Ah I didn’t mean my post to holding your feet to the flame or anything.
Anyways I guess I should have been more clear when I said nothing. I would consider a 25 dollar fine for a murder spree to be “nothing”. Letters of reprimand depending on the invovlement with the torture would fall under that “nothing” category.
Uh uh. It’s more fun this way. As it is, the administration and everybody the administration gives a damn about are getting their rocks off big time.
The reason the high-ranking officers are getting off with knuckle-rappings is that they were in fact just following orders. Did you see that there was an Executive Order authorizing torture? Last time I looked, Executive Orders are issued by the President.
If people high enough in the chain of command are threatened with hard time, they’ll roll on Bush in a minute. Can’t have that. It’s only safe to really prosecute the grunts who are low enough on the totem pole that they can’t roll on anybody in the Pentagon or the Oval Office.
One question, and the final one, in the OP was this: Just what in the hell is going on in the US? One thing going on is a call to patriotism, typically a precursor to war or to the installation of fascism. It is being used as a tool to muzzle dissent. It seems you are mistaken that I am nonresponsive to the OP. Moreover, your vague accusation of hijacking is all the more remarkable since you are declaring that the debate is about hostility to the military, you are invoking the OP as the standard for engagement, and the OP said absolutely zero squat about hostility to the military.
Yes, it’s almost as if one fucktard (Sam Stone) were trying to hijack the thread after another screeching drama queen (Liberal) had already attempted several times to do so.
Got your panties in a bunch because lil’ Sam’s single trick was succeeding where yours wasn’t?
Awww…poor guy.
-Joe
Jesus. If this had been said by someone i didn’t know, i’d seriously start to think i was dealing with a five year old.
My comment about your need to make the debate about what you want was in the context of the discussion that had developed in this thread, primarily at the instigation of Sam Stone, about whether or not liberals are hostile to the military. You marched into that particular conversation and just started spouting shit, responding to particular comments with non-sequiturs and irrelevant crap. And now you are saying that you really weren’t responding to our conversation at all, but to the OP? Your duplicity is staggering.
Sam asked:
To which both elucidator and i gave responses regarding how we feel about the military, and the distinctions we draw when judging it.
Then EddyTeddyFreddy added a post in which she agreed with our position, and made a plea:
Do you see what’s happening here? The thread has developed in a variety of different directions, and this little conversation is one of them.
Now, rjung decided to respond to EddyTeddyFreddy with a jab at Sam:
And here’s where you join the conversation. Of course, you had already made an invaluable contribution to this thread by making the accusation that, if the Bible had been desecrated, this would be a thread of celebration. But here you entered our particular conversation within the thread.
This is clearly a part of the foregoing conversation. It makes no mention of the OP (which is fine, because the thread had taken some turns over the previous day or so), and it directly addresses the issue of people’s attitudes to the military.
Of course, what it also does is completely miss the point that one not need start multiple threads in fulsome praise of American soldiers in order to refute an accusation that one is hostile to the military. Which i pointed out to you. John Mace, obviously a man of generous nature, jumped to your defense, suggesting that maybe your comment was irony directed at rjung. But the focus of the comment was attitudes to soldiers, so i really can’t agree with John’s interpretation. You also accused EddyTeddyFreddy of claiming that liberals were patriotic, and when she pointed out that you were in error, you just chose to forge on regardless, not even acknowledging your mischaracterization of her comments.
Then in the my last post, i said that the debate wasn’t about patriotism. I was clearly referring to the specific conversation-within-a-conversation that had developed in this thread. Your response was that patriotism was, in fact, mentioned in the OP. Well, yes it was, but in case you have never noticed during your 20,000+ posts, threads often wind their way through a variety of different issues, and when responding to particular posts (as you did in this thread) people generally try to address the particular comments of the poster to whom they are responding.
How you can be so obtuse or wilfully misleading and dishonest is beyond me. I was not accusing you of hijacking the OP. I was accusing you of wading into our conversation about attitudes to the military with a series of non-sequiturs, misreadings, and misplaced self-righteousness. I think those things might be the main materials used in the construction of the hammer that elucidator was talking about.
If mine is staggering, then yours is astronomical. You seem to have this notion that alia topica begins and ends with you. What is topical is whatever you are engaged in blathering about, even when it has veered from the OP. Have a look out your window. See those bipedal creatures? They’re called “other people”.
Perhaps I can learn from your lesson. With this bizarre chest-thumping sermon about how you do not understand me, you are not engaged in non sequiturs or misplaced self-righteousness. Perhaps the key is that I be you; that way, I could do no wrong.
No you fucking moron.
I’m simply asking that when you make direct responses to people who are talking about a specific topic, that you at least do them the courtesy of making responses that have some connection with the issue they are discussing, and that you purport to be addressing.
If you wanted to address the OP specifically, fine. Why, though, if you wanted to do that, did you choose a method whereby you waded into the middle of a conversation that was dealing with a derivative issue and proceed to hijack it with non-sequiturs and, i might add, false accusations? You made specific responses to specific people who were talking about specific things, and then, when it was pointed out that you are full of shit, assert that you were responding to something completely different.
Actually, there are times when i think that, as long as you could be anyone else but you, it would be an improvement.
Oh, be nice.
And I’m simply asking that you acknowledge that a single point being addressed might have multiple angles of addressibility. Suppose you said, “I like Kraft French dressing.” There are myriad ways that a discussion could procede from that. There could be talk about salads, talk about dressings, talk about likes and dislikes, talk about the etymology of the name (how it isn’t really French and whatnot.) What you don’t seem to understand is that it isn’t necessary to fall into lockstep and talk about you. And if there are four or five separate discussions going at the same time, you look silly trying to reign them in and point them back to what you want to talk about. Right now, in fact, you have changed your topic and are engaged in this infantile “we don’t want you to play” nonsense, complete with name-dropping. Is that what everyone should do now, or do your rules apply only to me?
Then that just means you have a bug up your ass about me in particular. You can just get over it, ignore me, or just keep on making an issue of me. Why don’t you just move along?
Why is it that, whenever anyone takes you to task for anything, you accuse them of having some sort of vendetta against you? Yourm paranoia appears to know no bounds.
If i have a “bug up my ass” about you, this is purely a product of your own apparent desire to make everything about what you want it to be about. Christ, you still haven’t retracted your completely unwarranted assertion, on the first page of this thread, that a similar thread about the Bible would likely be a celebration.
I could just ignore you, that’s true. But when you utter blatantly idiotic statements and lies in direct response to a conversation that i’m involved with, my silence might be misconstrued as acceptance or agreement.
You said, “there are times when i think that, as long as you could be anyone else but you, it would be an improvement”. Do you take it back?
Why don’t you wait until that happens?
And Threadshitter Prime strikes again.
It must be a lot of work being such a drama queen.
-Joe
No, because the times when i think that are a direct result of your obtuseness and self-centeredness. It is not some personal hard-on that i have for you, just a reaction to your periodic bouts of lunacy.
Self-centered? As an objectivist, I take no insult from that. Obtuse? I’m at the very least naive from time to time. Truce? 
Objectivist? Oh, merciful Og, it’s worse than I thought! Don’t give up hope, Lib, recovery is possible!
Hey, everybody, group hug on Lib!
On a total side note, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best ‘deprogramming’ tool for Randroids is the Illuminatus! trilogy. Not that Lib’s a Randroid, but, ya know.
~flings a pair and pennies and then runs away~
Mustard seeds, you fool.
The pennies do nothing!
Just be glad I didn’t throw any flax. I’ve got tons of it.
Well, at least he appears to be a small “o” objectivist. I guess that means he doesn’t have a ponytail like Leonard Peikoff.
Five tons?