I was so tempted just to reply "I don't read 'arguments' that begin with 'um' *or* 'sorry'" - but I decided that it was only slightly wittier than either of the originals, and witty they were not.
I was making a valid point, not just being witty. If you thought I was trying to be witty, that perhaps indicates that my wit was indeed sharp, despite your put-down.
I'll humour you by spelling out in detail why I refused to reply to ScentCone's childish post. It is not that I object to the style of "um" in the same way as you might object to the style of "sorry". It is because "um" (on Slashdot, at least) is a lazy and logically fallacious way of saying that your interlocutor's post is stupid. It is a substitute for a civilised discussion. He continued by nonsensically declaring "You're trying WAY too hard". Since there is no "trying" going on here, this can only be interpreted as a schoolboyish way of implying that he is cool and relaxed, whereas I am dorkily getting overexciting and having to use my full brainpower to respond to his points. Then, when he finally got to something approaching an argument, it was also seemed to be nonsense that avoided the main point, so I stopped searching for relevance in the sentence and decided to respond only to real posts.
FYI. Surely that should be for your information, since you're the one whose error was pointed out.
That is where your logic fails. You make the jump that assuming that being a little wrong makes it ok to be a lot wrong and vice versa.
You seem to have made some error there, because I am arguing (and not assuming) that being a little wrong (doing a small amount of unavoidable harm) does not make it OK to be a lot wrong (do a large amount of avoidable harm on top of that). My opponents are arguing the opposite.
I'm not justifying my eating habits, I don't need to.
This is part of the problem. You make an assumption that because we're talking about something as dear to you as the very food you eat, then you get to do as much harm as you like without needing to justify it. But you do need to justify it, as much as any action that has an impact on others.
I'm simply pointing out the vegetarians are full of shit regarding "meat is murder".
Not pointing out, but asserting without proof.
"Meat is murder" is a rather concise slogan, and it is disingenuous to treat it as a full argument. If someone said "Nike is slavery", you would presumably understand that the sloganeer wants to raise your awareness of child exploitation in specific factories, and is not saying that by boycotting one company you can have zero involvement with all exploitation.
Wrong is wrong. Don't bitch about someone that kills 1,000 people if you kill even 1 person yourself.
Nope, you're totally wrong there. There are shades of wrong. This is elementary. People die all the time, and it is generally at least partially caused by someone else. The fumes from the cars you have driven in your lifetime may have done cumulative medical harm equal to the death of one person, but that doesn't mean that you cannot say that genocide is wrong.
You are trying to set up an analogy in which person A does harm which is totally unacceptable, and person B does the same thing a thousandfold, whilst you sit back obviously not murdering anyone, able to take the moral high ground. But that is a wildly inappropriate set-up. To be appropriate, you need to specifically place yourself correctly. You are in the same group as person B, with his thousand human kills under his belt. And you are attempting to gain moral high ground over person A. It's just absurd.
...owning up to your guilt just like the rest of us
That's comical in either its cluelessness or its dishonesty. Owning up to guilt is characteristic of meat-eaters, is it? No, never having seriously reflected on the harm done to animals is characteristic of meat-eaters, in a society where it is the norm to eat meat. Reflecting deeply on these issues and concluding that a behavioural change is necessary to minimise suffering is characteristic of vegetarians and vegans, in a society where a conscious decision is required in order not to eat meat.
This is quite obvious, but it is more convenient for you to latch on to a single slogan (and how about "guilt-free grill" to add grist to your mill?) and justify your thousand kills on the basis of it.
Wrong. The fact is that you cause the deaths of animals. If not by eating them, then by consuming products that attribute to their death
You mean "contribute".
Persons A and B walk through a crowd. A bumps into one other person on the way. B bumps into a hundred people on the way. A says to B, "You're just carelessly ramming into people. Stop it and have some respect." B replies, "You bump into people as well; if not deliberately, then by being in the crowd, which contributes to a bump occurring."
Person B is of course a total wanker who, in order to justify wanton harm, uses the fact that person A cannot reduce the harm he causes to zero.
If you live on the grid you are just as guilty of murder as the rest of us.
By that logic I could kill anyone, not only because of the animals but a fortiori because humans are killed by shocks from the grid.
So STFU...
That's what it comes down to. It's not a debate; it's you needing people to shut up, because anything that challenges how you live traumatises you.
For all this stuff about creatures being hurt for non-meat purposes to be a good way of criticising vegetarians, you'd have to argue several other points first:
If you want to talk about electricity production, you'll have to prove that vegetarians use significantly more electricity than omnivores. You are unlikely to be able to do this.
If you want to talk about grain production, you'll have to prove that the extra grain which is directly consumed by a vegetarian significantly outweighs the large amounts of grain fed to livestock, and all other damage done to tiny animals by the livestock industry. This will be very tricky.
If you manage to prove the last point, you'll also have to make a good argument for (a) the accidental harm done to worms and suchlike outweighing (b) a lifetime of captivity followed by bloody slaughter inflicted on higher creatures. Since it is likely that both you and the other person both agree that priority ought to be given to higher creatures (humans before chimps, chimps before hamsters, hamsters before bacteria...), it would probably be pointless to try to make the argument.
Of course, you are unlikely to be interested in any of this. Stuff like "being presumptuous about your habits" leads me to believe that you are making these arguments about worms and bats totally disingenuously. You are not looking for the least harmful way of living, but simply throwing a tantrum because someone has said something that challenges your way of living.
You're searching the Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English - it's hardly surprising that it doesn't contain archaic spellings! Which is, of course, the point. What is in question is the right (correct/modern/standard/current...) spelling of "surprise", as opposed to any of the myriad ways in which the concept may have been expressed in speech and writing in other times or places.
I presume you mean in any work intended to be written in modern standard English. I hope you wouldn't if, for example, they had written a story set in the early 19th century and had used that spelling in a representation of the written language of the day!
Or if I went back in a time machine and worked in a Victorian school. Or if I were teaching some other language in which "surprize" were a real word. Or another other implausible and obviously inapplicable situation in which you can imagine that it would make sense not to make the correction.
You will find surpize in the OED I think you will find. It might not be a common spelling, does not make it wrong though.
It's amazing how far politically-correct morons will go in defending weird and non-standard usages against the charge of being "wrong". Read the post that this person was replying to. Was the word "wrong" used anywhere? No. Pure paranoia.
Now, is "surpize" a correct spelling that you will find in the OED? No, of course not. You must be thinking of "surprize". Is that a correct spelling in the OED? Look it up. It's not there. I imagine it would be in the unabridged print version of the OED, but that is not a dictionary of current English but an etymological dictionary that contains very many totally archaic forms. I am an English teacher and I would correct "surprize" to "surprise" in any work handed to me by my students.
That's a bit of a weird straw-man you've set up there. Who thinks that Microsoft gets hacked (I presume you are referring to viruses and malware on Windows systems) because it's evil? The big debate is over whether Windows users are at risk because of their numbers (as you say) or because Windows security is fundamentally flawed. The fact that MS is evil is a separate issue.
You try to make some sort of weak analogy between this and hostility to the US. Your unexplained "money and influence" motivation is presumably a variation on the childish "they're just jealous of us" argument that some like to bring up when they want to deny the legitimacy of people's grievances.
You missed the bit where he mentioned resisting the law with a weapon. The police will indeed follow any escalation. If you defend your TV with a knife, five of them will come at you with truncheons. If you defend it with a gun, they'll call in the gun squad. The state will win, and they will use any means necessary. It's just up to you how far you take it.
By going with the business model that people here want, yes they would be undercutting them as a whole. This is the great thing about competition within capitalism. In order to make money you have to satisfy some kind of consumer need. If the larger print consumers really need to pay less for cartridges, there is money to be made here. Sure it's difficult but certainly not impossible, especially when the business is sound. So if selling cheaper cartridges is a sound business, it's a need that someone could fulfill. And it would shake up the industry.
Otherwise, I fully support the ink manufacturer's ability to sell their labor and property for a price people are willing to pay.
I smell a capital-fundamentalist attitude here. I'm getting a "if it makes money, it is good" vibe from you. What you're saying is absurd, however.
For example, it is silly to suggest that to make money you have to satisfy some kind of consumer need. In reality, you need to satisfy a certain part of consumer desire. This part of their desire is in turn usually something that you have to boost or create outright in the first place. For example, cigarette manufacturers are not satisfying a need, or even the entirety of their customers' wishes (ask them and they will say they ought to quit). Instead, they manufacture part of the desire regarding the product and attempt to trick the consumer into seeing it as a need (via addiction in this case, but the same applies to Ferraris, PCs or Rolexes).
Phenomena similar to these are in play in every industry, including printers and ink. It takes quite a high degree of fundamentalism or naïveté for someone interested in economics not to see them.
They already are. Welcome to America. Nobody here pays cash up front for a house or a car.
Hmm, I suppose you're referring to hire-purchase (paying in instalments). That doesn't really fit what we are talking about here. With hire-purchase, you pay the full amount for the item, but you delay the blow. It's really not different from paying by credit card.
What I'm talking about is getting a house or car virtually for free (the way we do with printers, and also mobile phones, come to think of it) and then being the owner of that item. This makes you fully entitled to put it to one side and pay not a penny more for it, even if you get ten of the things. The builder/manufacturer only recoups the cost by artificially inflating the cost of some other factor, such as fuel or ink.
This is, of course, a reductio ad absurdum argument, because it would be extremely harmful to society to encourage large numbers of people to own multiple homes and vehicles and set them to one side, totally unused, and destroy them away when another model comes along and the existing ones are taking up too much room. People don't mind the same thing happening with printers, because it has become the norm, and because printers are smaller.
If you're right, then surely someone is missing an obvious business opportunity to undercut the large print companies and gain major market share. Perhaps, but it's difficult to break into a market. And they wouldn't really be undercutting. They'd be offering a product with cheaper consumables, but the product itself would be dearer, not cheaper. Plus, the average consumer has no motivation to look to the future, because he has been conditioned to assume that high-tech products will last a very short time before (deliberately) breaking down or being (deliberately) obsoleted. He doesn't care about the environmental impact either. The world is fucked, in short.
That's absurd. You have a piece of high-tech equipment, and you should pay for it. Perhaps ownership of cars and houses should be available for a handful of dollars too, and with the cost only being recouped when they are used.
I would also recommend PC-BSD to seasoned Unix users that have never tried using FreeBSD before and would prefer a shallower learning curve before getting down to business.
Why would you want it to be harder to learn?
Look at a curve on a graph (with time on the x axis, as is normal) and you'll see what I mean.
"Opinion" was in quotation marks because we are not talking about opinions here. We are talking about a broadcaster playing a major role in an armed uprising. There is no way they would be allowed to continue to exist if such a thing occurred in the USA. Guantánamo is full of people who have done much, much less.
he isn't a dictator.
tell it to the people who used to watch the TV station he shut down. You mean the TV station that backed the coup that briefly removed the democratically elected Chávez and replaced him with a military dictatorship? They already know what Chávez is and what they themselves are.
Except that everything you just said was either a lie or irrelevant due to it being standard practice. You also threw in a bit of Spanish to give it that xenophobic flavour.
You are apparently so [...] that I cannot justify listening to you further.
Losing the argument, so you're forced to refuse to talk to me? Sounds to me like a graceful way to bow out. Don't let the door hit your arse on the way out. I'll be glad if you shut up.
[...] convinced that the objectives of Iran in the Middle East are peaceful and that Mr. Ahmadinejad's numerous statements to the contrary are simply a misunderstanding [...]
He has and continues to encourage violence against specific ethnic groups who he perceives to have slighted him, and has made no move to work towards a more peaceful Middle East.
Again, you just repeating something doesn't make it true. You actually have to make a logical argument or present some relevant evidence. If you have found something that has eluded the ADL, the CIA and others, and it is clear evidence of plans for aggression, then the entire world will be very keen to see it.
I should address your straw-man argument though, or else you are likely to run with it and start painting me as a Shia fundamentalist who sucks Ahmedinejad's cock. I am not at all convinced about any particular intention in the mind of any particular person within the Iranian regime. They could all be sitting around right now, buggering boys and boiling kittens as part of a Satanic rite aimed at bringing harm to America. The point is that there is no evidence of any plan for aggression, which makes sense, given that any such aggression would be suicidal. Indeed, the extreme craziness of such plans means that there is a massive burden of proof on you if you wish to argue for their existence.
It is most telling that the "gem" on which your entire argument was based was in fact a fabrication that I had already discussed. Ahmedinejad simply has made no other statements that anyone has managed to construe as a call for military aggression.
If you browse through the Defamation League's list, you'll find plenty of condemnation of the sole world superpower and its Middle Eastern client state; and you can certain dispute the wisdom of them, and in a couple of cases I would agree (whenever he mentions this non-existent Allah, or whenever he is too hyperbolic, for example). There is also plenty to criticise in the way Iran is governed. But in most cases, to object to what he is saying, you'd have to be supporting the murder and ethnic cleansing carried out against Muslims. Or else you could (without reflecting on the actual issues) automatically be incensed by anything you perceive as criticism of your country.
Either way, you are wrong and the longer you attempt to brazen it out, the dumber you'll look.
My apologies. There is also a smattering of bigotry, hate, and encouragement of violence upon the western way of life.
"Also" implies that the list is still mostly calls to attack Israel. There is not one such call. So you are still a liar.
Nothing in there preaching tolerance or discouraging suicide attacks on nations you've been told to disagree with though.
Obviously not! As I've already said, it's a list of quotations cherry-picked by the Defamation League. Are you actually suggesting it is a representative random sample of his utterances?
If they were doing Gandhi, they'd probably quote him saying the British Empire was an evil oppressor. And you'd be there complaining about a specific lack of discouragement of suicide bombings.
I don't know the Persian term for Israel. You claim 'Qods' means 'Jerusalem', which as the capital of Israel makes it a suitable substitution ("Destroy America" vs "Destroy Washington"; the latter may be directed more against the government than the people, but indicates the same locale).
As a professional translator I can tell you that such liberties with the source text are not considered acceptable.
Incidentally, Tel Aviv is the capital of Israel.
Yes, destroying the government of Israel is MUCH nicer than destroying the nation if Israel. I can see where I screwed up the distinction there. My bad. Not.
It is quite sad that you can't actually see the distinction. Again, I have to ask you whether you see any difference between "Let's wipe America off the map" and "The Republican regime occupying Washington DC must vanish from the page of time". If anyone starts bombing Democrat centres soon, we'll know who did it!
Of course we won't [find is any talk of Iranian military aggression against Israel]. What you will find is encouragement of privately managed terrorist attacks, as well as a[g]gression by neighbo[u]r states such as Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority.
You'll have to come up with some evidence of that instead of just alleging. Furthermore, your accusation is a sign of desperation because the only issue at hand is whether Iran itself is a threat, not just a bad influence.
Note that under international law, even a threat is not a justification for aggression. Only an imminent attack (or a UN resolution) can permit military action.
Yeah, something must be wrong with me if I think it's normal for blokes to stand to pee and women to sit. What a weirdo, eh? Who thinks that?
Next I'll be saying something crazy like men don't have babies, or they look silly in dresses. I suppose I should be sent to a feminazi re-education camp.
Sorry for mentioning the man of the house. I should, of course, have considered the possibility of gay marriage. "The man or men of the house" -- there, fixed it.
One thing I won't apologise for, though: anyone who whines at me for leaving the seat up is a nasty controlling bitch, and will be told!
Slashdot Mirror
I was making a valid point, not just being witty. If you thought I was trying to be witty, that perhaps indicates that my wit was indeed sharp, despite your put-down.
I'll humour you by spelling out in detail why I refused to reply to ScentCone's childish post. It is not that I object to the style of "um" in the same way as you might object to the style of "sorry". It is because "um" (on Slashdot, at least) is a lazy and logically fallacious way of saying that your interlocutor's post is stupid. It is a substitute for a civilised discussion. He continued by nonsensically declaring "You're trying WAY too hard". Since there is no "trying" going on here, this can only be interpreted as a schoolboyish way of implying that he is cool and relaxed, whereas I am dorkily getting overexciting and having to use my full brainpower to respond to his points. Then, when he finally got to something approaching an argument, it was also seemed to be nonsense that avoided the main point, so I stopped searching for relevance in the sentence and decided to respond only to real posts.
You seem to have made some error there, because I am arguing (and not assuming) that being a little wrong (doing a small amount of unavoidable harm) does not make it OK to be a lot wrong (do a large amount of avoidable harm on top of that). My opponents are arguing the opposite.
I'm not justifying my eating habits, I don't need to.This is part of the problem. You make an assumption that because we're talking about something as dear to you as the very food you eat, then you get to do as much harm as you like without needing to justify it. But you do need to justify it, as much as any action that has an impact on others.
I'm simply pointing out the vegetarians are full of shit regarding "meat is murder".Not pointing out, but asserting without proof.
"Meat is murder" is a rather concise slogan, and it is disingenuous to treat it as a full argument. If someone said "Nike is slavery", you would presumably understand that the sloganeer wants to raise your awareness of child exploitation in specific factories, and is not saying that by boycotting one company you can have zero involvement with all exploitation.
Wrong is wrong. Don't bitch about someone that kills 1,000 people if you kill even 1 person yourself.Nope, you're totally wrong there. There are shades of wrong. This is elementary. People die all the time, and it is generally at least partially caused by someone else. The fumes from the cars you have driven in your lifetime may have done cumulative medical harm equal to the death of one person, but that doesn't mean that you cannot say that genocide is wrong.
You are trying to set up an analogy in which person A does harm which is totally unacceptable, and person B does the same thing a thousandfold, whilst you sit back obviously not murdering anyone, able to take the moral high ground. But that is a wildly inappropriate set-up. To be appropriate, you need to specifically place yourself correctly. You are in the same group as person B, with his thousand human kills under his belt. And you are attempting to gain moral high ground over person A. It's just absurd.
...owning up to your guilt just like the rest of usThat's comical in either its cluelessness or its dishonesty. Owning up to guilt is characteristic of meat-eaters, is it? No, never having seriously reflected on the harm done to animals is characteristic of meat-eaters, in a society where it is the norm to eat meat. Reflecting deeply on these issues and concluding that a behavioural change is necessary to minimise suffering is characteristic of vegetarians and vegans, in a society where a conscious decision is required in order not to eat meat.
This is quite obvious, but it is more convenient for you to latch on to a single slogan (and how about "guilt-free grill" to add grist to your mill?) and justify your thousand kills on the basis of it.
You mean "contribute".
Persons A and B walk through a crowd. A bumps into one other person on the way. B bumps into a hundred people on the way. A says to B, "You're just carelessly ramming into people. Stop it and have some respect." B replies, "You bump into people as well; if not deliberately, then by being in the crowd, which contributes to a bump occurring."
Person B is of course a total wanker who, in order to justify wanton harm, uses the fact that person A cannot reduce the harm he causes to zero.
If you live on the grid you are just as guilty of murder as the rest of us.By that logic I could kill anyone, not only because of the animals but a fortiori because humans are killed by shocks from the grid.
So STFU...That's what it comes down to. It's not a debate; it's you needing people to shut up, because anything that challenges how you live traumatises you.
For all this stuff about creatures being hurt for non-meat purposes to be a good way of criticising vegetarians, you'd have to argue several other points first:
If you want to talk about electricity production, you'll have to prove that vegetarians use significantly more electricity than omnivores. You are unlikely to be able to do this.
If you want to talk about grain production, you'll have to prove that the extra grain which is directly consumed by a vegetarian significantly outweighs the large amounts of grain fed to livestock, and all other damage done to tiny animals by the livestock industry. This will be very tricky.
If you manage to prove the last point, you'll also have to make a good argument for (a) the accidental harm done to worms and suchlike outweighing (b) a lifetime of captivity followed by bloody slaughter inflicted on higher creatures. Since it is likely that both you and the other person both agree that priority ought to be given to higher creatures (humans before chimps, chimps before hamsters, hamsters before bacteria...), it would probably be pointless to try to make the argument.
Of course, you are unlikely to be interested in any of this. Stuff like "being presumptuous about your habits" leads me to believe that you are making these arguments about worms and bats totally disingenuously. You are not looking for the least harmful way of living, but simply throwing a tantrum because someone has said something that challenges your way of living.
Or if I went back in a time machine and worked in a Victorian school. Or if I were teaching some other language in which "surprize" were a real word. Or another other implausible and obviously inapplicable situation in which you can imagine that it would make sense not to make the correction.
Back in the real world, I'll make the correction.
It's amazing how far politically-correct morons will go in defending weird and non-standard usages against the charge of being "wrong". Read the post that this person was replying to. Was the word "wrong" used anywhere? No. Pure paranoia.
Now, is "surpize" a correct spelling that you will find in the OED? No, of course not. You must be thinking of "surprize". Is that a correct spelling in the OED? Look it up. It's not there. I imagine it would be in the unabridged print version of the OED, but that is not a dictionary of current English but an etymological dictionary that contains very many totally archaic forms. I am an English teacher and I would correct "surprize" to "surprise" in any work handed to me by my students.
I for one would certainly go out killing far less often if only I could freely wank over puppies being raped.
And you can't make it mean "copyright infringement" by stomping your feet and being abusive.
That's a bit of a weird straw-man you've set up there. Who thinks that Microsoft gets hacked (I presume you are referring to viruses and malware on Windows systems) because it's evil? The big debate is over whether Windows users are at risk because of their numbers (as you say) or because Windows security is fundamentally flawed. The fact that MS is evil is a separate issue.
You try to make some sort of weak analogy between this and hostility to the US. Your unexplained "money and influence" motivation is presumably a variation on the childish "they're just jealous of us" argument that some like to bring up when they want to deny the legitimacy of people's grievances.
Yeah, a sort of "num quidam custodit ipsos custodes?" situation.
You missed the bit where he mentioned resisting the law with a weapon. The police will indeed follow any escalation. If you defend your TV with a knife, five of them will come at you with truncheons. If you defend it with a gun, they'll call in the gun squad. The state will win, and they will use any means necessary. It's just up to you how far you take it.
Otherwise, I fully support the ink manufacturer's ability to sell their labor and property for a price people are willing to pay.
I smell a capital-fundamentalist attitude here. I'm getting a "if it makes money, it is good" vibe from you. What you're saying is absurd, however.
For example, it is silly to suggest that to make money you have to satisfy some kind of consumer need. In reality, you need to satisfy a certain part of consumer desire. This part of their desire is in turn usually something that you have to boost or create outright in the first place. For example, cigarette manufacturers are not satisfying a need, or even the entirety of their customers' wishes (ask them and they will say they ought to quit). Instead, they manufacture part of the desire regarding the product and attempt to trick the consumer into seeing it as a need (via addiction in this case, but the same applies to Ferraris, PCs or Rolexes).
Phenomena similar to these are in play in every industry, including printers and ink. It takes quite a high degree of fundamentalism or naïveté for someone interested in economics not to see them.
They already are. Welcome to America. Nobody here pays cash up front for a house or a car.
Hmm, I suppose you're referring to hire-purchase (paying in instalments). That doesn't really fit what we are talking about here. With hire-purchase, you pay the full amount for the item, but you delay the blow. It's really not different from paying by credit card.
What I'm talking about is getting a house or car virtually for free (the way we do with printers, and also mobile phones, come to think of it) and then being the owner of that item. This makes you fully entitled to put it to one side and pay not a penny more for it, even if you get ten of the things. The builder/manufacturer only recoups the cost by artificially inflating the cost of some other factor, such as fuel or ink.
This is, of course, a reductio ad absurdum argument, because it would be extremely harmful to society to encourage large numbers of people to own multiple homes and vehicles and set them to one side, totally unused, and destroy them away when another model comes along and the existing ones are taking up too much room. People don't mind the same thing happening with printers, because it has become the norm, and because printers are smaller.
That's absurd. You have a piece of high-tech equipment, and you should pay for it. Perhaps ownership of cars and houses should be available for a handful of dollars too, and with the cost only being recouped when they are used.
Why would you want it to be harder to learn?
Look at a curve on a graph (with time on the x axis, as is normal) and you'll see what I mean.
"Opinion" was in quotation marks because we are not talking about opinions here. We are talking about a broadcaster playing a major role in an armed uprising. There is no way they would be allowed to continue to exist if such a thing occurred in the USA. Guantánamo is full of people who have done much, much less.
They "backed" the coup? Horrors! You mean, they had the affrontery to express an opinion?
-jcr
Express that sort of "opinion" in the US and you'll find yourself in Guantánamo.
tell it to the people who used to watch the TV station he shut down.
You mean the TV station that backed the coup that briefly removed the democratically elected Chávez and replaced him with a military dictatorship? They already know what Chávez is and what they themselves are.
Except that everything you just said was either a lie or irrelevant due to it being standard practice. You also threw in a bit of Spanish to give it that xenophobic flavour.
I once spilt a small amount of tea onto my keyboard and it never worked again.
It was one of those cordless ones though. Still, I wouldn't trust a dishwasher with any keyboard unless it was marked dishwasher-safe.
Losing the argument, so you're forced to refuse to talk to me? Sounds to me like a graceful way to bow out. Don't let the door hit your arse on the way out. I'll be glad if you shut up.
[...] convinced that the objectives of Iran in the Middle East are peaceful and that Mr. Ahmadinejad's numerous statements to the contrary are simply a misunderstanding [...] He has and continues to encourage violence against specific ethnic groups who he perceives to have slighted him, and has made no move to work towards a more peaceful Middle East.Again, you just repeating something doesn't make it true. You actually have to make a logical argument or present some relevant evidence. If you have found something that has eluded the ADL, the CIA and others, and it is clear evidence of plans for aggression, then the entire world will be very keen to see it.
I should address your straw-man argument though, or else you are likely to run with it and start painting me as a Shia fundamentalist who sucks Ahmedinejad's cock. I am not at all convinced about any particular intention in the mind of any particular person within the Iranian regime. They could all be sitting around right now, buggering boys and boiling kittens as part of a Satanic rite aimed at bringing harm to America. The point is that there is no evidence of any plan for aggression, which makes sense, given that any such aggression would be suicidal. Indeed, the extreme craziness of such plans means that there is a massive burden of proof on you if you wish to argue for their existence.
It is most telling that the "gem" on which your entire argument was based was in fact a fabrication that I had already discussed. Ahmedinejad simply has made no other statements that anyone has managed to construe as a call for military aggression.
If you browse through the Defamation League's list, you'll find plenty of condemnation of the sole world superpower and its Middle Eastern client state; and you can certain dispute the wisdom of them, and in a couple of cases I would agree (whenever he mentions this non-existent Allah, or whenever he is too hyperbolic, for example). There is also plenty to criticise in the way Iran is governed. But in most cases, to object to what he is saying, you'd have to be supporting the murder and ethnic cleansing carried out against Muslims. Or else you could (without reflecting on the actual issues) automatically be incensed by anything you perceive as criticism of your country.
Either way, you are wrong and the longer you attempt to brazen it out, the dumber you'll look.
"Also" implies that the list is still mostly calls to attack Israel. There is not one such call. So you are still a liar.
Nothing in there preaching tolerance or discouraging suicide attacks on nations you've been told to disagree with though.Obviously not! As I've already said, it's a list of quotations cherry-picked by the Defamation League. Are you actually suggesting it is a representative random sample of his utterances?
If they were doing Gandhi, they'd probably quote him saying the British Empire was an evil oppressor. And you'd be there complaining about a specific lack of discouragement of suicide bombings.
I don't know the Persian term for Israel. You claim 'Qods' means 'Jerusalem', which as the capital of Israel makes it a suitable substitution ("Destroy America" vs "Destroy Washington"; the latter may be directed more against the government than the people, but indicates the same locale).As a professional translator I can tell you that such liberties with the source text are not considered acceptable.
Incidentally, Tel Aviv is the capital of Israel.
Yes, destroying the government of Israel is MUCH nicer than destroying the nation if Israel. I can see where I screwed up the distinction there. My bad. Not.It is quite sad that you can't actually see the distinction. Again, I have to ask you whether you see any difference between "Let's wipe America off the map" and "The Republican regime occupying Washington DC must vanish from the page of time". If anyone starts bombing Democrat centres soon, we'll know who did it!
Of course we won't [find is any talk of Iranian military aggression against Israel]. What you will find is encouragement of privately managed terrorist attacks, as well as a[g]gression by neighbo[u]r states such as Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority.You'll have to come up with some evidence of that instead of just alleging. Furthermore, your accusation is a sign of desperation because the only issue at hand is whether Iran itself is a threat, not just a bad influence.
Note that under international law, even a threat is not a justification for aggression. Only an imminent attack (or a UN resolution) can permit military action.
Yeah, something must be wrong with me if I think it's normal for blokes to stand to pee and women to sit. What a weirdo, eh? Who thinks that?
Next I'll be saying something crazy like men don't have babies, or they look silly in dresses. I suppose I should be sent to a feminazi re-education camp.
Sorry for mentioning the man of the house. I should, of course, have considered the possibility of gay marriage. "The man or men of the house" -- there, fixed it.
One thing I won't apologise for, though: anyone who whines at me for leaving the seat up is a nasty controlling bitch, and will be told!