Jack, with all due respect, you don’t even know what an experimental control is so I would be wary what you consider a “solid argument”. Further, as quickly as the second page of the debate you were already labeling me as “anti-Israel”. So much for solid arguments, eh? Interestingly (but surprisingly) the moderators didn’t say *anything *about that. At all. Outside of that, you did bring up one or two good points and so did DSeid. Unfortunately, those points were lost in the din of my supposed anti-Semitism, alleged belief in Jew bankers, and a Zionist conspiracy that Israel murdered Mr. Arafat.
All right, this is devolving into another endless 'does not does too!" Set of posts.
I’m willing to give it a bit longer to grow into a worthwhile thread but I think I’m being generous. One more set that seems pointless and I’m shooting this in the head and not looking back. Get me?
I am not going to attempt a detailed synopsis of the thread or re-debate it.
However, when I (and others) initially brought up major drawbacks to the poisoning theory including the absence of a valid chain of custody of Arafat’s effects and the lack of convincing signs/symptoms associated with radiation poisoning, you responded by reposting figures in large fonts and by mocking numerous posters for supposedly visualizing exotic animals when it was obvious (to you) that you were hearing the hoofbeats of a horse.
Given your participation in mockery when it became apparent that your views weren’t meeting general agreement, and dismissal of valid objections to the poisoning theory, I have difficulty viewing you as the honest scientist subjected to unjustified persecution.
Your moderation in that thread was heavy-handed, and IMO showed favoritism. I read that entire trainwreck, and I was amazed at the decision you made to jump in and make your first mod appearance (and your first appearance at all, if I remember correctly) on page 8 (the last page) of that thread.
The moderation struck me as odd for two reasons. One, it was completely out of line to be as heavy handed as you were with Honesty, while leaving everyone else (except Terr’s slap on the wrist) off the hook. If you spent the time to read that thread, you would have seen all sorts of what i would consider inappropriate comments and remarks, not the least of which is this one by jackmanii, post #88, directed at Honesty:
Is that appropriate? If you read that thread, in the preceding 87 posts, Honesty says nothing about Israel’s involvement. In fact, in a post preceding jackmanii’s post #88, (Post #84), Honesty states for someone accusing him of anti-Israel bias:
The entire thread was derailed continuously by “joke” comments, remarks about Arafat’s dribbling piss in his underwear and other nonsense. Is there any legitimate discussion? Sure, but you have ti hunt for it, and you have to sift through the static that posters such as Jackmanii, BrianGlutton and Dissonance provided.
Post #13, Diceman offers a suggestion to Honesty that personal bias may ne the reason why Honesty was getting so many strange replies.
.
That was Diceman, not Honesty who made that statement, yet it didn’t seem to matter. Honesty was leveled with the charge of being Anti-Israel, and he had to stop and refute it each and every time.
The only person who apologized for incorrectly charging Honesty with this was XT, who originally accused Honesty of his Anti-Israeli stance, but backed off after Honesty called BULLSHIT.
Post #177, by XT reads in part:
bolding mine.
In post #180, XT retracts his statement because he, like me, couldn’t find anything in the thread written by Honesty that said any such thing.
Well, I’ve looked back over your posts and I guess you haven’t mentioned Israel as a possible suspect. I’m not sure if I was thinking of other posters or other threads you’ve been in (or another poster in another thread I thought was you), but regardless it’s clear I was wrong there, so my apologies.
Where was your indignation and mod hat when BrianGlutton was adding useless and pointless response after response when he joined the thread on page 3, when it was shifted to GD? I thought GD had much tighter control on nonsense and “joke” posts, since people can get emotional in GD. BrianGlutton was ignored by you, although he DID receive a warning from Jonathan Chance for his behavior.
Which brings me to my second problem with your moderation. Your post comes directly after another Jonathan Chance mod post, he took care of the issue without needing any assistance from you and your post. Post #352, JC says
Seemed appropriate and enough to me, but you come in with your bizarro-land post at #353, hammering at Honesty but not telling anyone else to knock off the bullshit. Not only was your moderation unnecessary (as JC had already modded the issue), but you seemed to either be oblivious to the Jackmanii quote I provided above, or it jist didn’t seem to bother you. It was nice of you to admonish Terr for his “fib” comment, but you didn’t tell him to back off. Your comments to Honesty read as personal to me, whereas your comment to Terr was just a standard Mod comment.
As to the bigger issue, (and this should address DSeid as well), the controversy stems from this post from Honesty, and the subsequent post by Dissonance (I’ve quoted the entire post for clarity, and i’ve bolded the particular part of the post that is the segment in question):
the two posts in question are as follows:
Honesty, post #217
Bolding mine, to point out the relevant part of the post for this discussion.
Dissonance’s post #218
My bolding, to show Dissonance’s quote of Honesty’s words, which was **one post ** before Dissonance’s post.
Now I’ve read Honesty’s paragraph beginning “For argument’s sake” a number of times, and I still don’t really know what he’s trying to convey. I could guess, but I could guess incorrectly.
If it were me, I would have asked Honesty to clarify what in the world he was trying to say. Once he did that, if he made himself clear, then I would go after his post if I disagreed with it. Instead, Dissonance decides he knows what Honesty meant and he goes off in that direction. Everyone else in that thread seemed to follow suit, and all of a sudden a post that was at the minimum confusing and muddled, turns into a statement of fact, and something that Honesty clearly meant. He now has to spend more time denying he meant what Dissonance said, and they argue about quoting/misquoting issues.
You don’t see the problem I have here? If it was handled how things SHOULD be handled in GD (and I admittedly don’t participate much in GD, bUt I do read threads from time to time), a clarification should have been made. Regardless of what you think, Honesty can say what he said was a hypothetical; Dissonance and the rest of the posters in that thread gave Honesty the moral high-ground because they didn’t ask him to clarify before leveling his charge. Everyone jumping on the bandwagon wasn’t a surprise to me at this point in the thread, since it was pretty much Honesty against the other participants.
If it is your contention that Dissonance didn’t break any established quoting rule, fine. He may not have broken the letter of the law, but he broke the spirit of it. You say that he didn’t need to provide the qualifier “for argument’s sake” because it wasn’t connected to the sentences he DID quote. Ok, then can you explain to us what the purpose of a paragraph break is? Because, when I read something that says “For argument’s sake”, to me that would imply that everything in the paragraph is part of what’s being considered “for argument’s sake”, not just the first line that starts with that.
I can see why Dissonance (and you and others) contend that there was no mis-quoting there. And by your definition, that would be correct. I personally disagree because I believe that whatever was part of that paragraph would have been included in Honesty’s hypothetical.
I cannot tell you what Honesty meant and I’m not going to try, since I didn’t understand what he was going for. But since no one bothered to ask him, I think his explanation is just as, if not more likely, to be the correct take. I can’t prove him wrong, and neither can anyone else, since no one asked for clarification up front.
I wasn’t suggesting that mods were going to be responsible for checking the veracity of each quote. That is ridiculous.
In this case, where supposed motives are determined by the reader and they run with it, quoting in the fashion that Dissonance did, without a <snip> or a (…) indicating he selectively cut a couple of sentences out of a paragraph really strains the feeling of fair play in a great debate thread.
What i would call common courtesy is not required by the letter of the law. But you know as well as i do that if Dissonance had done one or two simple things, that thread wouldn’t have gone off the rails there. Honesty was forced to go over again and again that he meant that to be taken in the context of “for arguments sake”, and Dissonance and others wouldn’t listen or didn’t believe him. I believe someone stated “who are you kidding?” when he attempted to explain himself. Isn’t that basically calling him a liar?
I have no dog in this fight, I don’t care that Arafat’s dead, and if he was murdered vs. dying of natural causes matters little to me. But the quality of a debate does.
Honesty worded his OP in my opinion incorrectly, as he stated that the man was definitely poisoned, based on a report he read. That report seemed to leave some doubt as to the ultimate conclusion of death. I think he can be forgiven for that, since the post originally appeared in IMHO, and not GD. He also didn’t do himself any favors by using all caps, large fonts and italics to try to hammer a point home. But he also originally asked for other’s opinions on who may have killed Arafat and why, he did not point his finger of blame at Israeli’s, jewish bankers, or whatever other nonsense was spewed in that thread. Why that was tolerated only folks like you (tomndebb) can say for sure. The rest of us can only speculate.
But others in that thread… Those accusing Honesty of being anti-Israel (and implying if not flat out stating he is anti-semitic) were clearly out of line.
I have no idea what kind of poster Honesty is, and what he likes to post about. I am not here to support his posts in that thread either. I AM, however, troubled by the tone that thread took from the beginning and was permitted to continue relatively unabated for 8 pages.
Tomndebb, the ONLY good thing your mod note accomplished was the closing of the thread.
You do have the right to challenge someone for misquoting you. You were not misquoted. No one changed or added or subtracted any word from the sentence that was quoted.
I am not surprised, as you continue to demonstrate your lack of understanding of the point.
It is not misquoting someone to selectively post a sentence if nothing is changed within it. Your insistence that a quote must include an entire paragraph is simply a rule that you have made up. It is not part of the typical rules of editing in journalism. THAT is what I mean by “setting up your own rules.”
And in this thread, you are repeating your accusation of trolling (a violation of board rules that I will overlook for the moment). To support your claim, you link to an article by Cecil, but nothing in his article supports your accusation without you giving some special interpretation to his words that do not actually bear on the thread in question.
Well, that would be due to the fact that the thread was not particularly interesting and I did not spend my days reading it until I received several Reports regarding accusations of trolling. Few posters in that thread covered themselves in glory with their behavior, but it tended to remain the sort of wrangling that is common in Great Debates until the last couple of pages.
One statement to refrain from falsely accusing another poster of misquoting one and another statement to tell a poster to stop accusing another of lying is “heavy handed”? That is one way to look at it.
If Post #88 was a violation of the rules, then you should have Reported it. I see no such Reported Post in my in-box.
You are right that I did not read the entire thread. For six and a half pages, no poster felt the need to report any other’s actions and, after reading the first page of the thread, I had not found it sufficiently interesting to keep reading. When a post was Reported, I read back over several preceding posts to see what had prompted the post in question. I found the typical bickering that frequently stands in for debate in that forum. I found only two accusations of dishonesty and one accusation of trolling. I addressed the two accusations of dishonesty (leaving the trolling report to Jonathan Chance who had responded a few minutes, previously).
If there were other rules violations, you should have reported them, then, rather than waiting weeks and weeks to report them from a totally different thread. (At least, you seem to have backed away from the odd claim that Honesty actually had been misquoted.)
I saw no lack of clarity as to the meaning of Honesty’s post. Neither did many other people in the thread. We all read it the same way, the same meaning that Honesty affirmed in the thread, the same meaning that was captured by the quote selected by Dissonance and no different than the meaning within the whole post that we had just read. Several of us responded with reaction to that meaning (without quoting) and our understanding was not “corrected.” It was what was meant.
For argument’s sake, if we had all misunderstood the intended meaning, then Honesty could have clarified what meaning was intended instead of verifying that such was what was meant.
Instead, Honesty decided to baselessly accused Dissonance of misquoting him/her. Dissonance was in good company because Honesty accused pretty much all thread participants of conspiring to misquote him/her (by not quoting complete posts) and of trolling. By the standards set up by some here we must all be guilty because the quoted said so.
The op presented something possible as FACT!!! and took offense and gave offense to those who were skeptics. Another poster claimed that the only reason anyone would be skeptical would be out of a pro-Israel bias and that Israel would be the only suspect. It was not fact. Those of us, like me, who came in with the first read impression that it was at least likely true became convinced by additional information during the course of the thread that the claim was complete bullshit.
The rules were explicitly broken and not by Dissonance.
We have a significant advantage in a forum like this. The quote feature gives us ready access back to the original post. So readers can see and judge for themselves if a quote mischaracterized the original text. All the original poster needs to do is call attention to what he regards as a misquotation and people can confirm - or not - the truth of the charge.
I know this wasn’t directed at me, but I’ll reply since I too think quoting the whole paragraph would have removed any excuses (for Honesty or anyone, for that matter). Yes, I get it. You made it clear. I have gotten it wrong. I accept that. I don’t agree with the quoting rule, but if that is what it is, so be it. I have made a note of it, and I will follow it. I will now use this as often as I can when it serves my purpose. And my purpose will be nothing more than saving myself some extra typing. I’m sure you understand, and will never question my (or anyone else’s motives) for following the protocol you have outlined.
Of course it wasn’t interesting… Believe me, I read it. But when called to action as a mod, do you not think it is your obligation to understand the entire tone of the thread? Before you come back with “some threads are 50 pages long, what do you expect me to do?”, I agree and I get it. I don’t know what the answer is. But as a mod, IMO you have a different and special obligation to try to read and understand as much as possible. Again, I realize I may be wrong. Which is why I used IMO.
That is correct, and it was my way of looking at it. But since I am not a mod, i realize my opinion matters little here.
That’s because, as I’ve explained a number of times in this thread, that I didn’t read that thread until this one. Seriously? Your contention is I should have reported it? When? How about now… I’m reporting it now. Will you dish out the appropriate warning? Or do I need to go into the thread and use the “report this post” button for you to do anything? Or are you going to tell us that it’s now too late, or the thread is closed, so you can’t report it? It should have been reported. And since you read it after the fact, you shouldn’t fall back on “I see no such Reported Post in my in-box.” That’s a joke, right? If it doesn’t show up in your in-box, you are absolved from moderating it?
That’s your story and you are sticking to it. That’s fine.
:rolleyes: I didn’t wait two weeks to report anything, and I didn’t come into this thread to report things that should have been reported in the other thread. You clearly aren’t paying attention to what prompted my participation in this thread. I cannot make it any clearer than I have. I disagreed with the quoting and said so. I have been told that it doesn’t really matter that I didn’t like the quoting, that the rules dictate that the quote was within the rules. Fine. I disagree but fine. I can live with it.
A serious question. Since you have seen some warn-worthy behavior, and agree that it should have been reported… Now that you have seen them, are you going to go back and issue official warnings? Why or why not? What is the statute of limitations on something like this? Is it a page of posts? An amount of time passing without the post being reported? There must be some rule mods use, so please share it with us.
It would also appear that you only jump into action when you receive Mod notes. Since Honesty has said he didn’t do much if any reporting, and chose to fight the fight himself, that was his call. But for anyone in that thread to report any post because they didn’t like something Honesty said was a bit hypocritical, wouldn’t you say? Especially considering the behavior of some of the posters. When something like what jackmanii said went unmoderated, I would think that would only bolster others to feel that they could get away with posts that skirted the edges of the “rules”. So why not keep it up?
It’s like kid B on the playground hitting kid A in the head with a rock. Kid A, instead going to a teacher, gets a rock and hits kid B back. Kid B immediately runs to the teacher and says “look what kid A did!” Instead of finding out why kid A hit kid B with a rock, you just threw Kid A in detention. Not great moderation. It was lazy moderation. Your answer is that it was MY fault for not reporting those other posts. Yeah, I guess I can be blamed, however unlike you, I didn’t even enter that thread until this thread was created, so I really didn’t have any knowledge of any part of that thread.
DSeid and others suggested I read the whole thread to get a picture of what was going on. I did that, because I thought it was important for me to make sure I formed my opinion on the whole picture. As a mod, you should feel a certain amount of responsibility to get the story straight, and not have a knee-jerk reaction to a complaint sent to you. But hey, yeah… Your time is limited. We get it. And even if you make a bad call you are a mod and feel no obligation to fix it, or to admit you may have jumped the gun. No, you do what you do. And you never apologize for it or admit a mistake.
If you are saying that you don’t seek out the whole picture, and if it is up to the reader to report infractions (or possible infractions) fine. The fact that Honesty claims that he didn’t report anything in that thread was his “fault” i guess, but I hope folks reading this realize that they must report every post that is against the rules before a thread gets out of hand.
I’ve never been a big “report this post” person, but you can bet that in GD, at least, I will do my part to make sure you are aware of ALL bullshit that has occurred in a thread, not just one side’s version. I’ll let you mods sort it out.
Finally, yes I backed off of my claim that there was a misquoting. Not because I no longer believe it, but because of the definition you have laid out here. I can’t argue that. Hell, I admit I don’t know exactly what he was trying to go for, and the first two times I read it, I thought he must have made an error in syntax, or he maybe cut and pasted something incorrectly and it came out oddly. Maybe it reads exactly the way he wanted it to. I don’t know and I don’t care. I didn’t enter this thread with an opinion on the subject matter in that thread. I entered it because I had an opinion on how someone should be quoted.
What I’ve learned from you in this thread is that if someone starts a paragraph off with a qualifier like “for argument’s sake” and ends that sentence with a period, anything after that period (even if, and in this case especially if it is in the same paragraph) can be quoted without acknowledging or indicating that there was anything before that period that may show that what is being quoted could be the complete opposite of what the author intended. And by doing that, the quoter is completely within the rules of quoting protocol here on the dope.
Not according to the rules spelled out in this thread. And you should know that.
Sorry. I tried. Perhaps what you are missing is that I am not arguing for honesty’s POV on the subject, but on the manner of quoting. That’s it. But I have wasted entirely too much time on this and I got what I needed to out of this thread, which was the board’s definition of what is the appropriate way to quote another.
I know you saw no lack of clarity, but we all did NOT read it the same way, I didn’t understand it. You may think that is irrelevant, and that’s fine. But don’t state that everyone read it the same way when that isn’t true. I’m not playing “ignorant” to bolster my position here. As I have learned, I have no position here. But I still can say that I didn’t understand his point he was making, and I would have asked for a clarification before quoting the way Dissonance did. Apparently, what he did was within the rules, so my complaint is invalid.
You have stated your position many times in thread, and I respect it. I am not here as an advocate for Honesty or his particular position on anything. I am simply stating that I disagreed with the quoting of his post. I have been told I am wrong, and that no quoting protocol was broken. I accept that, even though I disagree with it. I don’t have to agree with everything here, and now that I know this is the quote rule, I won’t complain about it any longer.
You also seem upset that a charge of personal bias could have swayed many in that thread to interpret Honesty’s post in one way. I don’t know everyone’s background in that thread, but isn’t it possible that if one were pro-Israel they would have read or interpreted Honesty’s posts differently than someone that was anti-Israel, or someone who held no strong opinion?
Finally, i thought I read that Honesty was trying to explain his original post, and felt he was misquoted by having “for argument’s sake” left out by Dissonance. I took that to mean that he was not advocating what a number of other posters were accusing him of. It seems that now you are saying that he actually DID believe that stuff and his denial was disingenuous, correct? Well, I can’t speak to that. I have no idea what he was trying to convey, and if his denials turned into admissions, I missed that.
To be honest, I’m done here. Not because I haven’t enjoyed this, but because my original complaint is still something I think is valid. Reading the entire thread gave me an overall picture of what the mood and tone was, but that really was secondary noise to me, the real issue was and has always been the way Dissonance quoted that paragraph.
As I’ve learned, I was wrong in claiming he quoted incorrectly. So for that, I stand corrected. As to all of the other crap - who is pro or anti-Israel, who did or didn’t kill Arafat, or if he was or wasn’t poisoned by polonium at all, is irrelevant to my concerns, and just provided the framework from which my quoting question came from. I don’t care WHAT Honesty (or you or anyone else in that thread) believes. That has never been my concern.
True. And I agree completely with your characterization.of how things should play out. But who really goes back and reads something in full unless someone else claims to have been mis-quoted? I confess that I usually don’t. When in this instance I saw that the sentence that started the paragraph quoted began with “for argument’s sake”, i thought he had a legitimate gripe. However, as I’ve pointed out a number of times now, I was incorrect and that including that sentence was not required, nor was in necessary to show its exclusion.
I’ve noted that for the future.
I now exit this thread with some new knowledge, so it wasn’t a total loss.
I will try to stay away from replying any longer in this thread, so after what will be Tomndebb’s inevitable reply, I won’t respond. He can and shall have the last word. He always does anyway, and I’ve said all I care to on this subject. So I’m good.
I am confused. Why should I, or another poster, ask for clarification about something we understand? I commented on it immediately after it was posted, giving Honesty a chance to clarify,
and the interpretation contained in that comment was confirmed in a response to another poster. I cannot see why asking for more clarification was needed until Honesty *later *alleged having been misquoted and not having meant that (but then what?)
I am not Tom but you do seem to have an unrealistic sense of what the mod’s job is. The hope is that mods keep threads within the standards of their fora while they are in progress. Going back to deliver retroactive warnings, deciding who was the bigger jerk first, especially after warnings for insults on all sides had already been given by other mods, does not do that. And they are not omnipresent. If they are there or called upon they should judge based on what is going on at the time. If a poster is calling someone a troll it actually does not even matter if the person is being one, doing that is a rule violation. Calling someone a liar also is. Modifying someones post in order to mislead about its contents is also a violation.
As to your personal bias comment … does perhaps your comment exhibit some? It is of note to me that some here believe that commenting on possible bias because someone is possibly “pro-Israel” is fair game but that commenting on possible bias because someone is possibly “anti-Israel” is not.
IMHO making either charge is usually counterproductive. A vacuous argument is a vacuous argument whether it stems from a biased perspective or not; no need to call the bias out.
One problem with quoting entire paragraphs is that it confuses things.
People sometimes express several concepts in the same paragraph, and if you want to your response to be understood as being directed at one particular concept and not the other, it helps if you only quote the part that you actually wish to dispute.
In this case, the two separate concepts were 1) whether a French report existed altogether, and 2) assuming that a French report did exist, whether one needed to consider the possibility that it was the result of Israeli pressure on the scientists who produced it. These are inter-related, but not precisely the same thing, and you could understand why someone might want to make clear that they meant to respond to #2 and not #1.
In addition to all this, the first sentence of that paragraph was poorly written - you yourself say you can’t figure out what was meant - and from the perspective of someone who thought they had managed to figure out the correct meaning, adding that sentence to the quote detracted rather than added to the understanding.
This is not something that anyone could reasonably derive from anything that anyone has said in this thread, IMO.
Everyone agrees that if what follows is the part that was only being advanced “for argument’s sake”, that the latter part can’t be quoted in isolation. The issue here is that people interpreted the quoted part as not being the part that “for argument’s sake”, and as such, the omission of the qualifier did not change the meaning.
This is an important distinction, and it’s not clear why you are obscuring it.
You seem to be arguing that since there was some ambiguity the term should not have been omitted. But that’s not the same thing as claiming that everyone has carte blanche to leave out the “for argument’s sake”, as you appear to be claiming here.
Sorry my posts confuse you. Maybe I should stop posting in this thread. Ok, one last time.
What I am and have suggested is for a case like this one ONLY. i agree that most of the time, asking for clarification before quoting or answering another person’s post is unnecessary. But in a case like this, it would have saved a lot of writing, finger-pointing, accusations, and ultimately mod intervention.
Here’s why. As i read the post that Honesty claimed was mis-quoted and that his position was being misrepresented, I went back and read his version. And sure enough, he had “for argument’s sake” in the sentence right before the two lines quoted by Dissonance. As I’ve learned in here, that is ok. But i don’t know how Dissonance or anyone else can claim they knew what Honesty was saying because a) he denied their interpretation of it, and b) it made no sense.
Seriously, when I read that, it seemed he was suggesting somehow that the French and Russians were threatened by Israel to either hold back or screw up the study, but the Swiss study was golden… Isn’t that the basic gist of his point? Anyway, that sounded absurd to me when I read it. And re-read it. So if it were me, I would have asked him to spell out what he was saying, OR i would have said “are you saying this?” Before just going with my interpretation of it and going forward from there. Because it is a strange idea coming from a guy who claims to be a scientist, to say that things were not being reported due to some outside Israeli govt. influence. Or whatever. That’s what I would have done. YMM (and obviously does) V.
I think you took my comments to tomndebb too literally. I don’t expect him or any mod to dish out retroactive warnings (i was being ironical). But jackmanii deserved one. Giving a warning to Honesty and Terr were correct calls, but there was so much crap that deserved a look before that mod ruling, it seemed to me to be too little, too late. And yeah, i would have liked him to have been made aware of the charges dished out by jackmanii, but he claims he wasn’t informed and I believe him. I guess we are to assume that unless someone reports a post, a mod is NOT going to see it and not going to issue a warning. Is that a fair assumption? The thing that bothered me about tomndebb’s intervention was the tone. He blasted Honesty and his warning to Terr was of the “oh, by the way” variety. And the only one in that thread that was going to report that post was going to be Honesty himself, and he has stated that he didn’t report anything. It also troubled me that Tomndebb seemed to get a number of "report this post"s in his inbox pointing out Honesty’s calling someone a troll, but no one felt a need to point out Jackmanii’s obvious rules violation. That should bother anyone who is fair-minded.
I don’t know what exact post of mine you are referring to, however I believe that neither being pro-Israel or Anti-Israel labels are fair game and appropriate UNLESS someone specifically identifies himself in such a manner and wants to debate from that point of view. If someone happens to be Pro or anti Israel, that’s their business. But accusing someone without proof makes for a very poor thread and/or debate.
If I have any bias in this, I would say I’m pro honest debate. That’s it. And I would want to see each and every poster represented correctly, and not have his words misinterpreted because of a bad quote technique. That’s why I got into a twist about this in the first place, not about the subject matter of the debate. I try to be fair-minded and I try to see both sides of a debate, but I’m not perfect. But in this case, I can honestly say I am not emotionally attached to now Arafat died, including the possibility that if he was poisoned. If he was poisoned, and Israel actually did it, I simply don’t care.
However, since I’ve learned by Tomndebb and others that there was nothing against the rules in how Dissonance quoted Honesty, i have nothing left to discuss in this thread. I don’t agree with it, but I will abide by it.
We agree on something! On this note, i will end and call it a success!
Please… Anyone else who wants to ask me anything and get an answer, PM me. I can’t come back to this thread because my particular concern has been answered.
