.
Some symbolic logic would come as a relief about now, honestly.
Seriously, magellan, you could simply have said:
“I like reading Der Trihs’s posts because it gives me a peek into the mindset of a complete batshit loony whom I consider to be an extreme leftist.”
That would be accurate, right? Why not be happy with that, instead of trying to score political points by seeing him as a part of some cabal of the “extreme left?”
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Keep digging. Rather than a hijack, I actually, (overestimating your ability to recognize the issue), thought that you would have simply replied, “Oh, I see what you mean” and the matter would have dropped, there.
Your two errors are,
First, that you believe that all thought can only be expressed on the single line continuum, so that everyone has to be either on the left or on the right. That is the sort of simplistic and fact free thinking that leads politicians to make truly idiotic statements such as “They either for us or against us.”;
and
Second, that you believe that if you know some thoughts of a person (who might very possibly be unaligned with your artificial left or right), you then have some sort of insight into the views of the larger group to which you would assign them, even when that person is not representative of that larger group and the views expressed are either not found or are found in a tiny minority of the group–the explicit error on which I first challenged you.
(And spare me your false claim that I “overlooked and then minimize[d] the importance of” your adjective “extreme”. I first replied when you had withdrawn it and before you hastened to re-insert it into the discussion. However, even there, Der Trihs provides no example of the “extreme left” as I do not recall him ever espousing actual communist or even radically socialst practices. On those occasions where he has addressed economic issues, he has rarely done more than deny that some form of socialism is as evil as some critic contends, but I do not believe he has ever actually put forth a proposal championing socialism and he has clearly stated that he does not believe communism can work, so he is pretty far from any “extreme” edge of the left, in any case. This is the problem with your simplistic “broad categories.” They are not broad categories but narrow shoeboxes into which you feel everyone must be wedged in order for you to make sense of the world. Basically, your definition of “left” or “extreme left” amounts to little more than “not like I am” which, while making you comfortable, does nothing to provide a workable description that others may use.)
Next time, you should not try to make absurd statements that you have gotten a "peek’ into the consensus of any group, based on a few repetitive comments by an individual that have no bearing on the general beliefs one might assign to that group.
Straw man? Lies? However do you wish to self-characterize this self-inflating piece of nonsense? I do not find your exercise frivolous because it involves debate, but because it involves you pulling stupid numbers out of your ass, with no way to support them, and then asking me to join you in your scatalogical rituals. This is more particularly true since, even if the numbers had any basis in reality, they still failed to make your point. You are attempting to generalize from a miniscule set of cherry-picked specifics that would not actually prove anything. Had you established some “general” beliefs held by the (extreme) left and shown how Der Trihs matched them, you would have had a position from which to argue. Simply picking a handful of ideas that are tangential to any artifical left/right continuum and are both held and not held by lots of people across the entire political spectrum is an exercise in illogic.
You do realize that I quoted you directly, so that this statement is simply a lie, right?
Der Trihs actually reminds me more of a ‘poster’ here a while ago (not saying that DT’s a troll as such, but the other poster was the definition of one). He came from another board, which I won’t name, but identified here as a Rabbi. Some of his posts were what might be called ‘reasonable’, but they were only there to muddy the water of those posts which were (to put it kindly) bat shit insane. The point of that nasty piece of work’s life was to discredit all Jews - luckily he was dumb enough to make reference to his identity here on that other board, and was found out pretty quickly.
If I wanted to present all atheists as - beneath their kindly veneer - mean-spirited, hateful, evil assholes with bad body odour, I would present pretty much exactly like DT. On the other hand, maybe he is just all those things. And I say that as a pretty committed libertarian atheist myself.
I love this. If I might have made a mistake, it’s not simply a mistake, but a lie. :rolleyes:
But I didn’t make a mistake. In fact, you made the mistake. Now you compund it. Here, I’ll show you. In Post 71 you quoted me saying:
When I pointed out your error, you replied, in Post 84: (emphasis mine)
But that is an “untruth”. (Whether it was an honest mistake or an outright lie I do not know. I’d vote a mistake. But wait, you don’t make mistakes. Or admit them, anyway. So, who knows?) What you quoted was NOT my original claim. What you quoted was a playful retort to Zoe. My original claim (which Zoe correctly quoted in Post 51) can be found in Post 13. Here it is:
So, you were, wrong back then. I pointed it out and you tried to downplay it. Now you tell me you quoted my original claim correctly (which you didn’t) and me telling you that you didn’t is a LIE?! When you very clearly did?!?!. 
:mad: :rolleyes:
Tom, you’ve outdone yourself this time. Now, let’s see if you know what your response to this post should be.
I am not optimistic.
Yeah, tom, stop compunding your mistakes!
[sub]Yes, I have nothing of value to contribute[/sub]
You seem to have excluded the possibility that I understood your point, but didn’t think it had the merit you did. I also though you were missing an important point. One that you still don’t get. Namely, that the qualifier I used mattered—a lot. Even that aside, I thought, and think, that you were, once again, being hyper-captious, attempting to scrutinize what was really a throw-away line with the eye of a logic professor. You’ve played this game before. It is trite, disingenuous, tiresome, and childish. I know you disagree, which is why I thought, and think, that you and I should just avoid each other except for official moderating. From the last exchange we had in another thread I thought you were of the same mind. You may want to reread it. I will admit that I did weigh in here in this pitting of you—but in your defense. I tried to be playful at the same time, as to smooth things over. Oh, well. Possibly a mistake on my part.
Handled in painful detail (for you) in my previous post.
I do not think further discussion as to the main point of the discussion will be fruitful, so I will leave it to you. I will, however, respond to anything you might have to say in reply to my previous post in which I show that your accusation of me lying is an untruth in itself.
You are probably right. You seem willfully unable to recogize both the logical errors you have committed along with the basic lack of value in your silly effort to impose a simplistic left/right dichotomy on the world.
Yes, it would have been accurate. And if I thought that every casual, playful, semi-sarcastic throw-away line was going to be anyalzed by a persnickety logic professor I might have taken the time to phrase it that way. Or simply qualified further with something like “…what some on the extreme left think”. But according to Tom, part of his beef is that Der Trihs is “sui generis”, a species unto himself, so he’d be objecting to placing DT on the left—extreme or not—anyway. To which I say complete bullshit. As I’ve said, the term is used very loosely. I’ve been referring to him as residing on the extreme left for over a year, I think. Not one complaint. Not even from those who did complain when I categorized him as being on the left, sans qualifier.
I would like you to respond to the other post, though. The one in which I show that your accusation calling me a liar is in complete error.
Nah. Going back over the whole exchange, I can see several points at which each of us misread what the other had said. If I actually lay out the whole sequence of mixed signals, I’m just going to get more denials and insults from you and it would not be worth my while to go through the effort just to watch you play that game, again.
Oy.
Let’s see if we can discuss this matter of “hand stabber” and its origin rationally. Maybe we can get at the root of why this even matters to you, notwithstanding any pretensions about “fighting ignorance” because if you were fighting ignorance, you would be fighting your own with respect to this matter with specific questions rather than mere shit flinging.
What would it profit me to make up a story about this? I could easily have taken full credit for inventing the term. It would be easy to connect such a term to hard atheism wihout any backstory, since hard atheists tend to be violently opposed to faith and the faithful. See Der Trihs, for example. Or Czarcasm (then Scythe) in 1999. (He has softened considerably over the years.)
What about the story is extraordinary with respect to Madalyn Murray O’Hair? She was utterly vitriolic and hateful toward the faithful in general, and toward Christians in particular.
When asked what she would do if her children converted to Christianity, she replied, “Take them to a psychiatrist, and if he couldn’t help them, I’d take them out and shoot them.”
3. What is extraordinary about her son William going on the talk show circuit after his conversion to Christianity? One thing I can remember distinctly is that the DJ’s name was Dick Pomerantz. It was an AM station. I’ve made several unsuccessful calls trying to track down the old call letters.
My mother was an evil person … She was just evil. She stole huge amounts of money. She misused the trust of people. She cheated children out of their parents’ inheritance. She cheated on her taxes and even stole from her own organizations. She once printed up phony stock certificates on her own printing press to try to take over another atheist publishing company. I could go on but I won’t. I included the last sentence in his quote to emphasize the fact that he did not give an unabridged list of her deeds.
With all those things considered, why is it so far-fetched that one day in the 1980s in Charlotte, North Carolina he told a rather unremarkable story of his mother stabbing a man’s hand who had wished upon her God’s blessings? I mean, if there were absolutely no connecting tissue, or even only tenuous connections at best, and if I had something to gain by crediting the invention of a very colorful and descriptive term to someone else rather than taking credit myself, and if William hates his mother so much, and since you yourself said that “nobody cares” — then why do you take the default position that I am lying? Not just that I have a false memory, or that I am mistaken, but that I am telling a deliberate falsehood?
If it’s because you think I’m a shit in general, that’s fine. Just say that. But if it’s because I can’t point you to a web page about something said on a local radio station more than 20 years ago, then you are a fucking idiot.
Hmmm. You know, in a debate things will often be misconstrued, misread, or misunderstood, and further discussion can usually clear those up those innocent mistakes. Then there are areas in which there is a genuine, substantive disagreement, in which cases it is sometimes prudent, and healthy, to simply agree to disagree.
But then there are direct, clear personal attacks, like you calling me a liar. Some of us take such accusations seriously, as they go to character and transcend any particular debate, and do not make them lightly. If we do make such an accusation and are then called on it, we feel it incumbent upon us as a matter of honor to substantiate the accusation. If unable to do that, or especially if it has been proven to us that the accusation was in error—as I have proven to you—we feel a strong urge to admit the error and apologize. For those of us raised with a deep respect for honesty, this is as much benefit to us as the accused.
Now, I’m of the mind that such a respect for honesty, like many issues that go to one’s character, is like the ability to handle a basketball well: if you don’t aquire it early in life it’s doubtful you will be able to aquire it later. So, I guess it would be harsh of me to hold you to account for something your parents apparently did not value nor spend time instilling in you.
Of course, I could be wrong about this and your parents valued honesty and character as much as any parents did and this type of behavior on your part is some twisted, desperate attempt to be rebellious. I have no way of knowing really. I can just see your actions and call them for what they are: low and despicable.
Now, for the final time, you made an accusation and called me a liar. I showed you that you were in error in doing so. Acknowledge it, and apologize.
Alternatively, please explain what the fuck is so hard about doing that? Seriously. You’ve even admitted that we both “misread” stuff. Why not take that next step and admit that you made the specific error of calling me a liar? And then take that final step that some vertebrates take and apologize for such an erroneous insult?
This is the second time you have accused me of calling you a liar when I have not done so even once. Go back, read your own post, then take it to heart.
Jeese, Tom. Would you mind getting your own thread?
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D’oh!
I direct you to Post 102. If you wish to now claim, as I think you will, that your statment was a sincere question and not an actual acusation with “, right?” added as a rhetorical device, I will be tempted to call bullshit.
Is that your position?
Answer that and I will offer my final response, to the relief of Liberal, myself, and I’m sure, you.
I was just kidding, Megellan. You weren’t the hijacker. That was Frank. **Carnal ** and **Crow ** merely opportuned. 
Maybe I’ve just been such a hard-ass free-speech defender for so long that I’ll accept almost anything short of hard-core porn and calls to violence as acceptable speech. To be sure, **Der Trihs ** is one of the grumpier athiests on the boards, but I’m glad he isn’t banned. I don’t think Tom overstepped with the warning, but I see that as a thrown flag for pass interference or a whistle for an illegal screen. **Der Trihs ** plays a little rough sometimes, noses get bloodied and knees get scraped, and the mods have to make sure things don’t get out of line. But we all have to know that there are people out there who disagree vehemently with us.
Of course, not. I do not deny having asked once and claimed once that you were posting a lie. I simply note that I have not called you a liar, yet you keep repeating that charge.
So, claiming that something I posted is a lie is not substantially the same as calling me a liar? It does not amount to the same thing?
Amazing.
To recap: you admit (above) that you did, in fact, claim that I lied—whoops, sorry, claimed that what I was posting was a lie. And after it was shown to you that your claim was in error, you do not acknowledge that specific error and, heavens-to-mercy, apologize.
That’s our Tom. At least you saved this pitting of you from failing to make you look bad. Well done.