Sorry to have ruffled your egomaniacal high-falutin moralistic feathers. Seems to me all you’ve done hear is provide your own op-ed piece to this forum.
Your continued campaign to lead the malicious attack on December for the entertainment of your sycophants is a blight on this messageboard and I will continue to say so. In fact, considering deep wrenching hatred you spew towards him has motivated your “op-ed” piece, It leaves me with wondering how credible the “facts” you reported are. Indeed, you are a sick, sick human being.
And you, least of all have no business in charging anyone with smearing others.
Well my whinging little depends wearing worm, my facts come with citations to CPA-I and international security cordination office documentation and also correlate with the body of reporting on the situation, including by such non-liberal sources as the Financial Times and The Economist.
It’s unsurprising I suppose in the end that you are too dim to tell the difference in quality of information.
I don’t particularly creep and crawl to Collounsbury’s meter, I find he can be abrasive to the point of rudeness, however december is very selective in who he quotes, what part of the total is quoted - often out of context, and simply refutes evidence whilst citing opinion from non-independant sources as fact.
I have not noticed **Collounsbury[b/] doing that, his links always check out, and he is not alone in his view either, and their cites check out.
If I were in Collounsbury’s position, where I was quoting details with which I had direct and personal experience, and was countered by someone who was so deliberately and willfully wrong, and in the face of what I knew and could prove, I think I would become less civil too.
grienspace, you come across as one one the less intellectually blessed people on this board. Remember this?
There is no way in this fucking universe that december is any kind of non-religious conservative version of Polycarp.
december is quite open about his religion, it’s not a secret that december has strong religious beliefs. That you would label him as non-religious is absolutely fucking bizarre.
december is a liar, a weasel, a distorter of facts. Polycarp is none of those things.
Desmostylus, the degree to which Collounsbury has brainwashed you is astounding. More so when you make it so clear that you Col sycophants have no reservations about spewing absolute untruths about him. So you say its no secret uh? Absolutely fucking bizarre is it ? You’re absolutely fucking bizarre!
I have said I was an atheist a number of times on this board.
You’re wrong about this as well.
grienspace, after many debates with the learned Collounsbury, I have learned his language. Hidden within his verbosity and insults is an admission that I was right.
Recall that the OP of the other debate quoted columnist Mark Steyn, who had spent two weeks doing a solo auto tour of much of Iraq, but not Baghdad. He said:[ul][]There’s no dysentery or cholera, []no sign of a human catastrophe, []the medical centres are empty and medical supplies are adequate []the countryside (outside Baghdad) is charming. []The refugees are primarily Palestinian. “In other words, this isn’t a human crisis but Arab politics - the longstanding refusal by Middle Eastern regimes to accord Palestinian residents any kind of legal status.”[]Despite the supposed “anarchy”, no one’s fleeing.[] In the western towns, which were relatively unscathed by the war, the Ba’athist buildings are the sole target of highly focused looting. Everything else is untouched []There’s plenty of food and water. [/ul] Collounsbury admitted that “the worst case scenarios did not come to pass.” In other words, he admitted that Steyn was right.
Now, Desmostylus, I do like you very much and hesitate to say this, but that’s not very nice. You may have plenty of legitimate beefs with december’s beliefs and topics, but making an accusation about him and requiring he prove himself innocent of it is just not cricket. Especially when Search is working right now.
What Collounsbury was not that Steyn was right, but rather that things did not get as bad as they possibly could.
Your original position in the OP was in fact "Things in Iraq aren’t that bad’.
Overstating the worst possible case scenario is one heck of a stretch from saying "Things in Iraq aren’t that bad’, and this is one powerful example of your distortion, I would have at least expected you would not try to be so blatent as to do this from your own OP!
He also added that due to information not coming in from the majority of medical centres in Iraq, it was actually impossible to say with real authority what the situation truly is.
WTF? either one half of your statemnt is true, or the other, or neither, but it is not possible for it all to be tue.In any case this does not tally with your assertion that Collounsbury agrees with Steyn or yourself.
…and the response
This does not seem like a ringing endorsement of your OP december
I just cannot see how you can reconcile Steyn, which you originally quoted, with Collounsbury this is a gross distortion and an extremely intellectually dishonest statement by you december
I cannot help but wonder if your last post is an attempt to get Collounsbury to cross the policy lines on the SDMB so he will be banned, it so little resembles what he actually posted that it is grotesque.
It is a pity that [b[december** has chosen a topic of actual importance upon which to build his Op-Ed empire.
Dear fellow, did nobody tell you, as a child, that the moon was made of green cheese? A far less offensive topic, and one that would generate considerably less ire, though to be fair I don’t recall seeing many bloggers expounding on the virtues of various cheeses in its composition.
Or, at this point, are you just riding the wave of misinformation and blog-comme-verité to its bitter end?
Bee-eye-enn-gee-ohh, and Collunsbury is the worst of the lot. I wonder whose side I would take if I were plucked out of the 16th century, exposed to the threads on the SDMB and then asked who was most likely to be right? On one side there is a calm recounting of facts and opinions as the poster sees them, on the other is a ranting ideologue whose arguements are shakey and who relies 90% of the time on hearsay to back up his claims. I imagine that would be an easy choice. December, your arguements are frequently based on the most unlikely and unreliable of sources and you willfully allow your politics to blind you to the obvious, but you’re certainly a poster I value having here, you make me think( don’t get a swelled head, frequently the conclusion I reach after thinking is that you’re wrong ) Colls and the rest of his ilk feel that bombast and hysteria is a valid method of debate, frothing at the mouth with outrage and seeting with resentment simply because you’re not blindly mouthing fealty to liberal ideology.
Oh, and in reguards to the OP, you’re right, in spite of his profanity laced screed, Collunsbury basically admitted that you were right several times, Things in Iraq are not as bad as the doomsayers are trying to paint them. I think he’s bitterly disapointed that most Iraqis aren’t lying dead in the streets as we speak. Sure, it would be bad for the Iraqis, but wow, would it ever prove him right, and what’s more important than that?
HOWEVER…
Things in Iraq are not “good” by any streach of the imagination, and I, also, would like to see a cite for your claim that some basic services in Iraq now excede pre-war levels. A Colunsburyeske “I heard it somewhere” dosen’t cut it.
Desmostylus, I assure you that december has repeatedly and consistently identified himself as an atheist, though he frequently sympathizes with conservative Christian political points of view, even on church-state issues. grienspace:
Are you high? Collounsbury provided assessments from the American authorities who are governing Iraq, right down to daily incident logs. He recounted the first-hand experiences of people he personally knows who do business inside Iraq. He provided multiple hard news stories, largely from sources that are anything but liberal. There wasn’t an “op-ed piece” anywhere in his detailed, informative, and by-god welcome posts.
Doesn’t it matter to you at all if the sources on which the calm person relies are opinion pieces based on third-hand information, and compiled by someone who as never set foot in the region, and who has an obvious political agenda? Or is it somehow inferior to rely on “hearsay” which actually consists of firsthand experience and personal conversations with people who have spent their careers dealing directly with the region, and transmitted by someone who has spent his career dealing with the region and therefore knows how to choose sources based on their relative objectivity and filter out the crap?
Or perhaps the mere fact of expert opinions being quoted by some conservative blog makes them somehow superior information sources, and the very same ideas are magically converted from “hearsay” into Shining Golden Objective Unquestionable Truth, by virtue of having appeared in print somewhere. Somehow the same “hearsay” doesn’t seem to give you pause when it’s been spun by a hawk with no regional or historical perspective.
) Colls and the rest of his ilk feel that bombast and hysteria is a valid method of debate, frothing at the mouth with outrage and seeting with resentment simply because you’re not blindly mouthing fealty to liberal ideology.