Yes, I know the difference. I was using over-the-top parody to show you that you might want to choose your words more carefully when making an otherwise sensible point.
Apparently, this is a hard concept to grasp. Let me spell it out.
Denotation: The specific meaning of a word.
Conotation: The suggestive or assosciative signifigance of a word.
Now that we have had our English lesson, can we put the torches down and return the tar to to the blacksmiths and the feathers to the pillow makers?
Missed your last one there (I type slow).
#1) Any time someone says “Geez! Can’t any of you get it?! Am I the only one who understands?!”, it is time for the person who spoke those words to reconsider.
#2) Posting shit for the fun of stirring up trouble is NOT “playing devil’s advocate”. Per several Mods/Admins, you are supposed to announce that you’re playing devil’s advocate. Several people have been banned for not doing so. (Taggert or Taggart or whatever that asshole’s name was comes to mind)
#3) Beeblebrox, I (and I’d bet Gobear and others) get your point. There’s a really obnoxious fallacy where someone says “You don’t agree with me?! You must not understand! You just don’t get it.” Don’t fall into that trap.
Fenris
Toby, I’d send my lesbian sister over there to kick your ass, but she’s too busy raising two daughters. Of course, they were given birth to by her partner, but she adopted them. I guess people who adopt children are abnormal.
My lesbian sister does have one biological daughter. Fathered by our stepfather. I guess he is normal, but she’s not.
But Fenris, I don’t think Uncle Toby was posting for fun or to stir up trouble. What I see is a guy who tripped over his own feet trying to make an academic point. Maybe he could have said it better, but Uncle Toby’s point does not deserve a pit thread. People are jumping to conclusions here. We don’t do that on the SDMB. Unpopular opinions should be welcomed.
At any rate, I think if people had actually read what he said rather that jumping on the Polycarp (bless him) bandwagon, they might have also realized that his point was based on a more intellectual view of marriage rather than a visceral one. I don’t agree with him, but the guy is not a troll. I do not have to tell you how heavy the accusation of “troll” is on this board. The guy is not a troll. He tripped over his own feet using the denotation of “perversion” but that was irrelevant to his point. He was called on the trip and tried to bow out gracefully in this very thread, but ya’ll won’t let him do that. He lost in GD. Let it go.
Christ, I said I washed my hands of this. I guess I can’t. I refuse to turn my back on the falsely accused and pride myself on fighting an unwarranted dogpile.
Beeblebrox, you’re a fuckin’ tool.
You can’t get offended; it only denotes that you have sex and that you have a penis. Just ignore the connotations.
The idiot Uncle Toby based his incorrect stance on a false premise that he posted in more than one thread. His use of “Perversion” is not supported by any biological text or even the fucking dictionary. He deliberately chose a loaded word to cause insult and injury. And by doing so he hurt one of our favorite people. So you can take your self-righteous bullshit and cram it back up your ass from whence it came.
I’ve thought about this. At length. And there’s two things I can say.
Good sir Polycarp, the man has an interesting view of matrimony based on the concept of procreation alone, and not the family unit. This means, of course, complete absence of the ‘uncle effect’, and implies, with a bit of consideration, polygamy or polyandry, provided that impregnation occurs. Indeed, marriage becomes nothing more than a birth certificate. Amusing, but hardly relevant to the world. Be at peace with the construct, as it is less than a straw man, indeed, no more than a shadow of Humpty Dumpty’s egg, where a word means no more or less than what you say it does. The definition of marriage he uses, renders it no more than eight letters assembled in a row, in a way that convientently resembles a common word.
As for UncleToby…
You, sir, are no gentleman.
More than one thread? Cite it, asshole. I am nobody’s tool.
The above was of course directed at the honorable Homebrew.
Is there no statement so hateful and idiotic that it will find no defenders?
Beeblebrox, here is a site for another thread where Uncle Toby was using his idiotic and assinine interpretation of the english language to gay-bash. Lazy fuckin’ bastard, you could have found this as easily as I did.
No they shouldn’t. I won’t welcome a Holocaust revisionist, I won’t welcome a Ku Klux Klan member, I won’t welcome a “Straight Supremicist” and I won’t welcome a troll.
Not all opinions and behaviors are equally worthy of respect.
And this…
…is the textbook example of trolling, of the “grand sociological experiment” variety (“I spewed evil to see your reaction for my grand sociological experiment”). The only thing lower than that is the "I wuz jes’ jokin’ " style troll.
You wanna play devil’s advocate? Kewl. All you have to do is say “I want to explore an idea that I don’t agree with. Someone wanna try to poke holes in this argument? I’ll try to defend it, even though I don’t believe it.” and you’ll win the hearts of GD’ers who’ll gleefully join in the fray. Lying to them for your (in general, not yours in particular) “grand experiment” is trolling.
Look, the troll said that people who can’t have kids have no business being married. Either he’s trolling or he’s a hate-monger. Either way, I can’t figure out why you’re defending him.
Fenris
Beeblebrox, you are, in several points, entirely right. I think your example of “normal” might prove that point – provided that being left-handed, or (as somebody pointed out) a male in a world that has slightly more women than men in it is equally “abnormal.” In the basketball-obsessed Triangle, my lack of interest in that sport is abnormal in that sense.
Uncle Toby was arguing a semantic point, to be sure. And, clairobscur, if marriage were indeed a private contract in which the state took no interest, you might have a valid point. But in point of fact, in the nations and cultures from which this board’s membership derives, every single one of them has laws in which marriage, without reference to progeny, has specific rights and privileges accruing to the members in it from each other and from the community as a whole.
I did not accuse Uncle Toby of being a troll; I said that he had admitted trolling. Those of you with a knowledge of the history of that term will appreciate the distinction – people can and do advocate unpopular stances with which they agree, and people can and do argue from a hypothetical perspective regardless of whether they agree with it, stating it as such. I myself have dealt with the marriage question by suggesting that if one concedes the sort of stance Uncle Toby was taking, then it would be mandatory for a man to divorce his wife at menopause, socially acceptable and even preferable for an older but still fertile man to take a much younger and therefore more fertile wife, etc. I do not believe that these consequences are desirable, but they are the implications of the “marriage is for progeny” argument, and can be pointed out as such.
Where Uncle Toby went wrong is in arguing as though it were his own view a stance that was insulting to much of the board membership, without revealing his intent was to press a view he did not himself hold in order to explore the consequences, and I will gladly grant that he pushed one of my sorest buttons in doing so. This was in fact trolling as the term was originally coined to mean – “dragging a line to see what bites.”
While I concede that I overreacted, I do not regret it. This has come to be a board where mutual respect is combined with fearless exploration of ideas, and his little game fell far short of the standards acceptable here.
Ah, screw it, if Polycarp was offended, I don’t even want to read it. Uncle Toby, you besmirch the name of one of my favorite literary characters.
And normal doesn’t mean statistically less frequent, no matter how much apologetic crap you pour over it. Abnormal means undesirable. If you don’t use it that way, you deserve to have your face punched by statistically infrequent, but entirely normal martial artists. Great big angry ones. Abnormally big, and undesirably angry ones, in fact.
Tris
Now see, it is that type of shit that pissed me off in the first place.
That is willfull ignorance and has no place here. Too many people have jumped on the dogpile without even knowing why. I spent half my time in this thread telling people to think for themselves and all I get is “I don’t even need to read it”. Pitiful.
Once again, here is another thread where Uncle Toby uses his willfully idiotic method of defining words to attack homosexuals.
It is really pissing me off how people go out of there way to give hateful bigots the benefit of the doubt while assuming the worst about the rest of us. For example, it is clear from Tris’ post that he has read clearly enough to know the type of vile bilge **Toby is spewing, yet Beeblebrox assumes the worst.
Polycarp, I just want to say that those children who you have graciously opened your house up to are very blessed to have you in their lives. You are a wonderful human being and God Bless You and Your Wife.
It could be that.
Or, it could be that Tris knows Polycarp and figures if something warranted not only a pit thread but the sort of introduction Poly gave, then it is not entirely to Tris’ benefit to read the entirety of the thread. It’s not like Polycarp’s entire OP was “In another thread, Uncle Toby was an ass”, and people blindly said “Rah Rah Polycarp! Eat shit, Toby! Yaaaay dogpile!”
Yes. And precisely, I think these rights and privileges should be throw outside the window. For, what is their basis? If gay people are allowed to marry, why shouldn’t I be allowed to marry two women? Assuming that I love them, they love me and we are happily living together, why wouldn’t we get the same priviledges than a couple (heterosexual or homosexual)? Why would we (consenting adults) be discriminated against on the basis of our lifestyle? Because people would be offended? Not different than the gay marriage issue…Hey! We would even be able to procreate…There’s zero objective reason to forbid polygamy, except the opinion of the moral majority…
Of course, polygamy exist in many countries, so it’s obviously possible to change the laws to allow marriages involving several partners…So, why am I against the marriage institution in itself?
Because if a woman is allowed to marry two men, why not four men? And if both polyandry and gay marriages are allowed, why not 2 women and three men? What would be the basis to forbid that, apart, once again, the opinion of the moral majority?
Similarily, we have already established that procreation isn’t the basis for the endorsment of marriages by the state (gay marriages, sterile people). Whet is the basis, then? Sex? It seems to me people have sex outside of the bonds of marriage, and that the marriage doesn’t necessarily imply intercourse. people can stay married though they don’t sleep together anymore, rape between spouses is now a crime, and anyway most people now accept the idea that the state has no business regulating the sex life of the citizens. Similar arguments could be used concerning love. No “love-test” is required before or during marriage.
So, what would be the basis to state that, if I want to live with my best friend, I shouldn’t benefit from the same advantages/priviledges than two other people, just because they have intercourses (possibly) and we don’t? In my opinion, none.
In other words, why would some people, on the basis they are two and not three, or that they are supposed to have sex, should be granted a special recognition and special priviledges?
Can you give me a rationnal argument, apart “people don’t like this lifestyle” explaining the impossiblity for a trio not to benefit from the same priviledges?
Eventually, I had to consider that if polygamic marriages are allowed, marriage lose any significance. Since, if 3 is allowed, why not 10? or 200? And I had to admit that there’s no reason altogether to give any advantage/priviledge to anybody on the basis of their lifestyle. That’s a reward for people living according to the social norm, nothing else. And the state has no bussiness telling me how I should live my live as long as I don’t harm anybody, not rewarding people who live in the “good” way.
If marriage is important for you, from a religious point of view for instance, nobody prevent you from having your union with whoever you want sacralized in your church, temple or sacred glade. Nobody prevent you from throwing a big party.
So, yes, I thing that marriage should be a private agreement, possibly involving a private contract, and that rights and priviledge should be granted only on the basis of objective elements, not related to the lifestyle of the person. One of the most obvious of these objective elements being certainly the birth of children. You live with a woman? Not the state’s busssiness. You live with a man? Not any of the state bussiness. You live with two men? Not the state bussiness. You live with your grandmother? Not the state bussiness. You have childrens? Then you can receive help, priviledges, etc…