Here is your phrase again: “illiterate third world non English speaking criminals who we let into the country by the millions”. If you are defining “illiterate” as “incapable of comprehending the English language”, then your statement is redundant. Immigrants incapable of understanding the mode language of a country are functionally illiterate. “Third world” originally meant unaffiliated with the USSR or the USA, though that definition is no longer useful for obvious reasons. For that reason I’d prefer operationalisable terms such as “very low human development”. For the record, Mexico is listed as a “high development” state according to the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report 2011. Referring to illegal immigrants as criminals is merely another redundancy. The final issue with this phrase is the definition of “let”. You personally propose standards to restrict legal immigration more or less already in place, barring the acceptance of family members. So, you would “let” the immigrants you complain about in at almost the same rate as they are “let” in by the US government (Obama’s administration oversaw a 42% increase in prosecutions and record breaking deportations, Clinton’s increased border controls by 35% and implemented many innovations in immigrant detection).
I don’t think that. I think you believe in government interference in markets. Well done! Leave libertarianism to the wealthy.
So, you actually don’t understand the point I made. Sigh.
I really don’t know what you’re problem is. But I am able to narrow it down. The breakdown seems to have occurred someplace post-reading and pre-responding. Alternatively, between your ears.
No, your problem is that I understand it better than *you *do. :dubious: Since, as we have established on previous subjects, you are absolutely unable to face the fact of your own bigotry no matter how it is shown to you.
Well, I’d say it was more than that, in that I think you had to choose a fairly contrived and unlikely interpretation of what he was saying… and then you used that as the basis for commentary about liberals as a whole. Putting those two things together is pretty Fox-News-y of you.
Umm, I don’t think so. I think it’s more that of tens of thousands of posters on the SDMB, the vast majority, even among people with thousands of posts, are just names on the screen to me. Fairly few are people I’ve interacted enough times in enough different threads that I really have a labelled mental box for them. So when someone who I don’t really know from Adam posts in a way that I disagree with, why would I bother getting into it? I don’t know who that person is, and I have no mental investment in how they post. And of course it’s easier to learn who people are when you engage with them repeatedly, and on the SDMB I’m more likely to engage repeatedly with people I disagree with. So I have a much clearer mental picture of you, Shodan, Starving Artist and magellan01 than four equally prolific left-leaning posters. Therefore I’m more likely to engage you on matters of this sort which aren’t pure debate-about-topics but more meta-level discussion-about-discussion.
Also worth noting is that it’s not like I just jumped into this thread for the sole purpose of criticizing your posting style… I initially wrote post 210 in this thread, in which I did criticize (although not by name) the people you were arguing with. And everyone pretty much ignored it. Then I reentered the thread with post 361, from which our current argument evolved. But it’s not like I just suddenly said “hey, I think I’ll go into that thread and criticize Bricker’s posting style while ignoring everyone else”.
Funny, I always thought that that didn’t actually accomplish anything, beating up on the other guy’s weakest argument.
It doesn’t show that you’ve got the better argument; all it really shows is that you want to make it look like you do, without the hard work of actually having that better argument.
I just reread MaxTheVool’s post #210, as he suggested to do. It was an excellent post, and the thread could/should have ended right there.
The entire post is worth reading, but I’ll just excerpt the part I want to respond to.
Please note that this post was more than 200 posts ago, and the “dialog” between Bricker’s pedantry and the people it irritates just goes on and on.
The real problem, IMO, is that Bricker seems trained (like a lawyer?) to seize on any slightly misstated logic and cry “Objection!” hoping to win points for his side. The observation that short waits cannot be absolutely guaranteed is obvious, and even the Doper (if any) who appeared to claim otherwise probably understood this. Bricker may have been right to point out the error (I’m not going to hunt through the thread to find the precise point), but the point deserved at most one well-written paragraph and a smiley face. Instead Bricker babbles on and on and on and on … lately confusing us by comparing himself to a 9-year old child (:smack: :dubious: ) for no purpose.
The rest of us are trying to debate public policy, but Bricker, like an anal-retentive pedant seizes on a minor misstatement and won’t let go.
If this were the first time he’d done this, we’d ignore him. But instead this is the nature of most of his participation lately. I suspect he still has the intelligence to make useful contributions, but seems to prefer this pointless threadshitting, with the apparently intended purpose of irritating. So I disagree with “vastly more hostility and insult than they deserve.” Like a dog that keeps shitting on the carpet, Bricker needs to be punished until he improves his behavior or goes away.
See? Right there, typical impractical liberal idea. No mention of how much it would cost to smack every Republican lawyer in the nose with a rolled up newspaper! Why, the newspapers alone cost maybe fifty cents each. Volunteers will probably do it for free, so they don’t have to be paid, but still…
Ha! Let me help you out here. I’ve read enough of you posts to state, unequivocally, that there is no subject that I’ve considered that “you understand better than * do”. None. You simply don’t have the mental chops. This is not so much me tooting my own horn as it is me pointing to the rusty, tinny one that is yours.
It would serve you well to accept and remember this. But you’re probably to dim to realize that, too. ::shrug::
So two guys are walking along, and they see this dog licking his balls, and one of them says “Damn, I wish I could do that!” And the other guys says “Well, maybe you should try petting him first.”
After all the embarrassment you’ve caused yourself over, say, the definition of marriage, you still don’t even *know *how much of a source of laughter you are here?
Go right ahead, toot that horn, start off another round. All you want.
After all the embarrassment you’ve caused yourself over, say, the definition of marriage, you still don’t even *know *how much of a source of laughter you are here? 