[quote]NorCal916 wrote:
^ of course. I’m waiting for China to check him. Just a matter of time. [/quote]
What do you mean by this?
[quote]Bismark wrote:
Was the surrender of Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal a undeniable diplomatic and strategic victory for US foreign policy toward Syria, or not? [/quote]
Maybe. But don’t get too carried away. Finding a cherry in the pile of dog shit that is Obama’s foreign policy does not make it an ice cream sundae.
[quote]SexMachine wrote:
[quote]Bismark wrote:
Was the surrender of Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal a undeniable diplomatic and strategic victory for US foreign policy toward Syria, or not? [/quote]
Maybe. But don’t get too carried away. Finding a cherry in the pile of dog shit that is Obama’s foreign policy does not make it an ice cream sundae.[/quote]
I doubt Romney’s would have been markedly different. As powerful as the POTUS is, they still operate within the confines of the American foreign policy establishment.
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]Bismark wrote:
[quote]Gkhan wrote:
[quote]Bismark wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
To reiterate a last time: The threatened strikes and the disarmament are one and the same matter, because the threatened strikes made possible the disarmament, and to have gone through with the strikes would have been to reject the disarmament deal. They were mutually exclusive alternatives, and the correct alternative was chosen. Choice by choice, the correct choice was made. You do not have the shadow of a case here.[/quote]
You can try as you might. They were not the same, they were different. Different threats issued at different times for different reasons. It was not tied together, except that they had made a fool of him by using them with a looming empty threat hanging over their heads. Had obama insisted that Syria not use and turn over there chemical weapons, then you’d have a point. But he didn’t. The fact that they used them in spite of the threat shows they have no regard or fear of the American threat.
Despite all of that, and the multiple failures in Syria and Iraq, the reserves have been called up and leaves cancelled in my area. War is looking more and more imminent because he was unwilling to do what it took to keep the peace.
[/quote]
You are arguing from intuition (as opposed to structured reasoning). This isn’t an attack upon your intellect, but rather upon your method. As SMH stated earlier, you are indeed attempting to play tennis without a racket. You began the Syria argument with little to no understanding of basic international relations, much less contextual knowledge of the Syrian chemical disarmament deal.
One of your glaring errors throughout this argument has been your muddled understanding of the employment of force in world politics. While the reasons actors employ force are myriad, producing such a list would be far too descriptive and provide little analytical utility. Instead, four general categories encompassing all of these provide a valuable conceptual framework. These include defense, deterrence, compellence, and swaggering.
http://www.columbiauniversity.net/itc/sipa/S6800/courseworks/FourFuncForce.pdf
Obama’s threat of military force in response to a violation of the chemical red line he established constituted an act of DETERRENCE. “Do not carry out action X, for if you do, I will strike you upon the head with this club.” Deterrence is always a peaceful exercise of force, and by definition it has failed when the threat of force has to be carried out.
When the treat of force is carried out, deterrence ends and COMPELLENCE begins. “I am now going to hit you over the head with this club and will not stop until you acquiesce to my demands.” In other words, compellence entails that actor A successfully compels actor B to carry out an action (or not to carry out an action) that it otherwise would not have. (or would have). Compellence does not necessarily require that violence be employed, but can be accomplished by the threat of it or through other means (economic sanctions). Ergo, it can take both peaceful and physical forms. Deterence failed and compellence began. The Obama administration’s deployment of military forces to the region coupled with clear signaling of its intent constituted an act of peaceful compellence, and a successful one at that when Assad reluctantly agreed to relinquish his chemical weapons arsenal.[/quote]
Read this:
[/quote]
A rag of an op-ed. Which demonstrates what, exactly? Don’t slap up an opinion piece which mirrors your own. Address the specific assertations I made into post. [/quote]
But that’s hard![/quote]
Indeed, especially when it concerns extremely complex high politics. You must have the patience of a Buddhist monk given the facts you’ve argued ad nauseam.
[quote]Bismark wrote:
[quote]SexMachine wrote:
[quote]Bismark wrote:
Was the surrender of Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal a undeniable diplomatic and strategic victory for US foreign policy toward Syria, or not? [/quote]
Maybe. But don’t get too carried away. Finding a cherry in the pile of dog shit that is Obama’s foreign policy does not make it an ice cream sundae.[/quote]
I doubt Romney’s would have been markedly different. As powerful as the POTUS is, they still operate within the confines of the American foreign policy establishment. [/quote]
Leaving aside comparisons with Romney, foreign policy is the exclusive purview of the executive branch. The president has near absolute authority and therefore near absolute accountability.
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]Bismark wrote:
[quote]Gkhan wrote:
[quote]Bismark wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
To reiterate a last time: The threatened strikes and the disarmament are one and the same matter, because the threatened strikes made possible the disarmament, and to have gone through with the strikes would have been to reject the disarmament deal. They were mutually exclusive alternatives, and the correct alternative was chosen. Choice by choice, the correct choice was made. You do not have the shadow of a case here.[/quote]
You can try as you might. They were not the same, they were different. Different threats issued at different times for different reasons. It was not tied together, except that they had made a fool of him by using them with a looming empty threat hanging over their heads. Had obama insisted that Syria not use and turn over there chemical weapons, then you’d have a point. But he didn’t. The fact that they used them in spite of the threat shows they have no regard or fear of the American threat.
Despite all of that, and the multiple failures in Syria and Iraq, the reserves have been called up and leaves cancelled in my area. War is looking more and more imminent because he was unwilling to do what it took to keep the peace.
[/quote]
You are arguing from intuition (as opposed to structured reasoning). This isn’t an attack upon your intellect, but rather upon your method. As SMH stated earlier, you are indeed attempting to play tennis without a racket. You began the Syria argument with little to no understanding of basic international relations, much less contextual knowledge of the Syrian chemical disarmament deal.
One of your glaring errors throughout this argument has been your muddled understanding of the employment of force in world politics. While the reasons actors employ force are myriad, producing such a list would be far too descriptive and provide little analytical utility. Instead, four general categories encompassing all of these provide a valuable conceptual framework. These include defense, deterrence, compellence, and swaggering.
http://www.columbiauniversity.net/itc/sipa/S6800/courseworks/FourFuncForce.pdf
Obama’s threat of military force in response to a violation of the chemical red line he established constituted an act of DETERRENCE. “Do not carry out action X, for if you do, I will strike you upon the head with this club.” Deterrence is always a peaceful exercise of force, and by definition it has failed when the threat of force has to be carried out.
When the treat of force is carried out, deterrence ends and COMPELLENCE begins. “I am now going to hit you over the head with this club and will not stop until you acquiesce to my demands.” In other words, compellence entails that actor A successfully compels actor B to carry out an action (or not to carry out an action) that it otherwise would not have. (or would have). Compellence does not necessarily require that violence be employed, but can be accomplished by the threat of it or through other means (economic sanctions). Ergo, it can take both peaceful and physical forms. Deterence failed and compellence began. The Obama administration’s deployment of military forces to the region coupled with clear signaling of its intent constituted an act of peaceful compellence, and a successful one at that when Assad reluctantly agreed to relinquish his chemical weapons arsenal.[/quote]
Read this:
[/quote]
A rag of an op-ed. Which demonstrates what, exactly? Don’t slap up an opinion piece which mirrors your own. Address the specific assertations I made into post. [/quote]
But that’s hard![/quote]
We have, but it’s not hard, it’s tiresome. I’m bored with the issue, so I let someone else make my points for me. No more an opinion than what you are spouting.
[quote]Bismark wrote:
[quote]Gkhan wrote:
[quote]Bismark wrote:
A cursory look at the casualties inflicted would suffice. The first generation nuclear weapons detonated above Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 caused between 150,000, and 250,000 deaths. I don’t know why you are so insistent upon arguing from the hip against a position that isn’t controversial among analysts, that is, the threat posed by chemical weapons is largely overstated.
The term WMD is a normative bete noir that lacks analytical rigor. Employing it to stoke fear amongst an ignorant populace often leads to the justification of bad foreign policy, case in point, the Iraq war.[/quote]
So, contact the countries involved in the OPCW and tell tell them you think the treaty’s wrong.
[/quote]
I never asserted that. Chemical weapons should be banned because they are inherently indiscriminate area weapons. I did assert that they have been erroneously lumped into the WMD classification, a term which itself is flawed. The fact that you’re comparing chemical weapons with biological and nuclear ones in terms of their capacity to inflict massive casualties is demonstrative of your own misunderstandings regarding their nature. [/quote]
I am not comparing chemical weapons with biological and nuclear ones, our leaders, like Obama, are doing this. So you are saying what? He’s even a failure at classifying weapons?
[quote]Bismark wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]Bismark wrote:
[quote]Gkhan wrote:
[quote]Bismark wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
To reiterate a last time: The threatened strikes and the disarmament are one and the same matter, because the threatened strikes made possible the disarmament, and to have gone through with the strikes would have been to reject the disarmament deal. They were mutually exclusive alternatives, and the correct alternative was chosen. Choice by choice, the correct choice was made. You do not have the shadow of a case here.[/quote]
You can try as you might. They were not the same, they were different. Different threats issued at different times for different reasons. It was not tied together, except that they had made a fool of him by using them with a looming empty threat hanging over their heads. Had obama insisted that Syria not use and turn over there chemical weapons, then you’d have a point. But he didn’t. The fact that they used them in spite of the threat shows they have no regard or fear of the American threat.
Despite all of that, and the multiple failures in Syria and Iraq, the reserves have been called up and leaves cancelled in my area. War is looking more and more imminent because he was unwilling to do what it took to keep the peace.
[/quote]
You are arguing from intuition (as opposed to structured reasoning). This isn’t an attack upon your intellect, but rather upon your method. As SMH stated earlier, you are indeed attempting to play tennis without a racket. You began the Syria argument with little to no understanding of basic international relations, much less contextual knowledge of the Syrian chemical disarmament deal.
One of your glaring errors throughout this argument has been your muddled understanding of the employment of force in world politics. While the reasons actors employ force are myriad, producing such a list would be far too descriptive and provide little analytical utility. Instead, four general categories encompassing all of these provide a valuable conceptual framework. These include defense, deterrence, compellence, and swaggering.
http://www.columbiauniversity.net/itc/sipa/S6800/courseworks/FourFuncForce.pdf
Obama’s threat of military force in response to a violation of the chemical red line he established constituted an act of DETERRENCE. “Do not carry out action X, for if you do, I will strike you upon the head with this club.” Deterrence is always a peaceful exercise of force, and by definition it has failed when the threat of force has to be carried out.
When the treat of force is carried out, deterrence ends and COMPELLENCE begins. “I am now going to hit you over the head with this club and will not stop until you acquiesce to my demands.” In other words, compellence entails that actor A successfully compels actor B to carry out an action (or not to carry out an action) that it otherwise would not have. (or would have). Compellence does not necessarily require that violence be employed, but can be accomplished by the threat of it or through other means (economic sanctions). Ergo, it can take both peaceful and physical forms. Deterence failed and compellence began. The Obama administration’s deployment of military forces to the region coupled with clear signaling of its intent constituted an act of peaceful compellence, and a successful one at that when Assad reluctantly agreed to relinquish his chemical weapons arsenal.[/quote]
Read this:
[/quote]
A rag of an op-ed. Which demonstrates what, exactly? Don’t slap up an opinion piece which mirrors your own. Address the specific assertations I made into post. [/quote]
But that’s hard![/quote]
Indeed, especially when it concerns extremely complex high politics. You must have the patience of a Buddhist monk given the facts you’ve argued ad nauseam. [/quote]
same could be said of the facts you’ve argued.
“The attack killed between 3,200 and 5,000 people and injured 7,000 to 10,000 more, most of them civilians.[1][2] Thousands more died of complications, diseases, and birth defects in the years after the attack.[3]”
to say that chemical weapons should not be classified as weapons of mass destruction because they do not kill enough people is a nonsense statement by the statistics stated above.
By the same logic nuclear arms should not be classified as weapons of mass destruction because firebombings caused more deaths and destruction.
What how would you classify a neutron bomb? It only kills people and does not destroy buildings. So according to your logic, or lack thereof, it would not be classified as a weapon of mass destruction, well, because it doesn’t cause enough destruction, correct?
And how could you possibly classify a biologic weapon as a weapon of mass destruction? Was biological warfare even successfully used in the 20th-21st Century to even classify it?
[quote]Gkhan wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
But that’s hard![/quote]
We have[/quote]
No you haven’t.
Yes it is.
How unfortunate.
I’ll let someone else read “your” (they’re not yours after all, are they?) points then. If I want to waste my time with generic, flimsy, unevidenced, inadequate stodge-stuffed op-eds, I can find them on my own. I come here to argue specific points with people who can make specific counterpoints and think for themselves.
If what I’m “spouting” were so shakily evidenced, one would think somebody could have actually shown this by now. Rather than, you know, just repeatedly saying so and then backing away.
[quote]Bismark wrote:
Indeed, especially when it concerns extremely complex high politics. You must have the patience of a Buddhist monk given the facts you’ve argued ad nauseam. [/quote]
Nirvana is near!
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]Gkhan wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
But that’s hard![/quote]
We have[/quote]
No you haven’t.
[quote]
We have. Pat & I have repeated the exact chain of events about the Syrian conflict and the red line. You do not want to admit that Obama threatened to attack Syria if CHEMICAL WEAPONS were used. CHEMICAL WEAPONS WERE USED and Syria was not bombed because of Russian pressure. The only reason you take issue with the editorial I posted, which backs our correct version of events, btw is because it completely contradicts the story you adhere to.
It is no more an editorial of events than the supposed “facts” you have written for the last 6 pages.
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/02/21/Putin-pressure-after-Obama-red-line-fail
Someone obviously agrees with our chain of events.
If someone is threatening to hit you with a baseball bat. You say “If you do that, I’m going to stick that bat up your ass.” He hits you in the face then says, “Sorry, I’ll put my bat down now.”
You can say “Well he knew I was going to kick his ass, and he was so scared he put his bat away.” But he still hit you. If he was intimidated, he wouldn’t have hit you. You still got hit in the face and look weak for not sticking the bat up his ass.
And as far as Syria giving up it’s chemical weapons…it’s a little too late for the people who died in these attacks. I bet their friends and relatives are glad Obama threatened to attack Syria since THE CHEMICAL WEAPONS WERE USED ANYWAY. If that is not a sign of weakness, please, I implore you, tell me what a “true” weak president would do? What would Carter have done, for instance.
What would have happened had Syria not given up the chemical weapons? Do you think we’d have drones over Syria right now? Do you think Russia would just sit idly by on the sidelines while the US bombs another of her allies?
http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/09/05/322139/weve-plans-if-us-strikes-syria-putin/
here’s an opinion I agree with:
[quote]Gkhan wrote:
Pat & I have repeated the exact chain of events about the Syrian conflict and the red line. You do not want to admit that Obama threatened to attack Syria if CHEMICAL WEAPONS were used. CHEMICAL WEAPONS WERE USED and Syria was not bombed because of Russian pressure. [/quote]
Syria was spared bombing because the Russians and Syrians offered up the Syrian chemical weapons stockpile in a bid to avert a forthcoming American strike. This bullshit about “Russian pressure,” as if the deal offered was about Russian and not American power (and any admission that Obama was behind coercion of a foreign antagonist is too much, just too much for your little partisan heart to bear), is tired and has been dealt with a dozen times.
Now, in order for your fantastical narrative to hold true, Obama’s decision to accept the Russo-Syrian deal–and therefore not to launch a strike–must have been irrational, and there must have been an alternative option the choosing of which would have entailed greater U.S. benefit and/or less U.S. risk than the option chosen in fact, which was: The removal of a chemical weapons stockpile from an unstable war-torn dictatorship overrun by Jihadists, and the accession of the Syrian government to the CWC after two decades of Syrian refusals, stalling, and obfuscation.
Given the circumstances of the situation, no better alternative option existed–if you disagree, then stop dicking around and make your case for the refusal of the deal–and therefore your facile complaint that we said we’d bomb them and then we didn’t!!! is just a flaccid string of words. It does not survive a few dozen seconds of critical thought.
But wait, there’s more. Even on the illegitimate, simplistic internal logic of your complaint, you do not have a case. Why? Because Obama’s precise words on the “red line” were these:
[quote]
A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus…That would change my equation.[/quote]
A “red line,” a “change [in] calculus,” a “change [in] equation.” A nonspecific promise of some nonspecific response–some way wherein something about Obama’s policy on Syria would change, with implications of hostility.
And what happened? What was the response in fact as opposed to in promise? The U.S. dispossessed the Syrians of their chemical weapons stockpile under threat of military force. Before Ghouta, the Syrians have chemical weapons and the Americans aren’t taking them. After Ghouta, the Syrians’ chemical weapons are taken from them at gunpoint, by the Americans. A change in calculus–yes, exactly that. Equation altered. Promise kept. Threat carried out. Credits roll. (But again, this is an aside. It wouldn’t have mattered if Obama had said “we’ll attack Syria if chemical weapons are used!” The taking of the Russo-Syrian deal was the rational choice and it entailed the greatest viable benefit and by far the least cost to the United States, and thus the narrative you’re pushing is nonsense.)
All of this has been said many times before, so I should be done now. If you’d like to post a response on the substance, convince me that a punitive strike was the more rational choice than acceptance of the deal. If you plan on simply posting a few shitty op-eds from such laudable and rational and impartial publications as Breitbart and the Washington Times, save your time because I won’t read them and you don’t get credit for copying other people’s homework, particularly when that homework was done by an imbecile.
[quote]Gkhan wrote:
it’s a little too late for the people who died in these attacks.
[/quote]
This has been addressed and addressed and re-addressed and re-addressed. I am not going to respond to points that have already been countered. If you want to address the counter, go for it. But I’m not going to argue with someone who would rather (or cannot help but to) continue babbling point A than address its counterpoints.
[quote]Gkhan wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]Gkhan wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
But that’s hard![/quote]
We have[/quote]
No you haven’t.
[quote]
We have. Pat & I have repeated the exact chain of events about the Syrian conflict and the red line. You do not want to admit that Obama threatened to attack Syria if CHEMICAL WEAPONS were used. CHEMICAL WEAPONS WERE USED and Syria was not bombed because of Russian pressure. The only reason you take issue with the editorial I posted, which backs our correct version of events, btw is because it completely contradicts the story you adhere to.
It is no more an editorial of events than the supposed “facts” you have written for the last 6 pages.
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/02/21/Putin-pressure-after-Obama-red-line-fail
Someone obviously agrees with our chain of events.
If someone is threatening to hit you with a baseball bat. You say “If you do that, I’m going to stick that bat up your ass.” He hits you in the face then says, “Sorry, I’ll put my bat down now.”
You can say “Well he knew I was going to kick his ass, and he was so scared he put his bat away.” But he still hit you. If he was intimidated, he wouldn’t have hit you. You still got hit in the face and look weak for not sticking the bat up his ass. [/quote]
***I already addressed this in my deterrence and compellence post, which you continue to ignore. Slapping up an op-ed and then writing from intuition does not constitute an argument. You, like Pat, are attempting to have a discussion regarding international relations without having a grasp of the very basics of the discipline, not to mention contextual knowledge of the Syrian chemical deal. Could one expect to adequately participate in a discussion of an economic event if they lacked understanding of basic economic theory? Only if they wished to make a fool of themselves. I’m all for having a civilized discussion regarding IR with anyone, but your continued refusal to put in the intellectual groundwork, coupled with your lazy from the hip responses to others’ time consuming arguments makes such an endeavor ill fated from the start.
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
First of all, let’s be clear the worst case scenario has and is happening. So any other alternative certainly wouldn’t have made it worse and had higher potentiality to make it batter.[/quote]
The worst case scenario is absolutely not happening. Your inability to think clearly about the specific argument that you and I are having, and have been having since the very beginning, is making this next to impossible for you. We are talking about chemical weapons. Assad’s chemical weapons are being turned into sand in Finland as I type these words. This is not remotely close to a worst-case scenario.
[/quote]
lol! Really? That quagmire in Syria overrun with terrorists, 150,000+ dead bodies and 7 million people displaced (estimates vary), mired in a stalemate civil war, a hotbed of terrorist activity that has spilled over into Iraq, etc, etc, etc is not the worst case scenario?
If that ain’t it, I’d hate to see the worst.
[/quote]
[quote]
Your inability to think clearly about the specific argument that you and I are having, and have been having since the very beginning, is making this next to impossible for you. We are talking about chemical weapons.[/quote]
[quote]
Your inability to think clearly about the specific argument that you and I are having, and have been having since the very beginning, is making this next to impossible for you. We are talking about chemical weapons.[/quote]
[quote]
Your inability to think clearly about the specific argument that you and I are having, and have been having since the very beginning, is making this next to impossible for you. We are talking about chemical weapons.[/quote]
[Third time’s supposed to be a charm, right?]
You need to cut the intellectual dishonesty.[/quote]
You need to know what that term means before you use it.
[quote]Gkhan wrote:
[quote]Bismark wrote:
[quote]Gkhan wrote:
[quote]Bismark wrote:
A cursory look at the casualties inflicted would suffice. The first generation nuclear weapons detonated above Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 caused between 150,000, and 250,000 deaths. I don’t know why you are so insistent upon arguing from the hip against a position that isn’t controversial among analysts, that is, the threat posed by chemical weapons is largely overstated.
The term WMD is a normative bete noir that lacks analytical rigor. Employing it to stoke fear amongst an ignorant populace often leads to the justification of bad foreign policy, case in point, the Iraq war.[/quote]
So, contact the countries involved in the OPCW and tell tell them you think the treaty’s wrong.
[/quote]
I never asserted that. Chemical weapons should be banned because they are inherently indiscriminate area weapons. I did assert that they have been erroneously lumped into the WMD classification, a term which itself is flawed. The fact that you’re comparing chemical weapons with biological and nuclear ones in terms of their capacity to inflict massive casualties is demonstrative of your own misunderstandings regarding their nature. [/quote]
I am not comparing chemical weapons with biological and nuclear ones, our leaders, like Obama, are doing this. So you are saying what? He’s even a failure at classifying weapons?
[/quote]
What the hell have you been doing throughout this thread? You have been attempting to argue for the efficacy of chemical weapons in relation to their nuclear and biological counterparts to elevate them to the status of WMD, a term which I have asserted time after time to be a bad one. WMD is a political blank check, and politicians will not hesitate to employ its use in securitizing rhetoric for their own advantage.
[quote]pat wrote:
You need to know what that term means before you use it.[/quote]
It means getting a bunch of elemental factual information wrong because you know next to nothing about the topic on which you’re struggling to opine, and then refusing to acknowledge your ignorance even in the face of overwhelming evidence of it. That’s intellectual dishonesty, and it’s the reason that I am not debating this issue with you any longer–not that this was ever an actual debate in the first place.
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
First of all, let’s be clear the worst case scenario has and is happening. So any other alternative certainly wouldn’t have made it worse and had higher potentiality to make it batter.[/quote]
The worst case scenario is absolutely not happening. Your inability to think clearly about the specific argument that you and I are having, and have been having since the very beginning, is making this next to impossible for you. We are talking about chemical weapons. Assad’s chemical weapons are being turned into sand in Finland as I type these words. This is not remotely close to a worst-case scenario.
[/quote]
lol! Really? That quagmire in Syria overrun with terrorists, 150,000+ dead bodies and 7 million people displaced (estimates vary), mired in a stalemate civil war, a hotbed of terrorist activity that has spilled over into Iraq, etc, etc, etc is not the worst case scenario?
If that ain’t it, I’d hate to see the worst.
[/quote]
[quote]
Your inability to think clearly about the specific argument that you and I are having, and have been having since the very beginning, is making this next to impossible for you. We are talking about chemical weapons.[/quote]
[quote]
Your inability to think clearly about the specific argument that you and I are having, and have been having since the very beginning, is making this next to impossible for you. We are talking about chemical weapons.[/quote]
[quote]
Your inability to think clearly about the specific argument that you and I are having, and have been having since the very beginning, is making this next to impossible for you. We are talking about chemical weapons.[/quote]
[Third time’s supposed to be a charm, right?]
You need to cut the intellectual dishonesty.[/quote]
You need to know what that term means before you use it.[/quote]
Writes the poster who takes specific terminology from my argument and leaves out its necessary counterpart because it didn’t coincide with his own.
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
I am not going to address anything you took out of context, because clearly you didn’t see the difference between hyperbole and presentation of fact. You are acting as if hyperbole was a statement of fact. You take them out of context, not to present facts, but to disparage me personally.
[/quote]
This is nonsense. There is nothing being taken out of context. Full paragraph, with my emphasis:
[quote]pat wrote:
And we have no way to verify whether or not [the Syrians] gave up all their chemical weapons or not. Maybe they used all they had. Initially they said they didn’t have any, so I don’t exactly trust them when they say they gave them all to Russia.
[/quote]
[quote]pat wrote:
You’re claiming that Assad was actually afraid of a U.S. strike? It was never going to happen. They are empty threats.[/quote]
There is no context within which these ^ claims are not utterly false. There is no context within which they do not betray fundamental ignorance of the simplest facts about the matter whereon you were trying to opine. These are not hyperbole. They are simply errors.
[/quote]
[/quote]
You have taken a turn for childishness and you have dug your heals into a position of unrepentant and egregious intellectual dishonesty in the face of overwhelming evidence of your own ignorance and error. You do not understand the basic facts particular to this matter, and you do not understand the norms by which informed people judge questions of this general kind. You refuse to weigh or engage counterpoints, opting instead to regurgitate facile bullshit that has been addressed a hundred times over. You refuse to acknowledge the impressive, enormous, this-would-be-funny-if-it-didn’t-represent-a-waste-of-my-time catalog of errors, misunderstandings, and piles of petrified horseshit that you’ve tossed into the cogwheels of this debate, and, just like in Proof of God thread, you refuse to give up when you have clearly lost (a refusal which does damage only to you).
In response to my posting a list of factual inaccuracies you pushed over the course of this argument, you posted a picture of a sinking ship. I am not availing myself of a rhetorical device when I say that I have no clue what this means: I literally have no clue what this means. I did not fabricate those quotes, and I did not force you to engage in a debate that has revealed itself to live a few miles over your head. If the sinking ship was some kind of subconscious admission of guilt and defeat, then I accept. Otherwise, this debate ceased advancing a long long while ago, and it is no longer serving a purpose for either of us.[/quote]
Oh brother. You’re getting desperate when you have to accuse me of things that are not true.
Okay smh, you are soooooooo smart I bow to your vast intelligence. I am sorry little ol’ me would dare contend that you’re well detailed points on the treaty and mechanical process of disarmament in some way mitigates the fact that obama issued a threat and Assad went right through the threat as if it didn’t exist.
You’re so caught up in the disarmament process, that you simply miss the fact that the deterrent didn’t work. Something that doesn’t work is typically constituted as a failure. But I guess in your world, if you apply for enough extra credit, it makes that failure go away. You just replace the grade, huh?
I’d like it noted that you have insulted me and disparaged me multiple times, repeatedly and I have not returned in kind once.