Error404/RS gets THAT from my post at http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18840&perpage=6&pagenumber=12. He uses the word "indecisive" three times. That's three more times than I used it. Nor does the phrase "nothing but middle of the road" appear anywhere in that post or any other. My key statement went: "Being middle-of-the-road, or unaffiliated, or uncertain, or maybe moderately liberal, or inconsistent doesn't make you wiser or more objective, it just makes you middle-of-the-road, unaffiliated, uncertain, maybe moderately liberal, or inconsistent." I quite conspicuously did not assign any label to him. I gave him a spectrum of choices, with what should have been the obvious implication that I wasn't really sure which, if any, accurately described him. The point wasn't where he stood, or whether or not he had a consistent position, or even whether I agreed or disagreed with any particular stand of his other than his implicit claim to superior judgment and objectivity. The point was that defining yourself as in the "center" or near it, claiming that you're unattached or unaffiliated, or claiming that you strive for "objectivity" doesn't mean that your perspective or your particular arguments on any given issue are correct or, in fact, objective. There are even instances - in politics, in science, in everyday life - when the position that is thought to be "extreme" is the only moral or truthful position. Don't we all know this already?
Quote from KF: "Objectivity, in this context, would include the ability and willingness to take each argument on its own terms, regardless of the actual or suspected political affiliation of the individual who offered it. Blanket judgments and vapid generalizations don't qualify as objective merely because the person who offers them is urging moderation." If one is objective, and individually issue oriented only (not blanket judgments of party of affiliation), why is there ever a need to label the one who presented a particular issue by their party affiliation? Why would it even be of issue to label someone's perspective to be from the "loony left" or the "loony right" if one is objective? Quote from KF: "Now the author's perspective begins to make a kind of sense, or at least shows internal consistency - while revealing that the author is either unaware of recent history, or so far out on the loony left that he can only believe something he reads on loony left web site. You could simply counter their position with an argument that is not based on party, but fact and reason that relates specifically that the point at hand. KF slings mud, but denies it. Hypocrisy.
My annoyance over Optional777âs hypocrisy and inconsequence is not meaningless to me. Like anyone, I prefer to avoid being annoyed and actively pestered, and, with comments such as the above, he confirms that he cannot be trusted to hold up his side of a civil debate. In other words, he has placed himself above discussion - or leaves open the possibility that he has done so - and suggests that he has reached an un-addressable conclusion about what he perceives to be my "bias." To the extent this conclusion cannot be discussed with him, it itself becomes an unshakeable bias, and, by his own standards, represents an unintelligent perspective that has nothing to do with a search for truth. He would care if, indeed, he had any interest in dialogue. Instead, he further confirms a lack of understanding for other people's interests, or a fundamental unwillingness to recognize them. Indeed, he explicitly rejects the possibility that anything someone else says here may have some meaningful impact on his own thinking or behavior: Thus his apparent lack of interest in âdiscussion,â and his confidence that he will continue to "do what [he] want, irrespective of someone else's opinions." Most of the volunteer drill sergeants, anti-social blowhards, and marauding sickos on the Net will, when pressed, also fall back on 777âs refrains, which all have recognizable real-world equivalents: "It's an open forum," he says - just like some foul-mouthed drunk asserting that, "It's a free country." "I"ll do whatever I want to!" he exclaims, like a chastised brat. "Why don't you just ignore me?" he asks, like a trench-coated exhibitionist who really means, "Made you look!" What 777 fails to acknowledge, rather typically for a case like his, is the damage that he does to the social construct that any open forum represents. For the offended parties, simply ignoring a hostile, irresponsible, and voluble individual on a message board or in a chat room means severing connections not only with that individual, but to a significant extent with the collective enterprise. It also means that, if one is to continue participating at all, then it will have to be at a disadvantage, particularly in relation to the individual who is being ignored. As ever in life, the borderline cases present unique difficulties: One senses less harm when putting an obvious blithering nutcase on ignore. In effect, they already put themselves on ignore. The message board bully, especially the ones who can act like "good citizens" during predictable cycles of contrition or relaxation, is harder to ignore. At any given moment, he could be contributing, or he could be disrupting. What is clear is that he seeks to devalue others, but that he doesn't really possess that power. He can succeed, however, in repelling those ill-equipped or simply unwilling to cope with him, and in devaluing the forum for all who care to frequent it. 777 has already made it clear that, at least consciously, he is the one who does not want and cannot handle (cannot even be affected by) "constructive criticism" - since he claims to be immune to the opinions of others, and implies that he lacks interest in a true exchange of ideas. He refers to these message boards as âanonymous,â and that formulation may be where one of his fundamental misconceptions begins. Perhaps the idea makes him feel safe, allowing him to think that since none of us knows his ârealâ name or can see his ârealâ life, nothing that he says here can really matter. Of course, the opposite is also true, at least in a narrow but still authentic sense, for we have nothing here except our good names â our screen-names and what we offer along with them. Who we really are, with all our âreal worldâ accomplishments, appearances, and possessions stripped away, is sometimes revealed all the more clearly by our mere words - in particular by what we do with them when granted freedom of expression. My feeling now is that it would be best to leave it to him and the rest of you to reach your own conclusions about what 777's choices, in this recent interchange with me and in whatever other interchanges, say about who and what he really is - in short, the "truth" about him, and how and whether he "handles it."
The Case of the Phantom Uranium raises questions about the president that could lead to legitimate calls for impeachment. By Robert Scheer Columnist The Los Angeles Times http://www.robertscheer.com/ June 17, 2003 â What did the president know and when did he know it? The answer to that question forced the resignation of Richard Nixon as he was about to be impeached. Now, with President Bush facing that same question, congressional Republicans have circled the wagons to prevent a public hearing on whether intelligence was distorted by the White House to convince us of the need for war. Why? Because public hearings could lead to public demands for impeachment. Sound far-fetched? Not when you consider the gravity of the charge. "To put it bluntly," former Nixon White House counsel John Dean wrote on the legal Web site FindLaw (www.findlaw.com) on June 6, "if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be 'a high crime' under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony 'to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.'." Of course, intelligence data is often open to interpretation, and some political distortion is probably inevitable. Consider, however, just one of the recent revelations about how Iraq weapons intelligence was handled by the Bush administration and you'll start to see a disturbing pattern of cynical mendacity. Call it the "Case of the Phantom Uranium." It starts with a document, later exposed by United Nations inspectors as a crude forgery, that was sold by an African diplomat to Italian intelligence, which passed it to the British. It seemed to implicate Saddam Hussein in an attempt to buy uranium from Africa. This apparently proved too juicy a tidbit for the hawks in the Bush administration to resist. They knew that the specter of Iraqi nukes - which U.N. inspectors would establish as baseless - would scare Americans much more than talk of mustard gas, and scaring Americans is this administration's M.O. Thus in his 2003 State of the Union address, the president intoned that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa." Scary stuff. Problem was, the document was signed by an official who had given up his post a decade earlier, and the CIA had told the White House the story did not check out. On Friday, the Knight Ridder newspaper chain reported that, according to a senior CIA official, on March 9, 2002, a full 10 months before the speech, the White House was duly informed that an investigation, including an agent traveling to Africa to verify the story, had found no basis for the document. Three senior administration officials told the Knight Ridder reporter that Vice President Dick Cheney and officials on the National Security Council staff and at the Pentagon ignored the CIA's reservations and argued that the allegation should be included in the case against Hussein. This is just one example of the administration's manipulation of intelligence in justifying a war that already has killed thousands of people and continues to take the lives of several Americans each week. It is exceedingly odd that the same congressional Republicans who impeached Bill Clinton for dissembling in a sexual scandal find none of this worthy of a full public hearing. To pacify a growing number of critics, they have instead scheduled a secret and limited inquiry. Perhaps the Republicans think they can stall until fragments of evidence of weapons of mass destruction are found, which would clear Bush's name. However, that won't do the trick. The president persistently claimed that the war was necessitated by the imminent threat of deployed weapons - "a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles," as the president put it, capable of dispersing a huge existing arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, including "missions targeting the United States." Instead, almost three months after we invaded Iraq, the United States and Britain have yet to find anything of the sort. "Frankly, we expected to find large warehouses full of chemical or biological weapons, or delivery systems," Army Col. John Connell, who heads the hunt for those AWOL weapons in Iraq, said in Sunday's Los Angeles Times. "At this point, we're getting fairly sure we're not going to find a full-up production facility. We're going to find little pieces." We now know that the threat of deployed WMD was a blatant falsehood. What has not been established is whether the president was in on the lie. If he was, he should be impeached. Copyright © 2003 Robert Scheer
KF, you are right. I misquoted you. I made the post off the top of my head. Originally, I had said that I wasn't even sure if it was you or AAA who said the things to that effect. Only later, after having written the post did I go back and check the sources you and AAA really wrote. So I had to make changes, and I wasn't diligent enough in correcting my mistakenly remembered (forgotten) ideas of who said what. BTW, I think this last post of yours that I am quoting from was a REALLY excellent post. Even if I got whipped a bit. So I am sorry if I misquoted you. And I agree with your assertions in this particular post pretty much down the line. You are right about the objectivity issue exactly under the circumstances you describe. Good job! Peace, Rs
This is the same Bob Sheer who is or was a national or White House correspondent for CBS News? No media bias there. The best that can be said about this latest Democrat obsession, the supposed fake invoice, is we really don't know what the facts were. I'm not sure sending some former ambassador to a third world hellhole to ask a few polite questions definitively proves anything. Intelligence matters are necessarily painted in shades of gray, not black and white.
RS, Don't feel bad. You are at least as accurate as the New York Times and far more objective, honorable and patriotic.
Unless you have been promoted to ET's version of Emily Post concerning how the forum should be run, and what the rules are, I suggest you talk to the King of ET first, this is not a democracy. Baron Administrator Registered: Apr 1999 Posts: 774 06-19-03 07:09 PM A Reminder for All Members Since there has been some recent "tension" among a few members and our moderators, it's probably a good time to revisit a few basic rules of participating here. ALL MEMBERS SHOULD KEEP THE FOLLOWING IN MIND: When you signed up to become a member of the site, you agreed to a very simple set of rules regarding the content of your posts. If your posts violate the terms of our member agreement, your posts will be edited or possibly deleted. If you continually post content that violates our rules, you will be banned. It's really very simple. There is a code of conduct here, and if anyone does not want to be accountable to that code, they should not register and participate. And for those who are already members and for whatever reason no longer want to abide by our simple and reasonable rules, they should move to a different online community. If a member wants to totally waste their time by posting a bunch of garbage, that's up to them, because I (and the moderators) will not hesitate to hit the delete button. It makes no difference to me whether a person has put countless hours into their posts. I can delete one hundred posts just as fast as I can delete one. In terms of warning a user, I can't guarantee that there will be any warnings at all because I don't have time to treat adults like children. Our rules are very simple: No Advertising (unless you are a site sponsor) and No Crude Posts. A crude post includes those posts that contain excessive profanity, personal attacks, vulgarity, sexually explicit content, etc. I think we all have a basic sense of when a person has crossed the line. But for those few who are so out of control, or just plain stupid, that they don't know where the line is, the moderators step in and show them where the line is. And again, if any user does not like where we set the line, they are free to either not join this community or they can simply post on other sites where there is more "freedom" to post whatever they want. And finally, the most important point of all: Elite Trader is not a democracy. It's a Monarchy.... and I'm the KING. If you don't like my rules, too bad! You don't like my criticisms of you? You want everyone to play the game like you do? You think I crossed "THE LINE" rather than your own personal line......then your path is clear. Take it up with the King. I spoke with Dr. Laura and Dr. Phil, and they agree with my assessment of your psychological state, and disagree with your assessment of me.