 2004]
The party of Lincoln and Liberty has been transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brown-shirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch President, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk.
[/QUOTE]
I should apologize to Shodan. Insulting him is like kicking an old dog that’s lost all sentience. I don’t apologize for insulting Bricker who is intelligent enough to see the Republican Party for what it’s become. A few posts ago he even admitted the GOP was noted for its “embrace of idiocy.”
I’d try to engage Bricker, and bring him back to sanity, but he’s on record as claiming the Affair of the Semen-Stained Dress was a bigger crime than the lies that led to the Trillion-Dollar War for Halliburton. After that bizarre claim, I’m happy just to sit back and heckle.