[quote]ZEB wrote:
Back to clarifying a point that is not germane to the argument?[/quote]
If it is not “germane to the argument,” why have you been copying and pasting it and recopying and re-pasting it into this thread for days? You described it as my – this is a verbatim quotation – “biggest flop yet.” You’re telling me that we are arguing, and my many-times-cited “biggest flop yet” has, by means mysterious and possibly magical, simply vanished from the list of things you’re willing to talk about? How curious. How deeply, deeply curious.
[quote]
I don’t think so smh. It is thrown out to distract from the main point.[/quote]
You are the one who has been throwing it against the wall of this thread for days now, so is this meant as some kind of admission on your part? You were distracting me from a bad argument by smearing yourself with a worse one?
[quote]
So we can post back and forth for 20 more pages about minutia, as I warned in my last post? Not going down that road. I’m not going to address anything except the main point which you don’t seem to want to talk about anymore.[/quote]
It doesn’t really matter what we talk about, because it’s all going to end in the same place, and you know well where that is (don’t worry: because of the height at which your historical conduct demands I peg my expectations, you are not expected to admit it). It has, in fact, already come to that place, with you abandoning your confusion about Trump’s fabled two-word sentence only to begin blindly harping on a separate point and then, having discovered that you’d gotten that literally (and comically) backwards as well, ducking back into the shadows – in search, no doubt, of yet another cowpie with which to defend yourself against steel and lead.
But while we’re here, I will explain very briefly why all of this matters. The first reason, as I explained above, is that you made it matter by making and remaking and celebrating and re-celebrating the damn argument in the first place. This is obvious; it’s also funny, because the thing was truly horrendous. As wrong as one can be, really.
The second reason – and this is actually more important – is that this particular series of events (i.e., your making a criticism, my explaining why it is ass-backwards, you re-making it as if you’d had your head stuck somewhere dark during my explanation, and so on and so on until you finally decided that, no, you didn’t want to talk about it anymore because it just ain’t important) is archetypical of the way in which you sometimes conduct yourself hereabouts. The recipe, I believe, is something like this: one part unabashed carelessness (i.e., careless and lazy misunderstanding of everything that can possibly be misunderstood), two parts febrile dishonesty, three parts argument by assertion/repetition, and a handful each of strawman and petulant intransigence. Cook in old dishwater, garnish with a “you’re wrong because I’m old,” and serve lukewarm on a bed of dirty laundry and grass clippings.
Anyway, I’m half-kidding with a lot of this stuff. But I’m not kidding about the dishonesty – it’s fun for nobody. It wastes people’s time and, since things take longer to write than to read, you are the most tragic victim of us all. I am pretty much done here. I have no desire to explain, again, why Donald Trump does not impress me, or why I don’t have any reason to believe he’s a “smart” person, the kind to whom I’d look up intellectually or the kind to whom I’d offer even an ounce of political support or general praise of any kind. I don’t want to go again into why an inheritance of (what is in today’s dollars) $100+ million, plus an already-built real estate empire, are not the kinds of things that are going to lead me in the direction of impression or awe or even moderate admiration. I am not going to get into why it is (so, so much) easier to accumulate wealth with $25 million with which to invest than with $25,000 with which to invest (of course, $25,000 is not money that can be invested unless rent and food and clothing are already taken care of, which they are by definition if somebody has dozens of millions on hand) – you say you’re in business, so you already know this. I’m not going to get into – again – why I don’t tend to be impressed when people hire competent painters to paint their houses and take their cars to competent mechanics and hire babysitters who have never spent time in any juvenile correction facility.
So, until next time (or until I return and find that you’ve made a mistake too grievous for me to ignore).
