Until and unless you can actually show that Bricker made such an admisson, you have made an unproven assertion. You have chosen, apparently, not to back it up. Instead you resort to attempting to argue that you should be allowed to spew out accusations, and leave others to disprove them.
Aldebaran was recently banned for, among other things, making assertions that were clearly false, and refusing to back them up. ElvisL1ves has made the same sort of accusation against Bricker that you did. He has chosen (apparently) to depart the thread rather than defend his slander. Is this the sort of company you want to keep?
You have made an accusation. Defend it, or withdraw it and apologize.
This is Great Debates, where the big boys play. If you can’t hold up your end, then get out.
I have already added to this thread, in the form of my observation that your accusation against Bricker was both false and malicious. annaplurabelle seems to be heading down the same path. One poster spewing lies is one too many in any thread; we don’t need two of them.
If you feel I have violated a rule of Great Debates, by all means report me.
You have been requested to back up an assertion. If the usual “Cite?” of any GD thread turns out to be “junior-modding”, then I am sure one of the moderators will rebuke me appropriately. If not, you can either back it up, withdraw it, or give yet another demonstration of the utter worthlessness of a good half of everything you have ever posted.
I do not intend to check every poster’s statement about another poster for accuracy and warn them if they are not correct. However, someone coming into a thread, posting a offensive allegation about another poster and refusing to back it up seems to be just stirring shit up for the sake of stirring up shit. annaplurabelle, I don’t want to see any more about Bricker’s supposed comments in this thread–if you feel you MUST get into it with him, we have a very lovely Pit where you can do so.
I’m not even sure if this “warning” means I shouldn’t post in this thread at all, but I am simply letting you know that my reply to Gaudere, Shodan, and anyone else interested, is posted in the Pit, as Gaudere has suggested.
That’s an interesting question, actually. Why DO people debate on the SDMB? What precisely are you trying to accomplish? Is your goal to convince thousands of leftists of the errors of their ways? Is it just to have fun? Is it something else?
Speaking for myself, when it comes to actual serious political discussion on the SDMB, I have several goals:
(1) That, every vague once in a while, occasionally, I might convince someone to change their mind
(2) That more often than that, I’ll at least get someone to look at something from an angle they otherwise wouldn’t, which might influence their thinking in the future
(3) That, when I’m wrong about things, (1) and (2) will happen to me
and
(4) That when people like you mention to your conservative acquaintances that you post on a liberal-leaning message board, and they say (not that I’m trying to imply that all conservatives would say this, but some would) “heh heh, I bet it’s fun to poke fun at all the idiotic leftist moron unpatriotic communist gay hippie traitors” you’d respond by saying something like “actually, I find many of the liberal posters there to be intelligent, passionate, patriotic, good-hearted Americans who I value as fellow citizens of this great land”
So, why should you respond at length instead of just saying “nyah nyah”? (Not that I’m necessarily saying you were, in this instance… as I’ve totally lost the thread of what was going on there.) Because you give a rat’s ass. And if you don’t give a rat’s ass, why are you here?
This is a preposterously disingenuous line of argument. If I read 1000 people the statement “black people are inferior and should be subservient” or “women shoudl be barefoot and pregnant”, and asked them which party more closely identified with that statement, you and I both know that they’d named the Republicans, and they’d be right to do so. Just because a party is CLOSER to an extreme and evil position doesn’t mean that they’re CLOSE to it.
Here’s my take on this issue, overall… The vast majority of democrats and liberals, on the SDMB and in general, have a nuanced and shades-of-grey opinion about the situation, as one ought. My version of it goes something like this (talking solely about the insurgency): There are a variety of reasons why people are currently fighting. And in some cases, I sympathize with them. For instance, someone who grew up in ignorance and poverty, who was exposed to propaganda, and who then had loved ones killed or maimed in the US attack, or someone who grew up being proud of the nation of Iraq and, through a combination of propoganda and the weakness of human nature, turned a somewhat blind eye to how terrible the Hussein regime was, and now views himself as fighting patriotically for his country. I can’t look at either of those people and say “you are pure evil”.
But that doesn’t mean that, if they’re trying to kill US soldiers, or those who are trying to currently bring democracy to Iraq (and much as I disagree with the war, and the Bush administration in general, I certainly support humanitarian and democratizing efforts in Iraq, now that we’re there), I wouldn’t try to stop them with deadly force. If I could case a magic spell which would mean that any time someone tried to kill a US soldier or an Iraqi ally of the US, their attack would backfire with lethal consequences, I would cast that spell in a heartbeat. I might not condemn them all as evil hateful terrorist scum, but they’re still not on my side. Sympathy does not mean support.
The problem is, a view like the above one is not easy to express in the harsh public limelight of current US politics. And even on the SDMB, where the level of discourse is generally far higher, if you get dozens of liberals posting their views which are kind of like the above, you rarely see conservatives quoting the entire view and saying “yeah, I respect that”. Rather, bits get taken out of context, or (more often) only the most extreme views get quoted, and then you say “see? all you liberals need to do is keep supporting the terrorists like this, and we’ll win!!!”
(Not, of course, that liberals never take things out of context, blah blah blah.)
Oh, and while I’m here:
(a) I really don’t see how “if those charges were true, how could he have won the election?” is an argument at all. I mean, wasn’t Nixon overwhelmingly reelected? Plenty of horrible people have won elections, plenty of terrible ideas have been popular, and plenty of utterly terrible choices have been made by large sections of the populace.
(b) I continue to be entertained by the implication that the way people talk on the SDMB is somehow going to cost liberals the election. There might be a case to be made that people like Michael Moore, Barbra Streisand and George Soros do the democratic party more harm than good. That’s an interesting debate. And there might be similarities between things they say and things that SDMB liberals say. That’s another interesting debate. But no matter what, there is no way in hell that anything anyone ever said on the SDMB ever did, or ever will, influence the outcome of an election.
(c) I’m still eagerly awaiting your response to my most recent post in this thread
It isn’t the intelligent, patriotic ones that are the trouble. It is the complete dipshits.
Look, the fact remains that in this thread, the only one making disgusting statements about supporting the death of American and allied military personnel is on the Left. And the response to that statement from the other lefties is tepid at best.
Contrast that, if you like, with the response someone would get if they posted anything like “blacks are inferior” or “women should be subservient” on a thread like this one. They would be eviscerated and almost immediately banned. And the attacks would come equally from the left-wing and the right-wing Dopers. We tightie-righties are heavily outnumbered, but I never saw a word of support for the opinions of the Strmfrnt invasion from any Doper who voted for Bush. And I think the reluctance of the Left on the SDMB to condemn this kind of thing speaks volumes. You guys (some of you) have a lot of trouble even with something as minimal as supporting our troops when they are in harm’s way.
Back in the 50s, the Republican party essentially purged itself of anti-Semitism by rejecting the John Birch society and its like. During the 60s and 70s, the Republicans joined the Democrats in disavowing open racism. Strom Thurmond came to accept blacks as equals just as much as George Wallace did. The fringe element remains, but it is no longer acceptable, in the Republican party or out of it.
The Democrats need to do the same sort of thing, IMO, with the more extreme elements of their party. Bricker and others made this point earlier - MoveOn and the rest of the extremist fiddlers are not doing you any good.
And every time someone suggests this, the Usual Suspects respond by saying (in essence) “No, everything is fine - we are entirely correct in every way, and we only lost because the Republicans rigged the elections and it was real close anyway and more people voted for Kerry than ever before and Karl Rove is Satan incarnate and BushLiedBUSHLIEDBUSHLIEDBUSHLIED!!!”
To which I tend to respond by shrugging my shoulders and leaving you to console each other over yet another electoral defeat, and Bricker tends to repond in good old-fashioned Republican ways - by trying to make a buck off you.
Isn’t this a bit of a double standard? You’re criticizing the left for not attacking an inflammatory statement, then you’re praising the right for not defending an inflammatory statement. In other words, when Extreme-Right people say bad things, and rightists say nothing, it’s GOOD. But when Extreme-Left people say bad things, and leftists say nothing, it’s BAD.
And, as others have pointed out, it’s honestly insulting to imply that we should HAVE to reaffirm our patriotism and loyalty.
Perhaps part of that is because it’s never quite that simple. Suppose someone violently opposes our administration, despises our military leadership, is disturbed by the atrocities and abu ghraib, and has some sympathy (in the sense of comprehension, not support) for the motives of some of the people fighting against our troops, yet still respects and values the individual men and women who volunteered to defend our country. Positions like that are not easily and honestly encapsulatable into pithy soundbites, particularly when those soundbites have been to some extended coopted by their political opponents.
Honestly, I don’t ever remotely see a comparison between someone like Strmfrnt and someone like MoveOn. SF is a truly hateful and abhorrent group which has no place in modern American life, and, while I’m sure that its denizens voted overwhelmingly for Bush, I would feel guilty insulting good, decent Republicans by associating it with them in any way. MoveOn.org isn’t anywhere NEAR that extreme. Granted, I disagree with their position on Afghanistan, but unless they had that position because they hate America and want to see more terrorist attacks, that’s hardly an outrageous outlying position on the order of white supremacy. (And, honestly, hindsight is 20/20. Now, given that we know the war went relatively easily, and we know with absolute certainty that Al Qaeda was there and was involved in 9/11, the argument pro-Afghanistan war is an absolute slam dunk. In the days shortly after 9/11, the argument, while still one I agreed with, was much less black and white.)
I think you’re oversimplifying a bit here. Bush won a quite close election. There are a variety of factors that influence who wins an election, with two very big ones being:
(a) How much people truly and correctly know about each candidate, and the substantial opinions they have about his positions
and
(b) How the campaign is run, how images are spun, how fears are played upon, how candidates are incorrectly perceived, etc.
In this case (not surprisingly), the Republicans like to think that they won largely because of (a), and the Democrats like to think that they lost largely because of (b). Until and unless someone proves one of those cases, neither one strikes me as preposterous, although I will point out that there is some evidence for (b), including the polls that show how ignorant many Republican voters were.
It isn’t necessary to accept the tighty-righties’ summary that “MoveOn was opposed to the war in Afghanistan”. You know how trustworthy they are.Ain’t quite what happened:
A. What’s to disagree with there? That’s a mainstream view, held even by many who voted for Bush anyway.
B. What effect did MoveOn’s position have on anybody’s thinking during the election anyway?
Btw, Shodan, Bush did lie. Do you have anything more to say about that fact than to point out that it keeps getting pointed out?
[i}Prediction:* Shodan will give the usual Bush apologista response, which will be along the lines of, “We don’t know if Bush lied or was merely misinformed. For all we know, it’s actually those evil terrorist-sympathising Clinton-appointed grunts at the CIA who fed bogus data to their superiors. How come you don’t complain about how Democrat leaders believed Saddam had WMDs, huh?”
…or, in other words, the same old bush. Never mind that Clinton never went on an “ad blitz” to sell a war, nor did he send Warren Christopher before the UN to shovel a truckload of bush about mobile bioweapons labs, nor…
Hi, I’m new to this thread (and forum), but I’ll reply to the question posed in the topic:
Islamic terrorism is as bad as any other kind of terrorism. It should be dealt with via firm international policy and cooperation.
To put it another way… a poor way of dealing with terrorism is going unhinged and invading any country that looks at you funny. In the specific case of Islamic terrorism, invading Iraq was a pretty bad move, but any foreign policy standards. Unless your goal is to make friends with the terrorists by removing one of the sole secular governments in the region to make way for an Islamist government (a move which I would think would be counter-productive), you’d probably want to stabilize the region as much as possible and help the nations in that region root out the terrorist cells operating therein.
Dealing with religious fanatics is difficult enough. We know this from dealing with the Republican party. Mostly we let them babble on incoherently and tuck them into bed when they get sleepy from it. The goal to counter it is not to start decapitating people (figuratively or literally), but to appeal to the more moderate and sensible people. You’ll never convince a religious fanatic anything by talking to him, even with the coolest voice of reason in the history of mankind. Your goal should be to limit the number of people who become religious fanatics so as to undermine their base population support. Agitating them simply gets the moderates agitated as well.
I clicked over the respond to the post you mention in item (c), and forgot about responding to THIS post!!
Your reasons are good ones. I post primarily to challenge my own concepts; if I hold a position that’s contrary to the views here – which happens quite a bit – and it survives heated discussion, then I’m more convinced of its solidarity.
Sometimes, reasoned discussion with certain people grinds to an unproductive halt. At those times, “Nyah nyah nyah,” while not advancing any particular meritorious view, is nonetheless viscerally satisfying.
“Black people are inferior and should be subservient” is PRECISELY the kind of message that minority advocacy groups impute to the Republicans, and they do so PRECISELY because it is that party which is more closely identified with that statement.
I’m sorry if it offends your sense of proper debate… but it happens. Tell you what: if you agree to get all advocates on the left to stop using such tactics, I’ll condemn those on the right for their continued use. But you seem to be suggesting unilateral disarmament. It was a bad idea when Kruschev was in power, and it’s a bad idea now in this circumstance.
OK.
OK. This is not, apparently, a view shared by everyone on the left, but I believe you completely.
Well, if all you liberals didn’t hate America so much, that would never happen.
–ducks and runs–
Yes, your point is well taken. But the reality is that you don’t have one The Left, with one spokesman. You have multiple voices, with multiple views. And the debate is somewhat binary. There is, therefore, an unfortunate tendency to ascribe to one side all of the views expressed by anyone who has allied themselves with that side.
In this case, the “charges” are that the course the President has chosen is unwise for the country. Of course there is no onjective, verifiable standard to prove or disprove that claim. But since (1) the President hung his re-election on the claim that his choices were wise, and his opponent hung HIS campaign on how the war was unwise, an objective component of THOSE choices does exist: the election results. (2) In the absence of an objective, verifiable measure, if we are to be guided by anything, it seems to me that the being guided by the results of the democratic process is a reasonable solution.
I’m going to acknowledge the technical truth of this, but point out that there’s no way in hell one piece of litter, thrown out of a car window, is destructive to the surrounding ecology. Nonetheless, we condemn a person who tosses a piece of litter out the car window. Why?
– and it survives heated discussion, then I’m more convinced of its solidarity.