My problem is that you discount his opinion soley because he is not an American.
I guess you just show how close-minded you are.
The entire point of my posting in this thread was to get a Mods comment of december’s dispicable actions in the other thread. I’ve got that.
Trolling for Mod comments? Doesn’t sound wise, to me.
How in the hell do you get trolling from that? This is the BBQ Pit right? The place for comments and questions regarding administration of the board?
Are you a fucking idiot, or do you just play one on tv?
From the description of the BBQ Pit on the SDMB main page:
As such, “get[ting] a Mods comment of december’s dispicable actions in the other thread.” is entirely within the bounds of this forum. The notion that it is trolling to do as others have done (with the mods’ blessings) for well over 3 years now is extremely peculiar.
Mixed feelings here. When I saw what december did, I have to admit that I was mildly amused, and was actually pretty interested to see what the responses were, and was disappointed that the “secret” was spoiled so early.
But the mods raised some convincing points in that it is something that would negatively contribute to the board if everyone mistrusted each other about deceptive quotes and soo forth. And that also lead me to more seriously rethink my initial amusement.
If december’s point was that the Clintons had said the same things that the Bush camp had, without garnering the same accusations of “liar!” that Bush has, there were better ways to make this point. It is a serious point: both Presidents worked with the same military and agencies, and any information Clinton had to back up his statements, Bush would have then also have had.
As a test of people’s partisaness, however, this was a subpar exercise, because it did not include any sort of attempt to get people to claim that they thought Clinton hadn’t lied himself before trying to trick them into calling him one. Indeed, the entire premise of the trick seems to lie in the rather odd, obsessive belief that people who disagree with Bush must love and believe everything Clinton said. While that may be true for some, it clearly is not a very good assumption to simply take as a given when springing the trap, and it borders itself on begging the very question that it’s seeking to answer (whether or not people’s perception of the truth depends on someone’s party affiliation).
Worse, the fact that people will read a statement, assume that it is saying something very similar to other things that Bush has publically said, and then launch into a refutation of that statement doesn’t really prove very much at all. People who think Bush lied already are convinced by prior examinations of different statements/revelations, so the quote might as well not even have been included for all anyone cared about its specific content.
Additionally, if you think someone is wrong, to accuse someone of lying (as opposed to being mistaken), you first have to know who they are (because otherwise you can have no legitimate discussion on what they knew when they made the statement). It is possible that Clinton lied, and Bush was merely mistaken, or vice versa. That further undermines any real usefulness to the exercise even if people were indeed fully tricked.
Considering all this, Shodan is flatly wrong to assert that if someone was tricked and called Bush a liar based on the quote, that this proves that their attitude is “If Clinton says it, it is true. If Bush said it, it is false.” The only people potentially guilty of demonstrating this sort of reasoning are those who were INFORMED of the trick, but then resorted to a non-sequitur about how Bush did something far worse with his lie (which may or may not be the case, but is irrelevant to whether or not he lied).
So, thinking through this, the reason I found it amusing was because I didn’t think it through fully to realize that it doesn’t make much sense, and I was likely getting too much the spirit of being vindictively meanspirited that seemed to animate both the exercise and the amusement at the exercise.
I also disagree that this was akin to what Sokal did. What Sokal did was submit nonsense to the editors of a journal to see if it would be published, demonstrating how low the publishing standards of said journal were. The very POINT of editorial position on a journal is to verify the quality and accuracy of what is submitted, and the acceptance of Sokal’s piece demonstrated that the editors basically had no standard for even base coherency.
The closest december came to this was submitting misleading quotes to see if anyone would check on them and be misled. However, as the mods have pointed out, it isn’t meant to be poster’s constant job to make sure the OP’s quotes are accurate and forthright: that is the responsibility of the OP. And instead of just putting out nonsense to see if he would be called on it, december tried to use very coherent reasoning to mislead people in the hopes that he could troll up some examples of partisan hypocrisy. If that was his goal, I would say that the exercise was both ill-concieved in execution, and failed in practice.
I also don’t think Lib’s sweeping characterization of the entire board’s sense of humor, “the liberals,” and his assertion that people’s anger about being decieved was contrived is fair. I admit that I’ve also rushed too quickly into assuming that someone’s outrage was convieniently contrived and pre-decided upon- when I had no good basis to assume so. But while december may get a worse rap than he deserves, 1) this is not a particularly good issue on which to claim unjust or contrived persecution and 2) it isn’t only liberals that have knee-jerk reactions to some of december’s past monkey business: people across the spectrum have had extended and repeated problematic experience with his tactics and style that makes them too quick to assume the worst.
Additionally, other well-known conservatives on this board are far far more aggressive and personally combative than december (who almost always remains both distant and controlled, if icily and dryly), yet do not garner the same complaints about repeated use of deceptive rhetoric, misrepresentation, and numerous tactics more suited to run people around in circles rather than debate an issue with them.
Given this, I don’t think it’s fair to lob accusations of bias and prejeduce (not to mention narrating the imagined content of the minds of others) so haphazardly. Clearly, december has been a recipient of overzealous condemnation from time to time. But this also not something that can simply be assumed to always be the case: used as a blanket defense whenever necessary without any demonstration that it is the true motive of the criticism in question.
Not to worry. I’m an equal opportunity critic. Just because I say A is Not B doesn’t mean that I think C is therefore B.
Context change? What context change?
One quote from Clinton, and another from one of his closest advisors. Both expressing the same opinion that Bush held, so closely that no one could distinguish if the quote was from Bush or Clinton.
Although I agree that misquoting Hilary as if it were part of Bill’s quote was a mistake. The post would have been much more effective if december had been scrupulously careful to ensure that every word of his post were the literal truth, and attributed the Hilary quote to “a close advisor to the President”.
As far the level of the administration’s knowledge changing in five years, you are assuming facts not in evidence. Everyone knew pre-invasion that Iraq had WMD. There was not a single word from anyone on the Left accusing Clinton of lying when he asserted that Saddam had nukes. What indication existed before the invasion that Iraq did not have nukes, as Clinton asserted?
But when Clinton said it and the lefties thought it was Bush, it was a lie. As predictable a knee-jerk as can be expected.
As far as not being able to draw conclusions, don’t be silly. Nary a one of the usual suspects said word one about why the quote was more credible when it came from Clinton. You were all suckered, and you all fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. And you all reacted to that sinking feeling at realizing that you had been outsmarted as the Left generally does on the SDMB - attack december, and call for his banning.
Big surprise. :rolleyes:
Regards,
Shodan
Oh, piffle!
The insult of the “trick” is not so much that it was a trick, but that it was a stupid trick. The only way this crippled duck of a trick works is if the people who criticize the quotes change thier tune when it is revealed that Clinton said it. Then, you might have been justified to gloat in “hook, line, and sinker” fashion. Failing that, you got D for diddly squat.
The premise that is misleading you is your assumption that all us “lefties” are united by a blubbering adoration of Bill. This is nonsense, but if it comforts you, it would be churlish to deny it to you. That a man would spend his whole life to obtain a goal, in this case the Presidency, and then damn near piss it away to get his knob polished…man, thats dumb.
Bill is a politician, down to his toenails, and no virgin ever gets elected Queen of the Whores. GeeDubya is a likeable enough doofus who is infected by the delusion that he is a Leader of Men, a statesman and an international visionary. God help us all, Elmer Fudd thinks he’s Churchill.
Has anyone noticed the wholesale change in tactics among the lunatic fringe of the right wing on these boards? They are no longer trying to convince us that Bush and company were telling us the truth, or that Bush and company were justified in believing that what they were spewing out was the truth. No, they’ve resorted to the “Oh, yeah, well your guy lied, too!” tactic.
Based on this change in approach, I have to conclude that they’re conceding that Bush and his cronies are lying sacks of shit, but are arguing that this doesn’t represent any change from the status quo ante.
Of course, if, for example, stocks of WMD are suddenly found in Iraq, they’ll be crowing like mad. Personally, if that happened, I would be almost certain that the Administration had planted the evidence, given their penchant for deciding what the truth is, then setting about to manufacture the evidence necessary to prove it.
This administration is the most consistently, appallingly, and dangerously mendacious bunch of morons we’ve ever been saddled with. It seems that the best argument our friends on the right can come up with is that Bush isn’t the worst. I call that progress.
And a big round of applause for ** Apos! **
Au Contraire! I, myself, usually don’t read poster’s names before I read their post (OPs, of course, but that’s hard to not do.) Very often, I see something so jarring, so unlike other people’s posts, that I have to look and see who wrote it in order to get a context. Usually, it’s either December or Susanann.
Of course, I may not be a “liberal”, as you put it, as I don’t really see a need to self-scrutinize merely for classification purposes. I guess that does make me a liberal 
I will never seriously read a December thread again. Once a poster has proven he plays fast and loose with basic message board protocol, what trust is possible from then on?
No. I have a problem with mindless drones who bought into the “with us or against us, my country right or wrong” line of Bushit and then have the audacity of accusing others of “immature, knee-jerk” reactions.
I’ll be the first one to admit that I don’t have an unmitigated love affair with the USA, nor, for that matter, any other country. Correct me if I am wrong, but monolithic support for a land mass that one happens to be born in, or in many cases, moves to, is just plain dumb. Sure, we remain tribal creatures at the core, pack animals instinctually driven to find a place in whatever hierarchy we inhabit. It begins with the family unit and grows in concentric circles from there. The last of those circles or boundaries, limited by any number of factors such as education, opportunity, freedom of choice, etc. A good argument can be put forth that the smaller those boundaries are, the more ignorance you’re likely to find within them. Veritable breeding grounds for racism, xenophobia and all sorts of unfounded fears based on ignorance. If you think about it, it’s really not all that different from socializing a puppy. Keep him isolated, the more likely he’ll remain in a feral state, lashing out from fear and insecurity.
Which leads me right back to the meaningless “Anti-American” charge. For as long as I view Americans as nothing more and nothing less than a collection of people that happen to be living within a politically defined territory, they are simply the same as any other group – not all good, not all bad, but a mere collection of individuals. Sure, at this particular junction in history, as a collective, there’s no doubt the US is the most powerful nation on earth. But how the fuck Dumbya & Sheeple think that defaults into mindless sloganeering like the “with us or against us” dribble, beats the hell out of me. Because short of Global Domination by intimidation through military force, there’s nothing anyone can do to shove any particular ideology down our throats. In my mind, the “Perfect System,” albeit obviously unattainable, is the one that tries to meld the best practical sociopolitical ideas from the myriad of choices available through reasoned discourse and logic. Imagine a Global Village incorporating Teutonic efficiency, American ingenuity, Swiss precision, Chinese wisdom, Latin savoir de vivre, etc.
Ideals aside, I think it also very clear that for purely pragmatic reasons, the larger the schism grows between the “halves and the halves nots,” the more resentment and ill will we will be fostering. And international naked power-grabs, highlighted by Dumbya’s neocon cabal’s ill-timed and conceived move into Iraq, is the perfect illustration of said behavior. So yeah, I am certainly Anti-American to the extent that I assign some portion of the blame to people like milroy and december, for whom ideological adherence to the Party Line is of the utmost importance – above and beyond any semblance of reasoned discourse. Fearless Misleader said it, thus it must be true. As for the rest of America and Americans, my own US-born teenager included, I just hope they put aside their apathy, fight back and get their country back on track.
Encouraging to see some of that happening right here on the SDMB, for there are any number of posters that I’d have no qualms endorsing for political office if that were possible. Guess they must be part of the grassroots Anti-American movement. Whatever the fuck that means.
So yeah, milroy, consider moi a “hippy, drug-addicted, bi-sexual, anti-Semitic pinko communist Anti-American” or whatever else is in vogue in you blog d’jour. I’ll wear those labels proudly until said time you grow a brain you can call your own. Because up until you do, you’ll remain nothing but a nasty cumstain in the fabric of history.
Later, toots.
So, by your own admission, you’re proud to be Anti-Semitic?
Fuck off.
So, by your own admission, you’re proud to be Anti-Semitic?
Fuck off.
So, by your own admission, you’re proud to be a hippy?
Way cool.
Millroy, you REALLY have your head up your ass on this one.
but hten again, you can ignore me because I’m not american. funny how thats ok for Sam Stone though…
Seriously, milroy, did you really think that’s what he meant, or were you just trying to score rhetorical points?
Oh, and everyone should read Apos’s post. It’s a very nice summation of what I think the lessons are here.
And I don’t think Clinton’s comments had any more credibility at all. The fact that we were not attacked by Iraq seems to support that, not to mention what we’re finding (or not finding) today. Whether he was simply wrong or lying or whatever other possibilities there are is a matter of debate.
Well, I don’t think it matters if you’re an American or not. I’m an American and he has pretty much ignored me.
He has however, shown himself to be a close minded asshole.
I will ignore you because you’re an idiot, albeit a furrin one. 
I do think that using Anti-Semitism even as a joke is pretty pathetic.
YMMV.