[QUOTE=Caridwen]
Yea, blame the democrats instead.
[/QUOTE]
He’s not “blaming the Democrats”. He probably erroneously assumes I am one so he was appealing to something I might personally respond to, which is valid enough. He was making the point that the problem is systemic and crosses the aisle, and he’s right.
We’ve gone from trolls, to fundies, to gay marriage… Ah, I see now. The circle is complete.
[QUOTE=Ensign Edison]
That was part of my point, Lib, though if you’re implying that I’m not taking enough personal responsibility in getting my own equal rights, I cordially invite you to stuff it and set it on fire. If by “filth” you mean “the Democrats”, right. I’m not sitting in it, so the analogy doesn’t apply.
[/quote]
I intended nothing personal either way. And I did not know you are gay; therefore, it was impossible for me to imply a lack of initiative on your part for securing your own rights. I have expressed the belief many times that peaceful honest people should be free to pursue their own happiness in their own way. That includes gay people. It is the heart of my philosophy, and I’ve never understood why so many gays reject it. Or… more precisely, I guess, they embrace it for themselves, but not necessarily for others (private ownership of property, and so forth.)
John Kerry expressed opposition to gay marriage in 1996, and supported a ban on gay marriage for Massachusetts. (Cite, if needed.) And in general, the people one might expect to fight hardest for gay marriage (the Democratic leaders) have done precious little about it. Even if they come out and declare straight up, “I support gay marriage”, it is an empty sentiment if they don’t use their offices to facilitate it.
I still believe that the media are the main culprits in propping up the fundamentalist viewpoint by constantly putting it on display. They like it when Falwell comes on their shows and blames gays for hurricanes because it’s provocative. It’s the same reason they don’t have “reality” shows that really are just shows about people living their ordinary lives. They choose spice over meat. They don’t care about the steak; they just care about the sizzle.
[QUOTE=DrDeth]
Why does badchad still have “member” under his name and not “banned”? 
[/QUOTE]
Maybe in his case it means “dick”? 
Liberal, I’m finding the topic of media responsibility in the fundamentalist “craze” interesting, but wondering if perhaps we should start a GD thread for it. We’re buried in three hijacks, not that anyone cares on page nine, but I’d like to hear from some of the usual suspects. Unless it’s been discussed and I missed it?
I don’t get why you don’t get that queer people usually saddle up with other liberal causes. For one, when nowhere else will take you, you learn to call it home.
[QUOTE=Liberal]
John Kerry expressed opposition to gay marriage in 1996, and supported a ban on gay marriage for Massachusetts. (Cite, if needed.) And in general, the people one might expect to fight hardest for gay marriage (the Democratic leaders) have done precious little about it. Even if they come out and declare straight up, “I support gay marriage”, it is an empty sentiment if they don’t use their offices to facilitate it.
[/QUOTE]
And I fully agree.
[QUOTE=Liberal]
But that’s a false claim. I used spiritual terms to convince my sister, a fundamentalist Christian, that her opposition to gay marriage is morally wrong. She no longer opposes it.
[/QUOTE]
I am going to step back from this now. I am not defending Harris, or claiming that I fully understand his arguments and given that I am only 1/5th through this book I won’t argue the veracity of the claim.
Ensign Edison said something that reminded me of the book and I was curious if he/she had read it.
My other tongue-in-cheek thread was euthanised, so please allow me the courtesy to transcribe my poem here:
An Ode to Bert
Badchad, badchad, may I count the ways
you make me want to scream
In pain, in joy, with laughter and tears
Your one-trick ponly comforts all my fears
Stalking, sniping, and being a fucking jerk
I loathe your attitude
But through thick and thin, you are a member
From January and even to December
People may want to ban your guts,
you filthy sack of shit,
But like i said before with my writing in the sand
even a troll may carry a flower
in his ugly, oafish hand
So let us see more of you, more and more and more!
until your being fills us to the brim, and your hatred stuffs our pores
You may be rude and lame and droll
But, I for one, welcome our new overlord troll
/bow
[QUOTE=Liberal]
That only works when there is diligent supervision over trolls by the mods. Let’s say someone signs up this morning and starts pasting saved lists about his obsession all over the place. We might respond by reporting his posts. A few people will feed him, and others will post several DNFTT messags. By the end of the day, his account will almost surely be banned, his posts deleted, and his memory erased.
Badchad, on the other hand, has been pasting saved lists about his obsession for years now. He doesn’t defend them, he just pastes them. When you refute each item in them, he either ignores you or responds by pasting more. Note that his response to my recent refutation was to say that Jesus is a cunt and I am a nutjob. Whatever truth value that statement might hold, it certainly is not a defense of his pasted list.
He also is a liar, as I proved earlier, and though he is representing himself to you as fighting a noble cause against liberal Christianity — you know, the tolerant Christians who are accepting of gays and minorities — he has in fact been battling only one: Poly. In the past, he has said that he targets Poly because Poly is somehow symbolic of, or represents, the rest of us. Now he is saying that he targets liberal Christianity in general, which is a lie.
But let us, for the sake of argument, stipulate that indeed he does fight against liberal Christianity. Surely, it gives one pause to wonder why. Why fight the Christians who are not bigots, and who believe that gays and other minorities ought to be church leaders and fully accepted in society? He will tell you some bizarre tale about how we are hypocrites for loving Jesus and loving gays at the same time.
If he is being honest about that — and we’ve ignored several of his lies to get to this point — then his gripe is against hypocrisy. But if that is the case, then why has he not attacked the hypocrisy of, say, the Bush administration? If his concern is hypocrisy, then he should be attacking the whole staff except for Tom because if Tom is showing favoritism, it is because he is Christian. It is the rest of the staff who are hypocrites if they are allowing Tom to do that.
In point of fact, he attacks one and only one alleged hypocrisy: that of liberal Christians; and within that subset, he actively pursues one and only one person: Polycarp. After many years of witnessing all this, I’ve finally put together a picture that seems reasonable to me, and it goes like this…
Badchad is not an atheist at all. He hates the liberal Christian God. Atheists do not hate God. They do not believe in God — a prerequisite to hating Him. He is, in fact, a conservative Christian, possibly a fundamentalist because all his pasted lists use the King James version of the Bible, popular among that group. He is using atheism as a cover because he knows that as a fundamentalist Christian, his behavior would long ago have been shut down. If he is an atheist, then he is the worst defender of atheism you have ever had the misfortune of having on your side.
And finally, he is a bigot. He is bothered by the liberal Christian acceptance of gays and minorites. He believes that we have besmirched the Fred Phelps Jesus that he himself adores. The only reason to target Poly, who is just as accepting of atheists as he is of gays, and to drive Poly away from posting, which is what Badchad gloats that he has done, is to silence one of the board’s greatest champions of rights and tolerance for gays and minorites.
So there you have it. Badchad is a fundamentalist Christian bigot who is himself a liar and a hypocrite, operating in the guise of a half-hearted atheist (who never participats in, say, creationism threads), intent on shutting down the board’s greatest facilitator between believers and non-believers and its greatest champoin of gay rights and the rights of minorities. It is with acceptance of that premise that everything about him makes sense.
[/QUOTE]
Can’t I just call him a jackass? It’s soooo much shorter and at least as accurate.
[QUOTE=Shodan]
I thought the technical name for it is argumentum ad rectum, but I could be mistaken.
Regards,
Shodan
[/QUOTE]
I think argumentum ex ano is closer to what you mean. 
[QUOTE=Ensign Edison]
I don’t get why you don’t get that queer people usually saddle up with other liberal causes. For one, when nowhere else will take you, you learn to call it home.
[/QUOTE]
The LP would love to have you.
How did this turn out to be out **Liberal ** again?
Oh, wait…
[QUOTE=Autolycus]
We’ve gone from trolls, to fundies, to gay marriage… Ah, I see now. The circle is complete.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, we’ve gone in a full circle around that jerk. If only there were a term to describe this …
[QUOTE=cosmosdan]
Can’t I just call him a jackass? It’s soooo much shorter and at least as accurate.
[/QUOTE]
Well, if you really must make a reasonable and sensible summary of something quite complex and speculative, then… yes. I suppose so. 
Jodi, would you please respond to post #315? Thank you.
[QUOTE=badchad]
Well I asked a business question once before, and once on Ayn Rand.
[/QUOTE]
Wow, renaissance chad.
Cisco:
Sure.
badchad hypothesized some “onlooker” who might “notice” this or “think” that about my posting behavior, and whom I might want to gratify by explaining myself. I replied that I wasn’t interested in “convincing the fictional anonymous onlooker.”
You then out of left field weighed in with a gratuitous “dubious” smilie to take issue with a grand total of three words in my post – “fictional anonymous onlooker” – and to point out that many people may be viewing this thread, thereby completely missing the point, which was that badchad’s hypothetical “onlooker” is completely fictional, which is all I said.
IOW, you jumped in to nitpick a very minor and tangential part of my post, threw in the dubious smilie, and managed to miss my point completely at the same time. So, yes, go ahead and call it “irascible.” Feel free to respond in a similar fashion if I ever concentrate my full attention on three words in any one of your posts.
Since you asked.
[QUOTE=badchad]
Every time a Christian calls me an idiot or tells a lie about me, they are sinning against their lord. I think that’s kind of neat.
[/QUOTE]
What do you think of the lies you’ve been telling and the false accusations you’ve been making? Against whom are you sinning?
Try to note that this is completely separate from the (alleged) lies others have told about you.
[QUOTE=Jodi]
Cisco:
badchad hypothesized some “onlooker” who might “notice” this or “think” that about my posting behavior, and whom I might want to gratify by explaining myself. I replied that I wasn’t interested in “convincing the fictional anonymous onlooker.”
You then out of left field weighed in with a gratuitous “dubious” smilie to take issue with a grand total of three words in my post – “fictional anonymous onlooker” – and to point out that many people may be viewing this thread, thereby completely missing the point, which was that badchad’s hypothetical “onlooker” is completely fictional, which is all I said.
IOW, you jumped in to nitpick a very minor and tangential part of my post, threw in the dubious smilie, and managed to miss my point completely at the same time. So, yes, go ahead and call it “irascible.” Feel free to respond in a similar fashion if I ever concentrate my full attention on three words in any one of your posts.
[/QUOTE]
I’m not trying to be a jerk here but I swear to god I still don’t understand what you are trying to say.
What I know is:
[ul][li]You called anonymous onlookers fictional[/li][li]I, conclusively, I think, demonstrated that anonymous onlookers are not fictional at all[/li][li]You snapped at me for doing so[/li][li]You stated that you didn’t care if anonymous onlookers were present or not[/li][li]I still can’t tell if you believe that people other than the recorded participants are viewing this (and all other) threads [/li][/ul]
I’m afraid I must disagree with you, Liberal. I have not, in my experience, met a fundamentalist Christian who would activity work against the faith in general of a liberal Christian. Moreover, he’s still dissing on himself on a regular basis, if he’s a fundamentalist (i.e., saying that liberal Christianity is just as bogus as fundamentalist Christianity implies that both are bogus.)