Back again

[Joe Cummings]

Back after a prolonged absence dealing with software and hardware
problems.

No, I didn't go up to that newsgroup in the sky communing with
all-time greats like Ed Conrad. In fact I've had the health equivalent
of a UK MOT test and it seems I may be hanging round for a while yet.

During my absence I've had the opportunity to surf the net more than
usual, and I have to say I'm getting alarmed at the changes in the
political-religious atmosphere in the USA.

There is a millions-strong movement to recast the country as a
theocracy, using as one reason among others that one political party
is in the control of demons. This may seem barmy, but I assure you
that to hear some of the Christian pastors/ayatollahs you will be
convinced otherwise.

I raise it hear because I regard the fight against evolution and
biology as a science as a constituent part of the same movement.

I don't think we should be surprised if some of our creationist
friends here share the belief that demons are in control of one of the
major US parties.

Scratch a "scientific creationist" and you find a believer in demons?
Well, it's up to our friends here to disabuse us of that concern.

Here is not the place to discuss religion and politics, but at least
our creationists here should say where they stand in relation to
demons.

Joe Cummings

[Dale]

I'm a pantheist.

Given inference, "The Whole" exists.

There is nothing besides "The Whole".

Everything is an experience.

Creation, miracles, and magic are experiences of imagination.

Though, imagination is part of "The Whole".

--
Mystery? -> https://www.dalekelly.org/

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, September 7, 2022 at 7:40:05 AM UTC-4, Joe Cummings wrote:
> Back after a prolonged absence dealing with software and hardware
> problems.

Glad to see you back, Joe. Your presence has a positive effect on t.o. IMHO.

> No, I didn't go up to that newsgroup in the sky communing with
> all-time greats like Ed Conrad.

I joined t.o. in 1995, but I don't recall seeing any posts by Ed, only a lot
of advertising of Ed's claims by Ted Holden, followed by oodles of
criticism by a lot of regulars, including myself.

> In fact I've had the health equivalent

> of a UK MOT test and it seemOs I may be hanging round for a while yet.

>
> During my absence I've had the opportunity to surf the net more than
> usual, and I have to say I'm getting alarmed at the changes in the
> political-religious atmosphere in the USA.

Where do you hail from, if I may ask?

> There is a millions-strong movement to recast the country as a
> theocracy, using as one reason among others that one political party
> is in the control of demons.

I don't think you've sized up the situation accurately.

>This may seem barmy, but I assure you
> that to hear some of the Christian pastors/ayatollahs you will be
> convinced otherwise.

Do you have any documented examples of pastors/ayatollahs doing that?
I've looked at blogs as far right as "Trump Train News" and as far left as Rob Kall's
OEN daily, and never saw any.

>
> I raise it hear because I regard the fight against evolution and
> biology as a science as a constituent part of the same movement.

There's very little of that fight going on here in t.o. The main argument
is about the non-creationist wing of the ID movement, centered on
Michael Behe. Also about scientific evidence for EITHER an
inconceivably vast multiverse OR a designer of our universe,
especially the low tolerance of the basic physical constants
for universes capable of supporting life, especially intelligent life.

As for the big outside world, I think creationism is doomed to die of its incompetence,
and I think support of it by the far right will redound to its defeat in many a race.

> I don't think we should be surprised if some of our creationist
> friends here share the belief that demons are in control of one of the
> major US parties.

I would be surprised if any made such beliefs public.

> Scratch a "scientific creationist" and you find a believer in demons?

I don't know what you mean by "scientific creationist," but as for me,
I am an agnostic who is heavily on the side of a vast multiverse [see above],
and I don't believe in the existence of demons.

[Relevant datum: a well known atheist, Dawkins if memory serves,
once announced that he puts the probability of the existence of God at 7%.
My estimate of the probability of demons as depicted in the Bible is below that.]

> Well, it's up to our friends here to disabuse us of that concern.
>
> Here is not the place to discuss religion and politics, but at least
> our creationists here should say where they stand in relation to
> demons.
>
> Joe Cummings

I don't keep up with most posters to t.o. by any means, but the last
self-admitted creationist [1] I've encountered was Ray Martinez.
And he stopped posting here several years ago.

[1] Dr. Dr. Kleinman posted like one, but never admitted to it; anyway,
he's gone too, banned by DIG at the instigation of Ron O.
Ron O himself once called himself a "creationist," but his definition
did not conform to the one that is almost universally used by t.o. participants;
it simply meant "one who believes in a creator." However, he never specified what
the word "creator" meant to him.


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Glenn]

On Wednesday, September 7, 2022 at 4:40:05 AM UTC-7, Joe Cummings wrote:
> Back after a prolonged absence dealing with software and hardware
> problems.
>
> No, I didn't go up to that newsgroup in the sky communing with
> all-time greats like Ed Conrad. In fact I've had the health equivalent
> of a UK MOT test and it seems I may be hanging round for a while yet.
>
> During my absence I've had the opportunity to surf the net more than
> usual, and I have to say I'm getting alarmed at the changes in the
> political-religious atmosphere in the USA.

Were your problems with connecting to a news server? Or did you lose your computer, and your interests satisfied with the triviality that can be found on a cell phone, or television.

>
> There is a millions-strong movement to recast the country as a
> theocracy, using as one reason among others that one political party
> is in the control of demons. This may seem barmy, but I assure you
> that to hear some of the Christian pastors/ayatollahs you will be
> convinced otherwise.
>
> I raise it hear because I regard the fight against evolution and
> biology as a science as a constituent part of the same movement.

I agree to a degree, on multiple fronts. Hopefully though you would not assume
that meant I agreed with you about the specifics.

>
> I don't think we should be surprised if some of our creationist
> friends here share the belief that demons are in control of one of the
> major US parties.

On that I would agree completely. Yet you neglect to think that we should not be surprised if some of our atheist friends here share that same belief.

>
> Scratch a "scientific creationist" and you find a believer in demons?
> Well, it's up to our friends here to disabuse us of that concern.
> Here is not the place to discuss religion and politics, but at least
> our creationists here should say where they stand in relation to
> demons.
>

So "we" are one sided, eh.

[RonO]

Nyikos lies like a rug again. The post that he claimed that he wanted
to see, but ran from recently enough so that he should have known not to
lie about the issue again will be reposted. Usually I don't read much
of anything that Nyikos writes, but I saw this thread by Cummings and
thought that it might be nice to read it. Nyikos is usually the one to
come back to harass me about the stupid junk that he has been lying
about for over a decade, but here he is lying about it to another poster
even as he is running from dealing with the stupid lies in another
thread. Shades of his projection in the Dirty debating thread. You can
use the links to go back to the thread that has the post Nyikos is
talking about, and you will see that Nyikos was the one prevaricating
about his religious beliefs. I am the one that stated what mine
creationist beliefs were, and he snipped out most of what I had written
and started lying about it. When I put the material back into my
response Nyikos snipped it out again, and in this repost you can get
links to Nyikos lying about being falsely accused of snipping and
running in the dirty debating thread. That is just how it has been for
over a decade.

I told him that I would just post this second holy water reposts if he
lied about the same things again, and here it is. Sooner than I
anticipated because it usually takes Nyikos a couple of months to start
lying about the same thing again.

I apologize to everyone else looking into this thread, but you don't
have to read the repost. It is only to get Nyikos to stop lying about
the past. He couldn't deal with what he did when he did it, so he
shouldn't be lying about it today.

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/0GJ7i2VKEbg/m/8VgLI1iOAAAJ

REPOST:
This post is directed at Nyikos. I don't recommend it for anyone else
because everyone else understands what a low life lying scum bag Nyikos is.

Nyikos has requested this post even though he knows that he has been
demonstrated to be lying about this junk, multiple times, for over a
decade. For whatever Nyikosian reason he has to keep coming back and
harassing me about stupid junk that he did a decade ago. These events
should have never happened, but Nyikos did them, and he should have
stopped lying about them when he had to run from what he had done when
he did it. He did not try to defend the stupid and dishonest junk when
exposed to have done it, so he shouldn't be lying about it a decade
later. Below Nyikos can see himself lying about wanting to see the
evidence when he knows that he has already seen it and run from doing it.

It should be noted that the junk that Nyikos is lying about in this
thread are things that he either snipped and ran from when he did the
dirty deeds or just ran. He did not try to defend what he had done when
he did these things. There is absolutely no reason for him to continue
to lie about these things with a history like that.

I am going to make this into another holy water repost that will be
reposted when Nyikos lies about the same things again. The first holy
water repost kept Nyikos in check and shut him down once he started up
his stupid repetitive lies. It worked for years, and then when Nyikos
had some type of psychotic break and tried to lie about the repost in
anyway that he could it literally turned him into a drooling shell that
started making lame threats as if that was any way to deal with what he
had done. After that tragic incident Nyikos has tried to control his
stupid and dishonest behavior and lying about the past has been minimal
compared to before the first holy water repost. Now, Nyikos has decided
to start lying about this junk again.

Nyikos has already embarassed himself by his response to his lies about
my Methodist beliefs in this current thread.

Nyikos' initial lies:
https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/0GJ7i2VKEbg/m/DUwOfxcTAAAJ

I initially told Nyikos to respond to what he was already doing in the
thread before spewing more lies about the past, and took him to task for
this incident in this post where he was lying to Glenn about the incident.

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/0GJ7i2VKEbg/m/EB9faPaFAAAJ

Over a decade ago Nyikos had manipulated my post and removed most of
what I had written in order to lie about my response. He has run from
doing this every time he has been exposed to what he did, but he can't
stop lying about the incident. For the last half decade all I have had
to do to make him lose interest in lying about this incident is to tell
him to go back to the post that he is lying about and demonstrate that
he did not snip out most of what I had written and then lied about what
I had written. He has never wanted to do that, so he usually just runs
away.

QUOTE:
>
> To demonstrate what a hypocrite he is, he compulsively left in a lot
of searing indictments
> I did where I very specifically singled out and clearly identified a
number of despicable
> things he has done over the years.

Your searing indictments are just more lies about the past. Just take
your claims about my religious beliefs. I am the one that told you that
Methodists did not have a set doctrine about the creation. You kept
lying about that statement as you do above. It was an example of you
manipulating my post to make it look like I had not addressed the issue,
but I obviously had. It is one of the incidences that I had to link
back to and you had to run from (how many times?). Now you project your
own stupidity onto me when it was you that could not accept what the
Methodists believed. I even saved the link from back then because it was
always something that you keep lying about.

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/avf9ye9cUE0/m/TjfWT5GhoIMJ

QUOTE:
I probably have the standard Methodist view on creation. It just
isn't important and we don't care how it happened just that it did.
I'm willing to go with whereever the evidence leads and see where that
gets me. Just check it out. We don't have an official stance on the
subject except to say that we are for separation of church and state
so that it never becomes an issue that we have to worry about.
END QUOTE

Read the quote in context. As usual you had to manipulate the post and
snipped out all but one line in order to keep lying about the issue.

This is your bogus and dishonest response, and you have run from this
and lied about the episode for years. Your post is from 2012. That is
how sad you are.

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/avf9ye9cUE0/m/vbIoLNY89MkJ

I am the one that told you that Methodists do not have an official
stance on the issue, but for your own Nykosian reasons you have to
project your senseless denial onto me.
END QUOTE:

If you use the link to go back to the original incident you will find
that Nyikos could not deal with what he had done when he did it, and had
to snip out the requoted material that I put back in and keep lying
about what he had done. Really, Nyikos simply snipped and ran instead
of face what he had done. That makes Nyikos continuing to lie about
this incident as stupid and bogus as it is.

Post where I take Nyikos to task for snipping and running instead of
deal with how he lied about the original quoted material.

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/avf9ye9cUE0/m/6fKj07blxWAJ

Nyikos' initial lies from the link from the current thread provided
above and in the post that I was responding to.

QUOTE:
You were already notorious for this tight-lipped behavior about your
concept when I returned to talk.origins in December 2010.
You claimed for a long time to "believe in a creator" but resisted all
attempts to elicit a description of what sort of creator you believe in.
Membership in a Methodist congregation, which you kept talking about,
says NOTHING about that.

It's been a few years since I've seen you make this claim, and I asked
you whether you are now upfront about being an atheist. So far, you
have avoided talking about this. Will you continue to avoid talking
about it?
END QUOTE:

It had been a few years since Nyikos has lied about this issue, likely
due to his tragic experience with the first holy water repost.

How did Nyikos respond to getting called out for the obvious lie?

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/0GJ7i2VKEbg/m/0QDyqOYNAQAJ

I begin the quote from the end of my response to Nyikos quoted above.
QUOTE:
> I am the one that told you that Methodists do not have an official
> stance on the issue, but for your own Nykosian reasons you have to
> project your senseless denial onto me.
>
> Ron Okimoto

That was then, this is now. Well over a year ago, I had told you that
you had not seen you claiming that you believe in a creator for quite a
while, and you are not claiming that you believe it now.

I do have one question, though. Does your Methodist denomination [did
you ever say which one it was?] say anything about what John says in the
first chapter about Jesus, and the first few verses of Hebrews 1, about
his role in creation? Specifically, they say that everything that was
made was made through him long before "the Word was made flesh, and
dwelt among us" [John 1: 14]?
END QUOTE:

Nyikos acknowledges that he has been lying about the situation for over
a decade, but claims it isn't the the incident that he was talking about
even though you can go to his own description where the event is
described as when he returned in 2010. Nyikos can go back and
demonstrate that his stupid efforts within the last 2 years have been
lying about this same old incident. He then tries to throw more dirt on
my religious beliefs because he got caught lying about them. That is the
type of slime ball Nyikos has been for over a decade. This type of
behavior should not be tolerated on TO.

This should be the end of Nyikos lying about this incident, but it
likely will not be because Nyikos has always come back and kept lying
about it for over a decade, so this second holy water repost will likely
be needed again.

Now I will get to his past stupidity to demonstrate that he has been
lying about the dirty debating junk for over a decade. Even though I
gave Nyikos a link, in this current thread, to the Dirty Debating thread
that he started over a decade ago he has lied about my ability to
demonstrate what I claim about his bogus and dishonest behavior in that
thread. Nyikos claims that I should demonstrate it all over again. These
events have been documented in the past as Nyikos has continued to lie
about them over the last decade.

Dirty Debating thread:
https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/H6k58771nkQ/m/dLLAwAbmQa0J

I initially ignored this thread because it looked like Pagano had
started the thread. Before Nyikos came back to TO Pagano was the loser
that would create threads like this to bad mouth other posters, and I
had stopped reading Pagano posts years before and basically only
responded to the loser when he posted to me. By this time I had already
started doing that with Nyikos. It just wasn't worth reading any of his
posts and incessant whining and disparaging remarks about other posters.
I was basically just responding to the asshole when he posted his
stupidity to me, and had to constantly remind him that I didn't care
about what other posters were doing to him, just as I had to do in this
current thread.

Nyikos came to me in another thread and told me that I had to respond to
what he had written in his Dirty Debating thread. I addressed Nyikos'
first two posts that he started the thread with and it was just
Nyikosian projection of his own dirty debating tactics projected onto
other posters including me. None of his claims applied to anything that
I had actually done, and were just Nyikos' lies about the past. Nyikos
was repeatedly shown to be the poster that repeatedly applied his dirty
debating tactics in his posts to TO. Projection is supposed to be some
type of defense mechanism, but I don't know how it works. Nyikos has to
understand what he is in order to project that onto someone else. In
the above example about Methodist beliefs it was Nyikos that was making
up lame junk about his own religious beliefs, so he wanted company in
lying about his religious beliefs, but I didn't join into the lie fest
and just told him what those beliefs were. He couldn't accept the
truth, so he had to start lying about it, and projecting his own
situation onto me.

This is my first post in the Dirty Debating thread and you will note
that Nyikos started off the thread lying to other posters about his own
stupid dirty debating tricks. He was not directly addressing any of my
posts and the posts were actually his responses to other posters.

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/H6k58771nkQ/m/17zEnsr_1WsJ

I note that Nyikos asked me to defend myself against his stupidity, and
then take apart each of Nyikos' own stupid dirty debating tricks. It
should be noted that Nyikos ran from my responses and would not defend
what he had been caught doing by lying about the junk to other posters.
Of note is that Nyikos is lying about the Phillip Johnson quotes. At
this time he was trying to lie about what Phillip Johnson meant in
anyway that he could because he was running from being wrong about the
ID perp running the bait and switch on creationist rubes.

The first thing was Nyikos lying to the other poster that I had never
given him my definition of the bait and switch. By this time, that lie
was so stupidly and obviouisly a lie because I had already given Nyikos
the definition multiple times, and linked back to the efforts multiple
times. In all those instances Nyikos would run or snip out the
definition and lie about not getting it. In this case he ran. Snipping
and misrepresenting what I had posted was a common Nyikosian dirty
debating trick, and it turned out that the dirty debating thread was
just Nyikos projecting his own degenerate self onto me and other
posters. After Nyikos returned to TO he started to lie about never
lying on the internet, and never losing an exchange on the internet, and
all the Nyikosian dirty debating tactics were employed to lie about
being wrong about the ID perps running the teach ID scam, and then
starting the bait and switch over 20 years ago. The ID perps keep
selling the rubes that they have the science of ID to teach in the
public schools, but every single time that any creationist rube believes
them they run the bait and switch and the creationist rubes only get an
obfuscation and denial switch scam that the ID perps tell them has
nothing to do with IDiocy. Nyikos is lying about that reality in the
dirty debating thread and all the related threads of that time, just
because he was wrong about the ID perp's involvement in running the bait
and switch on the Ohio creationist rubes in 2002.

QUOTE:
n Feb 24, 4:44 pm, pnyikos <nyik...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> The Broken.Usenet.Promise is a special case of what is commonly called
> "a bait and switch". It consists of an opening salvo like "False."
> or "What an idiot.", etc. followed by something that might fool a
> complete ignoramus into thinking that the opening salvo is being
> justified, whereas it is either irrelevant or actually supports the
> claims of the opponent.
Just remember I am here by request. Nyikos claims that I am running
if I don't follow him all over TO.

Actually the definition of bait and switch that you are running from
and lying about is when a scam artist or group of scam artists sell
the rubes one thing, but when it comes time to deliver they only give
the rubes the switch scam that isn't what the wanted and is usually
only a booby prize replacement for the real thing.

In the case of the intelligent design scam the bogus scam artists
never had the science of intelligent design to teach in the public
schools. When the rubes fell for the scam and claimed to want to
teach the ID science the ID perps ran the bait and switch on them and
only give them a bogus switch scam that doesn't even mention that ID
ever existed.

Nyikos keeps lying about this issue, but that is Nyikos. Beats me
what he is going on about this when he is doing so miserably lying
about the ID scam.
END QUOTE:

Nyikos had always snipped out the explanation about the bait and switch
or run instead of face reality, and he ran in this case.

By this time Nyikos had been given all the evidence he needed in order
to understand that the ID perps had been running the teach ID scam
before they started running the bait and switch. It is what the
Discovery Institute was most known for when Nyikos was still posting at
the turn of the century, and there was no shortage of evidence at the ID
perp's web site and on the internet demonstrating that to be the case.
Nyikos already knew that the ID perps were still running the teach ID
scam even after the loss in Dover, but he had to lie about junk like the
Scottish Verdict quote.

Nyikos had been lying about the Phillip Johnson admission since he had
first been given it. In the dirty debating post he is only providing
part of the quoted material and spinning his own fictional account of
what it means. At this time Nyikos was lying about what Phillip Johnson
admitted when he quit the teach ID scam because Nyikos was claiming that
the ID perps never wanted to teach ID in the public schools. That is
how Nyikos had been lying about this quote. You can still find quotes
by Johnson stating that teaching ID in the public schools was part of
the wedge strategy that he is credited with developing, but after Dover
Johnson admitted defeat in getting ID taught in the public schools, and
the fact that there wasn't any ID science worth teaching.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_strategy

Nyikos had no honest reason to lie to another poster about this Phillip
Johnson quote. I had put it up just as what it was, and Nyikos had to
run again. Really, Nyikos ran from this post and would not address it
even though he had requested that I come to the thread and respond to
his posts.

This is a working link to the article the quotes came from. The link
provided in the Dirty Debating thread is broken (It was put up a decade
ago). Nyikos knows what the quote means in context because the author
of the article was surprised that Johnson had given up and admitted that
there wasn't any ID science worth teaching.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070609171527/http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/articles/issue10/evolution.pdf

This is my second post to that thread, linked to below, and I ask Nyikos
what was the reason that he wanted me to respond to that junk after I
had exposed his usual dirty debating tactics.

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/H6k58771nkQ/m/Fck6kW433M8J

It should be noted that Nyikos ran from both posts. He could not deal
with reality. Instead he came back to me in another thread and claimed
that I had to address other posts that he had posted to other posters in
that thread. Why should I respond to junk that Nyikos is lying about to
other posters? Nyikos is just the type that has to run and then lie to
someone else about his stupidity. What type of dirty debating trick is
that? This thread was essentially Nyikos projecting his own degenerate
usenet behavior onto me. Time after time Nyikos was the one that got
caught employing the dirty debating tactics, and it led to his post that
should have ended his participation in this thread, but he just ran, and
started his Scottish Verdict misdirection ploy the day after, and
started posting to other posts in the dirty debating thread. He never
would address the post linked to below no matter how many times he was
directed back to it. In the post you can find Nyikos claiming that I
lie about his running misdirection ploys, when it is one of his standard
tactics that he had employed multiple times before starting the dirty
debating thread, and he had to resort to it instead of face what he had
done when exposed in this post.

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/H6k58771nkQ/m/pOsxaU8DlakJ

Nyikos had constantly been lying about me running some misdirection ploy
throughout the thread, but I couldn't figure out what he was talking
about since he would link back to a post where he was running the
misdirection ploy, and he mixed it in with lies about me falsely
accusing him of snipping and running when there is absolutely no reason
to lie about that since Nyikos does it so often. It turned out that
Nyikos seemed to have been fooled by his own post manipulation where he
had removed most of what I had written, and some how that had turned
into some type of misdirection ploy when I had stated exactly what
Nyikos had done in the part that he had removed. Stating exactly what
Nyikos had done is obviously no misdirection from the event. I claimed
that it could be a misunderstanding due to Nyikos' usual snipping
without attribution tactic, and that tactic seemed to have led Nyikos to
misinterpret what had actually happened and made him lie about the event
for months. Nyikos ran instead of admitting that he had done it on
purpose or had fooled himself by his own post manipulation. What kind
of dirty debating trick is that? He has never addressed that post, and
really did run and start the Scottish verdict thread the next day.
Misdirection ploys were just so ingrained in the Nykosian posting
tactics that he reverted to doing something that he claimed that I had
done, and that I was lying about him doing it multiple times. The
Nyikosian projection of his own dirty debating tactics onto me is
obvious in this example.

QUOTE:
I see that you cut this post up and have more responses, but it looks
like this is a misunderstanding that makes you look pretty pathetic.
I will go off and address some other posts. If you want to carry on
this misunderstanding on your part just let me know and I will
continue. If you carefully read this post you will see how tragically
stupid or insane you are. Who could make such mistakes? Who would
link to a post where they are caught running the misdirection ploy and
then claim that someone is falsely accusing them of running the
misdirection ploy in question? Who would claim that someone else was
misdirecting the argument, when there was nothing to misdirect from?
END QUOTE:

So I am saving this post as the next holy water repost to put up again
when Nyikos starts lying about the past again. It turned out that the
Dirty Debating thread was just Nyikos projecting his own dirty debating
tactics onto me. Nyikos had always been the dirty debater and he
demonstrated that multiple times in that thread.

I expect Nyikos to run because he has run from these posts for over a
decade, and just keeps lying about the incidents. Prevaricating about
the Methodist quote as not being what he was talking about, when his own
description was obviously about it, is about all that you can expect out
of the loser.

Nyikos should never lie about these events again, but my guess is that
this second holy water repost will have to make another appearance.

Just so Nyikos can relive the first holy water repost here is a link to
it, and a post that has quotes added and working links

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/b4eNYHIncSY/m/Zw0DAKbDvGEJ

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/H2Sw6NFIi4s/m/bu37mUbcBQAJ

A working link to Wells' report on running the bait and switch on the
creationist rubes in Ohio.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110814145400/http:/www.creationists.org/archived-obsolete-pages/2002-03-11-OSBE-wells.html

QUOTE:
Steve Meyer and I (in consultation with others) had decided ahead of
time that we would not push for including intelligent design (ID) in the
state science standards, but would propose instead that the standards
include language protecting teachers who choose to teach the controversy.
END QUOTE:

Getting IDiocy taught in the public schools was a major push for the ID
perps at this time. Wells is really telling the other ID perps that
will read this report (including Phillip Johnson) that when it came time
to put up or shut up that they decided to run the bait and switch and
not give the rubes any ID science to teach. Just before the bait and
switch had gone down Phillip Johnson had posted Senator Santorum's
editorial on his blog and agreed with the senator that ID should be
taught in Ohio. Santorum's editorial is linked to and quoted from in the
first holy water repost. So the bait and switch went down on both of
them as well as the Ohio IDiot rubes. Neither, obviously, knew that the
bait and switch was going to go down, or they would have been ducking
for cover instead of claiming that they wanted ID taught in the public
schools.

This is the latest access to the ID perp's teach ID scam propaganda. For
whatever reason they have kept updating this junk since Dover, but keep
running the bait and switch on the hapless rubes. It has been 5 years
since the last bait and switch went down on the Utah rubes. The Utah
creationist rubes wanted to teach the science of intelligent design in
their public schools and they didn't get any ID science from the ID
perps. Instead they were told to suck up the switch scam. What is sad
is at the same time the ID perps were putting up their Top Six that
pretty much ended the ID scam on TO. It turned out that there aren't
very many IDiots willing to support the best that the ID perps have
always had. It is just the same junk that the scientific creationist
resorted to when they figured out that there wasn't any creation science
that they wanted to do. There haven't been any IDiot creationist rubes
stupid and dishonest enough to believe the ID perps and try to teach the
junk since the bait and switch went down on the Utah rubes in 2017.

Top Six:
https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/a2K79skPGXI/m/uDwx0i-_BAAJ

Current link to where you can get the ID perp's teach ID scam
propaganda. For the last year they have been switching back and forth
between the 2018 version and the 2021 version. This seems to be the
2018 version, but that is no longer on the pdf downloaded file, but is
stated on the web page where you access the pdf.

https://www.discovery.org/f/1453/

Ron Okimoto


On 8/19/2022 5:47 AM, RonO wrote:
> On 8/18/2022 9:30 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>> On Wednesday, August 17, 2022 at 8:55:25 PM UTC-4, Ron O wrote:
>>> On 8/16/2022 5:19 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>> On Sunday, August 14, 2022 at 12:30:21 PM UTC-4, Ron O wrote:
>>>>> On 8/14/2022 10:02 AM, Glenn wrote:
>>>>>> On Sunday, August 14, 2022 at 7:30:21 AM UTC-7, Ron O wrote:
>>>>>>> On 8/14/2022 8:21 AM, Glenn wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>>> Projection is a stupid self defense mechanism because the
>>>>>>> perpetrator
>>>>>>> has to understand what he is in order to do it. You should stop
>>>>>>> doing
>>>>>>> such a stupid thing to yourself.
>>>>
>>>> I've commented on this mindless attempt to insert a square peg
>>>> ("projection") into a round hole (Glenn's words) directly. Glenn's
>>>> reply below
>>>> is the sort of generic reply that you do, Ron O, except that I have
>>>> seen
>>>> you behave exactly as Glenn describes below.
>>
>>> Why don't you deal with your previous stupidity before making more of a
>>> mess?
>>
>> You are referring to nonexistent events. I'd like to see what passes
>> for evidence in your sick mind, though.
>
> Why lie about the situation?
>
>>
>>
>>> Those previous posts of yours are left undefended so why even
>>> mention them.
>>
>> I dealt with one of them today, and came down even harder
>> on you than I would have if I HAD replied before you posted this.
>
> That is no reason to lie about what you did, and you admit that you have
> only tried to address one of the posts. The other is still not
> addressed by you. So everything I wrote still stands.
>
>>
>>
>>> It just shows that you know what you did, but can't deal
>>> with what you did.
>>
>> You are such an egomaniac, thinking every post of yours is supposed
>> to be replied to on YOUR timetable.
>
> You know what you did, and if you look at how you responded to one of
> the two posts, you know that you are just projecting your own stupidity
> onto someone else. How did you deal with what you had done? How have
> you not dealt with what you have already done?
>
>>
>> I've said it often enough to your kind:
>>
>> Be patient: the mills of justice grind slowly,
>> but they grind exceeding fine.
>
> You have bee lying about the same junk for over a decade. Persistently
> doing something stupid and dishonest is not patience. You are still
> running from that first post of yours where you were wrong about the
> Discovery Institute's involvement in the bait and switch scam on the
> Ohio rubes. Just imagine what things would be like if you had just
> accepted that you had been wrong, and incorporated the truth into what
> you understand about IDiocy? Over a decade of lies and stupidity would
> have not been necessary.
>
> You wouldn't have an excuse to lie about all the other junk you started
> to lie about if you didn't have to cover up that first stupid mistake.
> Sure you likely would have messed up later, just as you have
> consistently messed up trying to keep lying about the situation, but you
> would have, at least, had the chance of not doing what you still do.
>
>>
>> That's taken from a famous 19th century poem, except that the poet
>> had "God" where I put justice. Reason being, you have never shown
>> any sign of The Fear of the Lord, but your atheistic buddies at least
>> have to pay lip service to justice.
>>
>>> You are the king of projection.
>>
>> Are you so deluded that you actually BELIEVE what you said just now?
>>
>>> You weren't back posting on TO for very
>>> long before you started threads like the "Dirty Debating" thread, and
>>> who had been the dirty debater?
>>
>> You and a bunch of others using dirty tactics. I described several,
>> and one of them fit you.
>
> Demonstrate that is the case. You ran from my first two posts in that
> thread because nothing related to me even though you told me that I had
> to address what you had started. Then you started making up junk to
> other posters, and it turned out that they were lies that you couldn't
> back up. You would have gotten away with it, but you had to tell me
> that I had to address what you had written to other posters in that
> thread. That is how sick and sad you are. Go back to the thread and
> check it out.
>
> https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/H6k58771nkQ/m/dLLAwAbmQa0J
>
> This is the thread, take the time to go through it and try to
> demonstrate what you just lied about. You turned out to be the dirty
> debater, and the thread turned out to be you projecting yourself onto
> others.
>
> How many times were you caught lying? What about your post manipulation
> to claim that I was lying. You even stooped to quoting something of
> mine out of context, would not tell me where you got the quote from, and
> when I found the source and it was exactly how I defended the statement,
> you ran. It is all in this thread. You should remember that after your
> post manipulation had been exposed that you started the Scottish verdict
> thread as one of your multiple distraction attempts.
>
> You did all those things. Lying about it now is stupid. The posts are
> still there.
>
>>
>>> What dirty debating tactics did you use
>>> in that thread?
>>
>> None whatsoever, and you are powerless to document otherwise.
>
> You should go through and relive the shame and stupidity of your deeds.
> Admit that you just lied, or I will document what I just have
> described as what you did in this thread. Just use the link and scroll
> down to my first post listed in the google stack for that thread. If
> you don't admit that you just lied, I will document each instance that I
> described above.
>
> You do know how embarrassing it will be because you have already lived
> doing it. It would obviously take some time on my part, but if you
> don't want me to do it, just admit that you have lied about it and move
> on. Just remember how you started the Scottish verdict thread the day
> after I described your post manipulation to make it look like I had lied
> about you snipping and running. You couldn't face what you had done
> then, and you don't want to face it now. Just think about how many
> times that you had linked back to that manipulated post to claim that I
> had lied about you snipping and running, and I could never understand
> why you would link back to that post since there were examples of you
> snipping and running in it and I had never had to falsely accuse you of
> snipping and running. It wasn't until I found how you had manipulated
> my post so that it looked like I had claimed that you had snipped and
> run from an instance where you had not snipped and run that I understood
> what you were doing. When I put up what I had actually written and it
> said that you had not snipped and run in that instance, you ran.
>
> You should go back to that thread and deal with all the stupidity that
> you have maintained for the last decade. You are just that lame and
> degenerate.
>
> Ron Okimoto
>
>
>>
>>
>>> It was obvious projection of what you were.
>>
>> What a laugh! Right here you are adopting a dirty debating tactic
>> you've employed many times: asking questions that are cunningly
>> designed to make the reader think that the right answer is the
>> opposite of what it really is.
>>
>>>
>>> You could try to get Glenn to deal honestly with the Top Six, but it is
>>> a lost cause. When Glenn puts one of them up because he doesn't
>>> understand what he is posting, Glenn runs instead of trying to defend
>>> what he did.
>>
>> In the thread I started a few years ago, and which I talked about in
>> my reply to that
>> post which I had earlier overlooked, you made it seem like you didn't
>> WANT
>> anyone to defend OR attack any of the top six. Was that because you
>> are so
>> insecure about actually debating them, that you are secretly relieved
>> that Glenn "ran,"
>> as you put it?
>>
>>> Really, he doesn't even make an excuse for doing something
>>> as stupid as putting up something that he has been running from for
>>> years.
>>
>> You ran from discussing the top six, which YOU had been harping on for
>> years.
>> Must I revive that old thread of mine to show how out of character you
>> behaved on it?
>>
>>
>>> Go for it, or stop lying about things that you shouldn't be lying
about.
>>
>> You are lost in a fantasy world of your own invention.
>>
>>> Deal with the stupidity that you have already posted before making up
>>> new junk to lie to yourself about.
>>
>> You are more to be pitied than hated when you rant like this.
>>
>> The beginning of wisdom is fear of the Lord, but you won't take the
>> first step.
>>
>> I've been through a spiritual odyssey lasting almost half a century.
>> It has left me with very
>> little confidence in the existence of the Lord, but I still have a
>> healthy
>> fear that is tempered with hopes of mercy, should He exist.
>>
>>
>>> When are you going to start lying about some made up posting limit in
>>> order to run from what you have done?
>>
>> You don't even have the guts to name a specific example that you can
>> credibly document.
>>
>> Anyway, if I were to do what you wrote a few lines earlier, you would
>> just rant and rave
>> through a seemingly endless back and forth, the end result of which
>> would be you running to DIG
>> again like a crybaby in hopes of him banning me the way you had
>> Kleinman banned.
>>
>>
>>> You are just a sad and dishonest loser. Projecting that onto someone
>>> else is your issue.
>>
>> The loser is you. You can't even deal with what Glenn and I wrote
>> about you below.
>>>
>>> Ron Okimoto
>>
>> Since you left what Glenn and I wrote in, I will comment on it, so
>> that it won't just disappear
>> behind an ellipsis in Google Groups. Readers deserve to see
>> immediately what searing commentary
>> you are unable to deal with.
>>>>>> You should realize that you soil yourself as a result of your wet
>>>>>> dreams about me.
>>>>>> It is a sign of mental illness. And when you refuse to accept even
>>>>>> the possibility that
>>>>>> you are wrong about insisting on what and how I believe, your
>>>>>> mental illness becomes
>>>>>> more obvious. When you refuse to accept my past attempts to deter
>>>>>> you from your path,
>>>>>> little doubt remains that your impaired mental state and capacity
>>>>>> to reason is not restricted to the subject of ID.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Over the years, Ron O, you have repeatedly alleged that Glenn is
>>>> afraid to deal with
>>>> what you ignorantly call "the top six ID arguments" because it would
>>>> undermine his concept of what God is.
>>>> But you lack the minimal backbone to even HINT at what you think
>>>> Glenn's concept is,
>>>> while simultaneously saying nothing about what YOUR concept is. So
>>>> don't be too surprised
>>>> by what Glenn wrote about you above.
>>
>> All I said here was true, and you couldn't cope with it.
>>
>>>> You were already notorious for this tight-lipped behavior about your
>>>> concept
>>>> when I returned to talk.origins in December 2010.
>>>> You claimed for a long time to "believe in a creator" but resisted
>>>> all attempts to
>>>> elicit a description of what sort of creator you believe in.
>>>> Membership in
>>>> a Methodist congregation, which you kept talking about, says NOTHING
>>>> about that.
>>
>> Nor does the fact that the denomination takes no stand on what
>> creation is like;
>> that says NOTHING about your personal beliefs.
>>
>>>> It's been a few years since I've seen you make this claim, and I asked
>>>> you whether you are now upfront about being an atheist. So far, you
>>>> have avoided talking about this. Will you continue to avoid talking
>>>> about it?
>>
>> Evidently the answer is YES. You could easily deny being an atheist,
>> if that were the truth. But you never do that.
>>
>> How sad is that?
>>
>>>>
>>>>> What type of posts did you just project onto me?
>>>>
>>>> That you are forced to ASK this question instead of documenting
>>>> or even hinting at what sorts of posts by Glenn exhibit that kind of
>>>> projection,
>>>> only illustrates how mindlessly you use "projection" as a stick
>>>> to hit people over the head with.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Glenn may have been on target with the following parting shot:
>>>>
>>>>>> You're much worse, and more dangerous to society and science, than
>>>>>> the most religious fundamentalists.
>>>>
>>>> You are certainly dangerous to talk.origins, the way you went like a
>>>> crybaby to DIG
>>>> and got him to ban Dr. Dr. Kleinman. Worse yet, you have dropped
>>>> hints that
>>>> if I were to keep persisting too long in setting the record straight
>>>> about the things
>>>> in dispute between us, I would get the same treatment.
>>
>>
>> Your ranting and raving practically forced me to repeat that implied
>> threat of yours before you signed off.
>>
>>>>
>>>>> More projection doesn't do much. It is just kicking yourself in the
>>>>> butt and placing a
>>>>> sticker on your forehead. Aren't you talking about your own mental
>>>>> illness that you present when you post what you do?
>>>>
>>>> No. Glenn has been posting quite sanely in sci.bio.paleontology
>>>> these last three months,
>>>> often on topic. But Harshman is so paranoid about Glenn's often
>>>> helpful on-topic
>>>> references, he is obsessed by the thought that Glenn's real reason
>>>> for posting
>>>> them is that Glenn is anti-science.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> Just pointing out
>>>>> that you are doing those mentally ill things doesn't make a person
>>>>> mentally ill. What have you posted recently that isn't described by
>>>>> you
>>>>> above?
>>>>
>>>> I can post ample documentation for what I wrote above about s.b.p.
>>>> Would you like to see it?
>>
>> The answer is no, but that doesn't stop you from pretending to
>> yourself that it doesn't exist.
>>
>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> When rational posts with some honest intent are a minority, you
>>>>> should consider what your projection onto others means.
>>>>
>>>> You have perfectly described your own behavior in the first clause.
>>>> I have ample documentation for that, and the things I mention above
>>>> are just the tip of the iceberg.
>>>>
>>>> And so, your allegation of projection is itself an act of projection.
>>
>> Peter Nyikos
>>
>
END REPOST:

[Robert Carnegie]

I was going to say that all the preachers in North America
couldn't make me take seriously that one of the major
U.S. political parties is controlled by demons, but then
I realised you didn't say which party. (Or whether it's just
one of them, because, ...)

[Bill]

Reducing the question of the development of life to something comprehensible
tells us about the human need for explanations without explaining anything.
If life is the product of deliberate design then we have to consider
religious propositions. That's not admissible if one rejects religion.
Another option is that everything is fully explainable through mindless,
purposeless nature.

Whichever explanation one chooses doesn't really matter since there is no
way to comprehensibly test either. All we really have is our preferences and
those spring from what we believed before the question was raised.
Ridiculing or demeaning a point of view doesn't falsify that view, it just
announces what one is prepared to believe.

Bill

[peter2...@gmail.com]

We humans do our best to understand the world we live in,
otherwise we might still think the earth is flat, the stars are tinier than
Jupiter and Mars and Venus, and the sun goes around the earth
once a day. Do you really think the basics of astronomy
that correct these misconceptions don't explain anything?

> If life is the product of deliberate design then we have to consider
> religious propositions. That's not admissible if one rejects religion.

On the other hand, one might consider design explanations for
bacteria and for sexually reproducing eukaryotes that only involve
natural agents. I've done the former many times and have given
a possible scenario that encompasses many mysteries, including the latter.

> Another option is that everything is fully explainable through mindless,
> purposeless nature.
>
> Whichever explanation one chooses doesn't really matter since there is no
> way to comprehensibly test either.

Wrong. For instance, if we found microbes on Mars that have a
very different biochemistry than ourselves, almost everyone in t.o. could
comprehend that as evidence in favor of mindless, purposeless nature
and against the natural agent design explanations.

> All we really have is our preferences and
> those spring from what we believed before the question was raised.

Speak for yourself.

> Ridiculing or demeaning a point of view doesn't falsify that view, it just
> announces what one is prepared to believe.

If it is done without evidence for the point of view of the one ridiculing
the other, then you are correct.

[Bill]

It's an interesting fact that people had those beliefs for thousands of
years and disagreement was suppressed and even persecuted. The estimation of
human perfectibility was constant throughout history. Each generation
fancies itself superior to all the earlier generations, believing themselves
to be the crown of creation. It's happening now and will still be in effect
hundreds of years in the future.

Bill

[peter2...@gmail.com]

You are ducking my question, which DIRECTLY addressed
a bizarre statement of yours. I expect a direct answer to that,
if you reply to this post at all.

>The estimation of
> human perfectibility was constant throughout history. Each generation
> fancies itself superior to all the earlier generations, believing themselves
> to be the crown of creation. It's happening now

Among the woke. Hardly among anyone else.

> and will still be in effect
> hundreds of years in the future.
>
> Bill

I hope Glenn doesn't consider you to be superior OR equal to everyone who
argues rationally with you. At times, when (IIRC) you've behaved in the past
like you are behaving here, and he defended you, I told him he
was betting on the wrong horse. I hope he doesn't make that mistake again.


Peter Nyikos

PS I've left in everything we wrote earlier below. I do not fault you
for not saying anything in response to it, because I did not
ask you any direct questions there. However, I do fault you for
sabotaging communication between us the way you did.

[broger...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, September 8, 2022 at 5:25:05 PM UTC-4, Bill wrote:
<snip>

> It's an interesting fact that people had those beliefs for thousands of
> years and disagreement was suppressed and even persecuted. The estimation of
> human perfectibility was constant throughout history.

...............................

>Each generation
> fancies itself superior to all the earlier generations, believing themselves
> to be the crown of creation. It's happening now and will still be in effect
> hundreds of years in the future.

Are you sure that's true? It seems to me that there are plenty of people who think that people were better and wiser in the past, Qing dynasty Chinese who wanted to return to the Ming dynasty, contemporary Islamists who would like to return to the days of the Caliphate, American Republicans who want to go back to 1950 or 1776 or (lately) 1861, Hindu nationalists who think that thousands of years ago Hindu Indians maintained an advanced civilization far superior to anything currently on offer. While there may be a tendency to discount the past, there is an least equally strong tendency to romanticize and idealize it.

As always you'd be safer sticking to characterizing your own views than trying to summarize those of the rest of humanity.


>
> Bill
<snip>

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, September 8, 2022 at 6:15:05 PM UTC-4, broger...@gmail.com wrote:

> On Thursday, September 8, 2022 at 5:25:05 PM UTC-4, [Freon] Bill wrote:
> <snip>
> > It's an interesting fact that people had those beliefs for thousands of
> > years and disagreement was suppressed and even persecuted. The estimation of
> > human perfectibility was constant throughout history.
> ...............................
> >Each generation
> > fancies itself superior to all the earlier generations, believing themselves
> > to be the crown of creation. It's happening now and will still be in effect
> > hundreds of years in the future.

I've given a one-sentence criticism of Freon Bill's benighted comment and I'm glad to see
Bill Rogers giving other examples. I might add irredentists all over the world (including
Hungary, where my parents originated) who think back to when their countries were
much bigger (in the case of Armenia and Hungary, several times bigger) as a kind of golden age.

However, I am puzzled by three dates Bill Rogers gives below:

> Are you sure that's true? It seems to me that there are plenty of people who think that people were better and wiser in the past, Qing dynasty Chinese who wanted to return to the Ming dynasty, contemporary Islamists who would like to return to the days of the Caliphate, American Republicans who want to go back to 1950 or 1776 or (lately) 1861,

I don't think Republicans want to return to a year where Harry S Truman, a Democrat, was President.
I suppose a case could be made for 1953, although the people Bill has in mind would think
of Ike as a RINO, methinks.

I don't know what the 1861 refers to, unless Bill thinks anyone who is against the tearing down
of monuments and removal of portraits of Robert E. Lee is a proponent of slavery.

Come to think of it, the unsuccessful bid of a Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson
to have the Jefferson Memorial torn down might fall under the same category.
That would explain the choice of 1776, especially since Jefferson was the main
author of the Declaration of Independence.

> Hindu nationalists who think that thousands of years ago Hindu Indians maintained an advanced civilization far superior to anything currently on offer. While there may be a tendency to discount the past, there is an least equally strong tendency to romanticize and idealize it.
>
> As always you'd be safer sticking to characterizing your own views than trying to summarize those of the rest of humanity.

Absolutely.


Peter Nyikos

[*Hemidactylus*]

peter2...@gmail.com <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thursday, September 8, 2022 at 5:25:05 PM UTC-4, Bill wrote:
>

[snip]

>
>> The estimation of
>> human perfectibility was constant throughout history. Each generation
>> fancies itself superior to all the earlier generations, believing themselves
>> to be the crown of creation. It's happening now
>
> Among the woke. Hardly among anyone else.
>

There’s that all too common bogey trope. That people who see civil rights
legislation as an incomplete or largely unfulfilled promissory note and
election of Obama not to be the exemplar of post-racialism touted exist
means maybe there are strides yet to be made. The hated woke word goes back
to the Scottsboro boys and more recently BLM who had some legitimate
grievances no? CRT proponent Michelle Alexander puts forward a mirror that
returns a discomforting societal reflection given its decades long trend
toward mass incarceration and creation of a permanent caste based upon
criminalized stigma. Bill and Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden played no small
role given their actions at a critical period. Superpredators? The right
gave us a theory of broken windows that legitimized police militarization,
harassment and brutality.

On the reactionary side now after the backlash it seems the grievances
from perceptions of losing out to the ascendant Other (eg replacement
theory) are winning out and fueling resentment and revanchist return to a
mythic Golden Age of former glory. And now the anti-woke reactionaries
exploit engineered overreaction to their political advantage and hope to
rewrite history to eliminate discomfort and guilty feelings. Facts don’t
care about their feelings.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Friday, September 9, 2022 at 6:15:06 AM UTC-4, *Hemidactylus* wrote a
screed that looks like something out of the comments sections of WaPo:
a one-sided whitewash of the "woke" movement.

> peter2...@gmail.com <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Thursday, September 8, 2022 at 5:25:05 PM UTC-4, Bill wrote:
> >
> [snip]
> >
> >> The estimation of
> >> human perfectibility was constant throughout history. Each generation
> >> fancies itself superior to all the earlier generations, believing themselves
> >> to be the crown of creation. It's happening now
> >
> > Among the woke. Hardly among anyone else.
> >
> There’s that all too common bogey trope.

What follows is an all too common straw man to justify reflexive comments
like the one you've just made.

> That people who see civil rights
> legislation as an incomplete or largely unfulfilled promissory note and
> election of Obama not to be the exemplar of post-racialism touted exist
> means maybe there are strides yet to be made.

Strides like tearing down monuments to Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jefferson?
Deal with what I wrote to Bill Rogers if you really don't want my
comments to his post to remain unanswered. Bill has had me in a *de facto* killfile
for something like three years now, with no reasons given.

> The hated woke word goes back
> to the Scottsboro boys and more recently BLM who had some legitimate
> grievances no?

And who did not publicly and unconditionally condemn massive rioting in Portland, etc.? Gotcha.

Would it be unkind to get into the details of how one of the Marxist founders of BLM
bought a mansion in excess of 1 million dollars in a white neighborhood?

> CRT proponent Michelle Alexander puts forward a mirror that
> returns a discomforting societal reflection given its decades long trend
> toward mass incarceration and creation of a permanent caste based upon
> criminalized stigma.

And has fellow white liberals beating their breasts about their "white privilege"
and claiming that all whites, including refugees from the Soviet Union
and its satellite countries, and their children and grandchildren,
benefit unfairly from the pervasive racism of our society.

> Bill and Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden played no small
> role given their actions at a critical period.

Yeah, Biden has made trans "the civil rights issue of our time."

Time to cancel J.K. Rowling from celebrations of her Harry Potter novels and films,
and for the Harry Potter Fan Club to have a disproportionate number
of trans people, and not sound a peep of criticism for the massive campaign
of vilification and misrepresentation directed against Rowling for daring
to expose the widespread discrimination against those who dare to say
that there is difference between trans women and biological women.

For that, the creator of Harry Potter has received an avalanche of
hate mail, including at least one letter telling her,
"You are Voldemort." Does the name ring a bell, Hemi?

> Superpredators? The right
> gave us a theory of broken windows that legitimized police militarization,
> harassment and brutality.

Specifics?

> On the reactionary side now after the backlash it seems the grievances
> from perceptions of losing out to the ascendant Other (eg replacement
> theory) are winning out and fueling resentment and revanchist return to a
> mythic Golden Age of former glory. And now the anti-woke reactionaries
> exploit engineered overreaction to their political advantage and hope to
> rewrite history to eliminate discomfort and guilty feelings. Facts don’t
> care about their feelings.

On the other hand, facts care plenty about the feelings of trans women
whose feelings are hurt by not being allowed to compete in women's sports
in a number of "reactionary" states. Facts including Biden's campaign
in their favor.

And other facts, in the form of coerced re-education, or worse, for those
who dare to not refer to trans people by their preferred pronouns,
care plenty about the trans people involved.


Peter Nyikos

[jillery]

There is an antebellum odor exuding from Trump and his toadies, who
exhort legal and cultural doctrines straight from Taney. I wouldn't
be surprised if they pass laws to disqualify women, immigrants, people
of color, and LGBTQ from voting. And if Conservative Christians have
their way, I wouldn't be surprised if they declare Mar-a-lago Holy
Land that all U.S. citizens have to bow to five times a day.

--
You're entitled to your own opinions.
You're not entitled to your own facts.

[Joe Cummings]

FOR GLENN:
It was brave of you to repost "Glenn under themicroscope" and my
criticisms of you.It's a rare person who repeats criticism of himself.
It was much appreciated, Glenn.

I like to think that there's a special crown in heaven for people like
you. However I hink the crown can be withheld if the person
criticised doesn't improve his berhaviour. Maybe a crown of baser
metal?

FOR PETER;
Preachers can be easily founf on YouTube. "Telltale Anarchist" - Owen
Morgan makes it even easier by frequently reproducing some of the
crazier preachers.

Here are samples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3MEEzj5VKA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=916OZ8gMIUs&t=200s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoMDanc3De4

Ther's one, I think she's called Kat Kerr, who claims to go to heaven
every week.

Another, Greg Locke. claims that he was informed by a demon that there
were demons in his congregation.

Yet another, Ken Christmas, claims to "regenerate lost limbs."

I could go on and on annd on.

These people are unanimous in the support for Donald Trump, although
varying in their reasons for this. They regard the Democrat party as
ruled by Satan or demons.

As I said previously this is quite alarming, in that they address huge
congregations and theiir political remarks are enthusiastically
supported.

There is broad support amongst them for making the US into a
theocracy.

The question remains: do our creationist friends believe in demons?
To everyone else, that's about all I have to say for the moment.

Have fun,

Joe Cummings

[Bill]

Conservatives care most about what we do, liberals care about what we think.
We end up with an overbearing and intrusive government either way. We should
be able to think and behave however we like with the only limitation being
how we affect others doing the same. Why do we care so much about the ideas
and actions that don't directly affect us? Are witch hunts in our future?

Bill

[broger...@gmail.com]

You really should stop with the broad generalities about what large groups of people other than yourself think and believe. You don't know.

[Glenn]

Tell that to Biden. Or Cummings. Or yourself. At least Bill is introspective.

[Bill]

You could offer some counter-examples showing that my remarks don't apply.
I'm sure that "most" people will argue that they are not part of the herd I
characterize here, joining together in their agreement.

Bill

[broger...@gmail.com]

Counterexamples - In Florida, DeSantis' "anti-woke" law is entirely focused on what people think and say, not what they do. The conservative uproar about critical race theory is all about how people think about the history of racism and slavery in the US and explicitly designed to make sure that White children do not think they should be ashamed of being White. (And I always thought it was liberal kids who were "snowflakes.")

In the other direction, liberal calls for Medicare for All or criminal justice reform are all about what the government actually does with its resources and power. Climate activists' calls for individual action about climate change are all about changes in behavior, largely about changes in what you buy.

Clearly the generalization that "conservatives worry about what you do, liberals worry about what you think" is not remotely tenable.

You are certainly qualified to say whether you yourself feel you are part of the herd you characterize here, but you keep failing when you try to say what "most people" think.

[Glenn]

Complete horseshit. It is about what people are forced to hear. Propaganda is an act, not a thought. Teaching is an act, not a thought. Maybe you'd consider requiring school students to be taught ID in science class as being what people think and say. Gee, we can't get in the way of *that*, now could we. That would be like limiting our ability to teach kids that their parents are racists.

snip snip

[jillery]

On Sat, 10 Sep 2022 11:02:20 -0500, Bill <fre...@gmail.com> wrote:

>jillery wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 09 Sep 2022 10:11:17 +0000, *Hemidactylus*
>> <ecph...@allspamis.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>>peter2...@gmail.com <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

My experience is most political conservatives are concerned with what
they believe other people believe, which is at best incidentally
related to what other people say they believe.

Most Conservative Christians are Protestants and claim sola fide, and
so are far more concerned with what people believe than in what they
do.

To paraphrase the late Jim Stafford, Protestants like to have fun just
like everybody else. The difference is, they don't like to get caught
at it.

[Bill]

Wait! That sounds like one of those generalities that people here complain
about. Christians are a varied lot, holding many opinions about many things
with little agreement.

Bill

[John Harshman]

On 9/8/22 5:06 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Thursday, September 8, 2022 at 6:15:05 PM UTC-4, broger...@gmail.com wrote:
>> On Thursday, September 8, 2022 at 5:25:05 PM UTC-4, [Freon] Bill wrote:
>> <snip>
>>> It's an interesting fact that people had those beliefs for thousands of
>>> years and disagreement was suppressed and even persecuted. The estimation of
>>> human perfectibility was constant throughout history.
>> ...............................
>>> Each generation
>>> fancies itself superior to all the earlier generations, believing themselves
>>> to be the crown of creation. It's happening now and will still be in effect
>>> hundreds of years in the future.
>
> I've given a one-sentence criticism of Freon Bill's benighted comment and I'm glad to see
> Bill Rogers giving other examples. I might add irredentists all over the world (including
> Hungary, where my parents originated) who think back to when their countries were
> much bigger (in the case of Armenia and Hungary, several times bigger) as a kind of golden age.
>
> However, I am puzzled by three dates Bill Rogers gives below:
>
>> Are you sure that's true? It seems to me that there are plenty of people who think that people were better and wiser in the past, Qing dynasty Chinese who wanted to return to the Ming dynasty, contemporary Islamists who would like to return to the days of the Caliphate, American Republicans who want to go back to 1950 or 1776 or (lately) 1861,
>
> I don't think Republicans want to return to a year where Harry S Truman, a Democrat, was President.
> I suppose a case could be made for 1953, although the people Bill has in mind would think
> of Ike as a RINO, methinks.
>
> I don't know what the 1861 refers to, unless Bill thinks anyone who is against the tearing down
> of monuments and removal of portraits of Robert E. Lee is a proponent of slavery.

Not slavery, necessarily, but probably white supremacy. Why do you think
the monuments to Lee were erected?

> Come to think of it, the unsuccessful bid of a Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson
> to have the Jefferson Memorial torn down might fall under the same category.
> That would explain the choice of 1776, especially since Jefferson was the main
> author of the Declaration of Independence.

The big difference is that Jefferson was honored for the good things he
did while Lee was honored for the bad things, notably treason and making
war in defense of slavery.

I seem to recall you previously arguing that secession wasn't about
preserving slavery. Do I misremember?

[John Harshman]

On 9/8/22 5:06 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Thursday, September 8, 2022 at 6:15:05 PM UTC-4, broger...@gmail.com wrote:
>> On Thursday, September 8, 2022 at 5:25:05 PM UTC-4, [Freon] Bill wrote:
>> <snip>
>>> It's an interesting fact that people had those beliefs for thousands of
>>> years and disagreement was suppressed and even persecuted. The estimation of
>>> human perfectibility was constant throughout history.
>> ...............................
>>> Each generation
>>> fancies itself superior to all the earlier generations, believing themselves
>>> to be the crown of creation. It's happening now and will still be in effect
>>> hundreds of years in the future.
>
> I've given a one-sentence criticism of Freon Bill's benighted comment and I'm glad to see
> Bill Rogers giving other examples. I might add irredentists all over the world (including
> Hungary, where my parents originated) who think back to when their countries were
> much bigger (in the case of Armenia and Hungary, several times bigger) as a kind of golden age.
>
> However, I am puzzled by three dates Bill Rogers gives below:
>
>> Are you sure that's true? It seems to me that there are plenty of people who think that people were better and wiser in the past, Qing dynasty Chinese who wanted to return to the Ming dynasty, contemporary Islamists who would like to return to the days of the Caliphate, American Republicans who want to go back to 1950 or 1776 or (lately) 1861,
>
> I don't think Republicans want to return to a year where Harry S Truman, a Democrat, was President.
> I suppose a case could be made for 1953, although the people Bill has in mind would think
> of Ike as a RINO, methinks.

Before Brown v. Board of Education, perhaps?

[peter2...@gmail.com]

As a recognition of his heroic leadership of the Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War
and his work for reconciliation, first at Appomattox, and then as President
of Washington University, later renamed Washington and Lee University.

Where do you get your "probably"?

> > Come to think of it, the unsuccessful bid of a Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson
> > to have the Jefferson Memorial torn down might fall under the same category.
> > That would explain the choice of 1776, especially since Jefferson was the main
> > author of the Declaration of Independence.


> The big difference is that Jefferson was honored for the good things he
> did while Lee was honored for the bad things, notably treason and making
> war in defense of slavery.

Where do you get the kooky notion that Lee was a traitor?
from the Jack Palance character in the movie "Shane"?
He was no more a traitor than George Washington was.

Arguably, a lot less of a traitor. His beloved Virginia was no colony,
it was one of the thirteen states that signed the Constitution
at a time when the United States was little more than
an alliance of thirteen independent countries.

Virginia was among the last states to sign, and the campaign was hotly contested.
The opposition included Patrick Henry [as in, "Give me liberty or give me death!"],
who insisted that it would give the central government too much power.

The final vote was close: 89 to 79. Add to it the fact that it was very unclear
whether a state had the right to freely withdraw from the Union as
freely as it had joined it, [1] and anyone who claims that Lee was a
traitor is a walking anachronism.

[1] Tellingly, the text of the Ordinance of Secession begins with,
"To repeal the ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, by the State of Virginia, and to resume all the rights and powers granted under said Constitution."
https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/virginia-ordinance-of-secession-april-17-1861/#:~:text=The%20Virginia%20Ordinance%20of%20Secession%2C%20dated%20April%2017%2C,a%20statewide%20referendum%20confirmed%20secession%20on%20May%2023.

> I seem to recall you previously arguing that secession wasn't about
> preserving slavery. Do I misremember?

Yes, badly. My point was that preserving slavery was not the main
reason four states -- Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina and Virginia--
gave for seceding. These states hung back from secession until Lincoln
had made it clear that he was going to take back what he called
"the rebellious states" by military force. The Virginia situation was as follows:

The majority at first voted to remain in the Union, but stayed in session awaiting events. Conditional Unionists objected to Lincoln's call for state quotas to suppress the rebellion, and switched from their earlier Unionist vote to secession on April 17.
...
but on April 4, almost two-thirds of the Convention voted against secession, and a three-man delegation was sent to consult with Lincoln who had resolved to protect Federal property in the South.[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Secession_Convention_of_1861


And let's look at the other side of the coin: the North did NOT fight to end slavery.
Lincoln is famously quoted as saying, "If I could preserve the Union
by not freeing a single slave, I would do it."

Lincoln was no abolitionist. His own Republican Party only went
as far as wanting slavery in the territories to be illegal. [I think this
meant that they would not be admitted to the Union otherwise.]
The Abolitionists were never very popular. To add to the irony, leading
Abolitionists were AGAINST the use of military force to end secession.

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was little more than a political
ploy to reduce sympathy for the Confederacy in Great Britain and other
European countries. It had no effect on slavery in states "not in rebellion":
Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware; also AFAIK Tennessee,
which by then had a "non-rebellious" government in the capital, Nashville.

The new national holiday, Juneteenth, only celebrates the last slaves
freed under the aegis of the Emancipation Proclamation. Information
on the other "slave states" is hard to come by, but it seems that Kentucky
and perhaps other states still had people legally enslaved as late as autumn of 1865.


Peter Nyikos

[Burkhard]

so the "Amnesty and Pardon" he had to apply for to get his civil rights
restored where for what, in your considered opinion?

[Glenn]

That is such a weird question...

Had the colonials failed, Washington would have been tried and likely executed, and "traitor" would have been one of the charges. John Hancock had a bounty on his head.
That the English were driven off doesn't negate the fact that Washington would have been regarded as a traitor to the crown.

Jefferson Davis led a similar life as Lee. He also had a bounty on his head. At the end,

"Davis was released on bail. On December 25, 1868, he was pardoned and granted amnesty, along with all other former Confederates."

https://www.amphilsoc.org/blog/musings-manuscripts-metamorphic-figure-jefferson-davis

[*Hemidactylus*]

Alas Sherman’s march had its reasons, even to this day!

Sadly it was limited in scope and there weren’t many more of the same
laying waste to the south to the extent that the compromise of 1877 that
ended Reconstruction on those traitors would have been an impossibility.
The southern “aristocracy” divided and conquered, stoking flames of bigotry
in poor whites who should have allied with freed slaves and overthrown the
former slaveowners. The south was never anything to warrant pride or a
sense of tradition to uphold. Still a craphole.

[Glenn]

You have it about right. It does not matter to me if the statue is removed; it is not a great historical work of art or architecture, as I would consider for example Mount Rushmore.

But Lee's story is well known, and should not be left out of history, nor reduced to accusations of racism:

https://www.masshist.org/object-of-the-month/objects/all-are-gone-who-desire-to-do-so-2007-01-01

The world would be a different place had the South succeeded. Two United States may have accomplished more than a unified one, perhaps stronger together than enemies apart, and some of the serious problems facing the US now may not have occurred - perhaps a true "two party" system of kinds.

[John Harshman]

Nope. To some degree, they were for his heroic leadership, i.e. treason
in defense of the slave power. But is that a good thing? Certainly they
were not erected for his work for reconciliation. James Longstreet did
much more for reconciliation than Lee ever did. Where are his statues?
You won't find them, because Longstreet was a traitor to the Lost Cause.

Now, if your claims were correct, those Lee monuments would have been
raised soon after his death instead of in the Jim Crow era, mostly in
the 20th Century.

> Where do you get your "probably"?

You're right. I retract the word.

>>> Come to think of it, the unsuccessful bid of a Black descendant of
Thomas Jefferson
>>> to have the Jefferson Memorial torn down might fall under the same
category.
>>> That would explain the choice of 1776, especially since Jefferson
was the main
>>> author of the Declaration of Independence.
>
>
>> The big difference is that Jefferson was honored for the good things he
>> did while Lee was honored for the bad things, notably treason and making
>> war in defense of slavery.
>
> Where do you get the kooky notion that Lee was a traitor?
> from the Jack Palance character in the movie "Shane"?
> He was no more a traitor than George Washington was.

George Washington was a traitor to Britain, of course. "If this be
treason, make the most of it." But yes, Lee fits the definition of
treason perfectly.

> Arguably, a lot less of a traitor. His beloved Virginia was no colony,
> it was one of the thirteen states that signed the Constitution
> at a time when the United States was little more than
> an alliance of thirteen independent countries.

The constitution ended that independence. Did you not notice?

> Virginia was among the last states to sign, and the campaign was
hotly contested.
> The opposition included Patrick Henry [as in, "Give me liberty or
give me death!"],
> who insisted that it would give the central government too much power.
>
> The final vote was close: 89 to 79. Add to it the fact that it was
very unclear
> whether a state had the right to freely withdraw from the Union as
> freely as it had joined it, [1] and anyone who claims that Lee was a
> traitor is a walking anachronism.

How is any of that relevant to whether Lee committed treason against the
USA?

True initially. Of course that changed in 1862. And the Northern war
aims are not relevant to a discussion of the Southern war aims.

> Lincoln was no abolitionist.
Yes he was. Wherever did you get that idea?

> His own Republican Party only went
> as far as wanting slavery in the territories to be illegal. [I think this
> meant that they would not be admitted to the Union otherwise.]
> The Abolitionists were never very popular. To add to the irony, leading
> Abolitionists were AGAINST the use of military force to end secession.

The Republican platform was a minimal goal. But the eventual goal was
the end of slavery. "A house divided against itself cannot stand. This
nation cannot long survive half slave and half free". And so on.

> Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was little more than a political
> ploy to reduce sympathy for the Confederacy in Great Britain and other
> European countries. It had no effect on slavery in states "not in
rebellion":
> Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware; also AFAIK Tennessee,
> which by then had a "non-rebellious" government in the capital,
Nashville.
>
> The new national holiday, Juneteenth, only celebrates the last slaves
> freed under the aegis of the Emancipation Proclamation. Information
> on the other "slave states" is hard to come by, but it seems that
Kentucky
> and perhaps other states still had people legally enslaved as late as
autumn of 1865.

True. The 13th Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865. But so what?
This is all Lost Cause apologetics. Next you'll be telling me that the
slaves were all happy, slavery was a benign institution, etc. And of
course nothing you have said here is relevant to whether Lee committed
treason or why his monuments were erected.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Hemidactylus was unable to return Harshman's favor of trying to salvage one
of his arguments, and so he had to settle for a diversion that ignores
everything I wrote above.

> Alas Sherman’s march had its reasons, even to this day!

Yes, including restoring the Mongol tradition of total war, which had been defunct in the West
for centuries, with often indiscriminate massive damage to innocent civilians.

The descendants of that fateful decision were the firebombing of Dresden,
immortalized in Kurt Vonnegut's novel (later to be faithfully adapted to a film)
_Slaughterhouse Five_, and the nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Of course, the people responsible for these atrocities went unpunished,
because the Nuremberg Trials only targeted the losers.

>
> Sadly it was limited in scope and there weren’t many more of the same
> laying waste to the south to the extent that the compromise of 1877 that
> ended Reconstruction on those traitors would have been an impossibility.

You seem to be setting your seal of approval on the aforementioned
progeny of Sherman's march to the sea. More immediately, there
were Sheridan's devastation of the Shenandoah Valley, and countless
acts of genocide and ethnocide against the Indigenous People of America,
including Buffalo Bill's "celebrated" record of slaughtering so many bison
that the tiny remnant that remained were not enough to sustain the
independence of the tribes that depended on them.

> The southern “aristocracy” divided and conquered, stoking flames of bigotry
> in poor whites who should have allied with freed slaves and overthrown the
> former slaveowners. The south was never anything to warrant pride or a
> sense of tradition to uphold. Still a craphole.

Nonsense, even by your bigoted standards. The University of South
Carolina has wholeheartedly gone along with the kind of "wokeness" that I wrote about
at the end of my reply to you.

You are invited to gnash your teeth over the passing of a law by the SC government
that forbids turning trans women into members of women's sports teams.
If Biden is re-elected in 2024, and the three Scotus appointees of Trump
are impeached, I expect him to bring the full weight of the Justice Department
and the newly reconstituted SCOTUS against such "reactionary" laws.

And I expect the majority of accredited universities to be wholeheartedly behind
Biden's efforts.


Peter Nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Same here. If Harshman is correct and the monuments were only erected during the Jim Crow era,
I'm not going to object to them being removed, but I also wouldn't object to displaying them in museums,
like the outdoor museum in Budapest for a huge number of Soviet era statues.

Other than that, John Harshman has slavery on the brain, causing him to ignore the far better memorial
to Lee that was renamed Washington and Lee University almost immediately after he died in 1870.

I wonder what he thinks of this university being named after the two people he labeled traitors,
Washington grudgingly and Lee avidly, in his latest reply to me on this thread.

John's closing paragraph there shows almost the full depth of his artificially manufactured disdain for me.
It's typical of the attitude that has surfaced every now and then in his 12+ year interaction with me,
and shows what a sorry imitation of a responsible adult he is.

> But Lee's story is well known, and should not be left out of history, nor reduced to accusations of racism:
>
> https://www.masshist.org/object-of-the-month/objects/all-are-gone-who-desire-to-do-so-2007-01-01

It reads like a balanced treatment of Lee, and hence anathema to Harshman and Hemidactylus.

> The world would be a different place had the South succeeded.

Or George McClellan had defeated Lincoln in 1864, and the South negotiated a compromise that
would have resulted in manumission in the shortest feasible time, and retained all the rights of
states without the humiliation of a militarily imposed government.

It was a close call: if Jefferson Davis had not replaced Joseph E. Johnston with the rash Hood,
Atlanta may not have fallen before the election. And then an approximation to the following
scenario might have come about when McClellan took office:

> Two United States may have accomplished more than a unified one, perhaps stronger together than enemies apart, and some of the serious problems facing the US now may not have occurred - perhaps a true "two party" system of kinds.

I don't know how you figure all this, but the slave system of the South was on borrowed time, and the
boll weevil would have put an end to it.


Peter Nyikos

[Glenn]

Only if you consider Washington to be a traitor. Lee resigned his Union commission, and defended his State from occupation and invasion. Had the South won, Lincoln would have been considered a traitor. The "legality" of secession before the civil war was unclear, with many believing in a State's right to secession. The South had no ambition to attack and occupy any Northern States. The North did, and it cost millions of lives.

[Glenn]

I didn't include anything about what may have became of slavery, but Federalism isn't far off from raising it's ugly head, and two unified "United States" side by side, as is the EU today, may have avoided that for a longer period of time at least. Now we have "democrat" and "republican" states spread out all over the place.

[*Hemidactylus*]

Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com> wrote:
>>
[snip]

>>
> You have it about right. It does not matter to me if the statue is
> removed; it is not a great historical work of art or architecture, as I
> would consider for example Mount Rushmore.
>

I would think given its nasty associations that Stone Mountain should have
its traitors removed from the bas relief and replaced with MLK, Malcolm X,
Harriet Tubman and Barack Obama, though other candidates come to mind.
Biggie and Tupac would be preferable to the human refuse found there now.

[John Harshman]

On 9/12/22 11:21 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

Nope. To some degree, they were for his heroic leadership, i.e. treason
in defense of the slave power. But is that a good thing? Certainly they
were not erected for his work for reconciliation. James Longstreet did
much more for reconciliation than Lee ever did. Where are his statues?
You won't find them, because Longstreet was a traitor to the Lost Cause.

Now, if your claims were correct, those Lee monuments would have been
raised soon after his death instead of in the Jim Crow era, mostly in
the 20th Century.

> Where do you get your "probably"?

You're right. I retract the word.

>>> Come to think of it, the unsuccessful bid of a Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson
>>> to have the Jefferson Memorial torn down might fall under the same category.
>>> That would explain the choice of 1776, especially since Jefferson was the main
>>> author of the Declaration of Independence.
>
>
>> The big difference is that Jefferson was honored for the good things he
>> did while Lee was honored for the bad things, notably treason and making
>> war in defense of slavery.
>
> Where do you get the kooky notion that Lee was a traitor?
> from the Jack Palance character in the movie "Shane"?
> He was no more a traitor than George Washington was.

George Washington was a traitor to Britain, of course. "If this be
treason, make the most of it." But yes, Lee fits the definition of
treason perfectly.

> Arguably, a lot less of a traitor. His beloved Virginia was no colony,
> it was one of the thirteen states that signed the Constitution
> at a time when the United States was little more than
> an alliance of thirteen independent countries.

The constitution ended that independence. Did you not notice?

> Virginia was among the last states to sign, and the campaign was hotly contested.
> The opposition included Patrick Henry [as in, "Give me liberty or give me death!"],
> who insisted that it would give the central government too much power.
>
> The final vote was close: 89 to 79. Add to it the fact that it was very unclear
> whether a state had the right to freely withdraw from the Union as
> freely as it had joined it, [1] and anyone who claims that Lee was a
> traitor is a walking anachronism.

How is any of that relevant to whether Lee committed treason against the
USA?

> [1] Tellingly, the text of the Ordinance of Secession begins with,
> "To repeal the ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, by the State of Virginia, and to resume all the rights and powers granted under said Constitution."
> https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/virginia-ordinance-of-secession-april-17-1861/#:~:text=The%20Virginia%20Ordinance%20of%20Secession%2C%20dated%20April%2017%2C,a%20statewide%20referendum%20confirmed%20secession%20on%20May%2023.
>
>> I seem to recall you previously arguing that secession wasn't about
>> preserving slavery. Do I misremember?
>
> Yes, badly. My point was that preserving slavery was not the main
> reason four states -- Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina and Virginia--
> gave for seceding. These states hung back from secession until Lincoln
> had made it clear that he was going to take back what he called
> "the rebellious states" by military force. The Virginia situation was as follows:
>
> The majority at first voted to remain in the Union, but stayed in session awaiting events. Conditional Unionists objected to Lincoln's call for state quotas to suppress the rebellion, and switched from their earlier Unionist vote to secession on April 17.
> ...
> but on April 4, almost two-thirds of the Convention voted against secession, and a three-man delegation was sent to consult with Lincoln who had resolved to protect Federal property in the South.[8]
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Secession_Convention_of_1861
>
>
> And let's look at the other side of the coin: the North did NOT fight to end slavery.
> Lincoln is famously quoted as saying, "If I could preserve the Union
> by not freeing a single slave, I would do it."

True initially. Of course that changed in 1862. And the Northern war
aims are not relevant to a discussion of the Southern war aims.

> Lincoln was no abolitionist.

Yes he was. Wherever did you get that idea?

> His own Republican Party only went
> as far as wanting slavery in the territories to be illegal. [I think this
> meant that they would not be admitted to the Union otherwise.]
> The Abolitionists were never very popular. To add to the irony, leading
> Abolitionists were AGAINST the use of military force to end secession.

The Republican platform was a minimal goal. But the eventual goal was
the end of slavery. "A house divided against itself cannot stand. This
nation cannot long survive half slave and half free". And so on.

> Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was little more than a political
> ploy to reduce sympathy for the Confederacy in Great Britain and other
> European countries. It had no effect on slavery in states "not in rebellion":
> Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware; also AFAIK Tennessee,
> which by then had a "non-rebellious" government in the capital, Nashville.
>
> The new national holiday, Juneteenth, only celebrates the last slaves
> freed under the aegis of the Emancipation Proclamation. Information
> on the other "slave states" is hard to come by, but it seems that Kentucky
> and perhaps other states still had people legally enslaved as late as autumn of 1865.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Harshman's cherry-picking words out of Patrick Henry's speech
below is at least as as bad as a majority of quotemines that are
in the huge Talk.Origins Archive Quote Mine FAQ (QMF).

> > George Washington was a traitor to Britain, of course. "If this be
> > treason, make the most of it."

Patrick Henry made that statement in an utterly different context,
all the way back in 1765.

Henry began thunderously: “Caesar had his Brutus; Charles the First his Cromwell; and George the Third . . . .” At this point, Henry was interrupted by cries of “Treason! Treason!” But Henry persevered in the face of these cries. “George the Third,” he said, “may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it!”
https://www.taraross.com/post/tdih-patrick-henry-speech

>> But yes, Lee fits the definition of treason perfectly.

And Harshman is making the most of it, and then some, below.
[See after my electronic signature.]

> Only if you consider Washington to be a traitor. Lee resigned his Union commission, and defended his State from occupation and invasion. Had the South won, Lincoln would have been considered a traitor. The "legality" of secession before the civil war was unclear, with many believing in a State's right to secession. The South had no ambition to attack and occupy any Northern States. The North did, and it cost millions of lives.

There were two major 1862 forays into "non-rebellious" slave states: one into Maryland
and one into Kentucky, in the hopes of drawing them into the Confederacy.
The one major foray in 1863, into Pennsylvania, was not to occupy it but to
draw the Army of the Potomac away from his beloved Virginia, which was suffering
almost nonstop from the war being fought there.


Peter Nyikos

PS I've left in the text below, where one can see Harshman
behaving like a loose cannon in pursuit of "and then some,"
becoming positively rabid with his "Next you'll be telling me"
at the end.

> > > Arguably, a lot less of a traitor. His beloved Virginia was no colony,
> > > it was one of the thirteen states that signed the Constitution
> > > at a time when the United States was little more than
> > > an alliance of thirteen independent countries.
> > The constitution ended that independence. Did you not notice?
> > > Virginia was among the last states to sign, and the campaign was
> > hotly contested.
> > > The opposition included Patrick Henry [as in, "Give me liberty or
> > give me death!"],
> > > who insisted that it would give the central government too much power.
> > >
> > > The final vote was close: 89 to 79. Add to it the fact that it was
> > very unclear
> > > whether a state had the right to freely withdraw from the Union as
> > > freely as it had joined it, [1] and anyone who claims that Lee was a
> > > traitor is a walking anachronism.

> > How is atny of that relevant to whether Lee committed treason against the

[*Hemidactylus*]

It’s irony of ironies the redneck south coopted the Republican party of
Lincoln and used it as the parties realigned to do great reactionary damage
to the rest of the country throughout the last half century. The fever has
intensified as Q-nutters and the alt-right replace the Tea Party faction
who replaced Goldwater Republicans, contract on America Newters who
themselves had usurped previous remnants of Rockefeller establishment
liberals (me too RINOs).

The Great Agnostic Robert Ingersoll was a Republican, a label now deserving
more scorn than respect.

[Glenn]

I doubt you even understand and believe your own rants. You're clearly disturbed.

[*Hemidactylus*]

I doubt you could parse “me too Republican” on your best day. The problem
is in your own ideologically fossilized brain not in my eloquent delivery.

[Glenn]

Yea, you're a wonder to behold. I've been a registered Independent for decades. Ideology that, peckerhead.

[*Hemidactylus*]

By your actions here I can tell you lean rightward, thus supporting Rethugs
by your vote.

[Glenn]

You couldn't tell your butt from a hole in the ground.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

...whose leaders had already become split into anti-slavery folks, "vote yourself a farm"
types, and business executives between Fremont in 1856 (whose backing was from the first set)
and Lincoln in 1860. By the time Reconstruction ended, the business interests
were basically in control of the party.

> > >>and used it as the parties realigned to do great reactionary damage
> > >> to the rest of the country throughout the last half century.

Like Reagan did great reactionary damage by ending the Carter era's stagflation. Got it.

> > >> The fever has intensified as Q-nutters and the alt-right replace the Tea Party faction

The Tea Party was nonviolent, and it was like the Weathermen replacing the SDS types
and the Black Panthers and SNCC replacing the Martin Luther King types in enjoying
the spotlight of the mainstream media.

> > >> who replaced Goldwater Republicans, contract on America Newters who
> > >> themselves had usurped previous remnants of Rockefeller establishment
> > >> liberals (me too RINOs).

Yes, Rockefeller and George Romney were the same sort of Republicans as Mitt Romney,
but the Left wasn't as powerful in the Democratic Party as it is now.

And so, when I was much younger, we were spared the sight of Mitt destroying his
integrity by emotionally entreating Trump, in the name of decency, to declare
that the Charlottesville melee was SOLELY the fault of the neo-Nazis and other
white supremacists.

Trump had already condemned these factions by name, while NOT naming antifa
or other leftist elements, but he made the "mistake" of condemning "other" violence
in general terms, and that was an unforgivable sin in Mitt's eyes, unless Trump
sincerely repented of it.

I do believe that made Mitt a hero in the eyes of Hemidactylus.

> > >> The Great Agnostic Robert Ingersoll was a Republican, a label now deserving
> > >> more scorn than respect.

Biden talked about "MAGA Republicans" being a menace to democracy,
but then admitted that he didn't think that everyone who voted for Trump
was that kind of person.

Such distinctions are lost on Hemidactylus.

> > > I doubt you even understand and believe your own rants. You're clearly disturbed.
> > >
> > I doubt you could parse “me too Republican” on your best day. The problem
> > is in your own ideologically fossilized brain not in my eloquent delivery.

The egotism of Hemidactylus is here bordering on egomania.

> Yea, you're a wonder to behold. I've been a registered Independent for decades. Ideology that, peckerhead.

I don't like that word. I much prefer the word "peckerwood," a simple anagram of "woodpecker."

When I was in the Army, I was an assistant scoutmaster for a marvelously heterogeneous [1] Scout troop,
where "peckerwood" was used as a word for annoying white scouts, usually by black ones. One graphic example:

"Get my shoe off my pillow, you peckerwood!"


[1] Including sons of officers [2], sons of noncoms, and sons of civilian employees. The first named were
all white or oriental, the others of various races.

[2] The base commander was father to two of them; the older one was the peckerwood mentioned above.


Peter Nyikos

[*Hemidactylus*]

peter2...@gmail.com <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
[given his narcissistic habit of replying to people via the post of someone
else I have snipped all but one point below]

>
> Biden talked about "MAGA Republicans" being a menace to democracy,
> but then admitted that he didn't think that everyone who voted for Trump
> was that kind of person.
>
> Such distinctions are lost on Hemidactylus.
>

Hillary spoke of two baskets of Trump voters, a distinction lost on
everyone:
“I know there are only 60 days left to make our case — and don’t get
complacent, don’t see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate
comment and think well he’s done this time. We are living in a volatile
political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could
put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.
Right?

[Laughter/applause]

The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And
unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has
given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now
how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful
mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable,
but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket — and I know this
because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from
Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know,
New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who
feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down,
nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives
and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really
even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he
seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t
wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like
they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize
with as well.”

https://time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables-transcript/

Was that empathetic distinction lost on you too?

[Glenn]

Was this lost on you?

"“Last night I was ‘grossly generalistic,’ and that’s never a good idea. I regret saying ‘half’ – that was wrong,” Clinton said"

https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/09/politics/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-basket-of-deplorables

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, September 13, 2022 at 8:35:10 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

> When I was in the Army, I was an assistant scoutmaster for a marvelously heterogeneous [1] Scout troop,
> where "peckerwood" was used as a word for annoying white scouts, usually by black ones. One graphic example:
>
> "Get my shoe off my pillow, you peckerwood!"

OUCH! I can hardly believe I absent-mindedly put "my shoe" instead of "your shoe," which
is the way it actually happened: "Get your shoe off my pillow, you peckerwood!"

Peter Nyikos

[*Hemidactylus*]

She was too generous to begin with, especially in retrospect, then
backtracked on that. But she was misrepresented by people who focused
exclusively on her deplorables basket which was my point dingbat. I
wouldn’t expect a habitual distorter like you to get that at all and so you
post the above. Ideologically fossilized.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, September 13, 2022 at 9:00:09 PM UTC-4, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> peter2...@gmail.com <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> [given his narcissistic habit of replying to people via the post of someone
> else I have snipped all but one point below]

Nothing narcissistic about it, you clown. It's an attempt to let people like Glenn,
to whom I was replying, just how off base some of your comments were.

In fact, it is precisely because you are such a narcissist [1] that it is useless
to say the things I said in directly in reply to you: all criticism of you goes
like water off a duck's back.

[1] Like I wrote in the part you snipped:

"The egotism of Hemidactylus is here bordering on egomania."

> >

> > Biden talked about "MAGA Republicans" being a menace to democracy,
> > but then admitted that he didn't think that everyone who voted for Trump
> > was that kind of person.
> >
> > Such distinctions are lost on Hemidactylus.
> >
> Hillary spoke of two baskets of Trump voters, a distinction lost on
> everyone:

> “I know there are only 60 days left to make our case — and don’t get
> complacent, don’t see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate
> comment and think well he’s done this time. We are living in a volatile
> political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could
> put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.
> Right?
>
> [Laughter/applause]
>
> The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.

Did you applaud when Hillary put almost exactly one-fourth of all the
people voting in the 2016 election into such a poisonous basket?

> And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has
> given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now
> how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful
> mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable,
> but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket — and I know this
> because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from
> Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know,
> New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who
> feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down,
> nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives
> and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really
> even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he
> seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t
> wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like
> they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize
> with as well.”
>
> https://time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables-transcript/
>
> Was that empathetic distinction lost on you too?

I never saw it, but the bottom line is, you gave no hint of thinking that
Republicans are anything but people who should hang their heads in shame.

By the way, does the fact that Hillary is guilty of a False Dichotomy fallacy
completely escape your emotion-saturated mind?


Peter Nyikos

[Glenn]

This "empathetic distinction" was a political speech 60 days before the election.
You made no point about people focusing exclusively on one part of that, dingbat.
And I distorted nothing. You're the one that swallows such ideological claims.
You would have at the time "seemed to hold out some hope that your life will be different" because of *all* that she said.

[*Hemidactylus*]

Yes I did when I said “Hillary spoke of two baskets of Trump voters, a
distinction lost on everyone” and asked Peter “Was that empathetic
distinction lost on you too?” If someone loses or misses the distinction of
two baskets Hillary actually made they are focusing exclusively on the one
“deplorables” basket liar. All you do here is misrepresent people for sick
sport and lie about it. I call you out on your obnoxious bullshit.


> And I distorted nothing.

Yes you did.

> You're the one that swallows such ideological claims.
> You would have at the time "seemed to hold out some hope that your life
> will be different" because of *all* that she said.
>

Where the hell are you coming up with this made up nonsense liar?

[Glenn]

That is not in evidence here. At the time Clinton didn't think Trump had a chance to win, and only referred to a small number of people as irredeemable deplorables. She did
seem to correct her claim of only *half* of one "basket" of "Trump supporters" were irredeemable, but she had no idea that half of the voters would, after the election, be deplorables by her own criteria.

> > And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has
> > given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now
> > how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful
> > mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable,
> > but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket — and I know this
> > because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from
> > Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know,
> > New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who
> > feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down,
> > nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives
> > and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really
> > even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he
> > seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t
> > wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like
> > they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize
> > with as well.”
> >
> > https://time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables-transcript/
> >
> > Was that empathetic distinction lost on you too?
> I never saw it, but the bottom line is, you gave no hint of thinking that
> Republicans are anything but people who should hang their heads in shame.

Apparently Hemi thinks such political "empathetic" rhetoric is or should be notable, or even believable, and especially when the notable part of it is anything but empathetic.

If Hillary really felt that way, wouldn't we hear her loud voice today?

[Glenn]

Making a bald claim is not *making* a point in my book, Hemi. I don't recall any news media focusing exclusively on one part, and you haven't provided any reason or support
for the claim. You're the one here that misrepresents people. The notable part was likely identified more than the other part you claim was "empathetic". I didn't miss the distinction, you did.

>
> > And I distorted nothing.
>
> Yes you did.

That's obnoxious bullshit.

> > You're the one that swallows such ideological claims.
> > You would have at the time "seemed to hold out some hope that your life
> > will be different" because of *all* that she said.
> >
> Where the hell are you coming up with this made up nonsense liar?

Probably when you repeatedly insist that her speech was "empathetic", and your clear disdain for any and all things Trump.

[jillery]

Since you mention it, the following more accurately illustrates a
typical spirit of that word's use:

<https://youtu.be/j9TS1pRmajU?list=PLqdVZD2V7l6dRhGrJE00CAM6TPIaZAUuR>

--
You're entitled to your own opinions.
You're not entitled to your own facts.

[*Hemidactylus*]

peter2...@gmail.com <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday, September 13, 2022 at 9:00:09 PM UTC-4, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
>> peter2...@gmail.com <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>> [given his narcissistic habit of replying to people via the post of someone
>> else I have snipped all but one point below]
>
> Nothing narcissistic about it, you clown. It's an attempt to let people like Glenn,
> to whom I was replying, just how off base some of your comments were.
>
> In fact, it is precisely because you are such a narcissist [1] that it is useless
> to say the things I said in directly in reply to you: all criticism of you goes
> like water off a duck's back.
>

Your obnoxious tendency toward piggybacking demonstrates a self-absorption
rivaled by Nando in how you presume social convention does not apply to
you.

> [1] Like I wrote in the part you snipped:
> "The egotism of Hemidactylus is here bordering on egomania."
>

Physician heal thyself.

>
>>>
>>> Biden talked about "MAGA Republicans" being a menace to democracy,
>>> but then admitted that he didn't think that everyone who voted for Trump
>>> was that kind of person.
>>>
>>> Such distinctions are lost on Hemidactylus.
>>>
>> Hillary spoke of two baskets of Trump voters, a distinction lost on
>> everyone:
>
>> “I know there are only 60 days left to make our case — and don’t get
>> complacent, don’t see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate
>> comment and think well he’s done this time. We are living in a volatile
>> political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could
>> put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.
>> Right?
>>
>> [Laughter/applause]
>>
>> The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.
>
> Did you applaud when Hillary put almost exactly one-fourth of all the
> people voting in the 2016 election into such a poisonous basket?
>

She was too generous with her empathy toward the other basket. Not her only
shortcoming.

>
>> And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has
>> given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now
>> how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful
>> mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable,
>> but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket — and I know this
>> because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from
>> Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know,
>> New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who
>> feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down,
>> nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives
>> and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really
>> even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he
>> seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t
>> wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like
>> they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize
>> with as well.”
>>
>> https://time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables-transcript/
>>
>> Was that empathetic distinction lost on you too?
>
> I never saw it, but the bottom line is, you gave no hint of thinking that
> Republicans are anything but people who should hang their heads in shame.
>

Good observation. I am not Hillary.

>
> By the way, does the fact that Hillary is guilty of a False Dichotomy fallacy
> completely escape your emotion-saturated mind?
>

So it was wrong of her to entertain the possibility that a significant
number of Trump voters were then not deplorable but had genuine concerns?
She has had a nasty conservative shadow in her own past make-up being a
Goldwater girl and later believing in the racist myth of “superpredators”.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, September 14, 2022 at 8:35:09 AM UTC-4, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> peter2...@gmail.com <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Tuesday, September 13, 2022 at 9:00:09 PM UTC-4, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> >> peter2...@gmail.com <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >> [given his narcissistic habit of replying to people via the post of someone
> >> else I have snipped all but one point below]
> >
> > Nothing narcissistic about it, you clown. It's an attempt to let people like Glenn,
> > to whom I was replying, just how off base some of your comments were.
> >
> > In fact, it is precisely because you are such a narcissist [1] that it is useless
> > to say the things I said in directly in reply to you: all criticism of you goes
> > like water off a duck's back.
> >
> Your obnoxious tendency toward piggybacking demonstrates a self-absorption
> rivaled by Nando in how you presume social convention does not apply to
> you.

I will add you to my list of people who put libel they commit on the same
moral plane as social conventions that you and a small handful of
like-minded people have conjured up in *ipse dixit* fashion.

On top of which, relentlessly harassing people, year in and year out, to talk about your
pet interests doesn't even rate as violating social convention in your narcissistic mind, does it?

> > [1] Like I wrote in the part you snipped:
> > "The egotism of Hemidactylus is here bordering on egomania."
> >
> Physician heal thyself.

Mindless Pee Wee Hermanism noted.

> >
> >>>
> >>> Biden talked about "MAGA Republicans" being a menace to democracy,
> >>> but then admitted that he didn't think that everyone who voted for Trump
> >>> was that kind of person.
> >>>
> >>> Such distinctions are lost on Hemidactylus.
> >>>
> >> Hillary spoke of two baskets of Trump voters, a distinction lost on
> >> everyone:
> >
> >> “I know there are only 60 days left to make our case — and don’t get
> >> complacent, don’t see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate
> >> comment and think well he’s done this time. We are living in a volatile
> >> political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could
> >> put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.
> >> Right?
> >>
> >> [Laughter/applause]
> >>
> >> The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.
> >
> > Did you applaud when Hillary put almost exactly one-fourth of all the
> > people voting in the 2016 election into such a poisonous basket?
> >
> She was too generous with her empathy toward the other basket. Not her only
> shortcoming.

Your totalitarian mindset is very noticeable here. Robert Kennedy was
often called "ruthless" but you outdo him by a country mile.

> >> And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has
> >> given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now
> >> how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful
> >> mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable,
> >> but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket — and I know this
> >> because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from
> >> Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know,
> >> New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who
> >> feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down,
> >> nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives
> >> and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really
> >> even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he
> >> seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t
> >> wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like
> >> they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize
> >> with as well.”
> >>
> >> https://time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables-transcript/
> >>
> >> Was that empathetic distinction lost on you too?
> >
> > I never saw it, but the bottom line is, you gave no hint of thinking that
> > Republicans are anything but people who should hang their heads in shame.
> >
> Good observation. I am not Hillary.

All the worse for you.

> > By the way, does the fact that Hillary is guilty of a False Dichotomy fallacy
> > completely escape your emotion-saturated mind?
> >
> So it was wrong of her to entertain the possibility that a significant
> number of Trump voters were then not deplorable but had genuine concerns?

Your spin-doctored distortion of what she said adds quite a lot to my
reaction to your ruthless put-down of what she actually did say about them.

> She has had a nasty conservative shadow in her own past make-up being a
> Goldwater girl and later believing in the racist myth of “superpredators”.

You come across as a superpredator, but instead of racism you exude
political fanaticism.


Peter Nyikos