I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt for now and believe that you thought my argument that DT resides to the left was a series of single-pronged litmus tests. It wasn’t. First, though, let me make the rather obvious point that on each of the points offered, while there are people on the right that might ascribe to that particular view, any fair-minded person would agree that there is a much greater likelihood of a person holding any of those singular positions falling to the left of the political spectrum. Particularly as pertains to his views on religion.
Let’s pause there for a second. Do you deny the veracity of that assertion? You grant that it is true on the war for oil claim. How about the others?
You do the world an injustice to merely categorize him as an atheist. Especially atheists. He is rabid, crazed in this regard. You know this, yet you use the broadest term possible to describe his views in order to help your extremely weak, laughable defense of your original claim. You do atheists an injustice.
Now on to the main part of this. I didn’t offer each point as a single-pronged test, but to outline the breadth of his outlook. Now while you can find people on the right who might hold one of the positions I offered as examples—small as each group might be—you would be hard-pressed to find a single person on the right who would adopt the Der Trihs Manifesto in total.
Let’s pause again, do you agree or disagree with the veracity of that assertion?
If you agreee, we can move on and write this off to me perhaps being unclear in that particular post. If not, when you come back, bring a shovel.
I’d forgotten about Badchad. I did indeed have that lapse. I’m glad you found it. It’s good for the soul to be reminded of one’s frailties. I apologize to you for bashing you when you were clearly in the right.
I’m just trying to help you out with the trouble you seem to have with logic that causes you to encounter so much difficulty in Great Debates.
Let us examine your original claim. You said that seeing comments by Der Trihs gave one a peek into what “the left” believes. However, you really have no basis for that claim. While many of the positions that Der Trihs expresses might be held on “the left,” a very great number of positions that Der Trihs expresses are held by no one but Der Trihs, (that is what sui generis means), and a goodly number of positions expressed by Der Trihs are held by some number of people across the entire political spectrum. Der Trihs is not representative of “the left.”
We already know that his views toward religion do not fall into a left/right spectrum because we have posters on the right on this message board who share similar views of gods and religions. We also know that there are people on the left who are devoutly religious, (several posters posters on this board, as well as William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Dan and Phil Berrigan, Dorothy Day, Andrew Greeley, and others).
We know that his view toward persons in the military, while probably more often held on the left than on the right, is a tiny minority opinion even on the left.
So, with just two of your samples, we can see that a view of his words does not gives us a “peek” at “the left,” because a) one view is held among those on the left, those on the right, those who are more considered in their politics than falling into a simplistic left/right dichotomy, and those who are apolitical and b) the other view gives us not a view of “the left” but of a tiny minority of people who might be considered “left” but who are more likely off the left/right dichotomy in anarchy or some other political position.
The fact that some limited number of his views are shared by some number of persons on the left may make it unlikely that he would align himself with the right, politically, but his views are so unique that we simply cannot learn anything about “the left” by studying them. You have created a false dichotomy in which everyone is either left or right and have then, against the evidence, claimed that any idea he expresses is of the left.
I would defy you to find a single person on the left who would adopt the Der Trihs Manifesto in total. And even if you found a few, they would also not be representative of the left, since so many of his beliefs are not shared by those on the left.
Bad logic. Unsupportable assertion.
Now, before you try to make to big a deal about his own contempt for those he perceives to be on the right, let me point out the error of trying to make the world a place of simple dichotomy.
Take a North American Indian of the 1860s who has a bit of African ancestry. (Escaped slaves often joined Indian nations and married there.) Knowing that if he ventured into the states in rebellion, he could be subject to “taking” as an escaped slave (since he has no paperwork to prove he is free), he might very well make statements condemning the South, expressing utter hatred of the society there. By your logic, he has just aligned himself with the North. However, if he is has any awareness of the real social conditions in the North, he will be aware of the lynchings that have taken place during the anti-draft riots. He will be aware that he is considered a bit less than human throughout the North. He will be aware that he is not really welcome to live freely, there, either–his only advantage being that he is not subject to physical enslavement. His actual attitude might very well be that he wants all the whites in the North to be pushed back into the Atlantic, even though his stronger condemnation is leveled at the place where he rightly fears being enslaved.
He sees more than just two positions and a condemnation of one does not put him in agreement with the other. You really need to get away from thinking in dichotomies; it limits your horizons and causes you to make logical errors.
Incorrect. My original claim had to do with a peek into the “extreme” left. Feel free to check.
Well, so far even you have granted:
that his views on the military would be more commonly found on the left than the right
that his view about Iraq being a war for oil is more prevalent on the left than the right
Now, let’s look at those other positions. And I want you to tell me what you believe the breakdown would be of people who hold those individual positions. Namely, what percent of the people who might hold those individual positions would be on the left and what percent would be on the right. I’ll even offer my numbers first:
religion is a disease of the mind, and contagious to boot - 99%L/1%R
America is an evil empire - 98%L/2%R
we are in Iraq to conquer and kill and for oil. - 98%L/2%R
3-B) Oh yeah, and to rape - 100%L/0%R (also 0% sane)
American soldiers are murderous thugs - 99%L/1%R
people on the right are always wrong and are evil - 100%L/0%R
Now, you may be correct that Der Trihs is completely unique and no one holds the precise set of views he does. In fact, I think/hope you’re right about that. I also know of no one that holds the precise set of views that I hold. Some of them are even positions of the left (abortion, for instance). But that does not mean that, *on balance, *I do not fall to the right side of the spectrum. I do. (I am not aware of any view that DT holds that is known to be a position of the right.)
So, I ask you to directly assess the positions above and how they would be adhered to as far as what we consider to be the left and the right. After you go through the exercise and reassess this exchange, I would ask you to keep in mind what my original statement actually was—that it placed **DT’s **outlook on the extreme left.
To show you that my heart is in the right place, I will let you know in advance that I will accept your apology for this unnecessary and absurd distraction.
In the meantime, I look forward to the numbers you assign in the exercise above.
Well, if you’re going to just invent numbers that satisfy your own feelings, I guess I can see why you have so much trouble in GD while demonstrating that you still have not grasped the problem with your claim.
Even if 99% of the people who hold a position are on the left, if only 1% of the people who are on the left hold that position, it cannot demonstrate the beliefs of “the left.” Even if you want to keep inserting or withdrawing the adjective “extreme” so as to make more difficult to pin down your actual belief, you are still demonstrating failures in logic.
However, to play the silly game:
45% / 25% / 30%
60% / 15% / 25%
75% / 05% / 20%
3-B) 00% / 00% / 100%
10% / 00% / 90%
80% / 00% / 20%
[ golf announcer voice ] Now, folks, let’s see whether magellan01 can figure out the numbers and then watch while he commits the same two errors in logic one more time. [ /golf announcer voice ]
Sorry, I should have been more clear. I wasn’t calling you a liar for the O’Hair anecdote (though your “cite” on that leaves me unconvinced). You said I was trying to read Tuba’s mind so I meant to juxtapose these two statements:
And I’m less grouchy now and retract the liar bit. I’m sure you just remember things in a very flattering floodlight.
Well, Tris, according to Liberal it IS acceptable and he merely stopped using it out of respect for his beloved atheists. TubaDiva’s reasoning I gave in posts 90 and 78.
Ohh thanks, that really means a lot to me :rolleyes:.
Now if you’d just apologize to the board for the original lie.
CMC fnord!
Just in case I’m not being perfectly clear, I am calling him a liar for the O’Hair anecdote. Liberal’s “cite” has undergone a remarkable evolution over the years.
Well, despite what Liberal keeps saying about me I DON’T think everything that’s true is Google-able. However, he hasn’t shown anyone besides himself even use the term, let alone document the actual incident. With all the message boards indexed by Google and Boardreader, that seems a little odd.
Actually, I offered my numbers and requested yours in order to see where precisely we might disagree. Sorry if you find such an exercise on a debate board frivolous and something to pooh-pooh. You might want to rethink why you spend any time here or what your role is—official and not.
The only problem with my claim is that you chose to take a comment that obviously speaks to generalities and place it under an electron microscope. This is a common MO with you, trite as it is. You use it to derail or end a discussion the implications of which might lead to the ruffling of your delicate political sensibilities.
You want Der Trihs to be treated as a species unto himself because his particular set of beliefs are unique to him. Sure. We can then apply the same test to every single member on these boards, or in the world. Right? We can then dispense with “conservative” and “liberal” as categories because they, too, of course, are similarly ham-handed and potentially erroneous. Or at least not very helpful and fraught with pitfalls. Here’s an idea, why not start a new message board entitled “Beyond a Shadow of Doubt”, Hosted and Moderated but yourself, in which each and every post in every thread is simply offered in symbolic logic?
In this rough-and-tumble world we inhabit, Tom, people do use terms that are understood by others to be imperfect, yet quite useful. “The Left” is one such term. “The Right” another. I showed you earlier that although I do not adhere to all of what “The Right” might imply, I would not take someone to task for categorizing me there. I would not fly off the handle demanding that everyone refer to my particular belief set, sui generis, as Magellanism, because I understand how the term is being used. Additionally, if someone listed some of my beliefs (restricted to those that are not traditionally positions of the left) and then said something to the effect, “Let’s see what Magellan01 wrote about that and get a peek at what the right thinks”, no problem. Substitute the name of a poster you believe to be clearly on the Right; even if I didn’t agree with all of the points listed I wouldn’t freak out “…b-b-bbut as a member of the Right I don’t believe that and you’re implying I do. How dare you!” I would understand you were simply making a point, using every-day terms to do so.
If you had gone to the trouble to use the descriptor “extreme”, I’d have even less of a problem, as there would be two qualifiers in the sentence. “Peek”, implying that we’re just going to get a small glimpse of what the thinking might be; and “extreme” explaining that that glimpse is restricted to what a small subset of the larger group thinks. Tell me, next time shall I use “double-extreme” or “triple-secret-extreme”? Would that keep your panties smooth and comfy?
It’s quite amazing that you attempt to take me to task for making a point loosely then seek to ignore an important qualifier that goes to deeper specificity. Especially after you made the error initially and had to be corrected. — Opps, sorry. I forgot about your Cloak of Infallibility. :rolleyes:
Let’s. There are three different issues. A) the necessity to account for your “excluded middle”, B) the apportioning of the particular belief, and C) the incidence of that belief on the left.
First, given the broad, flexible, somewhat amorphous meanings of the terms “left” and "right"your desire to include an excluded middle as a category is a waste of time. While it might be difficult to draw one line demarcating the left and the right, at least you have the benefit of using one to define the other. In other words, you have the benefit of judging positions relatively, not just in the absolute. Adding your third category actually makes things more difficult and muddier. Which, I know, is precisely your little game. But it does not help the problem of roughly-defined categories.
The qualifier I used (the one you overlooked and then minimize the importance of) makes room for those beleifs that are not held by the mainstream of either side. Of course, if we did have your third category in real life, and you placed people there—with their consent—we could then go to them and say “okay, we’re going to dispense with the this third cagtegory and place you in one of the other two, you pick”, we’d be right back to where we started. Back to how political conversatons are held routinely, sans the wadded up panties alluded to earlier.
Now, the apportioning. We can skip over #s 2, 3, and 5, as we already agree that the belief is more prevalant on the left than the right, *and *that most people who might hold that position would be on the left. (Wow, seems like this exercise might not have been so frivolous after all.)
So let’s go to #1. Without even question your 45/25 split (which I do), if we went to the 30 and asked them to categorize themselves L or R, which do you think they’d wind up choosing. Do you think on that issue they’d feel more solidarity with the party that argues for keeping “under God” in The Pledge, or the one that has vocal adherents that we should take “in God We Trust” off our currency? (Mind you, I’m not saying that all members of either party agree with those respective positions, only that those positions are associated with those parties.) It seems obvious to me that they would choose the Left. But even if we just split the 30 down the middle, we have a belief more prevalant on the Left than the Right.
That leaves #s 3-B and 4: “rape” and “murderous thugs”. Given your answer on #3 (75/5/25) I think you’d have to grant on both 3-B and 4 that if we took your “excluded middle” and again pressed to them to self-identify with either L or R, that the result would be overwhelmingly Left. If you disagree with that, I’d love to hear your rationale.
And that brings us to C: incidence, the percent on the Left that might adhere to each of the positions. From a logic standpoint, this is your most valid criticism. That’s “most valid”, not “valid”. It wouldn have been completely valid had I NOT qualified my original statement, “extreme left”. (emphasis added)
I was careful to do so because quite a while ago I was taken to task for claiming that Der Trihs did, in fact, speak for the left in general. Posters, Miller, for one, if I recall correctly, and others which I thought included you, pointed out that most of those on this board who self-identify with the left thought he was too extreme or rabid in the points he made. I saw that they (you?) were right and since then I have consistently attributed him to an extreme wing of the Left. Since then, no one has taken issue with that characterization.
Until now. Until you. And you do so by first misstating what my original statement was and then—quite amazingly given your electron microscope—willfully ignoring or minimizing that important qualifier that tightened the scope of my statement.
