Show Me Why You Are Right and Everyone Else is Wrong

[velkyn]

but he is basically a nice person.

Yes.

I could do with a restatement of what his beliefs are, because I may have missed some, or lost track of them.

SPAG like every Christian/theist.   

[Alzael]

And go easy on TOT.   He may have some funny beliefs, but he is basically a nice person.

Your Mileage May Vary on this, Mr.Tape.

It depends on how one defines a nice person. Personally I would entirely disagree with you in this regard. I would say that he is fairly polite. But politeness is irrelevant from my perspective. I see very little in his behaviour to categorize him as "nice".

For one thing, a "nice" person wouldn't be so consistently dishonest. Actually that alone puts him fairly low in my opinion.

[Truth OT]

Alzy you frequently state this allegation. Why? What is it that I have lied about? Is this allegation objective or might you be biased towards me because of that with which we disagree?

[Omen]

Alzy you frequently state this allegation. Why? What is it that I have lied about? Is this allegation objective or might you be biased towards me because of that with which we disagree?

So now you pretend like people haven't called you out on avoiding questions, omitting information from posts relevant to what you counter with, respond with red herrings, etc?

Or are you pretending like none of that behavior is dishonest?

Or is it that you think if you don't acknowledge when people point it out, you can pretend like it never existed?

[Alzael]

Alzy you frequently state this allegation. Why? What is it that I have lied about? Is this allegation objective or might you be biased towards me because of that with which we disagree?

I said you were dishonest. Not that you had simply lied.

It is entirely objective. I have made entire posts in this thread alone pointing out your various dishonesties. It has been done in other threads as well by many different posters. You simply ignore all of those instances, mucha s you ignore most of the important points made and questions asked. Much as you're still ignoring the main question that is still being asked by everyone.

Your history of dishonesty, and being called out on it is a matter of record on this forum. Don't make some sad attempt to try and insinuate a bias on my part.

[screwtape]

It depends on how one defines a nice person. Personally I would entirely disagree with you in this regard.

yes, but you are a miserable prick.

[Alzael]

It depends on how one defines a nice person. Personally I would entirely disagree with you in this regard.

yes, but you are a miserable prick.

Pot.Kettle.Black.

[screwtape]

guilty as charged.

[Alzael]

guilty as charged.

However I believe "cantankerous" would better describe me, as opposed to "miserable".

[rickymooston]

We could construct on a whim any meaning drawn at random from any text

Awesome. I assume a lot of cherry picking is required to do this?

Here is the text.
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/61/pg61.html

The meaning I want to derive is that the stock market is great for society, that those who inherit great wealth should be respected and that the role of the labourer is to serve his betters and that its logical he shouldn't earn too much whereas the owner should control everything. For extra points, get the meaning that Jesus is the son of God who must be worshipped and that blacks are inferior people and the whites should be respected.

Here is the text.
http://www.crusader.net/texts/mk/

The meaning I challenge you to derive from it? Jews are fantastic intelligent people, who have contributed a great deal to the German society and culture. Germans are idiots and the treaty of Versailes was fair. Society should care about everybody. War is a bad thing.

[Omen]

We could construct on a whim any meaning drawn at random from any text

Awesome. I assume a lot of cherry picking is required to do this?

Here is the entire explanation you omitted:

What makes it really patently stupid is that we can literally pick up anything we wish and practice the same specious fallacies.  We could construct on a whim any meaning drawn at random from any text, without explanation and dependent upon nothing more than our arbitrary pleading that that is the intention.  We could then dismiss contradictions and explain them way, by making up new rationalizations or inserting new qualifications ( again per special pleading ), to the point where you could not find a contradiction that we would agree too.  Having presupposed it as true to begin with, then any rationalization we make is an inherent tautology.  We've already assumed it to be true, a contradiction can't make it false since we've assumed it as absolutely true, so the contradiction must be a different explanation rather then the disproof of the claim.

This is the standard M.O. of EVERY single religion on the planet.

Here is the text.
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/61/pg61.html

The meaning I want to derive is that the stock market is great for society, that those who inherit great wealth should be respected and that the role of the labourer is to serve his betters and that its logical he shouldn't earn too much whereas the owner should control everything. For extra points, get the meaning that Jesus is the son of God who must be worshipped and that blacks are inferior people and the whites should be respected.

Then presuppose that as self evident truth and then rationalize the text towards that.

Here is the text.
http://www.crusader.net/texts/mk/

The meaning I challenge you to derive from it? Jews are fantastic intelligent people, who have contributed a great deal to the German society and culture. Germans are idiots and the treaty of Versailes was fair. Society should care about everybody. War is a bad thing.

Then presuppose that as self evident truth and then rationalize the text towards that.

[Hatter23]

Then presuppose that as self evident truth and then rationalize the text towards that.

More than a little hard, but that isn't a surprise because he used modern authors who used modern( i.e. plain) language in books that were by a single author.

Basically he's cheating, or being intellectually dishonest if you will, by using an uneven analogy. If he chose some sort of anthology of poems, short stories, fables, and essays written in, say, the mid 19th century, the analogy would be good.

Of course you did say 'any text.' I would avoid using that term in the future.

My favorite thing to do in this regards if to pick up a comic book, and find predictive versus in Nostradomus or the Bible that can be interpreted as "predicting" the  fictional elements of the story

[Omen]

Basically he's cheating, or being intellectually dishonest if you will, by using an uneven analogy. If he chose some sort of anthology of poems, short stories, fables, and essays written in, say, the mid 19th century, the analogy would be good.

He's being obtuse with a poorly worded devil's advocate, its common ricky nonsense.

[Historicity]

Awesome. I assume a lot of cherry picking is required to do this?

Here is the text.
http://www.crusader.net/texts/mk/
(I corrected your link. You had them backwards.)
The meaning I want to derive is that the stock market is great for society, that those who inherit great wealth should be respected and that the role of the labourer is to serve his betters and that its logical he shouldn't earn too much whereas the owner should control everything.

Okay with a little editing.  Since it wasn't originally written in English I allowed my self some leeway in the translation.[1]  I have edited some passages merely for brevity as I did not think them important.[2]

THE TRIUMPH OF FREE ENTERPRISE

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society ... has ... established new classes, new conditions ... new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of Free Enterprise, ...

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of Free Enterprise were developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its time, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion Free Enterprise developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

Each step in the development of Free Enterprise was accompanied by a corresponding political advance... Free Enterprise has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world-market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs...

Free Enterprise, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

Free Enterprise, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless and indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade.

Or to simplify, "Greed -- for the lack of a better word -- is good," said Gordon Gecko.

And much, much more.  Ricky you googled and posted the link but I don't think you read the book.  I read it when I was a teenager and before I started reading I read the translator's intro.  He noted that in the first chapter Marx so praises capitalism that he virtually makes an argument for the wrong side.  I just elided a few hot button words like "slavery".  This is a quick job I did, if I gave it a little thought I could have euphemized it with the appropriate "translation".  This is the pure Republican ideology -- the poor have TV sets and electric lights.  And on their TVs they can watch "Life Styles of the Rich and Famous" so they can have their champagne dreams while sipping High Gravity.

1.	I'm lying.
2.	Ditto

[Historicity]

We could construct on a whim any meaning drawn at random from any text

Awesome. I assume a lot of cherry picking is required to do this?
...
Here is the text.
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/61/pg61.html

The meaning I challenge you to derive from it? Jews are fantastic intelligent people, who have contributed a great deal to the German society and culture.

Okay, one more time.  Hitler admired the Jews and held them up as a model for the Aryan people.[1]

From the chapter "Nation and Race":

The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is represented by the Jew. In hardly any people in the world is the instinct of self-preservation developed more strongly ... Of this, the mere fact of the survival of this race may be considered the best proof. Where is the people which in the last two thousand years has been exposed to so few changes of inner disposition, character, etc., as the Jewish people? What people, finally, has gone through greater upheavals than this one -- and nevertheless issued from the mightiest catastrophes of mankind unchanged? What an infinitely tough will to live and preserve the species speaks from these facts!

The mental qualities of the Jew have been schooled in the course of many centuries. Today he passes as 'smart,' and ... has been at all times. ... The boy of today, for example, grows up among a truly vast number of technical acquisitions of the last centuries, so that he takes for granted and no longer pays attention to much that a hundred years ago was a riddle to even the greatest minds, ... [The Jew's] intellect at all times developed through the cultural world surrounding him.

Wow, the Jews are courageous and tough and have always been on the cutting edge of technical and cultural development.   Adolph Hitler (with slight editing for clarity and y'know, well, ,) said so!  Given that quote, how can you say he was anti-Semitic?[2]  You were probably misinformed by the dirty Communists.[3]

1.	I'm doing that prevarication thing again.
2.	Rhetorical question. Don't bother to answer.
3.	Look up "mendacity" in the dictionary, or better yet, see Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof just 'cause Liz was really yummy 50 years ago.