"George Bush this, George Bush that"

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Redistribution programs go all the way back to the Hoover Administration.

The worst offender was Ronald Regan, The Great Communicator who delivered $1.75 cents worth of government for ever $1.00 in tax revenue collected. In addition, he promised to eliminated the Dept. of Energy and the Dept. of Education. Neither department was eliminated. Compared to the fraud Regan perpetrated, "W" Bush was an innocent saint.

ruveyn

Handing out lump sums of free money to already established businesses somehow makes sense to you? The notion of universal healthcare sounds nice, but where is it and who's going to pay for it? Thinking like a Democrat, I could say, "I'm unemployed, so where is my free money?". It seems as if most of his time is just spent campaigning or otherwise wasting his presidency doing practically nothing.

Haven't you heard? Orwell and I are the enforcement arm and the mouthpiece respectively of a vast PPR conspiracy that chases n00bs and undesirables off the forum...

Seriously though, I can't speak for Orwell, but Red H came into this forum on very aggressive footing spouting personal insults in every other post and sporting a very large chip concerning America and Americans. If he can't take a bit of what he's dishing out he shouldn't have come in here picking fights; I did actually ask him in an unrelated thread to tone things down before going after him hard like I am now. He chose not to play nicely, whatever comes his way is on him.

As for you Master P, I suggest you reread the complaint lodged against 'keet in the first place:



It seems that every week you have a new term to marginalize people you disagree with; this week it's "ultraconservatives", in the past it's been "tea baggers" or when that got too juvenile you switched to "tea partisans". I could go on, but I think you get the picture. While taking swipes at such low hanging fruit can be very fun and satisfying, overall it often does more harm to you and your position than to your intended target. You're obviously not unintelligent, but when you rely so heavily on these loaded terms it weakens your position and reflects poorly on your rhetorical skills; it feels more manipulative than actually persuasive and tends to be a turn off to people who are one the fence on an issue.

I mean this as an honest critique with no malice or ill intent, I may disagree with you most of the time but I respect the knowledge and effort that go into most of your posts.

And of course the two of us are charged with maintaining the strict orthodoxy of the forum, which is why we share identical views on every major issue, and in fact why everyone on this forum holds the same beliefs.


Yeah, I actually mostly just object to the flippant dismissal of mathematical fact. His blanket anti-Americanism is mildly annoying, but something I could overlook if he otherwise seemed reasonable. Rejecting results from math is not reasonable.

No such thing as free money. There is always an associated cost. Lose the talking points.

But I'm unemployed and disadvantaged, and even a minority where I live. Where's. My. Freemoney?! Where's. My. Freemoney?! ! Where's. My. Freemoney?! !!

Oh shut up you hypocrite. Also, I'm not the "master fallacy spotter", but rather that would be this noob:

I may be a noob to this forum, but I've run into shoddy arguments with enough regularity to know there is nothing new about them.

I doubt that you utilize the capability to discern facetiousness from seriousness.

Meh.

Facetiousness is not always obvious on an internet forum, especially on an Asperger's site.

Especially when you come into the site with a vacuum in the place of contextual posting history with other members.

Why George Bush? And are you referring to George W. Bush or George H.W. Bush?

Junior. And why? Because he's the reason why blue jays have an unpleasant call.

Orwell is a Russian History student who simply gets pissed off when people make false claims. You are much more ideologically motivated in your attacks and even a little hypocritical (you tell people to ignore RedH as he doesn't have credibility due to his "anti-Americanism" yet you think Climatologists should wade through countless carbon copies of the same drivel denialists with no experience in the field give them).



My main comment wasn't a normative defense of RedH, it was simply a postive observation - that Keet's claim that he was getting picked on for trolling and nobody else was, was BS.



I state the facts, if they're opinions are so inane that they warrant marginalization when described accurately (albeit with a few value judgments added in), then so be it. Orwell's made his fair share of less detailed but equally judgmental complaints about right-wing nationalists, which I see as a perfectly valid enterprise.



The actual process for "marginalizing" goes like this - I hear a stupid talking point repeated by people whose beliefs are so rightwing that conservatives in any other country would laugh at them (hence the qualifier "ultraconservative"). I notice that few people point it out and when it is pointed out, the far right fails to respond. So I make a thread and finally it gets on the WP conversation and is recorded forever the the archives.



I'd love to see you try and find ONE quote where I call the Tea Partisans "tea baggers". Next to Orwell, I'm probably the only Tea Party critic on WP who has never used the term "Tea Bagger". As a matter of fact, I was pretty soft on the Tea Partisans for a while - viewing the movement as an unfortunate case of misinformed, misdirected working class anger until I discovered gallop research showing that the Tea Partisans were actually a lot of relatively affluent former McCain voters.



Yes, I get the picture, You don't like it when I "marginalize" (read: critique) the ReadH's of the Right.



Firstly, you use quite a few loaded terms ("anti-American", "Nanny State", "nannies", or even "left fringe of WP"), so are you implying that your own position is being hurt by this rhetorical vice of yours? As for whether I'd be better to write in a dry, academic, non-judgmental prose, years on Internet Forums have taught me that it's stupid (and exhausting) to try and self-righteously take the high road while everyone else is throwing mud.



To be honest, I spend too much time writing posts that'll be read by (at most) 5 people.

Last edited by Master_Pedant on 08 Oct 2010, 1:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

Yea! I'm one out of five!

I'll chalk this one up to Aspieness; Orwell is often accused by certain posters of trying to "police" the forum for ideas that don't fit the majority's view while I was recently portrayed as the spokesman for some sort of vast PPR shadow conspiracy. I thought the emotes should have been enough of an indicator of my facetiousness, but again this is an Aspie forum so whatever.

Since you saw my repartee with Red H, you should be aware that I've plainly stated that I'm simply doing my best to conform to his idea of a typical banally evil American; you know, like Pandabear and co like to do in threads about conservatives. Further, though I mentioned his anti-Americanism since it's the virtually the only element to his posts, I wouldn't have even bothered with him had he not chosen to sign off nearly every post with an unambiguous personal insult. In other words, he has no credibility because he's shown nothing worthwhile other than the ability to be a jerk, which even here in PPR doesn't really count for much.

As for me, I'm done defending myself against you, especially when the post(s) in question have nothing to do with me personally. If you want to waste your time attempting to discredit me personally, that's your business.



'Keet is obstinate and occasionally abrasive; I wouldn't go so far as to call him a troll, especially by the standards of the forum.



Orwell doesn't really on "clever" put-downs and loaded language to the detriment of his rhetorical points; besides which I've called him on similar issues in the past. Again though, this isn't about Orwell. You can complain about right wing politics or really anything else to your heart's content without cheapening your arguments with linguistic sucker punches, you just seem to think that they add something and indulge in them more regularly than many other posters.



There you go again, "talking point", which in your lexicon is a synonym for a position you disagree with but don't care to refute. You're still missing the point anyway, that your attempts to marginalize groups and ideas merely make you look like a zealot who has to resort to linguistic trickery to make his points. Your writing would be stronger without them.



Since I don't feel like digging, I'll concede that I may have been mistaken here, though I believe Orwell did use that term early and often. However, refraining from using the most juvenile of these terms the one time is hardly exculpatory for you, your posting history will quickly reveal your penchant for mocking language and engineered terms designed to provoke a predetermined response rather than performing an actual descriptive function.



If right leaning posters show up who pick fights and sign every post with a personal insult, critique away.



I could fall back on your own defense of those being simple observations, but I actually do think that over-use of loaded language has hurt my posts in the past and I make an effort to keep it to a minimum in my writings. Nanny state in particular is a bit loaded, but is more of a time saver than anything as it instantly conveys exactly what I mean without unnecessary descriptions and qualifications. Your primary offense in my opinion is that you over-use loaded terms (e.g. using the term "Tea Partisans" EVERY single time) and create the impression that you're not so much here to talk as to push an ideology.

Further, you often use what I term "engineered language" that may not actually mean anything but attempts to frame a discussion in a particular way; two prominent examples (not specific to you but just in general) being "hate speech" and "cop-killer bullet", both terms are not so much descriptive as meant to create a specific reaction. In those cases, it forces a disagreeing party to be in favor of something that sounds inherently bad, manipulating the rhetorical playing field through linguistics rather than logical argumentation. If you have to rely on these tricks to make your points, your points themselves may bear some self examination.



Do you read the newspaper or watch political adds on TV? Which do you find more persuasive; the dry and neutral or the sensational mudslinging? Also, notice how many of your defensive replies in this post alone rely on "well other people are doing it" style logic to try and "justify" your behavior. I know your relative youth is a sore point to you when it comes to the fitness of your opinions, but you're not doing yourself any favors in that department with that type of reasoning.



On that at least we can agree...