There are a number of posters who are politically conservative, both as judged on the SDMB and in real life, who took issue with G W Bush. Making Bush the litmus test for whether someone is “left” or “right,” (when, for example, just about every one of Collounsbury’s predictions regarding the Iraq fiasco were born out in subsequent years while his economics tended to stand firmly on the Conservative side of the scale), simply indicates your personal prejudices, not those of the board ot staff.
No, I didn’t say your post referred to partisan politics. I said it was partisan. Also, in the real world, partisanship is just as often used on these boards to refer to Republican-Democrat, liberal-conservative, or left-right.
[QUOTE=Zoe;12061653Further, you are the source of your own misunderstanding. You have taken one of my sentences from that post and left off the last seven words – the part which gives the full meaning of the sentence. (See Irishman’s post above.) When you left off those seven words and kept only the first nine without indicating that any part of the sentence was missing, you completely misrepresented what the sentence really said. It did not mean what you tried to make it seem that it meant. Can you see the difference?
He is, for example, too hostile, intolerant, and simplistic in his views.
He is, for example, too hostile, intolerant, and simplistic in his views on Freedom of Religion.
That was my “amazing partisan statement”? [/QUOTE]
You’re forgetting my Post #28, where I quoted you in full. So your characterization, inadvertent as it may be, is both inaccurate and unfair. In the post you site above I merely repeated five words to remind you of what you said. It was not intended to characterize what you said as those words only. I think you know this. If not, refer again to Post 28.
[QUOTE=Zoe;12061653In your last post, you also claim " It’s amazing to think those qualities arenot and cannot be present on the left. And if they are, the person really is on the right."
What I really said was:
“I see the posts of Der Trihs to be too inconsistent to be classified as liberal or conservative.”
And at no time did I say that liberals can’t be hostile, intolerant or even simplistic.[/QUOTE]
That is what one could and did draw from your post. And I wasn’t the only one taken aback by what you wrote. I still think you think that, because reading your statement any other way seems a bit much. I think you’re backpedaling here trying to give yourself cover by building some fantasy that partisanship only applies when discussing conservative vs liberal in a more classical sense. There are meanings more commonly used. You seem to go through these contortions in an attempt to have DT’s hateful nonsense—even in part—characterized as something that has ANYTHING to do with conservatism. Even your quote, “I see the posts of Der Trihs to be too inconsistent to be classified as liberal or conservative” is remarkably partisan. If it weren’t, then a good number of people would view DT as being a conservative, right? Do you really think that to be the case? The only defense for that opinion would be to argue that hostility, intolerance, and simplicity of argument—as they refer to freedom of religion or anything else—are necessarily traits of the conservative side of the spectrum. Cannot one be hostile when it comes to defending Freedom of Religion? Cannot one demonstrate intolerance to those he disagrees with when it comes to Freedom of Religion? Cannot one be be overly simplistic when it comes to arguing for Freedom of Religion? The answer, I hope you see, to each of those questions is “yes”. The proof is DT’s own Posts.
And this leaves aside that he doesn’t argue for Freedom of Religion as much as Freedom from Religion. Or, All Religion Should be Destroyed. Your framing his position as such does both he and the rest of us an injustice. Review a few of his posts on the subject. He spouts that is evil, murderous, etc. He deserves to have his views fairly characterized and the sane deserve to have a spade called a spade and not have it’s prettified into something that is an acceptable view.
Not all requests for cites are reasonable. Particularly those that ask someone to prove a negative. This has been explained to you. And, evidently, ignored. Instead, you choose to carp on it thinking you make some grand, or “winning” point. You don’t.
Well reinstatements are pretty rare so it wouldn’t make a good sample size, they also happened when suspension wasn’t a vB function the mods could use. Therefore, a better way to examine favoritism would be to see whom was only suspended instead of banned. Curtis Lemay is a recent example of an even mild Bush supporter being only suspended. Weirddave was also a McCain supporter and a mild Bush defender who was suspended and came back before his ultimate banning. Are those two examples enough?
Don’t make assertions you can’t back up. Including those which would result in you having to prove a negative. Explaining that you can’t prove a negative is entirely irrelevant. You made an assertion that, apparently can’t be proven, which is entirely your fault. People asking you to support what you wrote is entirely appropriate. It isn’t our fault you can’t do it.
What? “Ours”?! You haven’t even posted in this thread up till now. I’ll leave you with this (from here) to read on that pathetic subject (:rolleyes:):
Now, you did ask me for evidence, as well. Here is my response to you. In it I asked for your sage guidance on just how I was to go about providing what your heart desired, You never answered. :rolleyes::rolleyes:
Magellan, sorry, I got the two threads mixed up. My comment applies, however, as you’re covering the same “can’t prove a negative” thing that was discussed in that other other. People who post unprovable assertions/claims should not get bent out of shape when someone calls them on it. Saying you can’t prove a negative when someone asks for a cite isn’t a reasonable response if the original claim would require doing so to prove.
You did quote in full, but when you paraphrased to show your understanding, you emphasized the three adjectives and dropped the phrase they modified. I certainly took your understanding to be thinking
“Der Trihs is hostile, Der Trihs is intolerant, and Der Trihs is simplistic in his views on Freedom of Religion.”
To be fair, the original wording is ambiguous and that is a fair way to read the statement. Like I said, I had to rethink the sentence to understand what Zoe intended.
“On Freedom of Religion, Der Trihs is hostile, intolerant, and simplistic in his views.”
Rather than trying to shout each other down and “win”, maybe you should both take a breath and try to read what the other is actually saying.
Not wrong, just kind of useless - especially your comment to Shodan. I do find it quite amusing that you mixed up threads while doling out the pro tips.
I think there are more liberals than conservatives on this board. I don’t consider that a bias, just a fact. But I think a result of this is that conservatives here feel the need to be more confrontational. A conservative is going to see a lot more opinions on this board that he disagrees with than a liberal is. And the amount of these confrontations increase the likelihood that a conservative here will cross the line into becoming a jerk.
This doesn’t mean that conservatives are inherently more argumentative than liberals. It’s just that this is a situation where conservatives have more cause to argue. If this were a more conservative board, it would be liberals who would be most often finding posts they disagreed with and argued against.
Nor am I saying this absolves conservatives (or liberals) for what they post. Regardless of how many conservatives and liberals there are on this baord, everyone is an individual and is responsible for their own actions.
I appreciate the distinction you, and Zoe, makes regarding the words “Freedom of Religion”. I do. But as I think I explained in my previous post to her, I don’t see how that matters. She still seems to think that “hostility, intolerance, and simplicity” in regards to F of R is necessarily an attribute of the right. And that is blind partisanship.
I read it the other way: “hostility, intolerance, and simplicity” in regards to F of R is necessarily antithetical to being on the left. There’s an excluded middle here.
I think what she’s trying to say is that Der Trihs doesn’t FIT the left-right dichotomy easily–while he takes more “traditionally” leftist than rightist positions, he seems most frequently to take positions orthogonal to the traditional divide–being both anti-Christian and anti-Freedom of Religion neatly excludes him from the mainstream rightists and leftists in the US today, for example, and while his anti-war position makes him not Right, his extremely bellicose violence towards the war and warriors is also not Left. Basically, I don’t think he can meaningfully be called a part of either side, so his disposition doesn’t seem to have relevance to a debate on left-v-right bias–on those things he feels strongly about, he’s in neither camp but in a fairly extreme place. You can CALL it leftist by focusing on part of the way he thinks (anti-Christian, anti-Freedom of Religion, anti-Iraq-War) but you can just as easily if arguing from a different set of biases call it Rightist (anti-Freedom-of-Religion, again, and willingness to use military force to achieve his political objectives (with regard to his desire to see US troops in Iraq all get killed)).
Neither side really wants him in toto.
I kind of have a dog in this fight, for that matter, as a lesser example–I’m pro-gun and pro-gay-marriage, if I get a warning is it evidence of bias either way? Der Trihs is just a more strident example of that much of the time.
For the purposes of what I’ve been saying, there’s very little difference. Whether one believes that hostility, intolerance, and simplicity are antithetical to one political persuasion or if they exist that they necessarily belong to the other is similar evidence of blind partisanship.
Sure it is. It’s not what all people on the left believe, or even a significant portion (my hometown of San Francisco notwithstanding), but all those who share his beliefs on our military are on the left side of the divide.
No, that’s not right. First, he’s not anti-Freedom of Religion, in that he wants to impose one religion. That’s the only way I see someone from the right being considered anti-FofR. That’s not DT. He is anti-Religion. Period. And I don’t think he advocates any military. He does, and has advocated that the people of Iraq resist our military and kill them‚ because they’re evil, etc. There is simply no way he is characterized as the Right. The right has their own nuts, like Fred Phelps, the left has theirs, like DT. Hmmm, I was intending to be a bit hyperbolic, but that’s actually a good comparison., that’s a pretty good analogy. They both spit out stupid hatred. On has a following, one doesn’t. (I mean one can’t really call the administration of one message board a following, can one? :D)