Sirs, you forget yourselves!
Lefty, I too usually enjoy your posts. But personally I would be flattered if Sampiro smacked me down in a thread, even if it wasn’t one of his better posts. It would be like if Christopher Hitchens suddenly decided that I was important enough for him to start hating me and put me in his column, even if what he said about me was unkind.
And no, I’m normally against masochism as applied to me.
Blah blah blah, I get it, you’re against slavery. I never referred to southerners as helplessness, I’m saying that if you hold enough dead babies and live hand to mouth enough you kind of don’t care as much about the suffering of others.
Afterbirth of the Christ Child on a Ritz Cracker Topped with Velveeta, but you absolutely have NO reading comprehension skills do you? I honestly- totally seriously here- wonder if you have some sort of learning disorder, because you’re the intellectual equivalent of tone deaf. Your non-sequiturs remind me of that song Daffy Duck sings in BOOBS IN THE WOODS:
I initially thought you were being dishonest or disingenuous, then I pondered stupid. Now I honestly think you’re intellectually broken, you’re impaired, you’re actually unable to follow a thread that has the slightest non-linear digression. You’ve pretty much admitted as much.
Since you’re unable to follow anything that involves two steps in my next post I’ll address your exact claims.
I SAID GOOD DAY, SIR!!!
Taking your posts one at a time:
I know you are but what am I?
No, I didn’t. I’ve no doubt that your Asperger’s & Prosaica Consolidated & (Very) Ltd. intellect, informed as it is by gut hunches and a confusion by facts and singing cats that only you can see or hear, interpreted it that way, but again, no, I didn’t.
Since you don’t believe anything I say I will ask upon others to please read this post, which is the only one you could possibly be referring to, and be my judge- did I compare myself to Shakespeare at all? Not a rhetorical question, somebody who isn’t LHOD please answer.
Nah, one of the singing cats just farted- that’s what made you laugh.
How the fuck did you make it through a college lit class, I wonder.
You have already been told in this thread by other people that it was you who misrepresented what I said, not the other way around.
My grandfather used to say of my grandmother “Goddam it Sibyl you would fly around the world three times to wind up on a back alley”. I never met him but I feel his pain. Again, it’s already been pointed out to you by others that you are the person in error here.
You really do think that whales was a major part of that don’t you? I make an analogy between two equally arguments. This is the post. Again- would somebody who isn’t LHOD please read this postand inform us if in your opinion whales are a major part of that argument?
Responding as you would, whales actually blow water out through that hole on their back. They’re mammals and can’t anymore handle water in the lungs that humans can. Sybil Dorsett couldn’t hold water either and her mother used to beat the hell out of her for it, but she still grew up to be good people.
The point is that you are completely totally failing to understand an argument that nobody else seems to have the least problem understanding. And that you can’t fucking spell logorrhoea. If you’re going to slur somebody know the words you use, it’s good manners.
Actually I never said they did cost lives, what I said was (in this post)
This is hypothetical. It’s saying that IF log spikers caused a death few would defend them- it actually matters little whether they have or haven’t, this is strictly an analogy. You are quite correct that ELF hasn’t been proven culpable in any deaths, which actually works to your demerit, for in your pitifully fumbling around like Blind Pew in trying to disprove something I never said you walk right in front of a horse that proves one of my points and one that ironically you specifically circumnavigated the globe to take to a back alley.
What is that? you ask. Well suh, ELF has never been proven culpable of any deaths, only of property damage. In fact ELF prides itself on not having killed, only destroyed property, and yet ELF is considered at terrorist group by the United States Government. Cite Cite Cite Cite Wiki
My entire point in addressing septimus as I tried to describe to you using colors but still to no avail was that it’s not necessary to kill x number of people (or even 1 person) to be a terrorist.
This also disproves your point about Brown “not being a terrorist because he wasn’t successful”. ELF doesn’t kill, and as to how successful they are- well, for all the millions in property damage they’ve caused how much have they helped the environment or accomplished in their overall objectives? And yet the FBI and the Senate label them legally terrorists.
Oh that’s not all unfounded, dear. The fact that even after that argument was spelled out to you in colors and your erroneous interpretation is witnessed by others that you are still misunderstanding it (when it wasn’t a complicated matter to begin with) and that it and many other points continue to slide through your intellectual gullet like bacon through a goose’s ass proves it. Frankly I’m the first to admit that debate’s not my forte and that’s why I rarely post in GD- I’m a mediocre debater- but I’m a hell of a lot better at it than you are in this one, not that this is a matter for pride; beating a Down Syndrome kid at chess doesn’t make you Bobby Fischer after all.
This makes at least twice you’ve accused me of doing this and again, I didn’t. I never did. You are either willfully lying or you are to logical conclusions what this woman is to math.
Here again, SOMEBODY ELSE please read this post and this one and tell me if I said one fucking thing about the reason for Barrett’s name, because again this is at least the second time LHOD has accused me of this.
Herein a critique of a LHOD’s attempts to neologize: LHOD seems to think that slaver is a more vilifying term than slave-owner; personally I think it’s neither a more or less damning term but just more vague: while by secondary definitions of the word a slaver can technically be anybody associated with slave ownership, historically a slaver is somebody who engaged in the transport and sale of slaves, which if you accept that slavery was immoral then “slave owner” is by definition a bad thing and slaver is a bad thing, and if you don’t accept that slavery was immoral then neither term is a bad thing, so what the fuck his point is I don’t pretend to know, but I’ll gladly use his term since I’m sure it’ll delight him.
In that thread LHOD and a few others in that thread attempt to paint “slavers” with a very broad and uniform brush and all of them deserving of death (their words). I find this an absolutely ridiculous notion and I point out in that thread that “slavers” were far from a uniform lot: there were Union generals fighting to end slavery in the Civil War who were “slavers”, there were poor whites and rich folk and New Englanders and even non-Americans who owned slaves in the Americas including men as diverse as U.S. Grant and Ben Franklin (president of an abolition society later) and Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett.
The reason I mention Barrett is because he is not somebody you think of when you think “owned slaves in the Americas”- he was a wealthy and refined Englishman who never even lived in the U.S. but owned slaves here. (He was partner in a trading company that had interests in plantations in the Caribbean, Florida, and the Louisiana.) The point of this is "are all of these men equally deserving of death: the stereotypical white-suit-and-string-tie guy and the poor-white-farmer who has one slave and the English aristocrat and the northerner and the colonial New Englanders and the like?
Now, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett is an oddly redundant name you must admit, like Butros Butros Gali or Sirhan Sirhan or James Roosevelt Roosevelt, but whereas most people would be familiar with those names (even if they couldn’t exactly place them) Ed. B. M. Barrett is not as well known and it looks confusing: is his name Edward Barrett or is it Moulton Barrett or is it Edward Moulton Barrett or what exactly? It looks like a typo. Not one place did I give or speculate as to the origins of the name, I only said “Not a typo”, and because he’s not a well known person I add “father of Elizabeth Barrett Browning”, which while trivial is nonetheless interesting- you don’t think of U.S. slavery as a global thing or as having arms that reached as far as English drawing rooms. While yes, trivial perhaps, it shows just how far reaching a thing slavery was and how diverse a group of people were involved in it. For those who aren’t LHOD, does anybody agree that this is a well chosen example?
But fuck it, I had no intention whatever of going into the origins of the name but I will here just for the hell of it:
Genealogy buffs will know that it was a common custom for parents to name their second son for the maternal grandfather. When the Moulton’s had their second son they named him after Mrs. Moulton’s daddy Ed, thus he was Edward Barrett Moulton. When Little Eddie Moulton grew up one of his mother’s wealthy childless relative left Eddie a fortune in his will with one attached string: he must change his surname to Barrett (the bequest being in large part to ensure the name was carried on) and thus Edward Barrett Moulton became Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett. (Why he didn’t just drop the first Barrett, I don’t know- but he didn’t; Elizabeth, his oldest daughter, whose name at birth was Elizabeth Barrett Moulton, became Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett and upon marriage Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett Browning.)
And just to give trivia for the sake of trivia, since why not, though I daresay this is pretty well known by anybody who knows anything of the Brownings or has seen The Barretts of Wimpole Street (Charles Laughton played EBMB in the movie version, John Gielgud in the remake), Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett had a little neurosis or perhaps psychosis about his family: he was the father of 11 children who survived childhood, and he was absolutely bound and determined that NONE of them should marry and procreate. There are numerous theories as to why, none of them conclusive of course, one theory (again unproven) being that his children had black blood. In any case it’s why Elizabeth was a cougar spinster at 40 when she eloped with Robert Browning; she wrote her father for the rest of his life but when he died she got all of the letters back unopened. (In a rare moment of live-baby happiness, her only child- born when she was 43- was hale and hearty- again, all facts and themes ultimately converge.)
And fuck it- Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s father owned hundreds of slaves. Isn’t that just interesting for its own sake to some people out there?
It’s too damned late to continue this tonight but rest assured I’ll address every claim LHOD has made. And I am serious when I ask that somebody PLEASE read the posts linked to and confirm whether LHOD is misrepresenting them or whether I am.
No, you didn’t compare yourself to Shakespeare. It was a very nice post btw.
IMO whales are not a major part of that argument.
To be clear, I’ve got no more interest in reading Sampiro’s proof of what a douchebag he is. He’s not being pitted for his weak-sauce argument in great debates, an argument so weak that even he stopped defending it there, admitting that John Brown probably wasn’t a terrorist. He’s not being pitted for being a colossal douchebag in life; I’m certain he can’t help it. He’s not being pitted for the content of his posts at all. He’s pitted for being a colossal douchebag in great debates, most specifically in the post linked in the OP. As he seems entirely incapable of recognizing that, I’m done with him.
[hijack][nitpick]
Black whales, please. The term Colored Whales is no longer politically correct and considered to be offensive by some.
[/nitpick][/hijack]
Carry on
Not so, you bigot - the term is Cetaceous-Americans.
Whales over a certain size are known as BBWs (Big Beautiful Whales). Aka “Curvy Whales”.
Regards,
Shodan
That kind of Jingoistic chest-thumping doesn’t fly here. The correct term is “melanically-enhanced cetaceans.”
As for the others, they are referred to as “Blubber Babies” in exactly the same way as our canine and feline brethren are called “Fur Babies.” Get out of the stone age, dude.
Yeah, you did.
When you defend yourself against a criticism of your writing style by saying, “Well you know who else wrote like that? Only Shakespeare, the greatest wordsmith English has ever known!” then you are comparing yourself to Shakespeare.
In fairness, he was responding specifically to the quotation “brevity is the soul of wit”, to which the subject of Shakespeare was apropos. He wasn’t just saying “Well, Shakespeare did it!” out of the blue.
Of course, that post taken in its entirety really does exemplify why Sampiro’s posts might irritate a reasonable person. Instead of “It’s funny that you write ‘brevity is the soul of wit’ because it undercuts your point – Shakespeare had it spoken by the idiot Polonius when giving pompous advice to his son Laertes. Besides, Shakespeare himself was no fan of brevity”, we instead get “blah blah blah, irrelevant, pompous, blah blah, Shakespeare, blah, I’m so smart, blah, you’re an idiot, blah blah blah” for about 3,000 lines.
Nah.
That wasn’t the argument made, and the reference to Shakespeare would be better summed up by “You’re quoting a line originally used with some ironic intent, from a playwright largely admired for spectacular verbosity.” Sampiro then went on to argue against simplification and decontextualization of complex issues as a way of defending his excursions into loosely related minutae.
Alright. Shakespeare he’s not. More like Twain or Mencken.
Not that I’m comparing Sampiro to Dickens, but Dickens is my go-to wordy author. Dude got paid by the word, you know?
Exactly. And I for one really enjoyed reading the post, and felt it was apropos enough.
ITT: OP backfires horribly.
Haters hate. News at 11.
Shot From Guns, the OP was, as I said, a chance to vent at his incredibly insulting style in GD. I learned that a lot of people like his prolixity, and I learned that he can’t stop himself from being his charming and delightful self. The fact that a lot of folks like how he includes trivia in his posts doesn’t qualify as a backfire for me.
Well, what he left out of his explanation is the reason for the irony: Polonius was a pompous windbag who never used brevity. The irony in the passage isn’t that Shakespeare disagreed with the expression. The irony is that it was spoken by someone who was overproud of his own voice and who went on and on and on.
In any case, the reason he gave a short version of Hamlet was to show that long passages were better, in effect insinuating a comparison of his long passages to Shakespeare’s, however much he wants to shy away from the comparison when it’s laid bare.
And in yet another case, it’s a fallacy to suggest that the provenance of the expression pertains: brevity either is the soul of wit, or it ain’t. My usage, a joking one intended to leaven the criticism, was pretty clearly to say that I wish he’d not go off on tangents like he does. I certainly wouldn’t mind his long posts were they relevant and focused, as I prefer my nonfiction to be, or were they pure fiction; in the past I’ve enjoyed his family sagas, because I’m not needing to find their thesis and supporting evidence and can just enjoy the ridiculous ride.
He responded to the criticism by finding every precious way he could to call me stupid, simplistic, etc., possibly staying just barely on this side of the rules for GD while stomping on their spirit with both feet. His claims about my intelligence are too silly to bother with, of course (I trust most folks who’ve read me know what I mean)–but when they pepper every second sentence, it makes his posts fairly irritating to read, and I’m not interested in wading through their ordure to figure out whether he makes any point worth reading any more.