Your ignorance is astounding.
Democrats are to the left of Republicans, who are likewise to the right of Democrats. Within each party, there is also a moderate, left and right faction.
Claiming that Democrats are anything other than left wingers is absurd.
I said he was on the left, which he is.
You are lying and claiming that I said he was a liberal, which I did not.
So you don’t care about the definition, but decided it’d be a good thing to needle me over, anyways?
Nice.
Sorry, bait someone else. I really am done feeding you now.
When you’re reduced to the state of self-parody in which you claim that Democrats aren’t on the left, you’ve decided to simply try to annoy me regardless of the facts. Just like you really don’t care about a definition, but decided to annoy me about it, anyway.
You wouldn’t know intellectual honesty if it bit you on the nose.
You know, Finn, I really hesitate to reply to this thread because you react so violently to people who disagree with you that it is usually more trouble than it is worth to argue with you (I remember you recently calling FriarTed a “son of a whore”, among other things, even though he was engaged in reasoned debate with you and behaved, throughout, like a complete gentleman and never once descended to name-calling or the like.) But face it–you demand such high standards of intellectual honesty from everyone else that you are the quickest person on this board to use the epithets “liar”, “dishonest”, and “troll”. So when you say,
And then back up your assertion by quoting a self-described conservative, you could at least have the integrity to say, “My bad; let me find a left-wing quote for you.” (Which probably wouldn’t be that hard to do.) But instead of doing that, you go on the attack. **BoyoJim **has shown in this thread his willingness to admit he was wrong. He even offered you an apology. Are you capable of the same?
Yes, out of the blue I just went and insulted him, like a crazy person!
Oh, no, wait… he was busy admitting that he supported the revolting Jew-poaching cult of liars known as “Jews for Jesus”. They are scum, as is anybody who supports them. He actually went so far in his apologia for those scumfucks that he, at one point and without shame, claimed that JfJ’s founder was a Baptist Minister Jew.
I’d also point out that he was engaged in some heavy duty lying, as he claimed that the JfJ cult was only interested in “biblical” or “cultural” Judaism and wasn’t lying to trick Jews into thinking that Christianity was a valid form of Judaism. Of course, when questioned about their appropriation of the Bat Mitzvah ceremony as a “Christian” ceremony, he kept mum, but continued to repeat his claims with nary a retraction. In fact, he never even once touched on their subversion of the Bat Mizvah ceremony, a purely religious and purely modern Jewish ritual. Nor did he retract his fiction that the JfJ cult weren’t engaged in pretending to be Jews
and pretending that Christianity was compatible with Judaism, in order to deceive Jews into converting.
If you honestly can’t understand why, after 2000 years of persecution by Christians including forced conversions at the point of a sword, a modern Christian cult of liars trying to deceive Jews into renouncing their faith is abhorrent, as are its supporters, I guess I can’t explain it.
Someone can be a fucking waste and worthy of scorn without having to use curse words, by the way. Someone who politely supports the morally reprehensible is still fair game for being called an asshole.
It’s also interesting that you’d credit his acts of lying and supporting liars who trick Jews into becoming Christians as the actions of a “complete gentleman”.
They’re not. Gentlemen don’t support the destruction of a religion by tricking its members into leaving it.
What does integrity have to do with offering an apology where none is required, and where it’s only obfuscatory bull that’s behind the demand that I offer one up in the first place?
Don’t you detect the irony of demanding that I cleave to some bogus form of ‘integrity’ while you’re repeating boyo’s obfuscation? The fact that a registered Democrat happens to also self-identify as having conservative politics does not mean that the Democrats are not the left wing of American politics.
If someone votes for the Democratic party and officially belongs to it, they’re on the left wing. They may be on the right of the Democratic party, but that still makes them on the right side of the left wing..
I’m not about to apologize for having my facts straight.
Nor is it necessary for me to find such a quote. Not many wackos have their own syndicated columns that can be cited. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to go digging through various comment threads/message boards only to have the same goalpost shifting bullshit pulled on me once I got the results back. “Oh, sure he says he’s a Democrat, but he might be one of the many right winger loyal DNC members.” “Suuuure, he calls himself a progressive, but he’s an American. In Europe, he’d qualify as right wing.” “Ahhh, yes, he’s a left winger, but his other opinions place him on the right wing of the Left, so really he’s a right winger.”
This is exactly the problem. I probably don’t agree with **FriarTed **about more than 1 issue in the entire world, but I have never known him to be dishonest or post without integrity. As I see it, you are very quick to accuse people who have factual or moral disagreements with you of being dishonest, liars, etc. JfJ may engage in things that are morally wrong, but I simply don’t think it’s plausible to cast **FriarTed **as some moustache-twirling villain who, by hook or by crook, supports “the destruction of a complete religion,” as you say it.
I am offering this as sincere, constructive criticism: I really think you are too quick to personalize disagreements with people, and to assume people who disagree with you (or don’t have all the facts that you have, because undeniably there are some issues about which you are extraordinarily well-informed) are guilty of malice or ill-will.
You and a lot of other people are ignoring the elephant in the room, which is talked about by **Boyo Jim **at post #26. Palin just understands the popular meaning of the word.
In popular usage, “person who uses extreme force to achieve political goals” is to “person of less than average intelligence” as “terrorist” is to “dumbass”.
I don’t suggest for a moment that is how it should be, or that it is what the dictionary might say, but that’s the nuance in popular usage.
Actually that’s not the right way to put it, except to illustrate that words carry baggage. “Person of less than average intelligence” merely sounds like you are intended to convey a message about IQ. Dumbass conveys that, plus dislike.
People are very good at learning nuance, and they learn it by hearing usage. They know very well that “terrorist” is not a neutral term used to describe a behaviour, but a term used to convey the message that the behaviour is being used to advance a cause the speaker does not support.
Palin did not wish to be understood to be condemning the anti abortion movement but understood very well that calling abortion bombers “terrorists” would convey that message. This is regardless of what she may think about abortion bombers themselves.
She’s not an ignoramus. A weasel maybe, but not an ignoramus.
FinnAgain, bad cite for something that I do think is true. I do believe I’ve encountered people who focus only on US policies as a cause for terrorism. They’re on both the right and the left. You inadvertantly found a cite written by a guy on the right. His reasons for being a Democrat are explicitly NOT that he agrees with their leftist policies.
In America we’ve gotten too used to conservative = Republican and liberal = Democrat. If someone is a conservative Democrat, I don’t think there’s anything to say other than that they’re on the right side of the left wing of American politics.
After all, presumably a registered Democrat votes for Democrat politicians. And I don’t feel comfortable, at all, with calling a registered Democrat whose votes go to the Democrat party as a rule… a ‘right winger’. At the point where someone determines that the Republican party is irrevocably corrupt and only supports the Democrat party, with his voice and/or his votes, at that point he has left the political right wing and joined the left. I’m not quite sure how else one could slice it. If someone believes in 2nd amendment rights, and i pro-choice, or what have you, and yet can be counted on voting for politicians who have diametrically opposed positions, then that person supports the politicians above his own ideology… which, I’d argue, means he’s supporting the American political left instead of voting for the American political right. And a supporter of the left is, in my book at least, on the left in the only way that actually counts. Ideals are nice and all, but if they’re gainsaid by one’s own voting record, then someone should be defined by what they do and not what they support in an abstract, intellectual manner.
It’d be interesting to ask some Dopers how they self identify, while we’re at it. IIRC, just off the top of my head, Weirddave self-identifies as a conservative Democrat and What Exit self-identifies as a green Republican. It’d be interesting to see if they’d place themselves on the left and the right, respectively.
But, yes, all that’s a bit of a sideshow. The main point is that somewhere out there, there are nuts who blame America for most, if not all of the world’s ills. Many of them verge into the lunatic fringe when they start alleging one-world-government conspiracies among the Jews and British monarchy, and such. Some among that fringe will blame America for terrorism, as well. Fuck, I don’t know if he’s left or right wing, but the nutter Alex Jones (IIRC) who claims “There’s no such thing as al Qaeda, or al Qaida, or however you want to spell it. It’s a fraud perpetrated on the American people by our own government to scare us into submission.”
But of course, not all of 'em are famous and not all the nuts will post in places I can easily search them down. And while I could wade through message board comments in various places to dig up arguments I’ve had with people, the work vs the handwaving goalspost shifting reward simply wouldn’t be worth it.
That’d be an interesting discussion. I’d probably end up arguing that being in the true center requires one to belong to neither party. And while right learning Dems are closer to the center, they’ve still officially thrown their lot in with the Democratic party.
I could respond to this, and I’m really tempted, but I"m going to show control and respond instead to this:
Agreed. I think you’d be best off saying that this guy is arguably not a liberal (or on the left, whichever), and spending teh time to find one of the liberals who espouse the few you’re accusing the nutbars of espousing. I highly suspect they exist, but the 2 minutes of Googling I"m willing to do isn’t turning them up.
I honestly don’t think it’s worth my time to find various fringe groups and then have this same argument about just how ‘left’ ‘right’ or ‘fringe’ they are.
Gods forfend that they don’t explicitly endorse a political party or if they do, that they describe themselves as being on one of its wings.
They hate Clinton )and called him a member of the evil global Illuminati… but they also hate Bush and describe Homeland Security as “gestapo” and they’re against torturing prisoners. But they’re also against gay marriage, etc, etc, etc.
I suppose I could dig up another cites, or look up arguments I’ve had on various message boards, but the quibble factor alone makes it not worth my time. Hell, I’ve had some of my drinking buddies in years past repeat the “Al Quada is a myth” claims and talk about how the “Power Elite” are really running all the terrorist organizations, as well as global banking, the ‘neocon agenda’, etc… and they hate Bush and support the Dems.
Of course, they don’t have web pages and I can’t cite them.
As it is, I found a registered Democrat who voiced roughly the same generally silliness, and it’s not okay because he’s on the right of the left wing. And right leaning Democrats, despite similarities, don’t generally vote for left leaning Republicans. On that front we can quibble over whether or not it’s a matter of how one votes, or what one thinks, or how often one votes in accord with what they think, or whatever.
Seriously, FinnAgain, you are a disingenuous asshole. You personally insult us for claiming never to have seen a bullshit claim by “leftists” that you say was “all over the news” since 2001. You come up with one link to a conservative who made the claim in 1998, and then say it’s not worth your while to find any more, because someone who is registered as a Democrat is “by definition” a leftist. Even when he himself proclaims himself to be a conservative.
You’re the one who’s been “waving your hands” while hurling personal insults at me. So fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
I don’t have any particular need to pile on to FinnAgain here. But I do find it amusing when any Doper indulges in verbal gymnastics to avoid sounding like the Fonz when it looks like it might be appropriate for him to say, “I was wuh - wuh - wuh-roh --.”
It wouldn’t bother me so much except that **Finn **gets so rabidly angry when he believes other Dopers are doing such gymnastics or making such maneuvers. If it were anyone other than Finn, I probably wouldn’t have said anything. I would have just rolled my eyes and gone to the next post.
I have no problem admitting when I’m wrong, and I’ve done so several times on these boards. In this case, I aint wrong.
Boyo displayed his true colors early on, as he immediately began preparations to shift the goalsposts with his bonkers claim that even an American leftist might not really be a leftist, because in Europe they make 'em much more lefty. :rolleyes:
The No True Scotsman level of argumentation in this thread is bizarre. A registered Democrat, whose votes would exclusively support democratic policies and oppose republican ones, becomes, what, a right winger? Only on the Dope would a party-loyal Democrat (to the point of claiming that only the Dems have any integrity) would be ‘not left wing enough’.
Really, should we follow this rationalization through as if it was logic?
If a man votes for Democratic candidates 100% of the time, for every year of his life, but held conservative values (values which are not opposed to the Democratic party platform, by the way), he’s not on the left in such twisted logic. Supported the Democrats till the day he died, but no, not on the left.
I mean, this argument has just gotten stupid. I’m not about to apologize or recant simply because some people are militant in their ignorance. Conservative Democrats are on the Left.
Now, moving on to another poster… the militant ignorance of some posters here simply astounds me. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, be silent. Is it really so hard to comprehend?
Doesn’t it make you ashamed, at all, that you have to lie in order to make your claims of my dishonesty? Isn’t there a part of you, at all, that feels a twinge of guilt that in order to slime someone, you have to make up false charges?
Liar, I said that the issue of the causes of terrorism has been all over the news since 2001. People have been discussing it on message boards and colleges for almost a decade now. If you were confused, you could’ve asked. But as you’ve already demonstrated, you don’t require knowledge to pick a fight on a topic, eh?
Your dishonesty knows no bounds, eh?
Just keep repeating “conservative” as if it eliminates “Democrat”, eh?
"Ayieeeeeee! He’s a CONSERVATIVE registered Democrat. No True Leftist would ever hold any conservative views while putting sugar on his porridge! "
Idiot.
After admitting, in your own words and without the sense to be ashamed, that you were prepared to pick fights about an issue that you “really don’t care about”? You’re either painfully stupid or you think I am if you think I’d consider treating you as an intellectually honest opponent.
Here’s a hint: after admitting that you don’t care about something , but still want to fight about it? It’s no longer worth my time to be baited by you as you find yet another tidbit that you don’t care about, but for which you would like to try to toss some bait out.
The opinion of every poster who has posted on the subject: **Finn **made a mistake, and should execute a mea culpa (which could have been done gracefully, but it’s too late now).
The opinion of Finn: He is right, and everyone else is lying or willfully ignorant (sorry, “militantly ignorant”).
Verdict: It must be a terrible burden, the gift of True Sight, to see the truth that others will not see. How are you bearing up, Finn? Seems like it’s getting to you.
Ahhhh, the bandwaggon fallacy. Now that’s convincing!
I should certainly deny facts because a bunch of ignorant folks disagree with me. Fuck the truth or reason or knowledge or logic. A bunch of ignorant people have ganged up on me. Quick, revise reality!
You’re right, I apologize.
I can include the category of willfully ignorant for folks like you.
Fuck, I just provided a cite from a group that makes its entire living by identifying, defining and researching groups. Ignorant Dopers don’t defeat the Pew Research Center. Not even if there are a lot of them or they’re very ignorant. Sorry.
It’s actually quite easy to only talk about issues that I already know about. How so many people can spill so much ink on topics that they don’t know about is what I can’t grok. I mean, honestly… if you don’t know that the Democrats are on the left, and the Republicans are on the right, you’re simply too ignorant to participate.
How unpredictable. I disagree with Finn; therefore, I am *willfully *ignorant. Not wrong. Not mistaken. But dishonest.
And apparently this is how you think of most people who disagree with you. Do you see the problem I referred to above? You don’t have a monopoly on the truth, and people who disagree with you aren’t necessarily doing so out of malice, although you seem to think that they are.
Whatever. You are apparently incapable of recognizing good faith disagreement; the other side must be lying, trolling, or malicious. There really is no point in debating with you. Fuck off, you delusional shitstain.
No, now you’ve gone from wilfully ignorant to simply being a petty liar.
I pointed out that you were wilfully ignorant because I just provided a cite from the Pew Research Foundation that you evidently either didn’t even look at, or looked at and deliberately decided to ignore. I was quite clear on that point, actually. This is why I am forced to point out that you’re either a fucking moron, or a fucking liar. See, when I say “because I just provided a cite from the Pew Research Foundation that you evidently either didn’t even look at, or looked at and deliberately decided to ignore?” That gives a pretty good reason to think that the because is that you ignored evidence so as to retain your ignorance, not that you simply disagreed.
Honestly, why do you think it is that you believe that lying about a post that’s right above your post is a particularly smart thing to do?
Apparently?
Well, sheeeeeeit, if it’s not true and enough people say it is, I guess that really is how I think. Ayup. You’ve just totally revolutionized psychology, sociology, anthropology, games theory, the works.
We don’t need to know anything anymore, just get a bunch of people ot assert it.
Yay!
I do when my claims are truthful and my opponents’ aren’t, genius.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh, that blasphemous certainty that comes from knowing what the fuck you’re talking about.
Seriously though, your pop-psychology is simply stupid.
Willful ignorance doesn’t require malice, just stupidity, an incurious nature, pigheadedness and a streak of anti-intellectualism.
Militant ignorance just requires someone to be ready and willing to fight about something they don’t know jack shit about.
Malice isn’t always the default answer when stupidity will suffice.
Mmmm hmmmmm.
It’s like… I expect people to know the facts before arguing about them. Or to clear up their ignorance of facts instead of deliberately holding on to it.
How very evil of me.
I weep.
On a side note though, you do deserve bonus points for having the stones to describe knowing what the fuck you’re talking about as if it was some sort of divine, magical, mystical insight.
Reading about an issue before spouting off is, evidently, True Sight.
Who knew that people who decide to inform themselves on topics that they talk about were really magicians, or something.
