Tony Blair's Speech to His Parliament

Abe: "This garbage reeks even by your abysmal standards, Milo. Since I am feeling magnanimous today, I will give you a couple tips. Firstly, write something of such an offensive nature again and I will do something about it, starting with humiliating you in such a manner as you are unlikely to have experienced on a message board before and proceeding with complaints about you to this Web site and all the rest of that fun. I put up with your idiotic arguments but I do not have to put up with the above statements of rapists, blood, and Abe, intended seriously or not. You have been warned.
"

Abe, I know you can entirely handle yourself, and have been here a long time, so this is just me butting in, unasked, from a sense of having been there before. As you know, the end of this is likely to be some Pit thread opening up where you are likely to end up trading swipes with Milo and casting pearls at lots of swine along the way.

To argue in good faith at great length as you have done presupposes a certain willingness to hear and to reason that is not always present among some posters. I find that very annoying: not b/c I care about any individual’s boorishness, but because it damages my faith in human nature! Some posters here are in GD without any attention of ever learning something new, or seeing things from a different perspective: you may think you have made a point or two, but if you see them two weeks later in a similar thread it will be as though, amnesia-like, they never heard a word a word. Some just fancy themselves really clever and are in it to flex whatever nasty muscle they learned to pride themselves in when they were about fourteen years old.

I know a Pit thread can be cathartic, and when I first started posting here I used to go there all the time: the virtual equaivalent of good round of mud wrestling, I guess. But in my experience, people as smart and knowledgeable as you are have better things to do with their intelligence. :slight_smile:

Just my 2 cents as the saying goes…

Mandelstam of course you are right, I apologize to everyone who reads my vitriol back there. I didn’t mean that I was going to start a Pit Thread, but I did mean to signal my displeasure in particular with the analogy presented by the poster – I must say that irritated me to no end, perhaps excessively. Certainly that happens with increased frequency when I am posting under time pressure.

Many thanks for pointing that out.

this ought to be required reading:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=172697

It’s Collounsbury and some others discussing some very interesting points regarding the effect of the fumbled diplomacy of the past year and the present war.

Blair is a good orator and highly skilled at debate. His arguments are almost always convincing and persuasive, but that’s because he knows how to argue effectively, eloquently, and persuasively

Sorry Abe, i have to disagree with you there, Blair is a good presenter, and yes a good orator, but not off the cuff. He was regulary destroyed by William Hague in the House of Commons in Prime Ministers question time. This was a prepared speech, written by some of the best speech writers in the business. Its the same throughout politics today.

Sure, but that doesn’t make Blair a ninny on the debating floor. I didn’t say he was the best and most regular destroyer of the opposition, and doubtless there are several better speakers, but I believe I was accurate when I said he was “a good orator and highly skilled at debate”.

The speechwriters definitely have a lot to do with the success of many speeches and even debates, I also don’t disagree there.