Starving Artist: Totally Insane? Or Just Almost?

The BBQ Pit
161

Let’s see. You opened the post to which I responded with the statement

Now, I had not actually made any statements regarding who had initiated changes. I simply noted that the actions of moving toward incivility arose as much from the Right as from the Left. Starting out a post by saying my statement is incorrect and then attacking a point I had not made seems to be a bit contorted, itself.

My response to your post does not even deny that the initial change might have come from the Left. I simply note that once a change is initiated, it is quite possible that the force of the change and the direction of the change can be driven by reaction to the change. (And unlike you, I did not even claim that your statement was incorreect; I simply put the discussion into the context of the earlier exchange with Starving Artist.)

So let’s review:
[ul][li]I made a statement challenging a claim by Starving Artist.[/li][li]You posted to say that you thought my statement was incorrect, but did not actually address any error I might have made, making a different point altogether.[/li][li]I responded without contradicting the point you felt was so important, but with additional information to explain my earlier comment.[/li][li]You stormed back, demanding to know how I could say something I had not said and then complaining that I had “contorted” your statement even though I did not actually address your hijack, merely clarifying the point I had made earlier.[/ul]Go drink some camomile tea and rest your fevered brow on a cool ice pack. [/li]Come back and read our exchange after a night’s sleep and try to understand exactly what has been posted.
Please do not burn any straw men in my honor and pay attention to what I have said, not what you want me to have said. :smiley:

162

It’s funny how you think William Ayers is black.

Please don’t deny you thought that, because you did.

163

Dude just admit it you’re a plant for some radical left wing group to make conservatives look bad. Nobody could really be as stupid as you sound.

164

Well, there are a few other aspects of the situation. (I do not agree with the notion of accusing everyone who opposes illegal immigration of racism.) The reason that so many illegals come to the U.S. is that they can find work, here. They tend to find work from businesses–often dominated by individuals on the Right, from meat packers to small construction outfits.
Therefore, while the leap to accusations of racism might be hasty and ultimately unsupported, it does tend to look a bit odd to see one side of the political divide both attacking and supporting the illegal immigration and, while I consider it unfortunate, i think it is understandable that some folks on the Left would see that as hypocrisy and wonder aloud if the motivation has more to do with skin color than law. (It does not help the position of those opposing the illegals to have such luminaries as Pat Buchanan and John Tanton (founder of the principle organizations promoting the curtailment of immigration and the estblishment of English as a national language) making snide comments about being overrun by brown people or making outright racist remarks. I do not think that everyone who opposes illegal immigration must be fellow traveler of those two, but I have certainly seen fewer efforts among the people opposing illegal immigration to distance themselves from or condemn their racist comments than I have seen Muslim leaders trying to distance themselves from or condemn al Qaida or Hezbollah.)

165

You raise good points, Tom…or Debb, I never know who I’m talking to when it comes to you two. :slight_smile:

However, now that you mention it I can see how it might look odd to see conservatives lambasting illegal immigration while at the same time some are taking advantage of it.

I suspect that many of these employers are against illegal immigration philosophically, but since not hiring them wouldn’t do anything to correct the situation, they feel they might as well go ahead and hire them and enjoy the benefits of having these generally highly dependable, hard working people working for their companies.

As far as your not seeing people trying to distance themselves from racist comments made by some right-wing agitator, my guess would be that first of all they don’t have much of a platform to do so.

166

At a decisive moment in the run up to an election here a few years ago there was an incident in which some Iraqi refugees attempted to get into Australia by boat. The incumbent’s strong and harsh reaction to exclude them is credited with him winning the election.

It was as you can imagine a very hot button issue at the time and I spoke to many Australians about it. Many that I spoke to (and indeed debated with here) said that the issue was illegality, pure and simple. They just didn’t like the fact that these Iraqis were said to be coming here illegally. Those on the right particularly got the epithet “illegals” to stick as the standard way to describe these people. They denied any element of racism.

Yet without fail, if I said: “so if these people were white folks escaping a dictatorship who turned up on our shores without going through the correct channels, you’d be OK with treating them as we are treating the Iraqis?”

There was not a single person who didn’t duck the question or go silent.

“Illegality” is a bullshit excuse.

167

That had to be the most tortured rationalization I’ve ever heard on these boards that wasn’t a parody. Well done.

168

Which is kind of like paying huge sums of money to your dealer for your drugs, while wondering why drugrunners keep flouting harsh penalties for bringing drugs into the country.

If every right wing business owner (and let’s face it that’s most business owners) stopped hiring them, that would do something to “correct the situation”. Why the fuck do you think they come?

The reason the right is both for and against illegal immigration is that the right comprises both rednecks and business interests. The latter control the party, but they pay lip service to policies that appeal to the former.

169

Hardly an analogous situation. People weren’t flooding into Australia from a next-door neighbor with no end in sight. People weren’t agitating for citizenship, language laws, and taxpayer supported health care, child care, etc.

There may well have been concern over whether or not at least some of the Iraqis were anti-west agitators, but not being the incumbent I wouldn’t know.

I would certainly have favored giving them asylum if it could be determined that their plight was as innocent and genuine as your post implies.

Thanks for proving my point. :rolleyes:

ETA: Thanks jayjay for your comments on the preceeding page. It’s nice to know that someone picks up on my little tidbits of humor. I’ve wondered from time to time if anyone does. :stuck_out_tongue:

170

I haven’t declared anything proudly. I’ve stated unequivocally and in no uncertain terms that since no so-called facts can possibly be presented to settle any of the numerous points that come up in these subjective discussions, and since whatever so-call facts presented can invariably be contested with facts asserting the opposite, I will not waste my time quibbling over them.

I don’t do that out of a sense of pride; I do it to make my position and the reasons for it perfectly clear. It saves a lot of time, and keeps people from trying to obfuscate things with facts that ultimately prove nothing.

As far as forming opinions based on personal experience, we all do it. People have neither the time nor resources to verify the veracity of every opinion they form. If someone posts something that I think has legs, and I trust their integrity as a poster, I will look at it and if I find it convincing I will accept it. But just because someone posts something that he alleges to be probative in regard to this issue or that, if I can see that it will only lead to obfuscation or misdirection, I will disregard it. People around here love to go Googling for something to support their position and come up with this or that piece of ‘evidence’ and slap it down and act as though it should settle the issue. More often than not, Googling in an effort to support the opposite can be found just as easily, so what’s the point?

You’re correct; it doesn’t. And if I find someone’s argument or point persuasive, as I did with tomndebb’s point regarding illegal immigrants upthread, I will accept it and respond accordingly.

Fallacious reasoning? Ignoring reason? I don’t suppose it will come as much of a surprise to you that I disagree quite heartily with these assessments.

Frankly, outside the Cecil page and GQ, and given the utter, utter bullshit I routinely see posted around here about conservatives that invariably go uncontested by the board’s legion of so-called ignorance-fighters, I’ve come to find that the notion that this board fights ignorance is utterly laughable. This board - and I mean this sincerely - doesn’t fight ignorance, it promotes it!

171

The Union of Post-Structuralist Relativists would like to welcome Starving Artist to their ranks.

It’s rare that we find a conservative willing to concede the flexibility and malleability of truth-claims, the inherent subjectivity of the historical actor, and irreducibility of the text. We have been asserting the impossibility of unitary and universalist notions of truth, evidence, and fact since the 1960s, and finally our critique of Enlightenment certitude and empiricism is paying off.

Vale, Starving Artist !!!

172

But surely if the problem with, and reason to dismiss, statistical evidence is that it is just as easy to find stats that say exactly the opposite, then personal experience should be doubly dismissable, the number of people with differing personal experiences being considerably larger than the number of studies on a subject? That’s the problem with judging by personal experience; studies can be biased, mistaken, wrongly designed or implemented, reported wrongly, or misinterpreted. But personal experience can be all those things much more easily.

I’m concerned because it seems to me it’s all too easy to seperate integrity of posters by viewpoint. Earlier in the thread you’ve used your own personal experience, and cited Mr. Moto’s, as good evidence. But you’ve also suggested that people on the left believe what they believe because of what they’ve been erroneously taught or told, suggesting that their personal experience is not to be trusted. That can be reasonable, as you’ve pointed out above; why trust what people say if they have no integrity? The problem lies in how you determine they have no integrity; it seems to me that if your view of integrity divides strongly by left/right lines, it could be that difference that leads you to understand integrity. So-and-so is clearly misled or lying, because they believe differently than I do, and they couldn’t have come to that honestly.

This is of course a worst-case scenario. So if I may, i’ll ask; how do you judge whether a poster has integrity? Who on the left on this board would you consider to have it, to the extent you would be willing to trust what they say about their personal experiences?

173

You just had a platform. You blew it.

174

Ironically, if you had made this point in Australia at the time you would have been one of the very few right wing people to have been doing so, and you would have been contradicting the very way that the incumbent right wing admin was portraying the situation.

And speaking of “making my point for me” if you check up thread you will find that you started this tangent off by saying that conservative objection to immigration was “illegality”. Yet you only have to touch the surface and you find suddenly it’s not about that at all. It’s suddenly about people wanting citizenship, language laws etc.

I appreciate that my story about an Australian incident is not directly comparable, but what it does show (like your swift change of direction just noted) is that when it comes to immigration, the sudden deep and abiding concern for the letter of the law is usually a front for what lies underneath.

175

I do think he and I were talking past each other, but I was not ascribing as much credit as I was blame. In fact, my comment was non judgmental. I only was making the point that change In modern times) starts from the left. But I appreciate you helping to shed light. Thank you.

176

[quote=“tomndebb, post:161, topic:467678”]

Let’s see. You opened the post to which I responded with the statement Now, I had not actually made any statements regarding who had initiated changes. I simply noted that the actions of moving toward incivility arose as much from the Right as from the Left. Starting out a post by saying my statement is incorrect and then attacking a point I had not made seems to be a bit contorted, itself.

My response to your post does not even deny that the initial change might have come from the Left. I simply note that once a change is initiated, it is quite possible that the force of the change and the direction of the change can be driven by reaction to the change. (And unlike you, I did not even claim that your statement was incorreect; I simply put the discussion into the context of the earlier exchange with Starving Artist.)

So let’s review:
[list][li]I made a statement challenging a claim by Starving Artist.[/li][li]You posted to say that you thought my statement was incorrect, but did not actually address any error I might have made, making a different point altogether.[/li][/QUOTE]

I thought it was clear. I very politely said I thought you were incorrect. I thought that your response sought to counter **SA’s **claim about change being initiated from the left. I reread your response and still get that impression. And I think the current post of yours (first bullet) admits that.

[quote=“tomndebb, post:161, topic:467678”]

[li]I responded without contradicting the point you felt was so important, but with additional information to explain my earlier comment.[/li][/QUOTE]

You were free to contradict it. I now think, from the post by Camus, that you were not necessarily disagreeing with SA, just adding to it. Is that right? If so, my apologies for missing it. But on the other hand, you just said above that your statement was, in fact “challenging” SA’s claim. Hence, my confusion.

177

Damn straight our white American culture is under attack! Why, you can’t even go into Applebee’s anymore without being offered a *margarita *or some fajitas! And whenever I set foot on US soil, it is only to be greeted by incessant anti-white racism.

You, sir, are also so right that in this thread there is at least one whiny pussy who cries like a little bitch at the drop of a hat.

178

I must confess that Lonesome Polecat’s outburst against multiculturalism disappointed me greatly as I hadn’t realized his views were quite so extreme.

But no, alas, LP is turning into these people.

<sigh>

179

I swear if it weren’t for the fact that I know better, I’d think people like you are from Mars.

Of course we have a problem with their wanting citizenship, language laws and welfare. They’re here illegally!

What the fuck is wrong with you?

P.S. - And actually, it doesn’t seem to be the illegal immigrants themselves who want all these things; they seem happy to fly under the radar and hope no one notices them. It seems to be their relatives who are here legally and white liberals (plus Democrat politicians wanting to pander to those two groups for votes) who do most of the agitating for citizenship and taxpayer-funded benefits for them.

P.P.S. - Revenant Threshold, you bring up good points and ask questions that will take a while to answer. I’ll try to answer them later in the day when I have more time.

180

Whatcha gonna do in the meantime? Can I tag along?